Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology 9781474242325, 9781474242356, 9781474242349

Citation preview

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Modernist Archives Series Series Editors: Matthew Feldman (University of York, UK), Erik Tonning (University of Bergen, Norway), and David Tucker (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK). Editorial Board: Chris Ackerley (University of Otago, New Zealand), Ronald Bush (University of Oxford, UK), Mark Byron (University of Sydney, Australia), Wayne K. Chapman (Clemson University, USA), Miranda Hickman (McGill University, Canada), Gregory Maertz (St John’s University, USA), Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College, USA), Steven Matthews (Oxford Brookes University, UK), Lois M. Overbeck (Emory University, USA), Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp, Belgium). From letters, journals, and notebooks to unpublished or out-of-print works, unfamiliar but important writings in translation and forgotten articles, Bloomsbury’s Modernist Archives series makes available to researchers at all levels historical archival material that can reconfigure received views of Modernist literature and culture. Annotated throughout and supported by extensive contextual essays by leading scholars, the Modernist Archives series is an essential resource for anyone with a serious interest in 20th Century Literature and Culture. Titles in series David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture Edited by Thomas Berenato, Anne Price-Owen, and Kathleen Henderson Staudt David Jones’s The Grail Mass and Other Works Edited by Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison Ezra Pound and Globe Magazine: The Complete Correspondence Edited by Michael T. Davis and Cameron McWhirter Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue Spill: A Manuscript Critical Edition Edited by Mark Byron and Sophia Barnes W. B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings, Wayne K. Chapman Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s The Call: A New Scholarly Edition Edited by Stephanie Brown Forthcoming titles The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and the Frobenius Institute, 1930–1959 Edited by Ronald Bush and Erik Tonning Man Into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition Edited by Pamela L. Caughie and Sabine Meyer The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas Edited by John Goodby and Adrian Osbourne The Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield Edited by Todd Martin

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

An Anthology Edited by Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Alys Moody, Stephen J. Ross and contributors, 2020 Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xxxii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image © Alfred Liyolo, Le Bouclier de la Révolution (1973, Mount N’Galiema, Kinshasa). Photograph by John and Pauline Grimshaw, reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4232-5 ePDF: 978-1-4742-4234-9 eBook: 978-1-4742-4233-2 Series: Modernist Archives Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

for Ari Jay

vi

CONTENTS

A lternate T ables of C ontents E ditorial P reface to M odernist A rchives C ontributor B iographies A cknowledgments P ermissions and C redits Global Modernism: An Introduction and Ten Theses Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross 1. Modernism in Latin America edited by Camilla Sutherland

xiv xxvii xxix xxxii xxxiv 1 25

i.   New Poetry (1926, France/Peru) César Vallejo Translated by Joseph W. Mulligan

30

ii.   Platforms for Living (1927, Peru) Magda Portal Translated by Melvin S. Arrington, Jr.

32

iii.  Cannibalist Manifesto (1928, Brazil) Oswald de Andrade Translated by Leslie Bary

35

iv. From “Revolution and Renascence” (1929, Mexico/US) Anita Brenner

44

v.

Will to Construct (1930, France/Uruguay) Joaquín Torres-García Translated by Stephen J. Ross and John Steen

49

vi.  Prologue to Sóngoro Cosongo (1931, Cuba) Nicolás Guillén Translated by Stephen J. Ross and John Steen

52

vii. From Woman and Her Expression (1935, Argentina) Victoria Ocampo Translated by Patricia Owen Steiner

54

viii. How I Write (1938, Chile) Gabriela Mistral Translated by Stephen Tapscott

58

ix.  Protest against Folklore (1943, Costa Rica) Yolanda Oreamuno Translated by Janet N. Gold

61

viii

CONTENTS

2 Modernism in the Caribbean edited by Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross i.

La Revue indigène: Program (1927, Haiti) Normil G. Sylvain Translated by Alys Moody

65 69

ii.    Légitime Défense: Declaration (1932, France/Martinique) Étienne Léro et al. Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson

80

iii. The Time Has Come (1933, Trinidad) Hugh Stollmeyer

83

iv. Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution (1935, France/Martinique) Aimé Césaire Translated by Alys Moody

87

v.

91

Tropiques: Presentation (1941, Martinique) Aimé Césaire Translated by Alys Moody

vi. Poverty of a Poetry (1942, Martinique) Suzanne Césaire Translated by Alys Moody

93

vii. Bim: An Introduction (1955, Barbados) George Lamming

97

viii. Jazz and the West Indian Novel, I (1967, Barbados/Jamaica/UK) L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite

100

ix. The Artist in the Caribbean (1970, Guyana/UK) Aubrey Williams

109

3 Modernism in Sub-Saharan Africa edited by Alys Moody

113

i.

In Search of the Lost! (1932, Madagascar) Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo Translated by Matthew Winterton

117

ii.

The Lost Is Found (1934, Madagascar) Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo Translated by Matthew Winterton

120

iii.  Negritude and the Concept of Universal Civilisation (1963, Senegal) Léopold Sédar Senghor Uncredited translation from Présence Africaine, English edition

121

iv.   Copying Puts God to Sleep (1963, Kenya) Elimo Njau

127

v.

133

On the Threshold, VIII (1965, South Africa) André P. Brink Translated by Klara du Plessis

CONTENTS

vi. The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist (1966, Nigeria) Ben Enwonwu

ix

135

vii. Prodigals, Come Home! (1973, Nigeria) Chinweizu

143

viii. Manifesto of the Zairian Avant-Gardists (1973, Zaire) Les avant-gardistes zaïrois Translated by Sarah Van Beurden

155

4 Modernism in the Arab World edited by Stephen J. Ross and Alys Moody

157

i.   On Degenerate Art (1939, Egypt) Kāmil al-Tilimsānī Translated by Mandy McClure

161

ii. Introduction to Splinters and Ash (1949, Iraq) Nāzik al-Malāʾikah Translated by Emily Drumsta

166

iii. Prologue to Souffles (1966, Morocco) Abdellatif Laâbi Translated by Teresa Villa-Ignacio

176

iv. Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution (1971, Palestine/Lebanon) Kamāl Bullāṭah Translated by Katharine Halls

181

v.

185

From Poetics and Modernity (1984, Syria/France) Adūnīs Translated by Catherine Cobham

5 Modernism in Turkey edited by Kaitlin Staudt i.

 Some Thoughts about Poetry (1921, Turkey) Ahmet Haşim Translated by Kaitlin Staudt

191 194

ii. The Garip Preface (1941, Turkey) Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, and Oktay Rifat Translated by Sidney Wade and Efe Murad

199

iii. The Change of Civilization and Inner Man (1951, Turkey) Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Translated by Kaitlin Staudt

205

6 Persian Modernism edited by Bahareh Azad i.  Preface to The Myth (1922, Iran) Nima Yushij Translated by Bahareh Azad

211 213

x

CONTENTS

ii.   A Poetry That Is Life (1958, Iran) Ahmad Shamlu Translated by Samad Alavi

215

iii.  Hasan Honarmandi’s Interview with Forough Farrokhzad (1967, Iran) Forough Farrokhzad and Hasan Honarmandi Translated by Bahareh Azad

221

7 Modernism in the Caucasus edited by Harsha Ram i.

Niko Pirosmanashvili (1926, Georgia) Kirill Zdanevich Translated by Harsha Ram

ii. Niko Pirosmani (1926, Georgia) Grigol Robakidze Translated by Harsha Ram 8 Modernism in South Asia edited by Rudrani Gangopadhyay

225 228

236

241

i.

From Japan: A Lecture (1916, British India) Rabindranath Tagore

245

ii.

Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association (1936, British India/UK) Mulk Raj Anand

248

iii. Introduction to A Stranger in Iran (1957, Pakistan/US) N. M. Rashed Translated by A. Sean Pue

250

iv. The Portrait of the Artist as a Notun Samalochak (1968, India/US) Malay Roy Choudhury Translated by the author

255

v.

257

The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry (1968, India/US) Malay Roy Choudhury Translated by the author

vi. Introduction to the New Story (1969, India) Kamleshwar Translated by Arshdeep Singh Brar and Rudrani Gangopadhyay

258

vii. From The True Story of Satyakatha (1969, India) Raja Dhale Translated by Sadhana Bhagwat

266

viii. Modern Literature (c. 1986–7, India) Ka. Naa. Subramanyam Translated by Darun Subramaniam

273

CONTENTS

9 Chinese Modernism edited by Stephen J. Ross

xi

281

i.    Some Thoughts on Our New Literature (1929, Republic of China) Lu Xun Translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang

285

ii. Dai Wangshu’s Poetic Theory (1932, Republic of China) Dai Wangshu Translated by Kirk A. Denton

289

iii. Dream of Genius (1940, Republic of China) Eileen Chang Translated by Karen Kingsbury

291

iv. Explicating the Tenets of the Modernist School (1956, Taiwan)  Ji Xian Translated by Paul Manfredi

294

v. The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto) (1980, People’s Republic of China) Hong Huang Translated and adapted by Zhu Zhiyu with John Minford

297

vi. Without Isms (1993, People’s Republic of China/France) Gao Xingjian Translated by Mabel Lee

302

vii.  A Particular Sort of Story (2003, People’s Republic of China) Can Xue Translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

311

10 Modernism in Japan edited by Alys Moody

315

i.    My Futurism in Action (1921, Japan) Hirato Renkichi Translated by Sho Sugita

318

ii. Red and Black Manifesto (1923, Japan) Translated by Tom Baudinette

320

iii. An Artistic Inquiry into the Barrack Towns (1924, Japan) Hagiwara Kyojiro Translated by Sho Sugita

321

iv. Novels without a “Story-Like” Story (1927, Japan) Akutagawa Ryūnosuke Translated by Sho Sugita

326

v. On Wall Stories and “Short” Short Stories: A New Approach to Proletarian Literature (1931, Japan) Kobayashi Takiji Translated by Ann Sherif

329

xii

CONTENTS

vi. When Passing between Trees (1930s, Japan) Sagawa Chika Translated by Sawako Nakayasu

332

vii. Literature of the Lost Home (1933, Japan) Kobayashi Hideo Translated by Paul Anderer

335

11 Korean Modernism edited by Keeran Murphy i.  Misconstrued “Dada”: For Kim Kijin (1924, Korea) Ko Dada Translated by Nagi Yoshikawa, with Sho Sugita

343 345

ii.  Soliloquies of “Pierrot”—Fragmentary Notions on “Poésie” (1931, Korea) 347 Kim Kirim Translated by Walter K. Lew iii. The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes by a Stream and “Wings,” I and II (1936, Korea) Ch’oe Chaesŏ Translated by Christopher P. Hanscom 12 Modernism in Vietnam edited by Phuong Ngoc Nguyen i.  Manifesto of the Self-Reliant Literary Group (1934, Vietnam) Translated by Chi P. Pham 13 Malay Modernism edited by Muhamad Nasir Mohamad Shah

352

357 358 359

i.  Our Art (1950, Malaysia) Mohd Salehuddin Translated by Muhamad Nasri Mohamad Shah

361

ii. Which Art Is for Us? (1954, Malaysia) Anonymous Translated by Muhamad Nasri Mohamad Shah

363

14 Modernism in the South Pacific edited by Alys Moody and Shaynah Jackson i.

Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art (1923, Australia) Margaret Preston

ii.  Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters (1934, New Zealand) A. R. D. Fairburn iii. Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors (1944, Australia) James McAuley and Harold Stewart iv. From Modern Trends in Maori Art Forms (1968, New Zealand) Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira

365 368 371

377 381

CONTENTS

v. Towards a New Oceania (1976, Sāmoa/Fiji) Albert Wendt 15 Modernism of the Ashkenazi Jewish Diaspora edited by Ariel Resnikoff

xiii

385 397

i.  The Introspectivist Manifesto (1919, US) Yankev Glatshteyn, Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, and Nachum Baruch Minkov Translated by Anita Norich

401

ii.  Procession IV: “Every New Poet: Proem” (1932, US) Mikhl Likht Translated by Ariel Resnikoff and Stephen J. Ross

412

iii. “Afterword” to Mannequins (1934, Poland) Devorah Fogel Translated by Ariel Resnikoff

415

iv. From Whom Did I Take Permission? (1979, Israel) Avot Yeshurun Translated by Ariel Resnikoff

417

I ndex 

421

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

1. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL FORMATIONS Revolutionary and Leftist Modernisms Red and Black Manifesto (1923, Japan; 10.ii) Hagiwara Kyojiro, “An Artistic Enquiry into the Barrack Towns” (1924, Japan; 10.iii) Ko Dada, “Misconstrued ‘Dada’: For Kim Kijin” (1924, Korea; 11.i) Magda Portal, “Platforms for Living” (1927, Peru; 1.ii) Anita Brenner, from “Revolution and Renascence” (1929, Mexico/US, 1.iv) Kobayashi Takiji, “On Wall Stories and ‘Short’ Short Stories: A New Approach to Proletarian Literature” (1931, Japan; 10.v) “Légitime Défense: Declaration” (1932, Martinique/France; 2.ii) Aimé Césaire, “Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution” (1935, Martinique/ France; 2.iv) Mulk Raj Anand, “Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association” (1936, British India/UK; 8.ii) Aimé Césaire, “Tropiques: Presentation” (1941, Martinique; 2.v) Raja Dhale, from “The True Story of Satyakatha (1969, India; 8.vii) Kamāl Bullāṭah, “Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution” (1971, Palestine/Lebanon; 4.iv) Conservative Modernisms Normil G. Sylvain, “La Revue indigène: Program” (1927, Haiti; 2.i) Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, “In Search of the Lost!” (1932, Madagascar; 3.i) Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933, Japan; 10.vii) Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, “The Lost Is Found” (1934, Madagascar; 3.ii) Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, “The Change of Civilization and Inner Man” (1951, Turkey; 5.iii) James McAuley and Harold Stewart, “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors” (1944, Australia; 14.iii)

320 321 345 32 44 329 80 87 248 91 266 181 69 117 335 120 205 377

Modernism as Anti-Communism James McAuley and Harold Stewart, “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors” (1944, Australia; 14.iii) Ji Xian, “Explicating the Tenets of the Modernist School” (1956, Taiwan; 9.iv)

377 294

Decolonizing and Anti-Colonial Modernisms Normil G. Sylvain, “La Revue indigène: Program” (1927, Haiti; 2.i) Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928, Brazil; 1.iii) Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, “In Search of the Lost” (1932, Madagascar; 3.i)

69 35 117

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

xv

Hugh Stollmeyer, “The Time Has Come” (1933, Trinidad; 2.iii) Aimé Césaire, “Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution” (1935, Martinique/France; 2.iv) Mulk Raj Anand, “Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association” (1936, British India/UK; 8.ii) Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry” (1942, Martinique; 2.vi) Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Negritude and the Concept of Universal Civilization” (1963, Senegal; 3.iii) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) Abdellatif Laâbi, Prologue to Souffles (1966, Morocco; 4.iii) L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel, I” (1967, Barbados/Jamaica/UK; 2.viii) Chinweizu, “Prodigals, Come Home!” (1973, Nigeria; 3.vii) Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v)

83

Settler Colonial Modernisms A. R. D. Fairburn, “Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters” (1934, New Zealand; 14.ii) James McAuley and Harold Stewart, “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors” (1944, Australia; 14.iii) André P. Brink, “On the Threshold, VIII” (1965, South Africa; 3.v) Nationalist Modernisms Grigol Robakidze, “Niko Pirosmani” (1926, Georgia; 7.ii) Normil G. Sylvain, “La Revue indigène: Program” (1927, Haiti; 2.i) Anita Brenner, from “Revolution and Renascence” (1929, Mexico/US, 1.iv) Hugh Stollmeyer, “The Time Has Come” (1933, Trinidad; 2.iii) Manifesto of the Self-Reliant Literary Group (1934, Vietnam) A. R. D. Fairburn, “Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters” (1934, New Zealand; 14.ii) Mulk Raj Anand, “Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association” (1936, British India/UK; 8.ii) Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry” (1942, Martinique; 2.vi) Nāzik al-Malāʾikah, “Introduction” to Splinters and Ash (1949, Iraq; 4.ii) Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, “The Change of Civilization and Inner Man” (1951, Turkey; 5.iii) Kamleshwar, “Introduction to the New Story” (1969, India; 8.vi) “Manifesto of the Zairian Avant-Gardists” (1973, Zaire; 3.viii)

87 248 93 121 135 176 100 143 385

371 377 133 236 69 44 83 358 371 248 93 166 205 258 155

Indigenism and Indigenous Modernisms Normil G. Sylvain, “La Revue indigène: Program” (1927, Haiti; 2.i) 69 Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928, Brazil; 1.iii) 35 Yolanda Oreamuno, “Protest against Folklore” (1943, Costa Rica; 1.ix) 61 Kāterina Mataira, from “Modern Trends in Maori Art Forms” (1968, New Zealand; 14.iv) 381 Aubrey Williams, “The Artist in the Caribbean,” (1970, Guyana/UK; 2.ix) 109 Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v) 385

xvi

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

Supranational Regionalisms Normil G. Sylvain, “La Revue indigène: Program” (1927, Haiti; 2.i) George Lamming, “Bim: An Introduction” (1955, Barbados; 2.vii) N. M. Rashed, “Introduction” to A Stranger in Iran (1957, Pakistan/US; 8.iii) Elimo Njau, “Copying Puts God to Sleep” (1963, Kenya; 3.iv) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) Abdellatif Laâbi, Prologue to Souffles (1966, Morocco; 4.iii) L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel, I” (1967, Barbados/Jamaica/UK; 2.viii) Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v) Cosmopolitan, Internationalist, and Universalist Modernisms Rabindranath Tagore, from Japan: A Lecture (1916, British India; 8.i) Hirato Renkichi, “My Futurism in Action” (1921, Japan; 10.i) Margaret Preston, “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art” (1923, Australia; 14.i) Grigol Robakidze, “Niko Pirosmani” (1926, Georgia; 7.ii) Lu Xun, “Some Notes on Our New Literature” (1929, Republic of China; 9.i) Victoria Ocampo, from “Woman and Her Expression” (1935, Argentina; 1.vii) Kāmil al-Tilimsānī, “On Degenerate Art” (1939, Egypt; 4.i) Eileen Chang, “Dream of Genius” (1940, Republic of China; 9.iii) Ji Xian, “Explicating the Tenets of the Modernist School” (1956, 9.iv) Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Negritude and the Concept of Universal Civilization” (1963, Senegal; 3.iii) André P. Brink, “On the Threshold, VIII” (1965, South Africa; 3.v) Expatriate Modernisms and Modernisms in Exile Margaret Preston, “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art” (1923, Australia; 14.i) César Vallejo, “New Poetry” (1926, Peru/France; 1.i) Aimé Césaire, “Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution” (1935, Martinique/France; 2.iv) Gabriela Mistral, “How I Write” (1938, Chile; 1.viii) Eileen Chang, “Dream of Genius” (1940, Republic of China; 9.iii) N. M. Rashed, “Introduction” to A Stranger in Iran (1957, Pakistan/US; 8.iii) Aubrey Williams, “The Artist in the Caribbean,” (1970, Guyana/UK; 2.ix) Kamāl Bullāṭah, “Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution” (1971, Palestine/ Lebanon; 4.iv) Chinweizu, “Prodigals, Come Home!” (1973, Nigeria; 3.vii) Avot Yeshurun, “From Whom Did I Take Permission?” (1979, Israel; 15.iii) Gao Xingjian, “Without Isms” (1993, People’s Republic of China/France; 9.vi) Feminist Modernisms Devorah Fogel, “Afterword” to Mannequins (1934, Poland; 15.iv) Victoria Ocampo, From “Woman and Her Expression” (1935, Argentina; 1.vii) Gabriela Mistral, “How I Write” (1938, Chile; 1.viii) Eileen Chang, “Dream of Genius” (1940, Republic of China; 9.iii)

69 97 250 127 135 176 100 385 245 318 368 236 285 54 161 291 294 121 133

368 30 87 58 291 250 109 181 143 417 302 415 54 58 291

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

xvii

Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry” (1942, Martinique; 2.vi) 93 Forough Farrokhzad and Hasan Honarmandi, “Hasan Honarmandi’s Interview with Forough Farrokhzad” (1967, Iran; 6.iii) 221 Can Xue, “A Particular Sort of Story” (2003, People’s Republic of China; 9.vii) 311 Aesthetic Autonomy and the Resistance to Politicized Art Ahmet Haşim, “Some Thoughts about Poetry” (1921, Turkey; 5.i) Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Novels without a ‘Story-Like’ Story” (1927, Japan; 10.iv) André P. Brink, “On the Threshold, VIII” (1965, South Africa; 3.v) Hong Huang, “The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto)” (1980, People’s Republic of China; 9.v) Gao Xingjian, “Without Isms” (1993, People’s Republic of China/France; 9.vi)

194 326 133 297 302

2. ARTISTIC MOVEMENTS AND STYLES Realism Margaret Preston, “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art”(1923, Australia; 14.i) Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes from a Stream and ‘Wings,’ I and II” (1936, Korea; 11.iii) Kamleshwar, “Introduction to the New Story” (1969, India; 8.vi) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) Symbolism and Poésie pur Ahmet Haşim, “Some Thoughts about Poetry” (1921, Turkey; 5.i) Dai Wangshu, “Dai Wangshu’s Poetic Theory” (1932, Republic of China; 9.ii) Sagawa Chika, “When Passing between Trees” (1930s, Japan; 10.vi) Ji Xian, “Explicating the Tenets of the Modernist School” (1956, 9.iv) André P. Brink, “On the Threshold, VIII” (1965, South Africa; 3.v) Surrealism Kim Kirim, “Soliloquies of ‘Pierrot’—Fragmentary Notions on ‘Poésie’” (1931, Korea; 11.ii) “Légitime Défense: Declaration” (1932, Martinique/France; 2.ii) Kāmil al-Tilimsānī, “On Degenerate Art” (1939, Egypt; 4.i) Aimé Césaire, “Tropiques: Presentation” (1941, Martinique; 2.v) Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, and Oktay Rifat, “The Garip Preface” (1941, Turkey; 5.ii) Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry” (1942, Martinique; 2.vi) James McAuley and Harold Stewart, “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors” (1944, Australia; 14.iii) Primitivism Kirill Zdanevich, “Niko Pirosmanashvili” (1926, Georgia; 7.i) Grigol Robakidze, “Niko Pirosmani” (1926, Georgia; 7.ii) Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928, Brazil; 1.iii) Aubrey Williams, “The Artist in the Caribbean,” (1970, Guyana/UK; 2.ix)

368 352 258 135 194 289 332 294 133

347 80 161 91 199 93 377 228 236 35 109

xviii

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

The Transnational Avant-Gardes Hirato Renkichi, “My Futurism in Action” (1921, Japan; 10.i) Red and Black Manifesto (1923, Japan; 10.ii) Hagiwara Kyojiro, “An Artistic Enquiry into the Barrack Towns” (1924, Japan; 10.iii) Ko Dada, “Misconstrued ‘Dada’: For Kim Kijin” (1924, Korea; 11.i) César Vallejo, “New Poetry” (1926, Peru/France; 1.i) Joaquín Torres-García, “Will to Construct” (1930, France/Uruguay; 1.v) Victoria Ocampo, From “Woman and Her Expression” (1935, Argentina; 1.vii) Malay Roy Choudhury, “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry” (1968, India; 8.v) Negritude and Pan-Africanism Nicolás Guillén, Prologue to Sóngoro Cosongo (1931, Cuba; 1.vi) Aimé Césaire, “Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution” (1935, Martinique/France; 2.iv) Aimé Césaire, “Tropiques: Presentation” (1941, Martinique; 2.v) Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Negritude and the Concept of Universal Civilization” (1963, Senegal; 3.iii) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel, I” (1967, Barbados/Jamaica/UK; 2.viii)

318 320 321 345 30 49 54 257 52 87 91 121 135 100

3. FORMS AND MEDIA Free Verse and Poetry Yankev Glatshteyn, Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, and Nachum Baruch Minkov, “The Introspectivist Manifesto” (1919, US; 15.1) Ahmet Haşim, “Some Thoughts about Poetry” (1921, Turkey; 5.i) Nima Yushij, “Preface to The Myth” (1922, Iran; 6.i) César Vallejo, “New Poetry” (1926, Peru/France; 1.i) Nicolás Guillén, Prologue to Sóngoro Cosongo (1931, Cuba; 1.vi) Kim Kirim, “Soliloquies of ‘Pierrot’—Fragmentary Notions on ‘Poésie’” (1931, Korea; 11.ii) Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, “In Search of the Lost” (1932, Madagascar; 3.i) Dai Wangshu, “Dai Wangshu’s Poetic Theory” (1932, Republic of China; 9.ii) Hugh Stollmeyer, “The Time Has Come” (1933, Trinidad; 2.iii) Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, “The Lost Is Found!” (1934, Madagascar, 3.ii) Sagawa Chika, “When Passing between Trees” (1930s, Japan; 10.vi) Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, and Oktay Rifat, “The Garip Preface” (1941, Turkey; 5.ii) Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry” (1942, Martinique; 2.vi) James McAuley and Harold Stewart, “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors” (1944, Australia; 14.iii) Nāzik al-Malāʾikah, “Introduction” to Splinters and Ash (1949, Iraq; 4.ii) Ji Xian, “Explicating the Tenets of the Modernist School” (1956, 9.iv) N. M. Rashed, “Introduction” to A Stranger in Iran (1957, Pakistan/US; 8.iii) Ahmad Shamlu, “A Poetry That Is Life” (1958, Iran; 6.ii)

401 194 213 30 52 347 117 289 83 120 332 199 93 377 166 294 250 215

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

Forough Farrokhzad and Hasan Honarmandi, “Hasan Honarmandi’s Interview with Forough Farrokhzad” (1967, Iran; 6.iii) Malay Roy Choudhury, “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry” (1968, India; 8.v) Chinweizu, “Prodigals, Come Home!” (1973, Nigeria; 3.vii) Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v) Hong Huang, “The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto)” (1980, People’s Republic of China; 9.v) Adūnīs, from “Poetics and Modernity” (1984, Syria/France; 4.v) Ka. Naa. Su, “Modern Literature” (c. 1986–7, India; 8.viii) The Novel Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Novels without a ‘Story-Like’ Story” (1927, Japan; 10.iv) L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel, I” (1967, Barbados/Jamaica/UK; 2.viii) Ka. Naa. Su, “Modern Literature” (c. 1986–7, India; 8.viii)

xix

221 257 143 385 297 185 273

326 100 273

The Short Story Kobayashi Takiji, “On Wall Stories and ‘Short’ Short Stories: A New Approach to Proletarian Literature” (1931, Japan; 10.v) 329 Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes from a Stream and ‘Wings,’ I and II” (1936, Korea; 11.iii) 352 Kamleshwar, “Introduction to the New Story” (1969, India; 8.vi) 258 Ka. Naa. Su, “Modern Literature” (c. 1986–7, India; 8.viii) 273 Painting and the Visual Arts Margaret Preston, “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art”(1923, Australia; 14.i) Hagiwara Kyojiro, “An Artistic Enquiry into the Barrack Towns” (1924, Japan; 10.iii) Kirill Zdanevich, “Niko Pirosmanashvili” (1926, Georgia; 7.i) Anita Brenner, from “Revolution and Renascence” (1929, Mexico/US, 1.iv) Joaquín Torres-García, “Will to Construct” (1930, France/Uruguary; 1.v) A. R. D. Fairburn, “Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters” (1934, New Zealand; 14.ii) Mohd Salehuddin, “Our Art” (1950, Malaysia; 13.i) Elimo Njau, “Copying Puts God to Sleep” (1963, Kenya; 3.iv) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) Kāterina Mataira, from “Modern Trends in Maori Art Forms” (1968, New Zealand; 14.iv) Aubrey Williams, “The Artist in the Caribbean,” (1970, Guyana/UK; 2.ix) Kamāl Bullāṭah, “Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution” (1971, Palestine/ Lebanon; 4.iv) Film and Photography Sagawa Chika, “When Passing between Trees” (1930s, Japan; 10.vi) Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933, Japan; 10.vii)

368 321 228 44 49 371 361 127 135 381 109 181 332 335

xx

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes from a Stream and ‘Wings,’ I and II” (1936, Korea; 11.iii) 352 Music Hirato Renkichi, “My Futurism in Action” (1921, Japan; 10.i) Elimo Njau, “Copying Puts God to Sleep” (1963, Kenya; 3.iv) L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel, I” (1967, Barbados/Jamaica/UK; 2.viii)

100

Dance Anonymous, “Which Art Is for Us?” (1954, Malaysia; 13.ii)

363

Criticism and the Essay Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933, Japan; 10.vii) Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes from a Stream and ‘Wings,’ I and II” (1936, Korea; 11.iii) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) Malay Roy Choudhury, “The Portrait of the Artist as a Notun Samalochak” (1968, India; 8.iv) Raja Dhale, from “The True Story of Satyakatha (1969, India; 8.vii) Ka. Naa. Su, “Modern Literature” (c. 1986–7, India; 8.viii) Manifestos Yankev Glatshteyn, Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, and Nachum Baruch Minkov, “The Introspectivist Manifesto” (1919, US; 15.i) Hirato Renkichi, “My Futurism in Action” (1921, Japan; 10.i) Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928, Brazil; 1.iii) Dai Wangshu, “Dai Wangshu’s Poetic Theory” (1932, Republic of China; 9.ii) Manifesto of the Self-Reliant Literary Group (1934, Vietnam) Mulk Raj Anand, “Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association” (1936, British India/UK; 8.ii) Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, and Oktay Rifat, “The Garip Preface” (1941, Turkey; 5.ii) Ji Xian, “Explicating the Tenets of the Modernist School” (1956, 9.iv) Malay Roy Choudhury, “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry” (1968, India; 8.v) “Manifesto of the Zairian Avant-Gardists” (1973, Zaire; 3.viii) Hong Huang, “The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto)” (1980, People’s Republic of China; 9.v)

318 127

335 352 135 255 266 273

401 318 35 289 358 248 199 294 257 155 297

4. THEMES Inheriting the West and Negotiating Western Cultural Hegemony Rabindranath Tagore, from Japan: A Lecture (1916, British India; 8.i) Hirato Renkichi, “My Futurism in Action” (1921, Japan; 10.i) Margaret Preston, “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art” (1923, Australia; 14.i) Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Novels without a ‘Story-Like’ Story” (1927, Japan; 10.iv) Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928, Brazil; 1.iii)

245 318 368 326 35

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, “In Search of the Lost” (1932, Madagascar; 3.ii) Hugh Stollmeyer, “The Time Has Come” (1933, Trinidad; 2.iii) Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933, Japan; 10.vii) A. R. D. Fairburn, “Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters” (1934, New Zealand; 14.ii) Aimé Césaire, “Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution” (1935, Martinique/ France; 2.iv) Kāmil al-Tilimsānī, “On Degenerate Art” (1939, Egypt; 4.i) Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry” (1942, Martinique; 2.vi) Mohd Salehuddin, “Our Art” (1950, Malaysia; 13.i) Anonymous, “Which Art Is for Us?” (1954, Malaysia; 13.ii) Ji Xian, “Explicating the Tenets of the Modernist School” (1956, 9.iv) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) Chinweizu, “Prodigals, Come Home!” (1973, Nigeria; 3.vii) Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v) Hong Huang, “The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto)” (1980, People’s Republic of China; 9.v) Adūnīs, from “Poetics and Modernity” (1984, Syria/France; 4.v) Gao Xingjian, “Without Isms” (1993, People’s Republic of China/France; 9.vi) Cultural Hybridity Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928, Brazil; 1.iii) Mikhl Likht, “Every New Poet: Proem” (1932, New York; 15.ii) Elimo Njau, “Copying Puts God to Sleep” (1963, Kenya; 3.iv) L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel, I” (1967, Barbados/Jamaica/UK; 2.viii) Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v) Hong Huang, “The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto)” (1980, People’s Republic of China; 9.v) Making Tradition Modern Yankev Glatshteyn, Aron Glanz-Leyeles, and Nachum Baruch Minkov, “The Introspectivist Manifesto” (1919, US; 15.i) Nima Yushij, “Preface to The Myth” (1922, Iran; 6.i) Kirill Zdanevich, “Niko Pirosmanashvili” (1926, Georgia; 7.i) Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928, Brazil; 1.iii) Anita Brenner, from “Revolution and Renascence” (1929, Mexico/US, 1.iv) Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, “In Search of the Lost” (1932, Madagascar; 3.i) Hugh Stollmeyer, “The Time Has Come” (1933, Trinidad; 2.iii) Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933, Japan; 10.vii) Kāmil al-Tilimsānī, “On Degenerate Art” (1939, Egypt; 4.i) Yolanda Oreamuno, “Protest against Folklore” (1943, Costa Rica; 1.ix) Nāzik al-Malāʾikah, “Introduction” to Splinters and Ash (1949, Iraq; 4.ii) Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, “The Change of Civilization and Inner Man” (1951, Turkey; 5.iii) N. M. Rashed, “Introduction” to A Stranger in Iran (1957, Pakistan/US; 8.iii) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi)

xxi

117 83 335 371 87 161 93 361 363 294 135 143 385 297 185 302 35 412 127 100 385 297

401 213 228 35 44 117 83 335 161 61 166 205 250 135

xxii

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

Kāterina Mataira, from “Modern Trends in Maori Art Forms” (1968, New Zealand; 14.iv) Chinweizu, “Prodigals, Come Home!” (1973, Nigeria; 3.vii) Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v) Hong Huang, “The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto)” (1980, People’s Republic of China; 9.v) Adūnīs, from “Poetics and Modernity” (1984, Syria/France; 4.v) Gao Xingjian, “Without Isms” (1993, People’s Republic of China/France; 9.vi) Inventing a New Tradition Margaret Preston, “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art” (1923, Australia; 14.i) A. R. D. Fairburn, “Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters” (1934, New Zealand; 14.ii) Aimé Césaire, “Tropiques: Presentation” (1941, Martinique; 2.v) Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry” (1942, Martinique; 2.vi) Language and Translation Yankev Glatshteyn, Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, and Nachum Baruch Minkov, “The Introspectivist Manifesto” (1919, US; 15.i) Lu Xun, “Some Notes on Our New Literature” (1929, Republic of China; 9.i) Mikhl Likht, “Every New Poet: Proem” (1932, New York; 15.ii) Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Negritude and the Concept of Universal Civilization” (1963, Senegal; 3.iii) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) Abdellatif Laâbi, Prologue to Souffles (1966, Morocco; 4.iii) Chinweizu, “Prodigals, Come Home!” (1973, Nigeria; 3.vii) Raja Dhale, from “The True Story of Satyakatha (1969, India; 8.vii) Adūnīs, from “Poetics and Modernity” (1984, Syria/France; 4.v) Gao Xingjian, “Without Isms” (1993, People’s Republic of China/France; 9.vi)

381 143 385 297 185 302

368 371 91 93

401 285 412 121 135 176 143 266 185 302

Folk Arts and Popular Culture Kirill Zdanevich, “Niko Pirosmanashvili” (1926, Georgia; 7.i) Grigol Robakidze, “Niko Pirosmani” (1926, Georgia; 7.ii) Anita Brenner, from “Revolution and Renascence” (1929, Mexico/US, 1.iv) Yolanda Oreamuno, “Protest against Folklore” (1943, Costa Rica; 1.ix) L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel, I” (1967, Barbados/Jamaica/UK; 2.viii) Aubrey Williams, “The Artist in the Caribbean,” (1970, Guyana/UK; 2.ix)

100 109

Mass Culture Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933, Japan; 10.vii) Eileen Chang, “Dream of Genius” (1940, Republic of China; 9.iii) Anonymous, “Which Art Is for Us?” (1954, Malaysia; 13.ii)

335 291 363

Landscape and the Natural World Rabindranath Tagore, from Japan: A Lecture (1916, British India; 8.i) Grigol Robakidze, “Niko Pirosmani” (1926, Georgia; 7.ii)

245 236

228 236 44 61

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

xxiii

Sagawa Chika, “When Passing between Trees” (1930s, Japan; 10.vi) Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933, Japan; 10.vii) A. R. D. Fairburn, “Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters” (1934, New Zealand; 14.ii) Gabriela Mistral, “How I Write” (1938, Chile; 1.viii) Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry” (1942, Martinique; 2.vi) Kāterina Mataira, from “Modern Trends in Maori Art Forms” (1968, New Zealand; 14.iv) Aubrey Williams, “The Artist in the Caribbean,” (1970, Guyana/UK; 2.ix)

332 335 371 58 93 381 109

The City Hagiwara Kyojiro, “An Artistic Enquiry into the Barrack Towns” (1924, Japan; 10.iii) Kirill Zdanevich, “Niko Pirosmanashvili” (1926, Georgia; 7.i) Grigol Robakidze, “Niko Pirosmani” (1926, Georgia; 7.ii) Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933, Japan; 10.vii) Eileen Chang, “Dream of Genius” (1940, Republic of China; 9.iii)

321 228 236 335 291

Religion Elimo Njau, “Copying Puts God to Sleep” (1963, Kenya; 3.iv) Kamleshwar, “Introduction to the New Story” (1969, India; 8.vi) Avot Yeshurun, “From Whom Did I Take Permission?” (1979, Israel; 15.iii) Adūnīs, from “Poetics and Modernity” (1984, Syria/France; 4.v)

127 258 417 185

War Magda Portal, “Platforms for Living” (1927, Peru; 1.ii) Aimé Césaire, “Tropiques: Presentation” (1941, Martinique; 2.v) James McAuley and Harold Stewart, “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors” (1944, Australia; 14.iii) N. M. Rashed, “Introduction” to A Stranger in Iran (1957, Pakistan/US; 8.iii) Kamāl Bullāṭah, “Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution” (1971, Palestine/ Lebanon; 4.iv) Gender (see also, Feminist Modernisms, above) A. R. D. Fairburn, “Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters” (1934, New Zealand; 14.ii) Devorah Fogel, “Afterword” to Mannequins (1934, Poland; 15.iv) Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry” (1942, Martinique; 2.vi) Anonymous, “Which Art Is for Us?” (1954, Malaysia; 13.ii) N. M. Rashed, “Introduction” to A Stranger in Iran (1957, Pakistan/US; 8.iii) Kāterina Mataira, from “Modern Trends in Maori Art Forms” (1968, New Zealand; 14.iv) Kamleshwar, “Introduction to the New Story” (1969, India; 8.vi) Individualism and Individuality Yankev Glatshteyn, Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, and Nachum Baruch Minkov, “The Introspectivist Manifesto” (1919, US; 15.i) Elimo Njau, “Copying Puts God to Sleep” (1963, Kenya; 3.iv)

32 91 377 250 181

371 415 93 363 250 381 258

401 127

xxiv

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel, I” (1967, Barbados/Jamaica/UK; 2.viii) Gao Xingjian, “Without Isms” (1993, People’s Republic of China/France; 9.vi) Can Xue, “A Particular Sort of Story” (2003, People’s Republic of China; 9.vii) Interiority, Subjectivism, and Psychological Narration Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes from a Stream and ‘Wings,’ I and II” (1936, Korea; 11.iii) Nāzik al-Malāʾikah, “Introduction” to Splinters and Ash (1949, Iraq; 4.ii) Hong Huang, “The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto)” (1980, People’s Republic of China; 9.v) Gao Xingjian, “Without Isms” (1993, People’s Republic of China/France; 9.vi) Can Xue, “A Particular Sort of Story” (2003, People’s Republic of China; 9.vii)

135 100 302 311

352 166 297 302 311

5. INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF THE FIELD Little Magazines Red and Black Manifesto (1923, Japan; 10.ii) Magda Portal, “Platforms for Living” (1927, Peru; 1.ii) Normil G. Sylvain, “La Revue indigène: Program” (1927, Haiti; 2.i) “Légitime Défense: Declaration” (1932, Martinique/France; 2.ii) Aimé Césaire, “Tropiques: Presentation” (1941, Martinique; 2.v) James McAuley and Harold Stewart, “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors” (1944, Australia; 14.iii) George Lamming, “Bim: An Introduction” (1955, Barbados; 2.vii) Abdellatif Laâbi, Prologue to Souffles (1966, Morocco; 4.iii) Raja Dhale, from “The True Story of Satyakatha (1969, India; 8.vii) Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v) Educational Institutions Ahmet Haşim, “Some Thoughts about Poetry” (1921, Turkey; 5.i) Margaret Preston, “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art” (1923, Australia; 14.i) Elimo Njau, “Copying Puts God to Sleep” (1963, Kenya; 3.iv) Kāterina Mataira, from “Modern Trends in Maori Art Forms” (1968, New Zealand; 14.iv) Raja Dhale, from “The True Story of Satyakatha (1969, India; 8.vii) Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v) Newspapers and the Popular Press Eileen Chang, “Dream of Genius” (1940, Republic of China; 9.iii) James McAuley and Harold Stewart, “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors” (1944, Australia; 14.iii) Raja Dhale, from “The True Story of Satyakatha (1969, India; 8.vii) Ka. Naa. Su, “Modern Literature” (c. 1986–7, India; 8.viii)

320 32 69 80 91 377 97 176 266 385 194 368 127 381 266 385 291 377 266 273

ALTERNATE TABLES OF CONTENTS

State Sponsorship of the Arts Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Negritude and the Concept of Universal Civilization” (1963, Senegal; 3.iii) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) “Manifesto of the Zairian Avant-Gardists” (1973, Zaire; 3.viii) Institutions of the Art World: The Art Market, Exhibitions, Galleries Margaret Preston, “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art”(1923, Australia; 14.i) Kirill Zdanevich, “Niko Pirosmanashvili” (1926, Georgia; 7.i) Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1966, Nigeria; 3.vi) Kamāl Bullāṭah, “Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution” (1971, Palestine/ Lebanon; 4.iv) Coterie Modernism Ko Dada, “Misconstrued ‘Dada’: For Kim Kijin” (1924, Korea; 11.i) Sagawa Chika, “When Passing between Trees” (1930s, Japan; 10.vi) George Lamming, “Bim: An Introduction” (1955, Barbados; 2.vii) Malay Roy Choudhury, “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry” (1968, India; 8.v) Kamleshwar, “Introduction to the New Story” (1969, India; 8.vi) Raja Dhale, from “The True Story of Satyakatha (1969, India; 8.vii) Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976, Samoa/Fiji; 14.v) Ka. Naa. Su, “Modern Literature” (c. 1986–7, India; 8.viii)

xxv

121 135 155

368 228 135 181 345 332 97 257 258 266 385 273

xxvi

EDITORIAL PREFACE TO MODERNIST ARCHIVES

Archival excavation and detailed contextualization are becoming increasingly central to scholarship on literary modernism. In recent years, the increased accessibility and dissemination of previously unpublished or little-known documents and texts have led to paradigm-shifting scholarly interventions on a range of canonical authors (Beckett, Eliot, Joyce, Pound, and Woolf, among others), neglected topics (the occult, “primitivism,” fascism, eugenics, book history, the writing process), and critical methodologies (genetic criticism, intertextuality, and historical contexts). This trend will surely only increase as large-scale digitization of archival materials gathers pace and existing copyright restrictions gradually lapse. Modernist Archives is a book series that aims to channel, extend, and interrogate these shifts by publishing hitherto unavailable or neglected primary materials for a wider readership. Each volume also provides supporting, contextualizing work by scholars, alongside a critical apparatus of notes and references. The impetus for Modernist Archives emerges from the editors’ well-established series, Historicizing Modernism. While Historicizing Modernism’s focus is analytical, Modernist Archives will make accessible edited and annotated versions of little-known sources and avant-texts. The monographs and edited collections in Historicizing Modernism have revealed the extent to which contemporary scholars are increasingly turning toward archival and/or unpublished material in order to reconfigure understandings of modernism, in its broader historical rootedness as well as in its compositional methodologies. The present series extends this empirical and genetic focus. Understanding and defining such primary sources as a broad category extending to letters, diaries, notes, drafts, and marginalia, the Modernist Archives series produces volumes that not only unearth significant unpublished material and provide original scholarship on this material, but also develop cutting-edge editorial presentation techniques that preserve as much information as possible in an economical and accessible way. Also of note is the potential for the series to explore collections pertaining to the relations between literary modernism and other media (radio, television), or important cultural moments. The series thus aims to be an enabling force within modernist scholarship. It is becoming ever more difficult to read this extraordinary period of literary experimentation in isolation from contextualizing archival material, sometimes dubbed the “grey canon” of Modernist writing. The difficulty, we suggest, is something like a loss of innocence: once obviously relevant materials are actually accessible, they cannot be ignored. They may challenge received ideas about the limits or definition of modernism; they may upend theoretical frameworks, or encourage fresh theoretical reflection; they may require new methodologies, or revise the very notion of

xxviii

EDITORIAL PREFACE TO MODERNIST ARCHIVES

“authorship”; likewise, they may require types of knowledge that we never knew we needed—but there they are. However, while we are champions of historical, archival research, Modernist Archives in no way seeks to influence the results or approaches that scholars in this area will utilize in the exciting times ahead. By commissioning a wide range of innovative and challenging editions, this series aims to once more “make strange” and “make new” our fundamental ideas about modernism. Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning, and David Tucker

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Bahareh Azad is undertaking a joint PhD program in English between University of Isfahan, Iran, and McGill University. Her main interest lies in modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics, posthumanism, gender, race, and Persian studies. She has authored Testing Liberal Humanism: The East in David Hare’s Plays and is writing a dissertation on the posthuman in the poetry of J.H. Prynne, Joshua Whitehead, and Tracy K. Smith. Her recent research engages biopolitics in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and chimeric subjectivities in Native American poetry. She is currently working with McGill English’s Poetry Matters and the Montreal International Poetry Prize. Rudrani Gangopadhyay is a doctoral student at the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Her primary research interest is the textual and cinematic city in twentieth-century South Asia. She is also interested in the theory and practice of translation as well as comparative modernisms in South Asia. She has been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Mejo: The MELOW Journal of World Literature, and the Contemporary Literary Review of India, among other places, and is one of the organizers of the Urban Humanities Working Group housed at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers. Shaynah Jackson is a graduate from the Master of Arts programme at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her thesis in English Literature focused on the figure of the child within modernism, particularly as a projection of adult desire. She has published on the portrayal of eating disorders within literature and her current research is interested in queer theory, feminist scholarship, and liminal bodies within modernism. She works as an English language teacher in Tokyo, Japan. Alys Moody is Assistant Professor in Literature at Bard College and a Senior Lecturer in English at Macquarie University. She was the 2018-19 Early Career Fellow in the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as numerous essays on modernism and world literature. Her current book project examines the relationship between world hunger, world literature, and global modernism in the second half of the twentieth century. Keeran Murphy is completing a PhD in English at Duke University. His research focuses on Global Anglophone and Korean modern fiction, comparative literary studies, globalization, and literary engagements with modernity/coloniality. He is a former Fulbright Korea English Teaching Assistant. Phuong Ngoc Nguyen is Senior Lecturer (MCF HDR) in Vietnamese language and civilization in the Department of Asian Studies at Aix Marseille University and member of

xxx

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

the Institute of Asian Research (IRASIA, Institut de recherches asiatiques, AMU-CNRS). Her doctoral thesis, on the first Vietnamese anthropologists, who published in the first half of the twentieth century, was published as A l’origine de l’anthropologies au Vietnam (2012). Her research continues to focus on Vietnamese intellectuals and writers during the period of French colonization. She is currently working on a book project entitled “The birth of a National Literature: The Vietnamese Literary Space in the First Half of the 20th Century.” Harsha Ram is Associate Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Ram’s first book, The Imperial Sublime (2003), addressed the relationship between poetic genre, aesthetic theory, territorial space, and political power in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian literature. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernisms. His forthcoming book, The Scale of Culture: City, Nation, Empire and the Russian-Georgian Encounter, seeks to provide a historical account of cultural relations between Georgian and Russian artists and writers during the imperial and early Soviet eras, while at the same time offering a site-specific case study of how a “peripheral” city on the margins of multiple regional systems negotiated the challenges of historical modernity and aesthetic modernism.  Ariel Resnikoff is a poet, scholar, translator, and educator who completed his PhD in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. His most recent works include Ten-Four: Poems, Translations, Variations (Operating System 2015), with Jerome Rothenberg, and Between Shades (Materialist Press 2014). With Stephen Ross, he is at work on the first critical bilingual edition of Mikhl Likht’s modernist Yiddish long poem, Processions; and with Lilach Lachman and Gabriel Levin, he is translating into English the collected writings of the translingual-Hebrew poet, Avot Yeshurun. He has taught courses on multilingual diasporic literatures at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (UPenn) and at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, the artist and landscape architect, Rivka Weinstock. Stephen Ross is Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University. He is the author of Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford University Press, 2017), and is currently at work on a second monograph that examines the relationship between poetic knowledge and the problem of compulsory self-description. With Ariel Resnikoff, he is working toward the first translation and critical edition of Mikhl Likht’s Yiddish modernist long-poem, Processions. Kaitlin Staudt recently completed her DPhil in Turkish literature at the University of Oxford. Her research examines how authors develop experimental aesthetics to counter hegemonic narratives of political modernity in Turkey, with an emphasis on the novels of the early Kemalist Republic and on contemporary fiction published since the rise of the AKP government in 2002. She is currently writing a book looking comparatively at Turkish and British modernisms. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the DAAD, the British Institute at Ankara, Turkey Scholarships, and the Fulbright Program. 

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

xxxi

Camilla Sutherland (PhD, University College London) has taught at the University of Oxford and is currently tenured Assistant Professor of Hispanic Literature and Culture and Co-Director of the Center of Mexican Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on gender and Latin American modernism. She is a contributor to the forthcoming Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines and is currently working on a monograph entitled The Space of Latin American Women Modernists. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our first thanks go to our editors at Bloomsbury, David Avital and Clara Herberg, for their unflagging guidance, support, professionalism, and patience. We are likewise extremely grateful to Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, the series editors, for inviting us to undertake this project in the first place and for stewarding this book through its early stages with unrivalled faith and generosity. Collaboration is the beating heart of this project. Editing it has taught us profound lessons about the virtues and necessity of collaboration and horizontal networking within the field of global modernism. Our inductive approach to assembling materials here reflects that scruple. Collaboration on a volume such as this one, especially beginning it as we did so early in our careers, has meant working largely with graduate students and early career academics who are building their credentials as scholars and area specialists. The pervasive and insidious precarity of junior scholars within the contemporary academy has afflicted our collaborators and us at every turn. It is not hyperbole to say that it threatened the existence of this project dozens of times. We are immensely proud of our collaborators and ourselves for having seen this project through in the face of the myriad challenges which precarity poses to academic labor in terms of mental health and access to institutional resources and support. It has been an enormous privilege to work with our large team of collaborators and contributors. We would like to begin by acknowledging the hard and dedicated work of our section editors: Camilla Sutherland (Latin American modernism); Kaitlin Staudt (Turkish modernism); Bahareh Azad (Persian modernism); Harsha Ram (modernism in the Caucasus); Rudrani Gangopadhyay (South Asian modernism); Phuong Ngoc Nguyen (Vietnamese modernism); Keeran Murphy (Korean modernism, who went above and beyond in putting together a stellar section on very short notice); Muhamad Nasri Mohamad Shah (Malay modernism); Shaynah Jackson (South Pacific modernism); and Ariel Resnikoff (Ashkenazi Jewish modernism). We would also like to single out Sho Sugita who, though not a section editor, made a number of inspired and indispensable contributions to the Japanese and Korean modernism sections. We would like to acknowledge the superb work of our many translators. The following provided original translations for this volume: Matthew Winterton (Malagasy); Klara du Plessis (Afrikaans); Sarah Van Beurden (French); Harsha Ram (Russian); Bahareh Azad (Persian); Emily Drumsta (Arabic); Sho Sugita (Japanese); Tom Baudinette (Japanese); Kaitlin Staudt (Turkish); A. Sean Pue (Urdu); Sadhana Bhagwat (Marathi); Rudrani Gangopadhyay and Arshdeep Singh Brar (Hindi); Darun Subramaniam (Tamil); Chi P. Pham (Vietnamese); Muhamad Nasri Mohamad Shah (Malay); Nagi Yoshikawa (Korean); John Steen (Spanish); and Ariel Resnikoff (Yiddish and Hebrew). We are likewise grateful for the labor of those whose previously published translations we reproduce here, as well as to all rights holders who granted us permission to use their texts. Please see the sources and permission section at the end of these acknowledgments for the complete list.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xxxiii

We have benefited enormously from the expert advice and assistance of a number of colleagues, friends, and associates along the way: Tom Baudinette (Japanese modernism); Jordan Walsh (Chinese modernism); Jerome Rothenberg (Ashkenazi Jewish modernism); Ahona Panda (Indian modernism); Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (Indian modernism); Klara du Plessis (Sub-Saharan African Modernism); Anjali Nerlekar (Indian modernism); Yiyan Wang (Chinese modernism); Maebh Long (Fijian/South Pacific modernism); Ben Etherington (Caribbean modernism); Ruzbeh Jamshidi (Persian modernism); Mike Niblett (Caribbean modernism); Sawako Nakayasu (Japanese modernism); Sarah Dunstan (African/Caribbean modernism); Moyang Li and Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Chinese modernism); A. Sean Pue (Urdu Modernism); Cath Duric (French translation); Melinda Cooper (Australian modernism); Joshua L. Freeman (Uyghur modernism); and Simon Wickhamsmith (Mongolian modernism). We particularly enjoyed our consultations with Joshua and Simon, and although we weren’t ultimately able to find suitable texts representing Uyghur and Mongolian modernism for this volume, our conversations with them both convinced us of the exciting work that remains to be done on modernisms in these regions. Special thanks to Rawad Wehbe for expert last-minute assistance with Arabic transliteration. Colleagues and friends have supported this project through their willingness to read and discuss the manuscript and to give general advice and feedback: Becky Roach; Kaitlin Staudt; Helen Rydstrand; Stephanie Russo; Sarah Dunstan; Ariel Resnikoff; John Steen; Daniel Katz; Andre Furlani; Omri Moses; Nathan Brown. We would like to thank and acknowledge our research assistants: Shaynah Jackson (University of Waikato), who did brilliant work as the South Pacific modernism section co-editor; Valerie Justo (Concordia University); and Derek Bateman (Concordia University), who heroically transcribed a large swathe of this manuscript. This project was generously supported along the way by a number of funding sources: a Summer Research Scholarship from University of Waikato, which supported Shaynah Jackson’s work on this manuscript; a New Staff Grant from Macquarie University, which allowed us to fund necessary travel and copyright permissions; a Travelling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities, for archival research; an Aide to Research Related Expenses grant from Concordia University; and a new faculty Start-Up Grant from Concordia University, which we used toward copyright permissions. When we conceived this project, in a very different form, way back in 2013, we could not have foreseen the winding paths down which our careers and lives would subsequently lead us: from the United Kingdom to New Zealand, Australia, and the US (Alys) and the United States and Canada (Stephen), but also from graduate students to tenure-track faculty, with plenty of potholes and rough patches along the way. This project bookends a (frankly) quite stressful but also deeply transformative and productive interval in our lives, and stands as a testament to the power of collegiality and friendship. Jane Hudson has been a rock-solid partner, a brilliant friend, and an unconditionally supportive fellow traveler of this project from the start; she is this volume’s third editor for the monumental work she has done outside its covers to make it possible. We dedicate Global Modernists on Modernism to Ari Jay, Jane’s and Stephen’s son, whose birth in 2018 was a beautiful premonition of this book’s coming into the world.

PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

1. MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA César Vallejo, “New Poetry,” trans. Joseph W. Mulligan. Originally published in Selected Writings of César Vallejo (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015). Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Excerpt from “Woman and Her Expression” by Victoria Ocampo, translated by Patricia Owen Steiner, pp. 128–32; complete text of Platforms for Living by Magda Portal, translated by Mervin S. Arrington Jr., pp. 151–4; and complete text of Protest against Folklore by Yolanda Oreamuno, translated by Janet N. Gold, pp. 223–5 from Rereading the Spanish American Essay: Translations of 19th & 20th Century Women’s Essays edited by Doris Meyer, copyright © 1995. By permission of the University of Texas Press. Oswald Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” trans. Leslie Bary. Originally published in Latin American Literary Review 19.38 (1991). Reprinted by permission of LALR and Leslie Bary. Anita Brenner, extract of “Revolution and Renascence.” Originally published in Idols Behind Altars Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929). Reprinted by permission of Peter Glusker, David Page, and Michael Page, for the Anita Brenner Estate. Joaquín Torres-García, “Will to Construct,” trans. Stephen Ross and John Steen. Originally published as “Vouloir Construire” in Cercle et Carré 1 (15 March 1930). Courtesy of the Estate of Joaquín Torres-García. Nicolás Guillén, “Prologue to Sóngoro Cosongo,” trans. Stephen Ross and John Steen. Originally published as “Prólogo” to Sóngoro Cosongo (Havana: Talleres de Ucar, Garcia y Cia., 1931). By permission of the Guillén Foundation. Gabriela Mistral, “How I Write.” From Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral, edited and translated by Stephen Tapscott, copyright © 2002. By permission of the University of Texas Press.

2. MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN Étienne Léro et al, “Légitime Défense: Declaration,” trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski. English translation originally published in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1996). Reproduced by permission of Verso Books, with the support of Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski. Hugh Stollmeyer, “The Time Has Come.” Originally published in The Beacon (1932). Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Hugh Stollmeyer.

PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

xxxv

Aimé Césaire, “Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution.” Originally published in L’Étudiant noir (1935). Translated and reproduced by permission of Marc Césaire. Aimé Césaire, “Presentation,” originally published in Tropiques, no. 1 (1941), and Suzanne Césaire, “Poverty of a Poetry,” originally published in Tropiques, no. 4 (1942). Reprinted by Nouvelles Éditions Place (1978). Translated and reproduced by permission of Marc Césaire and Jean-Michel Place. George Lamming, “An Introduction.” Originally published in Bim (1955). Reproduced by permission of George Lamming. Kamau Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel.” Originally published in Bim (1967). Every effort has been made to contact Brathwaite and his representatives for permission to reproduce this essay. Aubrey Williams, “The Artist in the Caribbean.” © Estate of Aubrey Williams. All rights reserved/DACS. Licensed by Viscopy, 2017.

3. MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Negritude and the Concept of Universal Civilization.” English translation originally published in Présence Africaine, no. 18 (2nd quarter, 1963): 9–13. Reprinted by permission of Présence Africaine. Elimo Njau, “Copying Puts God to Sleep.” Originally published in Transition 9 (June 1963): 15–17. Reprinted by permission of Elimo Njau. André P. Brink, “On the Threshold, VIII.” Originally published in Sestiger 1.3 (1965): 14–25. © The André P. Brink Literary Trust. Reprinted with permission by Liepman AG, Zurich. Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist.” Originally published in Colloquium: Function and Significance of African Negro Art in the Life of the People and for the People (March 30 – April 8, 1966) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1968): 417–26. Courtesy of the Ben Enwonwu Foundation. Chinweizu, “Prodigals, Come Home!” Originally published in Okike: An African Journal of New Writing 4 (December 1973): 1–16. Reprinted by permission of Amechi N. Akwayna, editor of Okike magazine.

4. MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD Kāmil al-Tilimsānī, “On Degenerate Art.” Essay reprinted by permission of May Telmissany. English translation by Mandy McClure originally published in Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, ed. Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018): 101–3. Reprinted by permission of MoMA and the editors. © 2018 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Nāzik al-Malāʾikah, “Introduction” to Splinters and Ash. Essay translated by permission of Barraq Mahbuba, on behalf of al-Malāʾikah's estate. Abdellatif Laâbi, “Prologue” to Souffles, trans. Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Essay reproduced by permission of Abdellatif Laâbi. Translation originally published in Souffles/Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, ed. Olivia C. Harrison and

xxxvi

PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

Teresa Villa-Ignacio (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). Translation reproduced with permission of Teresa Villa-Ignacio and Stanford University Press. Kamāl Bullāṭah, “Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution.” Essay reprinted by permission of Kamāl Bullāṭah. English translation by Katharine Halls originally published in Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, ed. Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018): 325–8. Reprinted by permission of MoMA and the editors. © 2018 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Adūnīs, from “Poetics and Modernity,” trans. Catherine Cobham. Reprinted from Adūnīs, An Introduction to Arab Poetics (London: Saqi Books, 1990). Originally published as Introduction à la poétique arabe (Paris: Sindbad 1985). © Sindbad 1985. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

5. MODERNISM IN TURKEY Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, and Oktay Rifat, “The Garip Preface,” trans. Sidney Wade and Efe Murad. Essay reproduced by permission of Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık Ticaret ve Sanayi A.Ş. Translation first published as “Garip: A Turkish Poetry Manifesto” in Critical Flame, November 8, 2015. Translation reproduced with permission of Sidney Wade and Efe Murad. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, “The Change of Civilization and Inner Man,” trans. Kaitlin Staudt. Essay reproduced by permission of Nermin Mollaoğlu.

6. PERSIAN MODERNISM Nima Yushij, “Preface to The Myth,” trans. Bahareh Azad. Originally published in Persian as the preface to Afsaneh (The Myth), 1922. Every effort has been made to contact Yushij’s representatives for permission to reproduce this essay. Ahmad Shamlu, “A Poetry That Is Life,” trans. Samad Alavi. Originally published in Persian ‘She’r-i Ke Zendegist’ in Hava-ye Tazeh (Fresh Air). Tehran: Nil Publication, 1958: 153–61. Every effort has been made to contact Shamlu’s representatives for permission to reproduce this essay. Forough Farrokhzad and Hasan Honarmandi, “Hasan Honardmandi’s Interview with Forough Farrokhzad,” trans. Bahareh Azad. Originally published in Persian in Arash 13 (1967). Reprinted in Javdaneh Zistan dar Ouj Mandan (Living for Eternity, Dying at the Peak). Tehran: Morvarid, 1998: 180–4. Every effort has been made to contact Farrokhzad’s and Honarmandi’s representatives for permission to reproduce this essay.

7. MODERNISM IN THE CAUCASUS Kirill Zdanevich, “Niko Pirosmanashvili,” trans. Harsha Ram. Originally published in Russian in Tabidze, Titsian, Grigol Robakidze, Geronti Kikodze, Kirill Zdanevich, and Kolau Cherniavskii, Niko Pirosmanishvili (Tiflis: Gosudarstvennoe Izdaltel’stvo Gruzii, 1926). Every effort has been made to contact Zdanevich’s representatives for permission to reproduce this essay.

PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

xxxvii

Grigol Robakidze, “Niko Pirosmani,” trans. Harsha Ram. Originally published in Russian in Tabidze, Titsian, Grigol Robakidze, Geronti Kikodze, Kirill Zdanevich, and Kolau Cherniavskii, Niko Pirosmanishvili (Tiflis: Gosudarstvennoe Izdaltel’stvo Gruzii, 1926). Every effort has been made to contact Robakidze’s representatives for permission to reproduce this essay.

8. MODERNISM IN SOUTH ASIA Mulk Raj Anand, “Manifesto of the Progressive Writers’ Association.” Originally published in Left Review (February 1936). Reprinted by permission of Kewal Anand, for Lokayata. N. M. Rashed, “Introduction” to A Stranger in Iran. Translated and reproduced by permission of Yasmin Hassan, for the N. M. Rashed estate. Malay Roy Choudhury, “The Portrait of the Artist as a Notun Samalochak” and “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry,” trans. Malay Roy Choudhury. Reprinted by permission of Malay Roy Choudhury. Kamleshwar, “Introduction to the New Story,” trans. Arshdeep Singh Brar and Rudrani Gangopadhyay. Originally published in Hindi as “Nayi Kahaani ki Bhumika” (Introduction to the New Story) in Nayi Kahaani ki Bhumika. Akshara Prakashan: New Delhi, 1969. Every effort has been made to contact Kamleshwar’s representatives for permission to reproduce this essay. Raja Dhale, from “The True Story of Satyakatha.” Translated and reproduced by permission of Raja Dhale. Ka. Naa. Subramanyam, “Modern Literature,” trans. Darun Subramaniam. Originally published in Tamil as “Naveena Ilakkiyam” c. 1986–7. Translated from Ilakiya Vimarsanangal: Ka. Naa. Su Katturaigal, II (Literary Criticism: Ka. Na. Su’s Essays, II), edited by Kaavya Shanmugasundaram (Kaavya: Chennai, 2005). Every effort has been made to contact Subramanyam’s representatives for permission to reproduce this essay.

9. CHINESE MODERNISM Lu Xun, “Some Thoughts on Our New Literature,” trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. English translation originally published in Selected Works of Lu Hsun, 4 vols, ed. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956–60). Every effort has been made to contact Lu Xun’s representatives for permission to reproduce this essay. Dai Wangshu, “Dai Wangshu’s Poetic Theory,” trans. Kirk A. Denton. Excerpted from Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. and trans. Kirk A. Denton. Copyright (c) 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. “Dream of Genius” by Eileen Chang (tr. Karen Kingsbury). First published in Renditions, no. 45 (Spring 1996), pp. 25–7. Reprinted by permission of the Research Centre for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

xxxviii

PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

Ji Xian, “Explicating the Tenets of the Modernist School,” trans. Paul Manfredi. English translation originally published in The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, ed. Sungsheng Yvonne Chang, Michelle Yeh, and Ming-ju Fan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Reproduced by permission of Columbia University Press. “The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto)” by Hong Huang (tr. Zhu Zhiyu and John Minford). First published in Renditions, nos. 19 & 20 (Spring & Autumn 1983), pp. 191–4. Reprinted by permission of the Research Centre for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Gao Xingjian, “Without Isms,” trans. Mabel Lee. English translation originally published in The Case for Literature, by Gao Xingjian, trans. Mabel Lee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001): 64–77. Reproduced by permission of Mabel Lee. Can Xue, “A Particular Sort of Story,” trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. English translation originally published in Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, by Can Xue (New Directions, 2006): 206–9. Reproduced by permission of New Directions Press, Chen Zeping, and Can Xue.

10. MODERNISM IN JAPAN Kobayashi Takiji, “On Wall Stories and ‘Short’ Short Stories: A New Approach to Proletarian Literature,” trans. Ann Sherif. English translation originally published in For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature, ed. Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Reproduced by permission of Ann Sherif, the editors, and the University of Chicago Press. Sagawa Chika, “When Passing between Trees,” trans. Sawako Nakayasu. English translation originally published in The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books, 2015). Reproduced by permission of Sawako Nakayasu and Canarium Books. Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home,” trans. Paul Anderer. English translation originally published in New Leaves: Studies and Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Edward Seidensticker, ed. Aileen Gatten and Anthony Hood Chambers, Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies no. 11 ﴾1993﴿, pp. 175–83. Reproduced by permission of Paul Anderer and the University of Michigan Press.

11. KOREAN MODERNISM Ko Dada, “Misconstrued ‘Dada’: For Kim Kijin,” trans. Nagi Yoshikawa, with Sho Sugita. Translated and printed by permission of Ko Dada’s daughter. Kim Kirim, “Soliloquies of ‘Pierrot’—Fragmentary Notions on ‘Poésie,’” trans. Walter K. Lew; and Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes by a Stream and ‘Wings,’ I and II,” trans. Christopher P. Hanscom. English translations originally published in Christopher P. Hanscom, Walter L. Kew and Youngju Ryu, eds, Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013): 154–64 and 169–72. Reproduced by permission of the University of Hawaii Press.

PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

xxxix

13. MALAY MODERNISM Mohd Salehuddin, “Our Art.” Translated and reproduced by permission of Adina Quraisa Tanrahim and the estate of Mohd Salehuddin. “Which Art Is for Us?” Originally published in Seni Magazine. Translated and reproduced by permission of Aziz Talib, on behalf of the publisher.

14. MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC Margaret Rose Preston, “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art.” © Margaret Preston. Licensed by Viscopy, 2017. A. R. D. Fairburn, “Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters.” Reproduced by permission of Dinah Holman and the Fairburn Estate. “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story from the Two Authors.” Originally published in Fact, supplement to The Sun (1944). Reproduced by permission of the James McAuley and Harold Stewart estates. Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira, excerpt from “Modern Trends in Maori Art Forms.” Originally published in The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties: A Symposium, ed. Erik Schwimmer (Auckland: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1968). Reproduced by permission of the Kāterina Mataira Estate. Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania.” Originally published in Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1.1 (1976): 49–60. Reproduced by permission of Albert Wendt.

15. MODERNISM OF THE ASHKENAZI JEWISH DIASPORA Yankev Glatshteyn, Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, and Nachum Baruch Minkov, “Introspectivism [Manifesto of 1919],” trans. Anita Norich. Originally published in Inzikh 1.1 (January 1920): 1–10. English translation originally published in Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav, eds, American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Reproduced by permission of Stanford University Press. Mikhl Likht, “Every New Poet: Proem,” trans. Ariel Resnikoff and Stephen Ross. Originally published in Processions and Other Poems (New York: Farlag Gelye, 1932). Reproduced by permission of Roslyn Wood. Avot Yeshurun, “From Whom Did I Take Permission?,” trans. Ariel Resnikoff. Reproduced by permission of Helit Yeshurun.

xl

Global Modernism: An Introduction and Ten Theses ALYS MOODY AND STEPHEN J. ROSS

Collecting, Jeremy Braddock argues, is a modernist practice. From art collections to literary anthologies, modernists embarked on ambitious, large-scale projects of assemblage and selection. In the process, they produced what Braddock calls “provisional institutions”: public-facing and polemical formations that “model[ed] and creat[ed] the conditions of modernism’s reception.”1 This process of assemblage and collection, of triage and sorting, has been central to the history of modernism’s reception. From the landmark modernist anthologies of Nancy Cunard and Ezra Pound to contemporary teaching texts and digital humanities archives, anthology-making has been one of the principal strategies by which modernism has been consolidated and contested. Texts like Bonnie Kime Scott’s feminist provocation, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (1990), have produced new directions in the field, transforming the conditions of modernism’s institutionalization. Those like Lawrence Rainey’s Modernism: An Anthology (2005) have enshrined the changes their more polemical cousins produce, providing snapshots of the modernist canon as it stands at a moment in time. Throughout the field’s history, we have learned what modernism is through anthology projects that generate ever-shifting canons, each as provisional in its claims as it is necessarily polemical in its selections. This book constitutes a minor contribution to this critical-institutional history. Like so many anthologizers before us, our impetus comes from a desire to reimagine what modernism is; we seek, in particular, to contribute to a recent expansion of modernist studies to new times and new places. Under the rubric of “global modernism,” scholars of modernist studies have, in the last decade or two, begun turning their attention to the proliferation of modernist practices that have flourished outside Europe and the United States. This anthology seeks to be one of the “provisional institutions” that sketches the contours of this burgeoning subfield. We approach this project through statements by global modernists themselves—that is, by those artists, writers, and critics whose creative and critical practices have produced modernism in parts of the world that we have not historically associated with the term. Global Modernists on Modernism thus seeks to understand how global modernists conceptualized themselves as modernist, and, in doing so, to advance a new understanding of global modernism itself. In bringing these texts together, our aim is threefold. First, and most basically, we want to stake a claim for the existence and vitality of global modernism as a field of inquiry. Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as a Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012): 3.

1

2

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

For reasons we detail below, modernism’s expansion has been greeted by skepticism in some quarters, both within and outside of modernist studies. Not everyone who works on modernism thinks expanding the term’s geographical scope is desirable; not everyone who works on the regions in which modernists are discovering “new modernisms” welcomes the intrusion of a traditionally Euro-American subfield into their field of expertise. The politics of these objections are complex, and we offer a preliminary sketch of the stakes in the text below and in some of the section introductions. At a minimum, however, we hope that the sheer volume and interest of the texts assembled here will stand as a testimony to modernism’s importance for writers and artists on all continents and in many parts of the world. Our second goal is to go beyond merely gesturing to the existence of modernists around the world, to defend the value of “global modernism” as a critical hermeneutic. In assembling these texts, we have been thrilled and often surprised at the echoes that ring out across unlikely times and places. We have traced the appearance of Japan as a model for a non-Western modernity in the years after the Russo-Japanese War, as colonized countries turned European modernism’s Orientalism to incipiently anti-colonial ends. We have found poets from Palestine to Japan repeating the metaphor of poetry as a bomb. We have chased the surprising affinity between anti-colonial black nationalisms in the Francophone African diaspora and the proto-fascist, anti-semitic group Action Française in the years before the Second World War. These (and many other) suggestive lines of connection arise out of the reality of modernity as a global phenomenon, but they also get some of their bite and much of their analytical interest from the peculiarly anxious and unsettled relation to modernity that modernists everywhere cultivated. Reading modernism globally, then, is not just a statement of historical fact, but also a productive and illuminating critical maneuver. By watching how this critical lens refracts across over seventy-five texts from nineteen languages, this book hopes to shed new light on modernity’s discontents and on the emergence of the global as a field of action and imagination in the twentieth century. Finally, and in keeping with the remit of this series as a whole, this book hopes to ground the sometimes rather flighty subfield of global modernism more firmly in the archive. Global modernism, barely a decade into its short life as a scholarly project, remains limited by the uneven availability of primary sources and by the difficulties of working comparatively in a field that comprises so many linguistic traditions. Perhaps as a result, many of the key theories of global modernism work from high-level theoretical standpoints, first developing an account of what they hope to find and then testing it in different locations. At the same time, many of these accounts have been extremely broad, leading to an expansion of the term modernism that, as we discuss, verges on the collapse of definition itself. In this volume, we attempt a different approach, foregrounding instead the voices of practitioners themselves, and seeking to work inductively to produce a definition of global modernism from the archive, rather than an archive from a definition of global modernism. In the process, we hope to discover new ways of delimiting the field and of grounding studies of global modernism in the rich archive of self-theorization that has been produced by our objects of study.

I. THE PROBLEM OF DEFINITION: MODERNISM AND MODERNITY Given the project’s definitional ambitions, it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the central dilemmas in assembling this book has been a disarmingly simple question: how do we know what we are looking for? What are we in search of, exactly, when we go

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

3

in search of global modernism? The difficulty is intimated by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers’ rather disheartening declaration, on the opening page of a volume promising to trace the history of the term, that “there is no such thing as modernism.” They mean that there is “no singular definition capable of bringing order to the diverse multitude of creators, manifestos, practices, and politics that have been variously constellated around this enigmatic term” and, of course, they are absolutely correct.2 But such hard truths about the inevitably imprecise and multivalent nature of the term make for poor selection criteria. Such claims can only bring us, as editors of a volume like this, up against the difficult reality that our task is an inherently definitional one, in a field that no longer really believes in its own definitions. Every text that we select necessarily carries with it the secret charge of definition; each is loaded with the assertion that it is modernism. In this context, the growing consensus in modernist studies that the term itself lacks clear parameters, however stimulating to critical and theoretical work, presents itself as a problem. How does one start to assemble a collection of texts from modernism— especially from modernism as practiced in unconventional times and places—when no one in the field believes that “modernism” denotes a fixed thing? How does one start to undertake an anthologizing project that presupposes definitions, when definitions themselves are precisely what is at stake? In many respects, this dilemma is not new. As Latham and Rogers highlight, modernism as a term has always been contested and polymorphous. Nonetheless, the definitional vagueness has become especially acute since the 1990s, in the aftermath of what Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have described as the expansive movement of the “new modernist studies,” of which global modernism constitutes a late but influential addition.3 In seeking to find modernism outside its historical centers of Europe and North America, global modernist studies has tended to reject accounts of modernism that tie it to a particular style or that ground it in a fixed historical period. In doing so, the field builds upon the expansive maneuver of earlier scholars, who have pushed literary modernism’s origins back to the mid-nineteenth century and forward to at least the Second World War, arguing in the process that modernism constitutes not a single aesthetic position or literary style, but a set of debates and contestations.4 Many scholars of global modernism, however, go further than these predecessors, redefining “modernism” simply as the literature, culture, and arts of modernity. This approach is broadly shared across the two main theoretical positions to have developed out of global modernist studies. On the one hand, Susan Stanford Friedman has made this case influentially, if controversially, in drawing on a “multiple modernities” model to

Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2015): 1.

2

Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737–48.

3

For scholars who find modernism as early as the mid-nineteenth-century, see Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Michael Levenson, Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). For an influential account pushing modernism toward the Second World War and beyond, see Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For influential accounts that locate modernism not in a single position but in a contest of ideas, see Nicholls, Modernisms; Levenson, Modernism; Latham and Rogers, Modernism; Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

4

4

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

argue that modernism should be understood as “the expressive domain of modernity.”5 On the other, scholars influenced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, such as the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), have offered an account of modernism as the literature that “registers” modernity.6 While WReC and Friedman have very different theoretical orientations, they share an attempt to redefine modernism in order to make it co-extensive with modernity, a move that has become the standard gesture of global modernist studies. It is not a coincidence that the expansion of modernist studies to new parts of the world has been accompanied by a redefinition of modernism to denote the aesthetic or cultural dimension of modernity. This coupling emerged as a response to one of the central realizations of global modernist studies: the sheer insufficiency of our standard definitions of modernism, when we try to transplant them outside Europe and the United States—a situation not helped by the fact that the revisions in the field prompted by the new modernist studies have been accompanied by such a sustained resistance to producing new definitions to account for the new parameters of the field. Typically, therefore, when we suggest that this or that text or artwork or dance is modernist, we mean one of two things: either that it “sounds” or “looks” modernist to us—that is, that it conforms to a set of stylistic conventions associated with modernism—or that it is the product of a milieu that we take to be modernist. Some modernists from outside the West certainly produce texts and artworks that seem stylistically modernist, and some participate in transnational networks that link them to the milieus we have associated with modernism. But using these qualities as definitions for modernism—as selection criteria in assembling a volume such as this—throws up more problems than it solves. The central problem with definitions of modernism that treat it as a period or a style is that, when we move beyond Europe and the United States, both these accounts tend to produce a kind of cultural imperialism. Such accounts typically cast non-European art and literature as secondary, derivative products, whose status as modernist is determined by their relation to the standard of European modernism. The classic refusal of this model is Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah’s hilarious and impassioned rejection of Charles Larson’s 1971 study The Emergence of African Fiction—still one of only a handful of attempts to discuss the modernism of African literature. In his book, Larson links Armah’s writing to that of James Joyce, a claim that Armah finds risible. Instead, he writes, this claim of influence arises from Larson’s “own obsessive, blind need to annihilate whatever is African in me and my work.”7 It reflects, he suggests, a deeper pathology, grounded in the conviction that “Africa is inferior; the West is superior. As African literature develops, the best of it must become less African, more Western.”8 A global modernism that defines its texts either by their conformity to Western models or by their historical links with Western artists and milieus will always be open to this devastating charge. Such an account inevitably reproduces the assumption that the West is the site of innovation, while the rest of the world merely imitates the novelty of the center—a set of assumptions

Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015): 54.

5

Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of WorldLiterature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).

6

Ayi Kwai Armah, “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction,” Asemka 4 (1976): 9.

7

Armah, “Larsony,” 12.

8

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

5

that have served as the warrant of colonialism and other forms of racial oppression on a global scale. By linking modernism not to Western styles or Western contexts, but rather to the experience of modernity itself, scholars like Friedman and WReC can reconceive modernism as an umbrella term that harnesses multiple, divergent aesthetic responses to modernity, without according ontological or historical priority to any particular mode or location. As a result, it becomes possible to imagine an African modernism, for example, that is not derivative of its Western counterparts, but that instead constitutes its own independent response to the conditions of modernity as experienced on the African continent. The obvious objection to this definitional solution is that “modernity” itself is not a neutral term in these debates. As many scholars have argued, the concept of modernity has frequently been wielded as part of a colonial project, enshrining the Western as the modern in a move that casts non-Western locations as developmentally “behind.”9 While modernity is typically understood as a social, economic, and political project—in contrast to modernism, which deals with aesthetics and culture—both terms have been integral to a racist and Eurocentric vision of history. Both are, for instance, centrally implicated in the spatializing of history that gave us nineteenth-century racial science’s claims that nonwhite races represent various earlier stages on the evolutionary family tree of humanity.10 Unless we are careful about what we mean by “modernity,” an account of modernism that equates it to modernity might therefore still smuggle in a model of Western advancement and non-Western belatedness, by way of the concept of modernity itself. What is needed, then, is not just a new way of conceptualizing modernism, but also a new way of conceptualizing modernity. We need to break from its history of oppression without losing the broadly helpful periodization that allows us to express that something has changed in the last several centuries of human history. There have, broadly speaking, been two primary approaches to this problem. The first, sometimes called the “multiple modernities” model, argues that, far from being a phenomenon that occurred only or first in Europe, modernity—usually understood as some combination of industrialization, transnational trade, urbanization, and so forth—has occurred in many places at many times, including some places that predate Europe’s supposed “firsts.” Thus, for instance, Geraldine Heng argues that eleventh-century Song China industrialized on a modern scale, centuries before such processes were imaginable in Britain, taking this as evidence for a Chinese modernity that predates European modernity.11 Friedman’s account of global modernism adapts the multiple modernities model, relying on an account of modernity as “multiple, polycentric, and recurrent instances of transformational rupture and rapid change across the full spectrum of political, economic, cultural, technological,

The foundational text to make this argument is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Notable work in this field has also come out of global medieval studies, where the stakes of “modernity” are highly contested for reasons of periodization. For an introduction to these debates, see Kathleen Davis and Michael Puett, “Periodization and the ‘Medieval Globe’: A Conversation,” The Medieval Globe 2.1 (2015): Article 3.

9

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995): 36–42.

10

Geraldine Heng, “Reinventing Race, Colonization, and Globalisms across Deep Time: Lessons from Longue Durée,” PMLA 130.2 (n.d.): 362.

11

6

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

demographic, and military arenas of interlocking societies and civilizations.”12 This capacious definition allows her to find modernism as early as the eighth century, in Du Fu’s poetry from Tang Dynasty China, and as late as the 1980s, in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982). In so doing, Friedman emphasizes that what links these exceedingly diverse writers is “not a singular aesthetic style or philosophical sensibility but instead a creative rupture of conventional forms that accompanies the specific modernities of their time and place.”13 The multiple modernities model has been contested by scholars who understand modernity not as the experience of rupture, broadly conceived, but more specifically as the epochal shift that accompanies the global expansion of capitalism. This work typically draws on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, an account that describes the “modern world-system” as a “capitalist world-economy,” where capitalism is the system that “gives priority to the endless accumulation of capital.”14 In this model, modernity is understood as a single phenomenon, which eventually drew the whole world into its purview, albeit unevenly and asynchronously. On this account, it makes no sense to talk of multiple modernities, for individual incidents of, say, mass production or state centralization, do not constitute modernity unless they take place as part of the modern capitalist world-system. This is the model that WReC draws on in developing an account of what they variously call modernism or “world-literature,” both signaling “the literary registration of modernity under the sign of combined and uneven development.”15 This project, like Friedman’s, entails a substantial expansion of modernism’s temporal scope, as well as its geographical one, “incorporat[ing] the great wave of writing from the mid-nineteenth century onwards that is construable precisely … as an encoding of the capitalisation of the world.”16 Both these models aspire to a reconceptualization of modernity that decouples the term from its historical tendency to elevate the West as the primary location of modernity. We are sympathetic to this project, which recognizes the fraught political terrain on which the terms “modernism” and “modernity” have developed. We agree that a global modernism that reinscribes the power imbalances of the world that it describes is probably not worth doing. In assembling this volume, we have tried to be alert to the risk of casting Europe and the United States as the gold standard to which all other parts of the world must aspire—the risk, that is, that global modernism will merely co-opt non-Western aesthetic products and bind them to a teleology that retains Western art as the source and center. Linking modernism to modernity is, we think, a useful tactic in staving this off. For the purposes of a volume such as this, however, it does not yet solve the definitional problem. If we were to take Friedman or WReC at their word, the modernism that we would produce here would be unrecognizable to most scholars working with either European or US materials, or in any of the regions and languages represented here. In reconfiguring modernism as the culture or art proper to modernity,

Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, ix.

12

Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 190.

13

Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004): 24.

14

Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development, 17.

15

Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development, 17–18.

16

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

7

these scholars expand modernism’s boundaries so dramatically that their modernism starts to include many things—Charles Dickens, Tang Dynasty poetry—that no one else generally considers to be modernist. This expansive maneuver is a key part of the polemical position-taking of both sets of scholars, and in this context, it is a salutary and provocative move that has been successful in generating debate and reflection within the field. But our goals are somewhat different: with this volume, we seek to facilitate exchange between scholars working with similar aesthetic objects in diverse parts of the world. In order to do so, we need to be sure that, as much as possible, we are all talking about the same thing, and that we do so in terms that are narrow and specific enough to provide a field of conversation that specialists in the various regions might recognize. Few if any Victorianists describe British novels of the mid-nineteenth century as modernist, just as few experts in Tang Dynasty China consider Du Fu’s poetry modernist. Insisting that they do so seems to overstep the bounds of what a useful modernism might involve. This is especially so, given that there are already plenty of scholars, writers, and artists in these and other parts of the world who do consider themselves to be working with something called “modernism.” If what we seek is a conversation about what modernism is, or what the stakes are of theorizing modernism on a global scale, it seems helpful if everyone involved in the conversation thinks they are in fact talking about modernism. This rather modest ambition has been our guiding principle in deciding what counts as modernist for the purposes of this volume. Rather than imposing a predetermined account of modernism everywhere we go, we have instead begun, more simply, with the ways modernism has been understood in different parts of the world. For this, we have drawn heavily on the accounts of scholars who are expert in local languages, literatures, and arts, and of practitioners who have understood themselves as modernist. By following this approach, this book aims to construct an archive from which we might begin to derive answers to the definitional questions posed above. To this end, we bring together a wide range of texts, each of which is engaged in a more or less explicit act of theorizing modernism. We hope that these texts will provide the basis for others to develop their own understandings of modernism, grounded in a clearer sense of what modernism meant to individual authors, artists, and critics. To put this another way, we have sought to develop an inductive method for the study of global modernism, one which begins with the particulars and works out from them to a general statement. In practice, this has meant that this project has been highly collaborative. Editing this volume, we have been acutely aware that, like most scholars of global modernism, we have been trained and employed primarily in English departments—although we both also work with non-Anglophone literatures—and have worked and studied primarily in the Anglophone world (including the United Kingdom and the United States, but also Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where we held positions during the development of this book). We have therefore sought actively to engage scholars with expertise and language training in regions in which we are lacking. Where possible, we have delegated individual sections to scholars who are expert in the languages and literatures of the nation or region under discussion. In several cases, we have worked closely with translators to produce new translations of previously untranslated texts, seeking in the process to better understand the larger linguistic, literary, and social contexts out of which these texts arose. In all sections, we have regularly consulted with scholars whose expertise on matters large and small has underpinned our understanding of the specific authors,

8

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

movements, languages, and contexts out of which the texts included here come (see the acknowledgments for a list of those to whom we owe particular debts, although the conversations have ranged more widely than can be fully accounted for here). Across the volume, our selections have been driven primarily by the scholarship about modernism in the given region, and by local understandings of the term, where available. Our priority has been to make available texts that are important for scholarly debate but that are not widely available in English. By and large, we have granted section editors autonomy in deciding what constitutes modernism in their part of the world. This book, therefore, arises not from a single overarching theory of modernism, but from an attempt to tease out the interlocking but never fully consonant meanings that the term has assumed as it has travelled from place to place.

II. TEN THESES ON GLOBAL MODERNISM Writing now from the end of this project, we can identify ten insights that have emerged as key through-lines of the project. Together, they provide the beginnings of a more comprehensive model of global modernism, rooted in an inductive method that works out from particular instances. Although these theses derive from our readings of the texts in this volume, they also, we think, shed new light on modernism in Europe and the United States, regions which for reasons of space are not represented here.

1. Modernism is one of the aesthetic modes of modernity, but it is not the only one. Everywhere we have looked, modernism has always been intimately connected to modernity. Modernism always arises in contexts that understand themselves to have undergone a process of modernization, and to be still grappling with the effects of this transformation. Indeed, modernism is always theorized as one of the aesthetic consequences of modernity. Scholars of global modernism are, in this sense, absolutely correct to suggest that modernism is the literature or art of modernity. However—and this gets less frequently remarked upon in global modernist scholarship—modernism is only one of several aesthetic modes that arise in and through modernization. Across a range of contexts, modernity is registered in works that scholars and artists understand not only as modernist, but also as Romantic, realist, symbolist, or aestheticist. In European literatures, we typically take these modes to exist in a particular narrative formation, where Romanticism gives on to realism, gives on to symbolism and/or aestheticism, and finally produces modernism. As they travel globally, however, they tend to become decoupled from this periodizing formation. At times, their boundaries lose their clarity: writers are described as romantic and modernist, realism becomes redescribed as a form of modernism, and so forth. At other times, they are understood to exist in a narrative relation, or as competing modes or resources that different authors choose between at a given time. One way of understanding this relationship is to see it as a literary correlative of the concept of combined and uneven development, whereby countries that develop as capitalist later are able to follow different paths, drawing on the whole set of resources and technologies that more industrialized countries have already produced. This is not to suggest that modernism is more “advanced” than other literary forms;

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

9

rather, it suggests that what emerged in the West as a linear narrative form loses its linearity when different aesthetic modes are imported simultaneously to new locations. Modernism, while always one of the key modes by which modernity is rendered in literature and art, therefore is never the only mode available. Modernism is an—but not the—aesthetic mode of modernity. One of the tasks of global modernism as a scholarly project, then, must be to specify what is particular about modernism—how it is different to other aesthetic modes for the registration or expression of modernity.

2. Global modernism develops across multiple, asynchronous chronologies, which reflect the specific experiences of modernity and the specific histories of art in different locations. If modernism is one possible aesthetic mode for responding to modernity among several, then it follows that (a) modernism cannot exist without modernity, but also (b) modernism is not necessarily found everywhere modernity is. These conclusions are supported by the multiple and asynchronous chronologies that characterize modernism as it develops around the world, reflected in the dates of texts included in this volume (see Figure 1). Although almost every part of the world has its modernism, these modernisms develop at different times in different places. Typically, modernism accompanies (or follows within a few decades) the emergence of particular locations as states in the modern world-system. Some places, like Japan, are generally understood to pass through periods in which literature undergoes a process of “modernization”—generally equated in this context with the Westernization of literature, and linked initially to the emergence of symbolist, aestheticist, or Romantic modes—before reaching a point of crisis, which produces

Figure 1  Modernism’s combined and uneven global timelines. (Graph records dates of texts in this volume for each region; where a single date is recorded for a section, the decade is given instead.)

10

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

modernism. In other places, especially areas in the process of decolonizing, as in Africa or the Pacific Islands, modernism emerges as part of the struggle for national identity at the moment of state-formation, often contemporaneously with other aesthetic modes. In still other places, like China or the Caribbean, modernism’s history is protracted and discontinuous; an early period of modernist proliferation returns again decades later as political, economic, and cultural conditions shift. The form taken by each nation’s or region’s entry into the world-system, the internal development of its own literary history, and the nature and timing of its interaction with literatures from around the world all condition the specific timeline on which modernism develops in any particular place. The result is a global modernism that, like modernity itself, is combined and uneven, developing on different timescales at different locations in the world-system.

3. Modernism is not a single position, but a set of debates about the form and status of the aesthetic under the conditions of modernity. When modernism does appear, it never arises as a consensus position. Instead, it is constituted as a set of debates about formal strategies, authorial positioning, and the relation of art to the social and political. In other words, modernism always arises as a literary (or artistic) field, as Pierre Bourdieu describes it—one in which different writers carve out space for themselves by adopting positions in relation to other writers.17 On this account, modernism is best understood not as a single position, but rather as the set of key issues around which these debates are mobilized, and which repeat across times and places. The central issues that define the modernist literary field include: whether art should be autonomous or political; how to relate to tradition in the face of the pressures of modernity; how to produce art, including national art, in a context where there is no clearly defined public for such an undertaking; how to establish a place for one’s national or individual writing on a global scale, in the context of the inequalities that constitute the modern worldsystem; and how to achieve and sustain an appropriately masculine mode of art or, conversely, how to make space for women within an overwhelmingly masculine set of movements. These debates will be familiar to scholars of European and American modernism as the central questions that polarize modernists in those regions, but they also repeat with unmistakable regularity everywhere that modernism arises. Modernism is never to be found in any single answer to any of these questions, but rather in the centrality of the debates themselves to the theory and practice of artmaking at certain times and places.

4. Modernism is a self-theorizing project. Because modernism is constituted by its debates, modernist aesthetics requires artists and writers to constantly justify their practice and approach. As a result, modernism—more than any aesthetic mode before it—is distinguished by its practitioners’ indefatigable self-theorization and their assimilation of criticism to creative practice. The centrality of this mode has long been recognized by scholars

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

17

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

11

of European and US modernism, reflected in the long-standing acknowledgment of the central role of the manifesto to the movement.18 As a result, authors’ and artists’ statements about their work—from avant-garde manifestos to T. S. Eliot’s literary criticism—have long formed the basis of understandings of European and US modernism. To date, however, these statements have been a relatively underutilized resource in global modernist studies, although (as this volume attests) modernists around the world produced a wealth of self-theorization. The modernist tendency toward self-theorization enables our inductive method, and has led us to understand this project as an anthology of texts by modernist practitioners that reflect on and enact modernism. Because of the centrality of self-theorization to the modernist project, a major goal of the book has been to gather documents of global modernist self-theorization and allow them to speak for themselves. We have gathered texts—statements, manifestos, essays, letters, prefaces, prologues, and so on—situated ambiguously between primary and secondary status, operating on the conviction that such texts do not merely reflect on modernism but, crucially, constitute it as well. We believe such texts, and the impulse to write them, are defining features of modernism. To the extent that modernist art challenges formal and generic boundaries between different aesthetic media, modernist self-theorization itself blurs the line between art and criticism. As the academic background of several of these texts suggests, the incursion into the domain of criticism and its assimilation to modernist practice is all the more notable, and partly explicable, for having happened alongside the emergence of modern academic criticism itself.

5. Western modernism was one of the central problems for non-Western modernism, but the relationship between any given modernism and the West, while always central and contested, was not derivative. Despite the understandable skittishness around questions of influence in much scholarship on global modernism, Western modernist precursors and interlocutors— including but not limited to Charles Baudelaire, André Breton and the surrealists, Pablo Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and the Italian Futurists, T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and so forth—loom large in much self-theorization by non-Western modernists. These precursors appear both as significant influences, stylistically and theoretically, and as figures of Western imperialism whose influence is fiercely resisted. Their presence in debates is sometimes what leads scholars of these nations or regions to consider a particular moment as modernist, even as practitioners and scholars alike push back against the assumption that modernist art is necessarily writing shaped by Western sources. Indeed, Armah’s scathing attack on Larson—the canonical repudiation of influence-based accounts of global modernism—needs to be understood not just as a commentary about the relationship between modernism and African literature, but as a specific act of position-taking in a field where the relationship between African and Western modernism was a source of bitter debate (see, for instance, Chinweizu’s essay, 3.vii). In this sense, we might say that one of See, for example, Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race, and Manifestos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

18

12

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

the central debates that constitutes non-Western modernism is its relationship to Western modernism. We suggest that to properly understand the phenomenon of global modernism, we need to acknowledge the central role that Western modernism often plays in it. At the same time, however, it would be a serious mistake to assume that when non-Western writers or artists take European figures as important interlocutors, this relationship is necessarily derivative. Time and again, it is clear that to read Breton in Martinique, or Loy in Japan, or Picasso in Africa requires a significant reconceptualization of each of their original projects, and opens unforeseen ways of elaborating their work. In a context where global Western cultural dominance is a given (as it is in every context where modernism arises), reading Western modernism, and considering what kinds of resources it might provide, becomes one of the tools by which writers and artists in the peripheral locations of the worldsystem negotiate their relationship to centers of power. In doing so, they substantially reimagine and radically redeploy both the forms of Western modernism and the meaning of those forms. To suggest that, say, Hirato Renkichi’s engagement with F. T. Marinetti is derivative, while W. B. Yeats’ engagement with Noh theater is a spur to original creation is to betray an unspoken assumption that only Western writers or artists have the capacity for innovation that allows them to remake other culture’s materials as “new.” A close reading of the texts contained in this volume reveals that, on the contrary, the active reappraisal of Western modernism was one of the foundations on which the innovations of non-Western modernisms were built.

6. The revitalization of tradition is as important for modernism as the break with the past or the demand for absolute novelty. Standard accounts of modernism tend to emphasize modernism as an experience of rupture, assuming that what makes modernism modern is its unprecedented commitment to novelty and innovation. Surveying the texts included in this volume, it is clear that this connection between modernism and the new is everywhere apparent, as writers on continent after continent worry about how to produce a new art, capable of responding to the pressures of modernity. This commitment to novelty, however, sits alongside an equally strong commitment to tradition, as writers seek to recast, invent, or sustain their own cultural heritage in the face of modernity’s demand for transformation. Scholars of European and American modernism are of course already familiar with this tension, which has made texts like T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new” central to our understanding of modernism. In the peripheral and semiperipheral zones that constitute this book, however, the pressures are greater and more fraught, as modernism becomes bound up with anti-colonial nationalisms that demand a strong national tradition to wield against the threat of foreign influence or occupation. In this context (as in European modernism), novelty and tradition are not really opposites. Rather, the push to make tradition new becomes one of the guiding pressures of many if not most modernist positions around the world. Tradition therefore becomes a site of ideological struggle. The discourse of novelty and innovation is a symptom of that struggle, and not (always) its foundational principle.

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES



13

The specific form that the attempt to renovate tradition takes varies according to the histories and political pressures experienced in each location. In declining or defeated sites of empire like China, Iran, and the Arab world, where strong literary and cultural traditions retain their grasp on the public imagination, the problem faced by writers is how to accommodate these still-influential traditions to the new demands of modernity. In many decolonizing nations, as in most African countries and among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands, the push for tradition takes the form of attempts to rebuild and make new use of suppressed and disrupted precolonial traditions, from oral literature to weaving and sculpting. In nations formed out of the population displacements of modernity, as in settler colonial states and those formed by slavery, from the Caribbean and Latin America to South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, the dilemma is instead how to build a new tradition, usually forged from some combination of a new relation to landscape, new social form, and the heritage of the countries from which the peoples of these new nations came. In all these contexts, Western modernism and other non-indigenous sources are often important for helping writers and artists rethink their own traditions. In each case, modernism is as much a project for recovering and reimagining a moribund or threatened cultural tradition as it is a project of aesthetic novelty and innovation.

7. Modernism has always been global, and this global disposition is inextricable from the radically unequal power relations that characterize modernity itself. It should be clear by now that although we are not satisfied with the approach that sees modernism as fully coextensive with modernity, the world-systems account of modernity nonetheless significantly influences our thinking. What this account allows us to see is that modernity is a system—a single system—that is constituted through unequal distributions of power and wealth. Rich and poor, powerful and marginal, and peripheral and core regions are thus bound together in a single worldsystem. In this context, we should not be surprised to see modernism proliferate throughout the world-system, albeit unevenly and asynchronously, according to different locations’ different access to cultural and political power. Nor should we be surprised to see that as it does so, it often becomes complicit in the inequalities at the heart of the system. This leaves us with two conclusions. First, because modernism is one of the aesthetic modes of the modern world-system, it has always been global, in each of its manifestations. Thus, global modernist studies’ foundational insight was not that there was modernism outside the core, but that the modernism of the core was already and foundationally global in its orientation and its influences.19 But, second, while modernists of core and periphery both participate in a single world-system, they do not do so on equal terms. Peripheral and semiperipheral modernists’ engagement with the culture of the core is fundamentally different to core modernists’ engagement with the cultures of the periphery, because the former is forced on them by the cultural hegemony of more powerful nation-states.

See, for example, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, “Introduction: The Global Horizons of Modernism,” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2005): 1–14.

19

14

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Similarly, peripheral and semiperipheral modernists’ recourse to tradition is often a defensive maneuver, an attempt to retain a degree of autonomy and agency in the face of this hegemony. While we want to emphasize that modernism everywhere is founded on processes of global exchange and dialogue, we need to always bear in mind that these exchanges are dramatically unequal and asymmetrical. Modernism is, then, one of the aesthetic routes by which this unequal system was dramatized, reproduced, and contested.

8. Because translation is a necessary condition for a global modernism, global modernism is shaped and distorted by the uneven politics of language. In order to have global modernism, there must be translation and, necessarily, its distortions. This principle applies as much to global modernist creative practices as to their disciplinary study in the academy. Our understanding of the significance of translation as it relates to global modernism draws from the robust body of scholarly work that has theorized the modernist “labour of translation” far beyond the strict remit of textual translation between languages.20 This expanded sense of translation helps us grasp the ways in which global modernism registers not just the linguistic inter-animation of literary traditions but the more general collision and clarification of aesthetic and political values across a world theater characterized by asymmetrical power relations. Global modernism, by foregrounding this established problematic of translation in the context of an awareness of the unevenness of global exchange, highlights the centrality of language politics to modernist literary creation. Translation and language politics are deeply consequential for every modernist practice featured in this book. The modernizing projects of places like Turkey and Israel, for example, yoke the concept of modernism to nationalist monolingualism (though not without internal voices of dissent). In these parts of the world, modernization was closely linked both to ambitious, state-driven projects to produce new national languages, as in the move from Ottoman to Turkish, as well as extensive statesponsored projects of translation from European to local languages. In regions such as South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, the diversity of languages precludes linguistic monoculturalism on this order and produces a different set of tensions between major/minor and colonial/indigenous languages. To choose to write in a minor and/or indigenous language, when there is a choice at all, often means to write oneself out of larger networks of modernist circulation. But to “opt out” in this way can also be a potent political gesture (as in the famous case of Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o switching from English to Gikuyu). A third way is to write between languages. We might consider the Yiddish poetry of Mikhl Likht (1893–1953), a body of work destined never to have a large readership in its original language. Tellingly, Likht started out by writing and publishing autotranslated bilingual versions of his poems in English and Yiddish and then switched

See, for instance, Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Gayle Rogers, Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

20

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

15

definitively to Yiddish later on. It has been said of him that he writes in Yiddish but thinks in English. Modernist literature privileges inter-, cross-, and multi-lingualism of this sort as often as it reinforces majoritarian/minoritarian language hierarchies (sometimes it does both at the same time). If modernism involves the assimilation of translation, like self-theorization, to creative practice, it does so for a wide variety of reasons. Translation might be an inspired tarrying with the “exotic” (as in Ezra Pound’s Cathay), or it might be born out of ingenious exophonic necessity (as in Eileen Chang’s English writings and auto-translations). Exophony—the practice of writing outside one’s native tongue—itself comes in many shapes and forms. Consider Avot Yeshurun (born Yekhiel Perlmutter, 1904–92), another native Yiddish speaker who immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1925 and wrote a “broken,” polyglot Hebrew poetry shot through with Arabic, Polish, and Yiddish syntax, grammar, and vocabulary in the teeth of nationalist Hebrew monolingualism. Consider, too, anti-colonial poets such as the Moroccan Abdellatif Laâbi (1942–) and the Martinican Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) who appropriate the literal lingua franca of colonial France rather than write in indigenous languages or local creoles. Or consider expatriate writers such as the Syrian poet Adūnīs (1930–) and the Chinese novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian (1940–), who have made France their home for decades but continue to write in their native languages. In each instance, the decision (forcible or voluntary) to write in one language over another, in one place or another, is constitutive of a given writer’s modernist practice, rather than incidental to it. If translation, in the broad sense, has been central to the development of global modernism, it must also be central to its study. Nonetheless, the sheer number of languages involved and the difficulty of working in languages one does not speak present serious problems for the study of global modernism. Although these problems are, in some sense, unsolvable, they can be mitigated in various ways, chief among them through collaboration. As we note above, this project has leaned heavily on experts in languages beyond our direct knowledge. Ideally, a volume such as this would go further down the path of multilingualism, reproducing the texts in their original language alongside English, and we regret that we have been unable to do that here for reasons for space. Translation can be an apparatus of linguistic and cultural domination, but it can also be a mode of recovering texts in a way that brings scholars and readers back to the original. Bearing both its possibilities and its limitations in mind is crucial for the advancement of global modernist studies.

9. Methodologically, modernism needs to be read across multiple scales simultaneously. In order to capture both the local specificity of modernism, including the agency and creativity of individual practitioners and movements, as well as the large-scale systems and structures that put pressure on their practice and limit their options, we agree with Harsha Ram that modernism might profitably engage in a method of “scale jumping.” Ram advocates for a method that moves between what he calls the “cartographic” scale of accounts like the world-systems theory model, which makes visible structural inequalities, and the “geographic” scale of the network-based

16

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

model that he associates with Friedman, which “seeks to render space as a series of distinct geographic locales or transregional itineraries.”21 This scalar method does not fully resolve the differences between WReC and Friedman—there is also, as we have seen, a fundamental difference of opinion over what modernity is, which is not reconcilable in this way. Nonetheless, as a method, rather than a theory of modernity, this mode allows us to shift focus between structural inequalities and individual responses, between transnational networks of friends and collaborators and large-scale systems, without relinquishing the insights of either. By organizing individual texts in this volume into regions or nations and by identifying more local links between them as we go along, we seek to facilitate work that reads individual texts simultaneously according to the large-scale historical structures within which these nations and regions are caught, and the more local and provisional networks in which modernism unfolds and develops. In making the decision about how to organize this volume, we have had to stake a position in a methodological debate within global modernist studies about the best way of approaching the globalness of the field. Many of the field’s most influential edited volumes—Mark Wollaeger’s field-defining Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, for instance, as well as Allana Lindgran and Stephen Ross’s recent The Modernist World—have, like us, worked through the field region by region, presenting global modernism as the accumulation of a series of discrete local modernisms. Peter Kalliney, in his critical introduction to the field, Modernism in a Global Context, however, criticizes this approach, which he calls “an area studies approach to modernism.” He argues that “categories such as European, African, or Latin American modernism” are “somewhat limiting, enticing us with a comfortable sense of cultural specificity at the expense of a more uneasy, a more expansive understanding of what modernism does when it is on the move.”22 Other recent texts, such as Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz’s A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, have followed Kalliney in seeking to adopt a method that integrates the modernisms of center and periphery into a cohesive whole, or at least a dialogic bundle. We are, on the whole, sympathetic to both sides of this debate which, following Ram, we understand as a debate about scale. Our two tables of contents—one framed around regional modernisms, the other identifying meridians that cut across different regions—reflect our desire to facilitate methodological scale jumping of this kind. Nonetheless, while we encourage readers to read across scales, we also want to insist that framing texts in local fields is crucial for a full understanding of their contexts of production. By embedding them in this way, we can see both how texts develop as part of local literary fields, with their own particular debates, and how they enter global circuits of exchange in ways that embroil them within global systems of oppression and inequality.

10. The institutional contexts within which modernism develops are as central to modernism as its formal strategies or aesthetic positions. One of the significant insights of modernist studies scholarship in the last several decades has been the role of institutions in sustaining and shaping modernism, Harsha Ram, “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local,” PMLA 131.5 (2016): 1374.

21

Peter Kalliney, Modernism in a Global Context (London: Bloomsbury, 2016): 24.

22

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

17

especially in the United States and Britain.23 As the field expanded globally, the attention to modernism’s institutional contexts followed this global expansion, as scholars came to realize the importance of state-sponsored institutions such as the BBC and the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), independent ventures such as little magazines, and commercial undertakings such as publishing houses and series to the development and circulation of global modernism.24 The process of assembling this anthology has underscored the extent to which these insights hold true—in fact, become even more pressing and significant—in a global context. As modernism moves from place to place, institutions common to modernism across the world (the little magazine, the modern revival of the patronage system, an uneasy accommodation with modes of literary professionalization, the rise of the university) become inflected by and embroiled with local institutional contexts. Our understanding of modernism therefore moves across scales, not just because of how texts or authors travel, but because of how institutions do too. On a global scale, there have been three major developments in the institutionalization of modernism over the twentieth century, which profoundly shape both the forms and meanings of literary and artistic production in this period. The first such development is the rise of organizations that made the global promotion of modernism into an important geopolitical endeavor. There were various such institutions, but perhaps the most emblematic is the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded organization charged with light-touch promotion of US interests by fostering global cultural exchange between writers and intellectuals. The CCF funded little magazines all over the world, including Black Orpheus and Transition in Africa, Quest in India, and Quadrant in Australia, and sponsored a number of landmark conferences of writers and critics. The network of CCF-funded little magazines provided an institutional context for modernism around the world, and facilitated the exchange of writings and articles between intellectuals whose political beliefs, aesthetic dispositions, and geographic locations made it unlikely that they would otherwise come into contact. In so doing, it strengthened the Cold War association between modernism and US-style liberal capitalism, and entrenched its opposition to Soviet-sponsored social realism.25 The importance of organizations operating across national borders is matched by the importance of state-sponsored institutions. Modernity, it is often remarked, has as one of its distinctive features the emergence of the modern nation-state, and while modernism is sometimes understood as a cosmopolitan movement that

See, for example, Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jonathan Goldman, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).

23

Peter Kalliney’s work has been particularly influential in this regard. See Peter Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Peter Kalliney, “Modernism, African Literature, and the Cold War,” MLQ 76.3 (2015): 334–68. On little magazines, see Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

24

On modernism’s relation to Cold War politics, see Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). The classic study of this relationship in the context of the visual arts is Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

25

18

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

pulls against this consensus, it is equally true that nationalist modernisms have long had significant purchase. In many parts of the world, modernism emerged either through or in reaction to state-sponsored cultural programs. The emblematic instance of this is Léopold Senghor’s Senegal, where state support for the arts was a key plank of the poet-president’s nation-building program. Elsewhere, in places like Japan and Turkey, state-sponsored translation and circulation of Western texts and the promotion of certain sanctioned forms modernized literature, in tandem with the development of the nation-state, which in turn laid the groundwork for modernism to emerge in these locations. Finally, the rise of the university as a site for literary studies and eventually literature itself over the twentieth century played a central role in the development of modernism. This has been influentially documented in the US context by Mark McGurl, in his history of US creative writing programs, but the university was an equally important site for the development of modernism elsewhere in the world.26 In Africa and the Caribbean, for instance, many little magazines from the 1960s and 1970s onwards were affiliated with university English departments and many modernist writers were employed in universities, either in their home countries or in the United States and the United Kingdom. This institutionalization of global modernism in the university helps to account for one of the striking formal shifts that is captured by this volume: over the course of the twentieth century, manifestos and critical essays expand dramatically in length, moving from the catchy 1000-word declarations of the interwar years to academic-length articles that frequently exceed 5000 words by the 1970s. This has produced its own pressures in assembling the anthology. Because of space constraints, it has tempted us to over-represent earlier texts (and modernisms where the bulk of texts were produced early) and neglect later ones by providing fewer or more heavily excerpted essays. But it also reflects the profound influence of institutional contexts in shaping the forms modernism takes and the routes by which it circulates. Because of changes in the institutional ecology of modernism in the post-war years, the specific chronology of a given modernism has a major bearing on the form and circulation of its textual products. If institutions are foundational to the development and circulation of global modernism at the moment of production, they are also central to its preservation and thus its availability for anthologization in the present. The availability of texts is shaped by different approaches to and pressures on the production of canons, which reflect both financial constraints and local norms. In Japan, almost all the authors represented in this volume have their own zenshū, roughly translated as “collected works,” which compile not just the author’s major works, but an extensive collection of their ephemera and occasional writings as well. This genre is itself a development of Japanese modernization; the first author zenshū appeared in the late 1910s, just as modernism was first emerging in Japan.27 The availability of these collected works makes even quite obscure texts easy to locate for the scholar, although it also

Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

26

Kiyoko Myojo, “The Functions of Zenshū in Japanese Book Culture: Practices and Problems in Modern Textual Editing in Japan,” Variants: Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship 10 (2013): 261.

27

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

19

entrenches and reproduces systems of author-based canonization that are then hard to escape. Similarly, Latin American countries have developed a system of nonprofit foundations for the promotion of individual authors’ works, which often also hold the copyright permissions for them. The extent to which these foundations are well-staffed and able to reply to correspondence has been a significant factor in whose work we have been able to secure the rights to reproduce. In this sense, local practices of canonization are inevitably reproduced as we move to a global scale. Nor are these institutional effects exclusively local. The importance of the African diaspora to African-American identity has meant that African and Caribbean little magazines and other archival materials are often well-preserved in well-funded US libraries. As a result, these texts have been unusually accessible for a volume such as this—although ironically, in the process they sometimes become less accessible to scholars and writers still living in the regions from which they are drawn. In this case, transnational political movements and global cultural orientations underpin processes of canonization that reproduce uneven outcomes. Some of the institutional factors are more practical. In many parts of the world, including most developing countries as well as, for instance, the Francophone world in general, the practice of using literary agents is not common. Authors without agents can be harder to locate and their estates can be harder to identify after their deaths, but those with agents sometimes set prohibitively high fees that have forced us to exclude them from this volume. Such differences also perpetuate global inequalities on a local scale, making it much easier to pay less to those who already have less. Finally, in some countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, and Iran, international copyright treaties are either not recognized or local laws have much shorter durations. In these contexts, securing permissions has been extremely difficult because institutional structures for handling copyright requests are not in place and rights holders are often not even aware that they own the rights. In such contexts, our own publisher is forced to make a decision about whether to proceed without being able to secure permissions. All these different circumstances lead to significant unevenness in the way texts are canonized and preserved. As a result, we need to bear in mind that the global modernism we have access to is itself not just a reflection but also a product of the combined and uneven modernity out of which it arises.

III. CONSTRAINTS AND LIMITATIONS As the foregoing suggest, a book such as this is inevitably partial and limited, and we would encourage readers to approach it with an awareness of its limitations. Its main constraint is, of course, the sheer enormity of global modernism itself. Although it draws from a global archive of modernist texts, the book could not possibly hope to be “global” in the sense of fully comprehensive. We are wary of the colonial overtones of attempting canon formation in a field with global scope, especially from within the Anglophone academy and in the English language. We would emphasize that while we are inevitably engaged in a project of canonization and institutionalization, this anthology should be approached, like all modernist anthologies, as a “provisional institution.” Nonetheless, while this project militates against the hierarchical and exclusionary logic of canon formation, most explicitly against the discourse of non-Western belatedness and derivativeness, we also

20

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

acknowledge that we have been compelled to make a selection that inevitably places emphasis in some places and not others. Such selection cannot but involve the staking of claims and the delineation of borders, however provisional we might want them to be. We understand “global modernism” to be a field that incorporates both Western and non-Western, core and peripheral modernisms, and we would want to see scholarship that reads across these regions. Nonetheless, this volume focuses more or less exclusively on texts of semiperipheral and peripheral modernism, for reasons of space and because European and US texts of this sort are already widely anthologized and available. Even within these limitations, it is not a comprehensive gathering; peripheral European cultures as well as indigenous and minority cultures within core countries are felt absences. In some cases, important texts are missing because we were simply unable to obtain rights to reprint texts we wanted. In most cases, when faced with a choice between an important but obscure or a widely circulated text, we opted for those that were less accessible or prominent. Given these constraints, the book must be read not as a stand-alone text, but as a supplement to existing European modernist sourcebooks like Kolocotroni et  al.’s Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, as well as those assembling further readings from the non-Western world (see the reading list for some suggestions). We would strongly encourage readers to place the texts assembled here in dialogue with those from Europe and the United States, and to engage them via deeper readings in the literatures of particular regions or nations. Our selection criteria for the book have required us to adopt a flexible approach to national and geographical divisions. Sections are organized according to categories that range from the national, to the regional or continental, to the diasporic. The size and scope of each section has been driven by the field that modernists in these regions imagined themselves to be writing into and out of, as well as by the limits of the scholarly fields that have sprung up to cover them. As such, the unevenness of the section divisions reflects the varied geographical imaginaries of modernism around the world. One consequence of the varied geographical reach of our sections has been an equally varied length. Our shortest section contains a single text; our longest contains nine. In each case, we negotiated with section editors to establish the smallest possible number of texts that would allow them to offer an acceptable representation of the breadth of modernist practice in the region. For this reason, multinational and multilinguistic sections—Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia—have tended to be the longest, demanding as they did the representation of multiple linguistic and national groupings. Similarly, Chinese modernism, which extended over an unusually long time span, and Japanese modernism, which was unusually active and contested, producing a large number of opposing movements, are each represented by seven texts. The shorter sections—Vietnamese, Malay, Turkish, Korean, and Persian modernisms, for instance— tend to represent single national traditions. In all cases, what we have included here represents only a necessarily limited sampling of available materials, and we hope that readers will continue to explore areas of interest to them through our suggested further reading in each section. We are scholars of literary studies, working within a tight word limit, and this volume reflects these limitations in focusing primarily on literary modernisms and on those that can shed more light on it. Because literary and artistic modernism often emerged in dialogue with one another in many parts of the world, many of our sections also include important representatives from the visual arts, although these are on the whole less comprehensive. We regret not finding space for more detailed discussion of the performing arts, and

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

21

would welcome an anthology attending more closely to this important area. Within the field of literature, our texts overwhelmingly and unintentionally incline toward poetry and poetics over fiction, a phenomenon that perhaps reflects the dominance of poetry in some parts of the world, especially across the Middle East, as well as poetry’s stronger impulse toward explicit self-theorization. Our selections focus overwhelmingly on self-theorization, and we have excluded, for the most part, autobiographies and memoirs by modernists, retrospective accounts, and other genres that tell the story of modernism “after the fact,” as reminiscence, or from a critical position outside the fray, as it were. The skewing of our materials toward these charismatic texts reposes on our conviction that modernism is a self-theorizing project. Nonetheless, one limitation of our inductive editorial method is that it might force us to relinquish critical distance and reaffirm power asymmetries endemic to modernism’s self-theorization. If we simply ask what modernism has meant to different practitioners and then derive a general account of modernism from the archive thereby assembled, we might fail to grasp those modernist practices that explicitly or implicitly refuse familiar and/or spectacular forms of self-theorization and self-description, like the manifesto. We might overlook practices that require a different critical lens entirely to become visible and legible. One issue we have faced as editors of this volume has been to represent modernists as they would wish to be represented; another issue has been to confront modernism’s failures to represent itself and/or to be fully representative in its self-theorizations. We would draw specific attention to the overwhelmingly male cast of authors and signatories of modernist manifestos and similar programmatic statements everywhere they have appeared. Far too few women appear in this book, even though this was a problem that has played on us from the beginning and that we sought repeatedly to address. Although we may still have done better, this gender imbalance is to a significant extent a symptom of the replication and magnification of gender inequality within modernism, especially modernism understood as a self-theorizing project. To write a manifesto, more so than writing a poem or an essay, is to lay claim to a form of authority—of authoritative selfmaking—that has often been unavailable to many women. To the extent that modernism is a self-theorizing project it is therefore one that reinscribes and frequently exacerbates gender inequity.

IV. EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES In editing the texts in this volume, we have sought as much as possible to provide editions that will be sufficiently authoritative to permit scholars to use them in their research, while being readable and accessible enough for use in the classroom. Texts originally published in English have been transcribed from the original publication with the greatest degree of fidelity possible. In keeping with the principles of documentary editing, we have sought to preserve idiosyncrasies in spelling, formatting, and punctuation from the original. Where we have been forced to depart from this practice, as in cases where the original text was not available, we have noted the source from which our version has been taken in the headnote to the text. Where texts were not originally published in English, preserving the precise idiosyncrasies of spelling and related textual features has obviously been considerably more difficult and often impossible. Nonetheless, we have sought, as much as possible, to

22

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

translate texts from the original publication or, where multiple authoritative versions exist, to translate through a comparison between different versions. In these cases, significant textual variants are recorded in the notes to the text. In all cases where it is known to us, the precise source text from which the translation has been produced is noted in the headnote to the text. Most translations have either been completed by professional translators and scholars for this volume, or reproduced from reputable scholarly sources, with permission of the original translator. In a few cases, translations undertaken by the author or by a journal have been reproduced, in order to preserve acts of translation that themselves constitute important historical documents in the circulation of global modernism. In these cases, we have followed the principles of documentary editing that we applied to texts originally published in English. In selecting texts, we have privileged whole texts wherever possible. The major constraint on this practice has, of course, been space, especially in cases where a booklength publication has made a significant contribution to our understanding of modernism, or in the case of more recent texts, which tend to be considerably longer. Where we have been obliged to edit the text, we have sought to excerpt continuous sections, and have preferred to reproduce sections that are themselves relatively self-contained (as in, for example, one section of a multi-section essay; one chapter of a book; or one installment of an essay that was serialized across several issues of a journal or periodical). In the vast majority of cases, ellipses in the text are there in the original. In those rare instances where we have reproduced a discontinuous section, ellipses in square brackets (“[…]”) indicate omitted sections. All texts have been extensively annotated for classroom use and to facilitate scholarly research. Section introductions introduce readers to the particular form that modernism took in each nation or region, while headnotes to individual texts provide background information on the author, text, and its circumstances of publication. Authorship of headnotes and section introductions is indicated by the author’s initials at the end of each piece of writing. Usually, the author will be one of the volume editors, the section editor, or the translator. Footnotes provide detailed information on sources contained in the text or explanations of references or allusions that may not be clear to the non-expert reader. Unless otherwise noted, footnotes are written by the person credited with writing the headnote for that text. In some cases, the translator or author has instead annotated the text, and this is indicated at the end of the headnote. The majority of these texts appeared without footnotes in the original, but where the original was footnoted by the author, we have reproduced those footnotes. Where a mix of author’s, translator’s and/ or editor’s notes is used, the author’s and translator’s notes are indicated in the note itself, and unmarked notes should be assumed to be written by the headnote writer.

V. HOW TO USE THIS BOOK Above all, we hope the book will be a useful reference text for students and scholars as well as a point of departure for future research and study. Our goal has been to gather a set of texts against which readings and theories of global modernism might be tested. Readers of this book will discover that many books are contained within it. In addition to our main table of contents we have included an “Alternate Table of Contents,” which can be used to direct more specific or focused studies of global modernism. This resource is also useful for drawing out the multitude of patterns and motifs that run through global

AN INTRODUCTION AND TEN THESES

23

modernist practices in different configurations than those emphasized by the geographical ordering of our main table of contents. It seeks to emphasize in particular those themes, groupings, and structures that connect the texts in this volume with those contained in European and US volumes of this sort, as well as to identify the relation of these texts to existing areas of research within modernist studies. Global Modernists on Modernism is also a book for writers and artists who are seeking a deeper understanding of the historical precedents and impulses animating contemporary art and literature. A number of our translators and section editors, including Sho Sugita, Sawako Nakayasu, Klara du Plessis, and Ariel Resnikoff, are themselves accomplished multilingual poets. Their contributions to this volume, and the conversations we had with them and other writers and artists along the way, remind us that this book is fundamentally about the perennially contested field of art making and the ongoing struggle to clarify the social function of art.

FURTHER READING Anthologies of Primary Documents Bowen-Struyk, Heather, and Norma Fields, eds. For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne, Michelle Yeh, and Ming-ju Fan, eds. The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Hanscom, Christopher P., Walter L. Kew, and Youngju Ryu, eds. Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013. Harshav, Benjamin, and Barbara Harshav, eds. American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, eds. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Lenssen, Anneka, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, eds. Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018. Olanyian, Tejumola, and Ato Quayson, eds. African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Rosemont, Franklin, and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds. Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Tyler, William J., ed. Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

Secondary Works about Global Modernism For works dealing with modernism in specific regions, see the Further Reading lists at the end of each section’s introduction. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Bulson, Eric. Little Magazine, World Form. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

24

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Charkabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2005. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Hayot, Eric, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds. A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Kalliney, Peter. Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kalliney, Peter. Modernism in a Global Context. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Latham, Sean, and Gayle Rogers. Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Lee, Steven S. The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Garde. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Ram, Harsha. “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local,” PMLA 131.5 (2016): 1372–85. Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Ross, Stephen, and Allana C. Lindgren, eds. The Modern World. London: Routledge, 2015. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Warwick Research Collective. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Winkiel, Laura. Modernism, Race and Manifestos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Wollaeger, Mark, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

CHAPTER ONE

Modernism in Latin America EDITED BY CAMILLA SUTHERLAND

One of the first problems when talking about modernism in Latin America is terminological: depending on the context, the Spanish and Portuguese term modernismo can refer to two very distinct moments of cultural production in the region. In Spanish America, modernismo refers to a fin de siècle literary movement spearheaded by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and characterized by its engagement with European Parnassianism and Symbolism. In the Brazilian context, however, modernismo designates the period of fervent artistic innovation that emerged out of the groundbreaking São Paulo Week of Modern Art of 1922. Within these same early decades of the twentieth century, we see a comparable moment of cultural innovation develop in Spanish America, but taking into account the extent to which these writers and artists were directly working against the perceived excesses and Europhilia of Spanish-American modernismo, the term “vanguard” is preferred among practitioners of the time and in subsequent scholarly accounts. The works of Spanish-American vanguardism and Brazilian modernismo most closely align with modernism as understood within the English-speaking world. I will therefore use the terms modernism and modernist (alongside vanguard and avant-garde) in their English usage to refer to the period of cultural production of both Spanish America and Brazil in the early part of the twentieth century. These modernist movements flourished in Latin America’s major cities—Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Lima, and Havana—predominantly between 1920 and 1945. This historical moment saw issues of national identity take center stage within both the political and artistic spheres of Latin America, with widespread efforts being made to identify and consolidate unique national, and also continental, forms of cultural expression. There are three key historical developments that provoked this particular moment of revived interest in national and continental cultural identity: (1) the SpanishAmerican War (1898), which marked the loss of the final Spanish colonies in the region and the intensification of direct US intervention in Latin America; (2) the independence centenaries, between 1910 and 1920, for the majority of Spanish American nations (1922, the year of the São Paulo Week of Modern Art, marked the centenary of independence in Brazil); (3) the Mexican Revolution (1910–17) and the shockwaves it sent through the entire continent. These three developments contextualize the extent to which artistic renewal within the region responded to liberation from colonial influence and other forms of oligarchic rule. The renewal of artistic identity during this time of political fervor therefore entailed a distancing from, or rejection of, European cultural models—even if only in word and not in deed. At the same time, during this period technologies of modernity (rapid

26

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

advancements in mass mechanical reproduction, communication, and transport) enabled the wider dissemination of ideas of the European avant-garde within Latin America. These technologies also allowed for unprecedented mobility of both people and ideas within the American continent itself, contributing to a certain commonality in major artistic trends and developments stretching from north to south, particularly notions of indigenism and Pan-Americanism. A pertinent example from this period of artistic experimentation and continental interchange is the 1926 Índice de la nueva poesía americana. Co-edited by the Peruvian Alberto Hidalgo, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, this collection was among the first anthologies to offer an overview of vanguard production across the Spanish-American region, and is typical of efforts to unite artistic output in a common transnational project. A dominant preoccupation of modernist activities across Latin America is how to account for and incorporate European and US cultural trends while asserting a singular, autochthonous form of expression. Isolating this singular voice takes on distinct forms throughout the nations of this diverse region. As with Anglo-Irish modernism, 1922 was a crucial year for Latin American modernism, one which marked the publication of four seminal volumes of poetry across the region: César Vallejo’s Trilce (Peru), Gabriela Mistral’s Desolation (Chile), Oliverio Girondo’s Twenty Poems to Be Read on the Streetcar (Argentina), and Manuel Maples Arce’s Inner Scaffolds (Mexico), with Borges’s Fervor of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Pablo Neruda’s Crepusculario (Chile) both appearing early the following year. Central to this year of fervent vanguard activity was the São Paulo Week of Modern Art, the first exhibition of its kind in the continent. Akin in status to the Armory Show held in New York nine years earlier, the São Paulo Week of Modern Art consisted of exhibitions of works by experimental plastic artists, alongside avantgarde poetry readings, musical performances, and lectures on modern art. The event was predominantly received with horror, confusion, and ridicule by the public and press, but its impact irrevocably shaped the development of Latin American artistic expression and cemented Brazil’s position at the center of modernist expression in the region. In the wake of the revolution, Mexican writers and artists embarked on a Janus-faced project to create a strikingly modern and forward-looking Mexico that was at the same time rooted in its indigenous, pre-Columbian history; the country was, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, “captured between its native impulses, the Zapata syndrome, and its modernizing impulses, the Ford syndrome.”1 This dynamic tension is encapsulated in the works of painters such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Rivera’s The Liberated Earth with the Natural Forces Controlled by Man (1926) and Kahlo’s Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932), with their overt use of both indigenous and mechanical symbolism (synthesized in the work of Rivera and placed in opposition in the case of Kahlo), are indicative examples of the dualism at the heart of much Mexican modernism. The oscillation between autochthonous and cosmopolitan concerns is likewise present in the two key literary groups of the age: the Estridentistas (with whom Rivera was briefly associated) and the Contemporáneos. Within the Peruvian context we see a comparable preoccupation with incorporating the country’s prominent indigenous heritage into a burgeoning avant-garde movement. As with post-Revolutionary Mexico, Peruvian modernism was characterized by its socialist inflections. Spearheaded by José Carlos Mariátegui (considered Latin America’s first Marxist theorist), the aims of Peru’s Fuentes, Carlos, “Introduction,” in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-portrait, by Frida Kahlo (New York: Abrams, 2005): 19.

1

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

27

vanguard can be traced through the program of its key publication, Amauta, founded by Mariátegui in 1926. Though defined by its explicit socialist concerns, this modernist magazine attempted to strike a balance between local political struggles, internationalism and innovations in the arts. The defining aims of Amauta can be characterized as the following: the revalorization of Peru’s indigenous heritage; the establishment of a dialogue between previous generations and emerging writers; and the promotion of three key vanguard practitioners: Carlos Oquendo de Amat (Five Meters of Poems, 1927), Martín Adán (“anti-sonnets” and novel The Cardboard House, 1928), and the Surrealist poet and painter César Moro. Surrealism took a dominant position within the Amauta group and represented for Mariátegui a method for humanity to escape subordination. Amauta is also notable for the active presence of Peruvian women writers in its vanguard activities, most notably poet Magda Portal (represented in this anthology) and cultural critic María Wiesse. In Cuba—another center of modernist developments—the emphasis fell on capturing a vernacular form of expression particular to the Hispanic Caribbean. Central to these efforts was the Grupo Minorista de La Habana, a group formed in Havana in 1923 that defined itself as “a movement of purification and renovation as much socio-political as literary and artistic.”2 Inflected with Afro-Cuban cadences and bringing to the fore the legacy of African music, dance, and cosmogonies in the Caribbean, poet Nicolás Guillén’s Sóngoro Cosongo (1931) and novelist Alejo Carpentier’s ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! (1933) are indicative examples of Cuban modernism. Argentine modernist developments are typically categorized according to the two main artistic factions that existed in the capital in the early decades of the twentieth century: the Florida and Boedo groups. Named after two districts of Buenos Aires, these groups represent the central (and opposing) artistic and ideological currents that coexisted in the capital during this period. Florida brought together primarily middle- and upperclass writers and artists who sought to promote avant-garde experimentation and the rejection of traditional culture. Boedo championed working-class causes and the social realist fiction that best represented them. Leónidas Barletta succinctly encapsulates the groups’ opposing though related aims when he writes that Florida sought a “revolution for art” while Boedo pursued “art for a revolution.”3 Borges was central to the Florida group, founding and contributing to a number of its key publications, such as Prisma, Proa, and Martín Fierro. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Ultraísmo dominated much of the poetic production of the Florida group and defined itself as a quest for the new, aiming to shed the ornamentation of previous generations of writers and achieve what they saw as concentrated metaphor. Ultraísmo shares many characteristics with Creacionismo developed by Chilean Vicente Huidobro; this poetics privileged the singular role of the writer as creator—casting him as literally “a little god” whose works would reject mimetic forms in favor of autonomous creation.4 While Huidobro valorized the act of “pure creation,” fellow Chilean poet Neruda advocated an opposing poetics of impurity that rejected the Félix Lizaso, Las vanguardias literarias en Hispanoamérica: Manifiestos, proclamas y otros escritos, ed. Hugo J. Verani (Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990): 21.

2

Leónidas Barletta, Boedo y Florida: Una visión diferente (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Metrópolis, 1967): 52. Translation my own.

3

Vicente Huidobro, “Arte poética,” in Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996): 117–8.

4

28

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

autonomy of the art object and reconnected it with the dirt and sweat of humanity and thus anchored it in material reality. This tension between autonomous avant-garde creation and social engagement colors many of the modernist developments throughout the continent. Rather than simply rejecting European and US cultural modes, Latin American modernists demanded to be voices (not echoes) in a larger dialogue. Even so, the issues of influence and imitation have governed subsequent scholarly accounts of Latin America’s positioning in relation to European and US modernism. Of the figures represented in this section, Victoria Ocampo, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo, and Joaquín Torres-García spent substantial periods in Europe observing and contributing to vanguard artistic activities. Other key figures such as Rivera, Huidobro, Neruda, Borges, Emilio Pettoruti, and Carpentier likewise made important interventions in European and US modernist scenes. In the late teens and early 1920s, Huidobro and Borges, for example, edited and published frequently in French and Spanish literary journals such as Pierre Reverdy’s Nord-Sud and Isaac del Vando-Villar’s Grecia, with both writers credited with having consolidated the Ultraísta movement in Spain before transporting it to the Southern Cone. In the US context, Rivera was the second artist (after Matisse) to have a solo show at New York’s MoMA gallery in 1931, breaking all previous attendance records in his opening week. Meanwhile, the 1920s and 1930s also saw an unprecedented number of US and European artists and writers operating within Latin America. The American photographer Edward Weston, for example, based himself in Mexico almost continuously between 1923 and 1927, collaborating often with Italian photographer Tina Modotti. At the invitation of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, American painters Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish completed a mural in the Museo Michoacano in the State University of Morelia, Mexico, in 1934, while the French Surrealists André Breton and Antonin Artaud made important trips to the country in 1936 and 1938, respectively. In the Southern Cone we see the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti undertake an acclaimed lecture tour of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1926, while key Spanish writers such as Guillermo de Torre, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, and Federico García Lorca participated actively in the Buenos Aires vanguard scene by publishing in local modernist magazines such as Martín Fierro and Sur. In addition to documenting the creation of regionally specific Latin American modernist voices, the texts in this section highlight the simultaneity of vanguard developments in the region and the predominance of multilateral transatlantic and Pan-American cultural exchange and collaboration. This section also showcases the work of figures who have not always received sufficient attention within the English-speaking world, and in doing so offers insights into the vibrant debates that shaped this era, highlighting key themes of indigeneity, gender, and the new. CS

FURTHER READING Gallo, Rubén. Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution. London: MIT Press, 2005. Geist, Anthony and José B. Monleón, eds. Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. Hedrick, Tace. Mestizo Modernism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Madureira, Luís. Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

29

Montgomery, Harper. The Mobility of Modernism: Art and Criticism in 1920s Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Rosenberg, Fernando J. The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Schelling, Vivian, ed. Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America. London: Verso, 2000. Sullivan, Edward J. Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art 1910–1960. London: Laurence King, 2018. Unruh, Vicky. Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Unruh, Vicky. Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

I. NEW POETRY César Vallejo Originally published as “Poesía Nueva” in Favorables París Poema 1 (July 1926) 14. Also published in Amauta 1, 3 (November 1926) 17; and Revista de Avance 1, 9 (August 1927), 225. Translated from the Spanish by Joseph W. Mulligan. César Vallejo (1892–1938) was a Peruvian poet and journalist who is central to considerations of modernism within the region. Spending the late teens as part of the bohemian Grupo Norte in Trujillo, Northern Peru, Vallejo published his first collection of poetry, Los heraldos negros, in 1919. In 1923, the year after the publication of his second and most critically acclaimed work, Trilce, he left for Europe and never returned to live in Latin America. Being based in Europe resulted in him being somewhat of an outsider within Latin American vanguard circles; however, he continued to publish widely throughout the continent until his death and his lasting impact upon the region’s literature cannot be underestimated. His experiments with language—exemplified in Trilce—revolutionized Latin American poetics, and to this day his work is considered some of the most radical produced in the Spanish language. “New Poetry” was first published in the debut issue of Favorables París Poema—an avant-garde magazine founded and edited in Paris by Vallejo and his friend Juan Larrea (1895–1980), a Spanish writer. The lifespan of the magazine was short, with a total of only two numbers appearing in July and October 1926. Despite its ephemeral nature, Favorables París Poema published key works by Vallejo and Larrea alongside central figures of both the Latin American and European vanguard, such as Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, Tristán Tzara, Juan Gris, and Pierre Reverdy. Vallejo’s short essay was subsequently widely reproduced throughout Latin America, appearing in seminal vanguard journals such as the Peruvian Amauta and the Cuban Revista de Avance. In it he speaks of the necessity of developing a modern “sensibility” within poetry, one that will allow writers to capture the nature of contemporary life beyond a simple resort to stock images of modernity. CS

New poetry has been used to classify verses whose lexicon is made up of the words “cinema,” “jazz-band,” “motor,” “radio,” and in general all terms of science and contemporary industry. It doesn’t matter whether or not the lexicon corresponds to an authentically new sensibility. It’s the words that matter. But this isn’t new poetry, or old poetry, or anything else. The artistic materials offered by modern life must be assimilated by the artist and transformed into sensibility. The radio, for example, is destined to awaken a newly nerve-stricken mentality, a more profound sentimental perspicacity, proof, and understanding that amplify an ever-denser love, rather than just making us say “radio.” So it is that anxiety builds and one takes the breath of life. This is the true culture that makes progress. That is its only aesthetic purpose: not to fill our mouths with newly coined words. There’s often a lack of new words. A poem may not say “airplane” and still possess the emotion of aviation in an obscure and tacit, yet effective and human way. This

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

31

is the real new poetry. Otherwise, there’s barely enough to combine such and such artistic materials, and, accordingly, a more or less beautiful perfect image is produced. In this case, it’s no longer a matter of “new” poetry based on new words, but on new metaphors. Yet this too falls into error. There may be a lack of new images in truly new poetry—its function being one of ingenuity and not genius—but in a poem the creator relishes and suffers a life in which new relations and rhythms of things and men have become blood, cell, something anyway that’s been incorporated vitally and organically into sensibility. “New” poetry by means of new words or new metaphors is distinguished by its novel pedantry, its complications, and its baroqueness. New poetry by means of new sensibility, on the contrary, is simple and human and, at a first glance, could be taken as ancient or doesn’t call into question whether it’s modern or not.

II. PLATFORMS FOR LIVING by Magda Portal Originally published as “Andamios de vida,” in Amauta 2 (January 1927): 12. Translated from the Spanish by Melvin S. Arrington Jr. Magda Portal (1900–89) was a prolific Peruvian writer and activist. She was a leading participant in Peru’s vanguard movement of the first half of the twentieth century, and was known during this time principally for her contributions in the fields of poetry and journalism. Portal demonstrated her political convictions from early on in her career, refusing to accept the prestigious Juegos Florales poetry prize in 1923 due to the fact that Augusto B. Leguía, the then dictator of Peru, would present the award. It was due to her political engagement that Portal spent large portions of her life in exile and at times imprisoned; she was a founding member of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and whilst initially resistant to conventional feminism, Portal went on to become APRA’s National Secretary of Women’s Affair and a fierce campaigner for women’s rights throughout her lifetime. She contributed frequently to the pioneering Peruvian literary journal Amauta, where her essay “Platforms for Living” was first published in 1927. This piece is a meditation on “New Art.” Contextualizing this art as a response to the First World War, Portal underlines the centrality of modern technology to contemporary aesthetics. It is an essay in praise of dynamism, a dynamism that Portal presents as particularly necessary to the Latin American cultural scene. Fiercely rejecting the notion of art for art’s sake embodied by Spanish-American modernismo, Portal, in line with broad tendencies throughout the region, insists that the “New Art” be a socially committed art. CS

1 Amauta and Vanguard Art Amauta’s view of art is eclectic; it subscribes to all of art’s credos so long as Beauty is allowed to illuminate the patches of darkness that emanate from deep below the surface. But Amauta is a forward-looking publication, and as such it has the obligation, as Haya de la Torre1 says, to examine values and align its whole moral structure with the winds of aesthetic and ideological renovation, in order to strengthen its position as an organ of the vanguard. It is, thus, on this basis that the new art, as we the youth of America understand the term, will find in Amauta its rightful home. It must be reiterated that for us the moribund European “-isms”—of which there remains only what has been recorded in the pages of history—these movements mean nothing more than the first warning cries in the artistic revolution.

Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895–1979), Peruvian politician and philosopher who in 1924 founded the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), now the oldest surviving politic party in Peru. APRA campaigned on a platform of anti-imperialism, Pan-Americanism, and economic nationalism and counted Magda Portal as one of its active members.

1

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

33

It is not uncommon to hear, among those not a part of the proletariat, statements of disbelief and derision regarding the triumph of the new ideological creeds, which signal the dawning of a new day for the brotherhood of humankind. Likewise, among the intellectual bourgeoisie and in the spurious journalism of the Americas the new aesthetic manifestations are being angrily fought against, and they are even being called products of perversion.

2 The New Art and the Pre-War Generation The phenomenon can be explained in this way: the new art—the child of an age of formidable eruptions (the European war, the Russian Revolution, hunger in Germany, China, and Russia, and, lastly, the Chinese Revolution), of great scientific triumphs that have multiplied human activity, erasing mileage markers from the map, confounding common sense and creating a new philosophy—this new art was an inevitable and undelayable outcome of all these occurrences. Like all the new philosophical, sociological, and scientific outbursts that barely grazed the consciousness of the pre-war generation, the persistence of the new clarions—be they called jazz band, burlesque, etc.—mortifies its listeners accustomed to the monastic bells of Romanticism and decadence.2 But the new man, born in the midst of these cataclysmic events when the world was going through its greatest hour of stormy unrest, fatally charged his brain with photographic plates of rapid comprehension and synthetic creation, like the moment, the only time in which we live—atom and eternity. The new art undoubtedly emitted its newborn cry in the cabin of an airplane or on the concentric waves of a radio signal.

3 The Vital Meaning of the New Aesthetics This, which for us has its most perfect expression of meaning in terms of humanity and life itself, becomes something overly subtle, obscured by forced cerebrations for the intellectual diversion of the generation immediately prior to the war. It is precisely for us that this new art has its formidable symbolic meaning: ITS DYNAMISM. The new art tunes up the cerebral motor, which, being composed entirely of nerves in motion, is a stimulant of energy. The new art always sings of the reality of ACTION—be it of thought or movement—and for our Latin peoples, idle dreamers, there is such a great need for a propellant of energy that will awaken the creative forces of the great future that awaits us.

4 The New Art and the New Ideological Currents In all the ages of HUMANKIND, art has been a logical outgrowth of the various sociological and philosophical tendencies. It has not been an anarchical, disconnected product, even though art more than any other field has a right to anarchy. Directly linked to the most representative bases of the age, art has been, rather, a mirror forecasting the total panorama that is about to unfold. And this notion, which falls within the strictest bounds of logic, has not been violated this time, in spite of the fact that common logic has been violated.

Here Portal makes reference to the vanguard’s rejection of the aesthetics of the Spanish-American modernistas who drew heavily upon Romanticism.

2

34

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

The new art—truth, synthesis, the human joy of life, power, and creation—responds to this great postwar age of ours, marked by uncommon triumphs of science and humankind’s cry of freedom. A whole parade of cadavers was necessary for this, as well as millions of hungry ghosts. Art divested itself of the worthless pomp and circumstance of Darío’s poetry3—Beauty in and of itself is sterile, whereas art should be creative—and by penetrating to the root of life it began its human labor. Before the war art was decadent, totally sterile and lifeless, an enervating and degenerative blight on all life except the world of artificial paradises. The war with its gashes of blood added more humanity and a greater feeling of life to artistic manifestations, and, as in every chaotic age, art endured its own chaos to escape from literary decadence, finally arriving at the broad, sun-drenched steppes of liberty, which signify the new art, an art not bound to any particular school, an art fraternally linked in thoughts and action to the Social Revolution whose seeds bear fruit in the real world. It is unimportant that the first ones to fulfill this mission—the precursor poets—deny art’s ties to the social movement and disclaim what it is obscurely carrying out. Those who come afterwards and who have already been born into the full HUMANIZATION OF ART are the ones who are consciously fulfilling their double mission of BEAUTY and LIFE.

5 The New Art and the New Artists But with what right do the “bourgeoisie of literature” demand of this heroic and singularly brave art—I do not wish to repeat the reasons—an absolute product of sincerity and talent? We, the soldiers of the social revolution, are surrounded by a great number of false soldiers, who at any one time may be traitors and dissidents or simply those who are useless for action. All schools of art have had their mischievous pupils: D’Annunzio, Santos Chocano, etc.4 The new art is not obliged to cover the earth with lighted billboards calling attention to its wayward satellites. The pseudo-intellectual journalists and other artistic rabble have no right to demand an absolute selection in an art that has just recently pushed its happy plant upward toward the oxygen of Reality. And to deny this movement in art is to act like a frightened and, for that very reason, incredulous petit bourgeois who refuse to acknowledge the still-distant but unstoppable march of the soldiers of the Social Revolution.

Rubén Darío (1867–1916), Nicaraguan poet credited with initiating the fin-de-siècle literary movement of modernismo.

3

Gabriele D’Annuzio (1863–1938), Italian writer associated with Decadence and Symbolism; José Santos Chocano (1875–1934), polemical Peruvian poet and political activist associated with Spanish-American modernismo.

4

III. CANNIBALIST MANIFESTO Oswald de Andrade Originally published as “Manifesto Antrópofago” in Revista de Antropofagia 1:1 (São Paulo, May 1928). Translated from the Portuguese by Leslie Bary. Translation originally published in Latin American Literary Review 19.38 (1991). Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) was a Brazilian poet, playwright, and polemicist. A key figure within São Paulo’s vibrant avant-garde scene, Andrade formed part of the Grupo dos Cinco (Group of Five) alongside the painters Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral and the writers Mário de Andrade (no relation) and Menotti del Picchia. Born into a wealthy family, Andrade traveled extensively in Europe during his youth and had first-hand experience of avant-garde developments emerging in France and Italy. Having taken an active role in the São Paulo Week of Modern Art in 1922, Andrade focused his writings on a quest for isolating the uniqueness of Brazilian cultural expression. His 1924 literary manifesto, Pau-Brasil (Brazil Wood), stands as a firm rejection of sterile Portuguese literary and social models and an affirmation of what he sees as the spontaneous vibrancy of indigenous culture. It is in this earlier manifesto that we see the seeds of what will later develop into Andrade’s seminal theory of cultural anthropophagy. A vehicle for the exploration of these ideas of cultural anthropophagy was the Revista de Antropofagia, founded by Andrade, Raul Bopp, and Antônio de Alcântara Machado. Ten issues of the magazine were published in its first incarnation between May 1928 and February 1929, with the “Cannibalist Manifesto” appearing in its debut issue accompanied by an illustration by Tarsila do Amaral. This now-canonical piece calls upon Brazilians and Latin Americans more broadly to move away from the reproduction of European cultural forms, advocating, by way of its cannibalistic metaphor, the digestion of European culture with the aim of ultimately transforming it into something uniquely Brazilian and uniquely Latin American. All notes to this text are the work of the translator. CS

Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. *** The world’s single law. Disguised expression of all individualism, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. *** Tupi or not tupi, that is the question.1 *** I want to thank Margaret Abel Quintero, Wilton Azevedo, Aloísio Gomes Barbosa, José Niraldo de Farias, Dalila Machado, Sonia Ramos, and Lisa Fedorka-Carhuaslla at Latin American Literary Review, who read and commented on earlier versions of this translation. LB In English in original. Tupi is the popular, generic name for the Indigenous people of Brazil and also for their language, nheengatu.

1

36

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Down with every catechism. And down with the Gracchi’s mother.2 *** I am only concerned with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal. *** We’re tired of all the suspicious Catholic husbands who’ve been given starring roles. Freud put an end to the mystery of Woman and to other horrors of printed psychology. *** What clashed with the truth was clothing, that raincoat placed between the inner and outer worlds. The reaction against the dressed man. American movies will inform us. *** Children of the sun, mother of the living. Discovered and loved ferociously with all the hypocrisy of saudade,3 by the immigrants, by slaves and by the touristes. In the land of the Great Snake.4 *** It was because we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants. And we never knew what urban, suburban, frontier and continental were. Lazy in the mapamundi of Brazil.5 A participatory consciousness, a religious rhythmics.6 *** Down with all the importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study.7 ***

A student of Greek and Latin literature, Cornelia is said to have been virtuous, austere, and extremely devoted to her sons. In the Manifesto she is the bad mother who (in contrast to the mother-goddesses Jaci and Guaraci) brings her children up as subjects of a “civilized” culture.

2

Saudade or yearning, homesickness, nostalgia, is a sentiment traditionally associated with the Portuguese national character.

3

In his annotated French translation of the Manifesto, Benedito Nunes points out that the sun is a maternal deity here. As Nunes points out as well, the “Great Snake” (Cobra Grande) is a water spirit in Amazonian mythology, and is the theme of Raul Bopp’s Cobra Norato (1928). See Oswald de Andrade, “Le manifeste anthropophage,” trans. Nunes, in Surréalisme périphérique, ed. Luis de Moura Sobral (Montréal: Université de Montréal, 1984): 180–92, esp. 181, n. 3.

4

Nunes writes, “Oswald establishes an analogy between the absence of grammatical discipline and the absence of a split between Nature and Culture [in Brazil]. [As they were] so close to nature, [Brazilians] did not need to gather herbs, (collections of old plants) as Rousseau and Goethe did” (“Le manifeste anthropophage,” 182, n. 4). “Old plants” (velhos vegetais) also seems to allude to the entrenched, inactive, vegetative attitude of the Brazilian literary and cultural establishment Oswald wants to displace.

5

References to the work of Lévy-Bruhl on the structure of “primitive” thought. See below, n. 8.

6

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, French philosopher and ethnologist (1857–1939). Among his publications are Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), La mentalité primitive (1927), and La mythologie primitive (1935). The “primitive” mentality, according to Lévy-Bruhl, is not a deformation of the “civilized” one, but rather a completely different structure of thought. The primitive mind is mystical, collective and pre-logical.

7

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

37

We want the Carib Revolution. Greater than the French Revolution. The unification of all productive revolts for the progressive of humanity. Without us, Europe wouldn’t even have its meager declaration of the rights of man.8 The Golden Age heralded by America. The Golden Age. And all the girls. *** Heritage. Contact with the Carib side of Brazil. Où Villegaignon print terre.9 Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution and Keyserling’s technicized barbarian.10 We push onward. *** We were never catechized. We live by a somnambulistic law. We made Christ to be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará.11 *** But we never permitted the birth of logic among us. *** Down with Father Vieira.12 Author of our first loan, to make a commission. The illiterate king had told him: put that on paper, but without a lot of lip. The loan was made. Brazilian sugar was signed away. Vieira left the money in Portugal and brought us the lip. *** Neil Larsen writes, “The Manifesto itself plays ironically on the ‘theory’ that the Enlightenment discourse of natural right, leading from Locke through Rousseau and ultimately to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Bourgeois Revolution as such, has its origins in Montaigne’s ‘noble savage,’ based on the first reports from Brazil of ‘cannibalism’ among members of the Tupinamba tribal aggregate.” Modernism and Hegemony (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990): 80.

8

In Montaigne’s essay “Des cannibals,” “où Villegaignon print terre” is Antarctic France (the French mission in Brazil). Montaigne argues in this essay that ritual cannibalism is far less barbaric than many “civilized” European customs.

9

Count Hermann Keyserling, German philosopher, world traveler and Orientalist, (1880–1946). His works propose the (Spenglerian) ideas that the Western world must be compenetrated with Eastern philosophy and that Latin America will rise as a world power while Europe declines. Nunes informs us that Keyserling, whose “visit to São Paulo in 1929 was welcomed by the Revista de antropofagia, set forth the idea of technical barbarism in his book Die neuentstehende Welt” (“Anthropophagisme et surréalisme,” in Surréalisme périphérique, ed. Luis de Moura Sobral (Montréal: Université de Montréal, 1984), 159–79, esp. 173, n. 15). Oswald inverts Keyserling’s idea that a soulless “technical barbarism” is the sign of the modern world. In Oswald’s utopia, primitive man enjoys the fruits of modernization.

10

The Brazilian city of Belém, or Bethlehem (state of Pará). Christ is thus not brought to the New World in Oswald’s text, but born in His own Bethlehem.

11

Antonio Vieira (1608–97), Portuguese Jesuit instrumental in the colonization of Brazil. He came to be known as “the Judas of Brazil.” In the war between Portugal and Holland over Pernambuco, Vieira negotiated a peace treaty by which Pernambuco was given to Holland so that Portugal would not have to pay Holland to end the war (with money made in Brazil). A noted orator and writer, Vieira is associated with formal, elegant rhetoric—a language directly opposed to the poetic idiom Oswald is forging for Brazil. Nunes writes that Vieira “is for Oswald the strongest of all emblems of Brazilian intellectual culture …. Oswald refers to Vieira’s 1649 proposition to organize a company to exploit the sugar produced in the state of Maranhão” (“Le manifeste anthropophage,” 183, n. 11).

12

38

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

The spirit refuses to conceive a spirit without a body. Anthropomorphism. Need for the cannibalistic vaccine. To maintain our equilibrium, against meridian religions.13 And against outside inquisitions. *** We can attend only to the orecular world. *** We already had justice, the codification of vengeance. Science, the codification of Magic. Cannibalism. The permanent transformation of the Tabu into a totem.14 *** Down with the reversible world, and against objectified ideas. Cadaverized. The stop of thought that is dynamic. The individual as victim of the system. Source of classical injustices. Of romantic injustices. And the forgetting of inner conquests. *** Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes.15 *** The Carib instinct. *** Death and life of all hypotheses. From the equation “Self, part of the Cosmos” to the axiom “Cosmos, part of the Self.” Subsistence. Experience. Cannibalism. *** Down with the vegetable elites. In communication with the soil. ***

According to Nunes, “meridian” religions are religions of salvation. See “Antropofagia ao Alcance de Todos,” in Oswald de Andrade, Du Pau-Brasil à Antropofagia e às Utopias (1972) (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1978): xxxi. Meridian as a dividing line seems, in the context of the Manifesto, to connote the divisions between body/soul, native/foreign, and so on, which Oswald is attempting to dismantle.

13

In Totem and Taboo (1913, tr. 1918), Freud argues that the shift from “totemistic” to “taboo” systems of morality and religion consolidated paternal authority as the cornerstone of culture. Subjects of the taboo system are “civilized” because they have internalized the paternal rule. Oswald’s advocacy of totemistic cannibalism, then, constitutes a rejection of patriarchy and the culture of the (Portuguese) “fathers.” See also Nunes’ more detailed explanation in “Anthropophagisme et surréalisme,” 169–70.

14

The original roteiros (from rotear, to navigate) can also signify ships’ logbooks or pilots’ directions. Oswald can thus be construed here as referring to a rediscovery of America.

15

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

39

We were never catechized. What we really made was Carnaval. The Indian dressed as senator of the Empire. Making believe he’s Pitt.16 Or performing in Alencar’s operas,17 fully of worth Portuguese sentiments. *** We already had Communism. We already had Surrealist language. The Golden Age. *** Catiti Catiti Imara Notiá Notiá Imara Ipejú.18 *** Magic and life. We had the description and allocation of tangible goods, moral goods, and royal goods.19 And we knew how to transpose mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms. *** I asked a man what the Law was. He answered that it was the guarantee of the exercise of possibility. That man was named Galli Mathias.20 I ate him. *** Only where there is mystery is there no determinism. But what does that have to do with us? ***

William Pitt, (1759–1806), British statesman influential in the formation of colonial policy for India.

16

José de Alencar, Brazilian writer and conservative politician, (1829–77). His Indianist novel O Guarani (1857) was turned into an opera, with music by Carlos Gomes (1836–96), which opened in the Teatro Scala, Milan, December 2, 1870. Nunes points out that “Peri, the hero of O Guarani, [has] civilized manners, imitating the great Portuguese lords” (“Le manifeste anthropophage,” 186, n. 18).

17

In a footnote, Oswald provides a Portuguese translation of this Tupi text, running “New moon, oh new moon, blow memories of me into [the man I want].” The note gives the source of this text as O Selvagem, an anthropological work by Couto de Magalhães, the politician and anthropologist (1836–98). Nunes quotes Couto de Magalhães’ complete translation of the Tupi text: “Lua Nova ó lua Nova! Assoprai em … lembranças de mim; eisme aqui, estou em vossa presença; fazei com que eu tão somente ocupe seu coração.” [New moon, oh new moon! Blow memories of me into …; I stand here before you; let me and no other fill his heart. “Le manifeste anthropophage,” 186, n. 19].

18

The original here reads “dos bens físicos, dos bens morais, dos bens dignários.” Oswald is playing with legal terms for various kinds of property, so as to ridicule “civilized” European institutions and show that they are superfluous to Brazilian culture. Bens físicos are probably the land and natural resources of Brazil, and bens morais the native culture. Bens dignários, property granted by the king, suggests both the aspects of Brazilian culture held in common with Portugal and also property “granted” by the Portuguese king that was in fact originally Brazilian.

19

“Galli Mathias” is a pun on galimatias, or nonsense.

20

40

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Down with the histories of Man that begin at Cape Finisterre. The undated world. Unrubrified. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar. *** The determination of progress by catalogues and television sets. Only machinery. And blood transfusers. *** Down with the antagonistic sublimations. Brought here in caravels. *** Down with the truth of missionary peoples, defined by the sagacity of a cannibal, the Viscount of Cairu21:—It’s a lie told again and again. *** But those who came here weren’t crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization we are eating, because we are strong and vindictive like the Jabuti.22 *** If God is the consciousness of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living.23 Jaci is the mother of plants.24 *** We never had speculation. But we had divination. We had Politics, which is the science of distribution. And a social system in harmony with the planet. *** The migrations. The flight from tedious states. Against urban scleroses. Against the Conservatories and speculative tedium. *** From William James to Voronoff.25 The transfiguration of the Taboo into a totem. Cannibalism. *** José de Silva Lisboa, Viscount of Cairu (1756–1835), Brazilian politician. After Dom João VI established his court in Rio de Janeiro (1808) in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal, the Viscount of Cairu convinced him to open Brazilian ports to “all nations friendly to Portugal.”

21

Tortoise of northern Brazil; in the popular culture of the Indians, he is a trickster figure. The jabuti is astute, active, comical, and combative.

22

Tupi sun goddess, mother of all men.

23

Tupi moon goddess, creator of plants.

24

William James, American philosopher (1842–1910), is the author of Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and A Pluralistic Universe (1909). Serge Voronoff, Russian-born

25

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

41

The paterfamilias and the creation of the Morality of the Stork: Real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + sense of authority in the face of curious offspring. *** One must depart from a profound atheism in order to arrive at the idea of God. But the Carib didn’t need to. Because he had Guaraci. *** The created object reacts like the Fallen Angels. Next, Moses daydreams. What do we have to do with that? *** Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness. *** Down with the torch-bearing Indian. The Indian son of Mary, the stepson of Catherine of Medici and the godson of Dom Antonio de Mariz.26 *** Joy is the proof of nines. *** In the matriarchy of Pindorama.

27

*** Down with Memory as a source of custom. The renewal of personal experience. *** We are concretists. Ideas take charge, react, and burn people public squares. Let’s get rid of ideas and other paralyses. By means of routes. Believe in signs; believe in sextants and in stars. ***

biologist (1866–1951), is the author of Etude sur la vieillesse et la rajeunissement par la greffe (1926) and La conquête de la vie (1928), a method of rejuvenation by the grafting of genital glands. James’ demystifying interpretation of religion can be contrasted to the catachesis Oswald rejects, and Voronoff’s interest in grafting, as well as the return to youth and defiance of death, has affinities with Oswald’s project. Nunes writes that “one could consider [Voronoff] to represent a biological pragmatism, towards which the Anthropophagy Manifesto leans” (“Le manifeste anthropophage,” 188–9, n. 26). Nunes writes that this is a “[s]uperimposition of three images: that of the sculpted Indians of the chandeliers of certain Baroque churches, that of the Indian Paraguassu, who went to France in the 16th century, accompanied by her husband, the Portuguese Diogo Álvares Correia, and [that of] D[om] Antonio de Mariz, the noble rural lord, father of Ceci, with whom Peri falls in love, in O Guarani. Paraguassu was baptized as Saint-Malo. A false version [of the story], spread through schoolbooks, made Catherine of Medici the godmother of this native” (“Le manifeste anthropophage,” 189–90, n. 28).

26

Pindorama is the name of Brazil in the Tupi language. It may mean “country or region of palm trees.”

27

42

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Down with Goethe, the Gracchi’s mother, and the court of Dom João VI.28 *** Joy is the proof by nines. *** The struggle between what we might call the Uncreated and the Creation—illustrated by the permanent contradiction between Man and his Taboo. Everyday love and the capitalist way of life. Cannibalism. Absorption of the scared enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. The earthly goal. Even so, only the pure elites managed to realize carnal cannibalism, which carries within itself the highest meaning of life and avoid all the ills identified by Freud—catechist ills. What results is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometrical scale of the cannibal instinct. Carnal at first, this instinct becomes elective, and creates friendship. When it is affective, it creates love. At times it is degraded. Low cannibalism, agglomerated with the sins of catechism—envy, usury, calumny, murder. We are acting against this plague of a supposedly cultured and Christianized peoples. Cannibals. *** Down with Anchieta singing of the eleven thousand virgins of Heaven,29 in the land of Iracema30—the patriarch João Ramalho, founder of São Paulo.31 *** Our independence has not yet been proclaimed. An expression typical of Dom João VI: “My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer puts it on his!”32 We

Dom João VI, King of Portugal (reigned 1816–26). As Prince Regent, he fled the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal (1807) and installed the Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro (1808–21). He made Brazil a kingdom (1815), equal in status to Portugal, and was Brazil’s last colonial monarch before independence (1822).

28

Father Anchieta (1534–97), Jesuit missionary among Indians, known as “The Apostle of Brazil” and generally considered to be the first Brazilian writer. He helped found São Paulo in 1554, after founding a Jesuit school at Piratininga (São Vicente). Anchieta is the author of a long Latin poem to the Virgin Mary, which he composed and committed to memory while a captive of the Indians, and a dramatic poem in Portuguese about the arrival of a relic of the Eleven Thousand Virgins (legendary companions of St. Ursula, martyred at Cologne in the early fourth century, after whom the Virgin Islands are named) in Brazil. Anchieta thus embodies the catechesis, importation of culture, and inscription of Brazil as colony that Oswald rejects.

29

Indian heroine in Alencar’s novel of the same name (1865).

30

João Ramalho was one of the first Portuguese colonizers of Brazil. Shipwrecked off the coast near São Paulo in 1512, he made friends with the Tamoia Indians, married the daughter of a chief, had many children by her and other Tamoias, and created a small empire. He founded what is now Santo André and also the village of Piratininga. He was opposed to the Jesuits’ founding of São Paulo, and organized the Indians’ resistance against the missionaries.

31

Dom João VI’s son, Dom Pedro I, became Emperor of Brazil when Independence was declared in 1822. According to tradition Dom João, already sensing that Brazil would separate itself from Portugal, had given Dom Pedro the directions Oswald quotes here before returning to Lisbon in 1821.

32

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

43

expelled the dynasty. We must still expel the Bragantine spirit,33 the decrees and the snuff-box of Maria da Fonte.34 *** Down with the dress and oppressive social reality registered by Freud—reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without penitentiaries, in the matriarchy of Pindorama. OSWALD DE ANDRADE In Piratininga, in the 374th Year of the Swallowing of Bishop Sardinha.35

The Portuguese kings of the period were of the Bragança dynasty.

33

The legendary figure Maria da Fonte became the symbol of a popular rebellion in the Minho (1846) against higher taxation to finance the improvement of roads and reforms in public health. The uprising strengthened conservative forces in Portugal, associated with absolution and colonialism. In the context of the M A, Maria da Fonte is an emblem of the allegiance to Portuguese tradition and a patriarchal woman, parallel to the Gracchi’s mother and opposed to Jaci and Guaraci.

34

Sardinha was Bishop of Bahia from 1552 to 1556, when he was killed and apparently eaten by the Caltis Indians, into whose hands he fell when the ship that was taking him back to Lisbon sank in the São Francisco River. Sardinha had favored punishing Portuguese settlers who, enraged at the Jesuits’ opposition to the enslavement of Indians, attacked the school at Piratininga in 1554.

35

IV. FROM “REVOLUTION AND RENASCENCE” Anita Brenner Originally published in English in Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929). Anita Brenner (1905–74) was a Mexican journalist and intellectual fully immersed in the country’s post-revolutionary artistic scene. The daughter of a Latvian-Jewish émigré, Brenner’s father moved the family between Mexico and the United States during the Revolution, giving her a unique bilingual and dual cultural perspective that came to shape her professional identity. Brenner returned to live in Mexico in 1923 and was initiated into a community of cosmopolitan artists and intellectuals. She pursued a career in journalism whilst also acting as translator for anthropologist Manuel Gamio (1883– 1960) who encouraged her to pursue a doctorate in anthropology, which she received from Columbia University in 1930. Throughout the 1930s Brenner promoted the work of many pivotal Mexican artists, among them Diego Rivera (1886–1957), Dr. Atl (1875– 1964), David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974), and José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949); Brenner was committed to establishing contacts between Mexican artists and US gallerists such as Alma Reed (1889–1966), who provided many with their debut exhibitions in the United States. She would later come to travel widely throughout Europe where she wrote articles for The New York Times and served as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. The present piece is an extract from Brenner’s seminal work Idols Behind Altars, first published by Harcourt Brace in 1929. Having received funding for the book project from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in 1926 Brenner contracted her friends the photographers Edward Weston (1886–1958) and Tina Modotti (1896–1942) to travel through Mexico with her documenting pre-Columbian, folk, and contemporary artistic developments. The book represents the first English-language account of Mexican art history and charts the unique interactions between indigenous and colonial forms and the traces that this artistic syncretism has left in modern Mexican art. Moving chronologically from pre-Columbian through colonial to later folk art forms, Brenner dedicates the third and final section of her work to the impact that the Revolution had upon Mexican arts. Offering sensitive written portraits of the central artists shaping the contemporary scene, this extract sees Brenner build upon the key notion of the “Mexican Renaissance”—a term she coined in an earlier 1925 article for the journal Arts with reference to the flourishing of the arts in post-revolutionary Mexico. Brenner’s work captures the unique interplay between national and artistic regeneration that defined Mexico during the early twentieth century. CS

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

45

In the span of one generation Mexico has come to herself. Her first and definitive gesture is artistic. While the government shifts and guerrillas still battle for Cristo Rey1 and other interests, the builders, necessary as the destroyers, re-found the nation. It is a nation which establishes a school for sculpture before thinking of a Juvenile Court, and which paints the walls of its buildings much sooner than it organizes a Federal Bank. Sanitation, jobs, and reliably workable laws are attended to literally as a by-product of art; for the revolution is a change of regime, because of a change in artistic style, or, if one wishes a more usual description, of spirit. In goods of this world the nation is poor. It is uncomfortable, exposed to many diseases, hungry, and generous to death. Its scenic and racial beauties and dangers are largely unmapped, unexploited, unlinked to western civilization except by an occasional aeroplane. On the east coast adventurers, gun-men, oilmen and natives clutch at each other’s throats; farther south in the forests many Indians die of overwork for chicle2 and lumber and fruit interests, or die underfed, or retreat still farther; in the plateau often mines once rich are deserted, and others are flooded or boycotted by restless peons demanding a higher wage and less disastrous conditions than those traditional since the conquest; in the cities the governments wrestle with all these evils, and with the murder and lust in their own personnel. Ancient Greece at grips with the barbarians and before that torn in class conflict and family disputes, the Italian city-states rising and breaking by battle and treachery, had no more desolate and painful a social panorama than this. But one cannot admire Greek thought and maintain a relationship with the Renaissance at all cordially intimate if one prudishly requires of each, Protestant virtues. The greatness of these civilizations lies in achievements that were the results of all their conditions and aptitudes. They were organic, consistent with themselves. The beauty of Mexico lies in precisely the same quality of unified culture; in the flowering of culture at the crossing of many threads, with great pain. And what else than consistency is beauty? Insistently Mexico has died and killed for a phrase: Land and liberty.3 Never does it open interested eyes to the slogan Prosperity. The cult of health, wealth, and happiness is meager for people who practice the three heroisms that they preach: of emotion, and thought, and expression. Zapata was murdered, and the lands are not yet completely restored to his people, as he visioned4; Carrillo Puerto was betrayed, and his Mayas are not much better in health or in wealth since his death5; Orozco’s critiques of social disasters have had no measurable practical result; the Syndicate disappeared without having created an economic niche for the artist.6 But in all of these things are embodied the three heroisms, and that is enough. Here Brenner refers to the Cristero Wars that were ongoing at the time of this work’s composition. This civil conflict saw violent uprisings initiated by Catholic leaders and their followers in reaction to harsh anti-clerical laws imposed by post-revolutionary President Plutarco Elías Calles.

1

Chicle is the Spanish for gum and here refers to natural tree sap or resin.

2

¡Tierra y libertad! (Land and liberty!) was a central slogan of peasant leaders and fighters during the Mexican Revolution (1910–20).

3

Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919), key peasant leader during the Mexican Revolution. His ideas on agrarian reform, laid out in the 1911 Plan de Ayala, continue to inspire revolutionary movements in Mexico to this day.

4

Felipe Carillo Puerto (1874–1924), Mexican journalist, politician, and campaigner for indigenous rights. Famed for his role in negotiating reconciliation between Yucatan Mayans and the state after the Caste War (1847–1901).

5

Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos Pintores y Escultores (Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors) was a union formed by Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and their fellow artists in 1922. The 1923 manifesto of the Syndicate urged artists to reject easel painting and dedicate themselves to forms of monumental public, socially committed art.

6

46

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Yet these ideas and images with a life of their own reproduce others similar. They travel to other arts, to music, literature, government; and to other places. Their seepage to practical matters eventually bursts old dams. Thus material changes come sudden and enormous as floods.

II. When the Syndicate disappeared several men had already made permanent influential records in murals: Siqueiros, Orozco, Rivera, Charlot.7 Fermin Revueltas8 had decorated a hall in which machines were to be kept, in an abstract manner appropriate to machines and reminiscent of pulquerías.9 This was an original and personal contribution to the art of pure decoration. Merida had adorned a children’s library in a charming and simple style, which was followed by other painters on the walls of primary-school classrooms.10 Many painters who sighed for walls and never received them, were on canvas increasing the volume of “revolutionary art” which has changed metropolitan taste. Recently a building (Headquarters of the Police and Fire Department) went up which is neither European nor colonial. It is re-enforced concrete with an angularly tiered cornice, broad arched patios, and for single decoration a large carving of the native god of fire in lava rock. This building was much admired. The architect was asked what style he had followed. He said that it was smelted of native pre-Spanish and native post-Spanish lines, and designed in the modern spirit which the material implies, and therefore it could be called modern Mexican. The open-air schools of painting,11 multiplying to date, have been followed by craft centers, groups of woodcut students, tapestry and embroidery classes, a sculpture workshop where the carving is done by young boys directly on hard rock from living animal models, and groups of mural students in the primary schools, who decorate the walls of their classrooms. Dolores Cueto embroiders on fine tapestries motifs borrowed from children’s work, from popular art, and from the work of the modern painters.12 Potters and weavers from nearby villages “take samples” from their friends among the painters to copy in their own materials. They lend these patterns to other villages, or send them already woven or worked in clay, assimilated to popular tradition. On the sixteenth of September, the Day of the Dead, Christmas or Easter week, when the villages bring their wares to the capital, one may discover, in one of the many booths filled with “Aztecistic” ceramics, lacquers, and textiles designed for the foreigners who buy them, patterns of modern metropolitan origin. However their modernity is no more strikingly Jean Charlot (1898–1979), French painter of Mexican heritage who spent a predominant part of his life based in Mexico contributing to the country’s flourishing modernist art scene.

7

Fermín Revueltas (1901–35), Mexican painter associated with the Estridentista movement and commissioned in 1923, alongside five other artists, to produce murals for the National Preparatory School of Mexico City.

8

Pulquerías are traditional Mexican bars that specialize in pulque, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented agave sap.

9

Guatemalan painter Carlos Mérida (1891–1984) was commissioned in 1923 to paint a mural entitled Caperucita Roja y los Cuatro Elementos (Little Red Ridinghood and the Four Elements) in the Children’s Library of the Mexican Ministry of Education.

10

The Escuelas de pintura al aire libre (Open-air Schools of Painting) were a cornerstone of the state-sponsored arts program that emerged in post-revolutionary Mexico under the leadership of Minister of Education José Vasconcelos (1882–1959). The aim of the schools was to provide artistic education to a broad sector of society, with particular emphasis on children of indigenous and working-class families.

11

“Lola” Cueto (1897–1978), as she is more commonly known, was a Mexican artist who specialized in folk-art with a particular emphasis on children’s theater and puppeteering.

12

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

47

evident than is the antiquity of certain forms and designs whose counterparts are found under lava. Folk-art influence is in turn now common in the work of metropolitan artists, sometimes because these artists came to the city from towns and villages whose art, they discovered, was much admired in the capital, and sometimes, as in the case of Manuel Rodriguez Lozano,13 deliberately courted. Rodriguez Lozano was bred in Paris. When he returned to Mexico he was made head of the department of drawing in the Secretariat, under Vasconcelos.14 He changed the Best-Maugard tradition15 because he was interested in the folk-art of the city. The results in the classrooms, pulquería art, and miracle-boards, together with the work of Abraham Angel16 which was likened to these arts, helped to determine the course of Lozano’s own style. Steadily it has become simpler, more solid, less apparently sophisticated. Younger men learning from him develop under his influence painting which is at once learned and naive. One of the more interesting among them is Julio Castellanos.17 Of other painters in Mexico City who consider themselves the next generation, and who have worked in the wake of the Syndicate, Rufino Tamayo and Agustin Lazo are to be watched with critical interest.18 Lazo, influenced by Rivera, later in Paris developed his original tendency toward the abstract and the intellectual, not without affectation. Tamayo has been original and industrious. His rich and delicate water colours imply at once the tropics from which he came, the fruits odorous in his house. Tamayo least the cerebral, most the intuitive whose improvisations fall sensual and skillful as the ballads he sings with his famous guitar. After Covarrubias,19 Tamayo captivated blasé New York, but he returned to Mexico.

IV. […] Precisely as Mexican plotters against Diaz fled to the United States to escape “fugitive justice” and life sentences in under-sea dungeons,20 Venezuelans who breathe against Gomez21 and are injected with arsenic, Peruvians who organize labour or write of its

Manuel Rodríguez Lozano (c. 1894–1971), Mexican painter associated with the Contemporáneos group. Co-founder of the Teatro Ulises (Ulises Theater) and later director of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas.

13

José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) was the Mexican Minister of Education and an important figure in the development of state-sponsored culture in post-revolutionary Mexico.

14

Refers to the influential text Método de dibujo: Tradición, resurgimiento y evolución del arte mexicano (Drawing Method: Tradition, Resurgence, and Evolution of Mexican Art) published in 1923 by Mexican painter Adolfo Best Maugard (1891–1964).

15

Abraham Ángel (1905–24), Mexican painter and protégé of Rodríguez Lozano.

16

Julio Castellanos (1905–47), Mexican painter and engraver who studied under both Rodríguez Lozano and Best Maugard.

17

Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) and Agustín Lazo (1896–1971) are two key Mexican painters of this period whose works distinguish themselves in their eschewal of the overtly political subject matter of contemporaries such as Rivera and Siqueiros.

18

Miguel Covarrubias (1904–57), Mexican artist known principally for his work as an illustrator. He gained substantial attention in the United States, with his celebrity caricatures featured frequently in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

19

Brenner refers here to those such as Francisco Madero (1873–1913) who aimed to bring an end to the 35year reign of dictator Porfirio Díaz (1830–1915) in 1910—events that eventually sparked the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.

20

Juan Vicente Gómez (1857–1935), military dictator of Venezuela from 1908 to 1935.

21

48

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

benefits and are jailed, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, race if in political danger to the Mexican Embassy and from thence exile themselves to Mexico City. These revolutionaries for any of the four reasons Pater recognizes, find an ideological form already cast for their sentiments, and for their energies. They find it because they speak the same language in Mexican literature, and because they are similarly minded and moved, in Mexican pictures. Then they write and they whisper lyrically: “My dreams, brewed in your soil, my America, race of my grandfathers; my dreams, brewed in your soil, perfumed and steaming as barbecues, I place in the prow, in the hands of your Mexico, which protects my country with its body; I leave them in those paws, dark and robust, learned in caresses, brushes and guns.”22 Except to believers in miracles, pictures and verses are no shield against bullets. As shields and as symbols however they are taken by persons who hope to re-duplicate the Mexican miracle, and the Mexican heroisms. The assistance that Mexico gives them is moral: Vasconcelos protests against Gomez’ murder of students,23 and Mexico breaks diplomatic relations with the country he rules; labor unions in Mexico send votes of adherence to strikers in Cuba, Peru, and Colombia; Mexican papers and magazines reflect sympathetically on Sandino.24 But the greatest protection that Mexico means farther south, is a matter of spirit. So long as that country paints and sings because it has fought, continues consistently itself, its unhappy neighbors can also sing and hope to fight. The drama unfolds in the grace that ennobles the Mexican day. It is a conflict of unmaterial values, of attitude, in the end, and the concrete determinants which on the one hand push for more goods of this world, and on the other struggle for grace, are attributes of two disparate viewpoints. Geographical factors distribute these viewpoints racially; economic factors also; but each of the racial groups numbers allies to the predominant spirit in the other. It is drama because it is conflict of two incompatible powers. In its course it unfolds the rise of America.

Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Carlos Mérida (Madrid: Ediciones de La Gazeta Literaria, 1927).

22

Refers to the violent protests launched in 1928 by Venezuelan students—collectively known as the Generación del 28—against the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez.

23

Augusto César Sandino (1895–1934), Nicaraguan revolutionary and leader of revolts against US occupation of the country between 1926 and 1934. Sandino’s legacy is seen in the later Sandinista uprisings in Nicaragua that overthrew the longstanding dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza (1925–80) in 1979.

24

V. WILL TO CONSTRUCT Joaquín Torres-García Originally published in French as “Vouloir Construire” in Cercle et Carré 1 (15 March 1930). Translated into Spanish by Jorge Schwartz in Las vanguardias latinoamericanas. Textos programáticos y críticos. México: FCE, 2002. pp. 428–430. Translated through a comparison of the French and Spanish texts by Stephen J. Ross and John Steen. Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) was a Uruguayan painter, sculptor, and art theorist who pioneered the development of abstract art in Latin America. He received his formal training in Spain where his family had moved in 1891. His time in Europe led to important collaborations, such as his work with the famed Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí on the stained glass windows of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca (1903–7). In 1929, while based in Paris, Torres-García, Piet Mondrian, and Michel Seuphor founded a collective of abstract artists named Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square). The group went public in 1930 with a journal of the same name and an exhibition of works by forty-six Constructivist artists at Galerie 23, Paris. In 1934 TorresGarcía returned to Uruguay with the aim of disseminating modernist and constructivist aesthetics amongst his peers. In Montevideo he founded the Asociación de arte constructivo (Association of Constructivist Art) and began republishing the journal he had founded in Paris under the Spanish name Círculo y cuadrado. In February 1935 he released his first Latin Americanist manifesto entitled “Escuela del Sur” (“School of the South”) which had a lasting impact upon the trajectory of the visual arts in the region. The early decades of twentieth-century vanguard artistic production in Uruguay had been dominated by figurative works influenced by the school of Mexican muralism, what Torres-García proposed was to incorporate pre-Columbian forms with modernist abstraction to create a new, distinctly Latin American, visuality. Originally published in French in Cercle et Carré, “Will to Construct” lays out Torres-García’s conceptualization of Constructivism, highlighting the primacy of form, unity, and rejection of mimetic modes. CS

If we think we must come together it is because all around disorientation and disorder reign. It is to find a base, to have certainties. And our reasoning showed us that this base is construction. Being in agreement, we all start from this sign. What is construction?— when a person abandons the direct copying of nature and makes an image in the manner of nature, without desiring that it agree with the visual deformation imposed by perspective. That is to say, once you sketch the idea of a thing more than the thing in measurable space, a certain construction begins. If you give those images an order as well, seeking to harmonize them rhythmically so that they might belong more to the whole picture than that which they want to express, you have already touched on a high level of construction. But this is not yet construction, as we understand it. Before coming to this, we still have to consider form. As a representation of things this form has no value in itself and we cannot call it plastic. But when this form has a value in itself—namely, through the abstract

50

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

expression of its contours and qualities—it acquires a plastic importance and it could be said of a work conceived in this way that it already partakes of certain construction. We can go further and consider it the unity of surface. This surface is divided, these divisions will determine spaces; these spaces must be in relation: there must exist an equivalence among them so that the unity of the whole remains complete. Ordering would already be something, though not much. We set out to create an order—we can arrange, for instance, a naturalist landscape. All painters compose their canvases in more or less this way. They are in nature just like when they are on a walk. But he who creates an order, establishes a blueprint, passes from the individual to the universal. Whence its importance. Now it is necessary to clarify something. Not all people possess nature equally. Without a doubt, they have within them the same elements, but the proportions of those elements vary. From this emerges a diversity that determines the corresponding works, without meaning that each one’s diverse composition presupposes a more or less higher level of evolution. Let us try to make a parallelism of two tendencies between which there are always gradations: intuition—intellect; the present—time; tone—color; tradition—the new spirit; the spiritual—material reality; the fixed—the relative; emotion—reason; the personal—the impersonal; the concrete—the abstract; the felt—the mediated; faith— belief; the romantic—the classical; synthesis—analysis; prescience—physical science; metaphysics—philosophy; the artist—the sculptor. Well now, if the sculptor leans on pure ideas of the mind, he can construct; the artist, too, can do so by leaning on his intuitions. We should be indifferent as to whether there is emotion or reason at the base of a construction: our only objective is to construct. Representation is the polar opposite of the constructive sense. To imitate an already-made thing is not to create. Why imitate caverns, it is better to construct a cathedral! Construction must be above all the creation of an order. Outside of us lies pluralism, unity lies within us. We can consider the pure concepts: time and space. All of our representation of the phenomenal world is inscribed in these pure forms of thought. If we base a sculpture on these principles we will have a pure sculpture. All form will be prohibited to us. But if we base construction on intuitive facts, we will be artists and our art will have a certain relation to metaphysics. In the opposite direction, our art will draw near to philosophy. We have in mind the totality of an object, but visually we only see one of its parts. This part changes appearance if we change position. This means that visually we never possess a complete object. The complete object only exists in our mind. If we have in mind the complete object, in order to give a graphic idea of it, we will choose, almost without noticing it, the essential parts and we will construct a sketch that, if it were in agreement with the laws of perspective, would be, on the other hand, much more illustrative. That is the spirit of synthesis. The thing has been so standard that in all periods, except during the Renaissance, drawing was always done in this way. And, spontaneously, all those not initiated in the Academy draw in this way. That’s fine. The greater the spirit of synthesis in the one who draws, the greater the possibility she will give us a constructed image. The drawings of all primitive peoples, Black, Aztec, etc., and Egyptian, Chaldean1 drawings, etc., are good examples. This spirit of synthesis, I believe, leads to the construction of the whole painting, of the sculpture, and to the determination of proportions in architecture. This spirit alone makes it possible to see the work in its totality, in a single order, in unity. What wonders this law has accomplished across time! Why overlook it? This law is an Chaldea was a nation in ancient Mesopotamia from approximately the ninth to the sixth centuries BC; it later became assimilated into Babylonia.

1

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

51

anonymous thing, it belongs to no one. Everyone can use it in their way, it ought to be the true path of all sincere people. But if this law has been used in all ages, how can it be used in a modern way? Regarding form, we already said: what is useful to us is the absolute value that we give to form independently of what it might represent. The same happens with structure or construction: which goes from simple skeleton for ordering forms to assuming its place and to constituting the work in itself. With this a duality disappears that always existed in the painting: the background and its images; where structure takes the place of superimposed images there will no longer be duality between the background and the images, and the painting will have recovered its primary identity, unity.

VI. PROLOGUE TO SÓNGORO COSONGO Nicolás Guillén Originally published as “Prólogo” to Sóngoro Cosongo (Havana: Talleres de Ucar, Garcia y Cia., 1931). Translated from the Spanish by Stephen J. Ross and John Steen. Nicolás Guillén (1902–89) was a Cuban poet, journalist, and political activist. Part of the vanguard circles of Havana, he participated in the activities of the Grupo Minorista, publishing in key journals such as the revista de avance. His first published collection of poetry, Motivos de son (1930), was born out of Guillén’s meeting with US poet Langston Hughes (1902–67). Hughes, by Guillén’s own admission, opened the Cuban poet’s eyes to a new kind of racial consciousness, one that moved beyond simply a protest against racial inequality and into a concerted exaltation of African culture. In the work of Guillén this manifested in poetry that incorporated folkloric musical forms, dislocated rhythms, and renderings of Afro-Cuban speech. These works lead Guillén to become a leading figure in the Négritude movement. The present work was written as the prologue to Guillén’s second volume of poetry Sóngoro Cosongo (1931) that saw him build upon the experiments with Afro-Caribbean rhythms and vernacular initiated in Motivos de son. In the prologue, Guillén advocates for the creation of a Mestizo poetics, one that accounts for and venerates the legacy of African influences in the Hispanic Caribbean. It likewise stands as a crucial theorizing of the plural nature of Cuban identity. CS

Prologue? Yes. Prologue … But nothing too serious, since these first pages should be fresh and green, like young branches. Actually, I’m in favor of putting prologues at the end, as if they were epilogues. And in any case, of leaving epilogues for books that do not have prologues. On the other hand, a separate prologue has a certain provisional status of something borrowed. After the book is published, the author who puts a few lines from his friend at the beginning should be able to live with the shock of his asking to see them: —Menéndez says that when you finish the prologue, send it to him … And best of all is using them in another work. To lend it out to another friend. My prologue is mine. Well, I can say—having clarified the above—that I have decided to publish a poetry collection by virtue of having already written the poems. In this regard, I am a bit more honorable than certain authors who announce their works without having drafted a single line. Almost always, said announcement appears in the first book, with a totally elastic title: “works in progress.” And right away, a list that comprises several volumes of poetry, criticism, drama, novels … An entire world of aspirations, but with very short wings for flight.

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

53

I’m not unaware, certainly, that these verses are repugnant to many people, because they deal with the affairs of negroes and of common people. I don’t care. Or better yet: I’m happy. What I mean is that such prickly spirits are not included in my lyric agenda. Besides, they are good people. They have painfully entered the aristocracy from the kitchen, and tremble no sooner than they see a pot. I will say, finally, that these are mulatto verses. Perhaps they partake of the same elements that make up the ethnic composition of Cuba, where everyone has some of the níspero in them.1 Does it hurt? I don’t believe so. In any case, it must be said before we go and forget it. The African injection in this land is so profound, and such capillary currents cross and crisscross in our irrigated social hydrography, that it would take a miniaturist to disentangle the hieroglyph. I’d argue, therefore, that a creole poetry in our midst will not be completely such if it forgets the negro. The negro—in my estimate—mixes in a strong essence to our cocktail. And the two races that bloom from water on the Island, different as they might look, are hooked together underwater, like those deep bridges that secretly unite two continents. For the moment, the Cuban spirit is mestizo. And the definitive color will come to the skin from the spirit. Some day they will say: “Cuban color.” These poems want to bring that day closer.

Here Guillén refers to the brown colour of the níspero fruit.

1

VII. FROM WOMAN AND HER EXPRESSION Victoria Ocampo Originally given as a radio address in August 1935 (some sources give 1936). First published as “La mujer y su expression.” Sur, 11 (1935): 25–40. Translated from the Spanish by Patricia Owen Steiner.

Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979), Argentine writer and editor, played an active role in shaping the Buenos Aires vanguard scene. Ocampo’s cultural activities converged and culminated in the founding of the literary journal Sur in 1931. The magazine (alongside the associated Sur publishing house) went on to become a cornerstone of Argentine literary culture, showcasing the works of Alfonso Reyes, Virginia Woolf, Martin Heidegger, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Ricardo Güiraldes, and many others. The magazine ran consistently between 1931 and 1966 and published its final issue in 1992. Although it is undoubtedly as the founding director of Sur that Ocampo is best known, she was a prolific essayist and cultural commentator, producing ten volumes of published Testimonios and a six-volume autobiography, alongside literary translations, journalism, and extensive correspondence; 1977 saw Ocampo become the first woman to be elected a member of the Argentine Academy of Letters in recognition of her contribution to the Argentine cultural field. Originally composed as a radio address broadcast simultaneously in Argentina and Spain in August 1935, “Woman and Her Expression” stands as an impassioned call for greater visibility of women within the arts and society more broadly. This extract, drawn from the middle section of the essay, sees Ocampo advocate the need for women to create a unique form of self-expression, alongside a meditation on gender relations and the tensions inherent to women’s relationship to the act of creation. In its original context, it appears between an opening analysis of monologic and dialogic forms of communication, framed specifically within the context of gender, and a closing comparison of the position of women in South America and Europe. Ocampo ends her piece with a fervent defense of true self-expression and dialogue between the genders. CS

Women, according to their environment, their talent, their calling, in many fields and in many centuries—and even in those that were most hostile to women—are trying today, and each time trying harder, to express themselves. And each time they are meeting with greater success. One cannot contemplate contemporary French science without referring to Marie Curie; nor can one think about English literature without bringing up the name of Virginia Woolf, or about Latin American letters without mentioning María de Maeztú,1 an admirable woman who has accomplished for young Spanish women, thanks to her authentic genius as an educator, what I would like to see her do for our young women.

María de Maeztú (1882–1948) was a Spanish feminist and educator who in 1915 founded the Residencia de Señoritas in Madrid, the first institution officially dedicated to promoting women’s participation in higher education.

1

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

55

I am totally convinced that women are also expressing themselves outside the realm of science and the arts and that they have already expressed themselves marvelously in these fields. I am also convinced that this expression has enriched human existence through all of time and that it has been as important in the history of humanity as the expression of men, although it is of a hidden quality, subtle and less flamboyant than man’s, in the way the plumage of the hen pheasant is less flamboyant than that of her mate. The most complete expression of women, the child, is a work that demands, in those who are conscious of it, infinitely more care, scrupulousness, sustained attention, delicate righting of wrongs, intelligent respect, and pure love than the work that goes into the creation of an immortal poem. This is because it not only involves carrying the child for nine months and giving birth to a being who is sound of body, but it also implies giving birth spiritually. That is to say, not only living beside them and with them, but before them. I believe, above all, in the power of example. There is no other way to persuade either adults or children. There is no alternative means to convince them. If that fails, there is no recourse. The child, then, by presence alone, has demanded that the conscientious woman express herself and that she do so in the most difficult way: by living before him as an example. The essential importance of early infancy is one of the points on which modern science has recently insisted the most. You could almost say that it has just discovered this fact. At this precise moment in life the child is exclusively in the hands of the woman. It is the woman, then, who leaves her indelible and decisive mark on the still-soft clay; it is she who, consciously or unconsciously, shapes it. Man’s resistance to recognizing that woman is a being as perfectly responsible as he is himself seems absurd and comical when one becomes aware of the tremendous contradiction that it encompasses; that for centuries, no doubt through ignorance, the greatest responsibility of all has been borne by an irresponsible being. I am talking here about the responsibility of molding a human being at the moment when he is impressionable and of leaving her stamp on him. The principle difference between great artists and great saints (apart from other differences) is that artists strive to put perfection into a work that is exterior to themselves and therefore outside their lives, while saints endeavor to put it into a work that is interior to themselves, and that consequently cannot be separated from their lives. The artist tries to create perfection outside himself, the saint in his own being. For this reason, I would dare to say that the artist who is sensitive to saintliness always runs the risk of losing his gifts as an artist. As the zeal to put perfection into his own life grows, the desire to give it life in a work of art diminishes. It is conceivable that the child has often made woman into an artist tempted by sainthood. Because in order to strive to put perfection in the work that is hers, the child, she needs to begin by trying to put perfection into her own self and not outside herself. She needs to take the path of saints and not the one of the artists. The child does not tolerate her trying to impose the perfections on him that he does not see in us. At this moment in history that is given us to live, we are witnessing a weakening of the power of artists. You might say that at this present time the world has more need of heroes or saints than of aesthetes. The temptation to sainthood, which, it would seem, is fatal to the perfection of the object, stands out all around us. And for this reason men today are becoming more like women; they are beginning to sense that, in our times, it will no longer be possible for them either to create perfection (which remains beyond human reach) or even the sense of that perfection, at least as they

56

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

themselves approach it. They begin to feel that every form of art that does not embrace the same requirement of perfection that the child demands is today obsolete. The work of art, like the child, will be able to correspond, more or less, to our desires, will go, more or less, beyond ourselves, but it will need to be created in the same sense as we strive to raise the child. God keep me from demeaning artists, whatever might be their defects; their past, present, or future vices; whatever might be their weaknesses. They have been, are, and will be as necessary to us as heroes or saints. Their way is also the way of heroism and sainthood. Even when the beauty of their work, as often happens, is a compensatory beauty (that is, condemned to be realized outside themselves, because it can not be realized within themselves), it is profoundly necessary to humanity. Whatever may have been their personal miseries, what we owe to great artists is some of the best of our inheritance. Take away the contributions of Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Bach, Leonardo da Vinci, Goya, Debussy, Poe, Proust—just to give the first names that occur to me—and how impoverished we would feel! That some of these men personally may have been poor wretches who might be reproached for such and such a defect—what does it matter? They have bequeathed to us what they had of an extraordinary nature. Perhaps they have known no other happiness than suffering for their work. Their work was for them the only way of fitting into an orderly sense of the world. And this means of fulfillment, among other things, is what men have unjustly taken pleasure in, or have been stubborn in denying to women. For there are certain women, just as there are certain men, who can know no other happiness than suffering for a work of art. One of these women, who is one of the most gifted beings I know, a celebrated novelist who writes with a wonderous style, said to me, “I am not truly happy except when I am alone, with a book or paper and pen. Beside this world—so real to me—the other one vanishes.” However, this woman, born into an intellectual atmosphere and whose vocation, right from the beginning, was absolutely clear, went through some atrocious years of torment and doubts when she was young. Everything conspired to prove to her that her sex was a terrible handicap in a career of letters. Everything conspired to magnify for her what she had inherited, what all we women inherit: an inferiority complex. We should struggle against that complex, since it would be absurd not to comprehend its importance. The spiritual state it inevitably creates is one of the most dangerous. And I see no other way of struggling against it than by giving women as solid, as carefully conceived an education as men, and to respect women’s freedom exactly as we respect the freedom of men. Not only in theory, but in practice. In theory, most civilized countries accept this idea. And in this sense Spain, since the revolution, has progressed rapidly. Unfortunately, Argentina has not advanced that far. Among our people women have not attained, either in theory or in practice, the position they ought to have attained. Men keep on saying to them, “Don’t interrupt me.” And when women assert their rights to freedom, men, judging no doubt from themselves and putting themselves in the woman’s place, interpret this as “licentiousness.” By freedom, we women understand absolute responsibility for our actions and selfrealization with no holds barred, which is very different. Licentiousness has no need to lay claim to freedom. One could be a slave and also be a libertine. As to self-realization, it is, in brief, intimately linked to expression, whatever form that may take. One does not express oneself except by understanding perfectly what one wants to express; or, rather, the need for expression always derives from that understanding.

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

57

Well, then: the understanding most important to every human being is the one that concerns the problem of his or her self-realization. That this woman realizes herself by caring for the sick, that one by teaching people how to read and write, another one by working in a laboratory or writing a first-rate novel matters little: there are many different ways to find self-realization, and the most modest ones, just as the most eminent examples, have their own meaning and value. Personally, what interests me most is written expression, and I believe that here women have a field for conquest and a harvest in the making. It is easy to demonstrate that until now women have spoken very little about themselves directly. Men have talked at great length about women, doubtless out of the need to compensate, but consequently, and inevitably, as a way of talking about themselves. Out of the gratitude or deception, the enthusiasm or bitterness this angel or demon left in his heart, in his flesh, in his spirit. Men could be praised for many things, but never for a profound impartiality on this subject. Until now, then, we have listened principally to witnesses for women. Women as their own witnesses, a thing the law would not allow since it classified them as suspicious witnesses whose statements are biased, have hardly said a word. It is now women’s turn not only to discover this unexplored continent that they represent but also to speak out about men, in their turn, as suspect witnesses. If she succeeds, world literature will be incalculably enriched, and I have no doubt that she will.

VIII. HOW I WRITE Gabriela Mistral Originally delivered as part of a roundtable discussion entitled “Como escribo” in January 1938 in Montevideo, Uruguay. Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Tapscott. Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) was a poet, journalist, and educator who in 1945 became the first Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Serving as Latin American representative to the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations and as Chilean consul throughout Europe and the Americas, from 1922 until her death Mistral led an itinerant existence, embracing the role of public intellectual, giving frequent lectures and amassing a large body of published journalistic writings on both literary and socio-political themes, alongside her collections of poetry. Between 1914 and 1954 Mistral published five collections of poetry, and a substantial number of her additional poetic works have been collected since her death in 1957. Despite never returning to live in the country, within her native Chile Mistral underwent a form of canonization that was both literary and verging on the hagiographic. Chilean critics emphasized the themes of nurture and childhood in her poetry, transforming Mistral into an idealized mother figure for the Chilean nation. Recent scholarship has, however, begun to reframe Mistral as an increasingly radical and unconventional figure, reading her biography and works through the lens of queer theory, and repositioning her within the context of the Latin American vanguard and global modernism. In this piece, Mistral offers a candid insight into her writing process, one that demonstrates a rootless and cosmopolitan perspective that is common to many Latin American writers of her generation. “How I Write” is a transcript of Mistral’s contribution to a roundtable discussion at the January 1938 “Curso sudamericano de vacaciones [South American Summer School]” at the University of Montevideo; speaking alongside her were Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) and Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou (1892–1979)—the most well-known women poets of their generation. Woven into this text are two themes that prove central to not only Mistral, but also other writers of the region during this period: first the primacy and uniqueness of the American landscape and second the desire to capture a poetics of “ordinary speech.” CS

We women don’t write solemnly, like Buffon,1 who for the crucial moment would dress up in a jacket with lacy sleeves and arrange himself, with all solemnity, at his mahogany desk. I write across my knees. The writing desk has never been useful to me, not in Chile, or Paris, or Lisbon. I write at morning or at night. The afternoon has never inspired me; I don’t understand why it seems sterile or passionless to me …

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), French author and naturalist.

1

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

59

I believe I have never written a poem in a closed room, or in a room with windows facing the blank wall of a house. A piece of the sky always steadies me; what Chile offered me in all its blueness, Europe offers scribbled-over with clouds. My mood improves if I voluntarily focus my old eyes toward a grove of trees. As long as I was a settled creature, living among my people and my country, I wrote about what I saw or about what I had at hand. Ever since I have become a vagabond, in voluntary exile, I seem to write only amid phantoms. The landscape of America and my people, alive or dead, come back to me in a wistful but loyal procession, which rather than surrounding me, contains and presses in on me; it only rarely allows me to observe the new terrain, the foreign peoples. I’m usually in no hurry when I write; at times, though, I write with the vertical momentum of stones rolling down the Andes. Either way, it annoys me when I have to stop. Because I’m lazy, I always have four or five sharpened pencils at hand; I’ve developed the spoiled habit of having everything ready at the same time, except the lines … When I used to do battle with the language, demanding intensity from it, I tended to hear within myself an angry gnashing of teeth: a furious, sandy whetting across the blunt blade of words. Now I don’t fight against words, but rather with something else … I’ve grown dissatisfied with and distant from those poems of mine whose tone isn’t my own because it’s too emphatic. The only things that justify me are those poems where I recognize my ordinary speech, what Don Miguel (“The Basque”)2 called “conversational language.”3 I revise more than people would believe, revisiting some poems that even in their published versions still feel unpolished to me. I left a labyrinth of hills behind me, and something of that untangleable knot survives in whatever I create, be it poems or prose. Writing tends to make me happy; it always soothes my spirit and bestows on me an innocent, gentle, childlike day. It is the feeling of having spent a few hours in my true homeland, in my habits, in my unfettered impulses, in full freedom. I like to write in a neat room, although I’m very disorganized. The order seems to give me space; my eyes and my soul crave space. Sometimes I’ve written following the rhythm I’ve absorbed from a rill of water running down the road beside my house, or I’ve followed natural sounds. It all melts within me and forms a kind of lullaby. On the other hand, I still do admit the poetry of anecdote, which younger poets disdain these days. Poetry comforts both my senses and what is called “the soul,” although other people’s poems do this more than my own do. Both make my blood flow better; they protect the childlike elements of my character; they renew me and make me feel a kind of aseptic purity toward the world. Poetry lives simply within me as a remnant, as the vestige of a submerged childhood. Although it may turn out bitter and hard, the poetry I make washes the world’s dirt from

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Spanish poet, philosopher, novelist, and essayist.

2

In his 1936 analysis of the work of Spanish writer Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Unamuno highlights and praises the unique form of habla (speech) employed in Valle-Inclán’s work—one that is defined by its individual, conversational nature and yet achieves a simultaneously universal perspective. See: Miguel de Unamuno, “El habla de Valle-Inclán,” Ahora, January 29, 1936. 3

60

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

me, and even the inscrutable, essential impurity that resembles what we call “original sin.” I do carry that with me; I carry it grievously. Perhaps original sin is nothing more than our fall into the rational, anti-rhythmic mode of expression into which the human race has descended, and that hurts us women more because of the bliss we’ve lost, the grace of a musical intuitive language that was intended to be the language of the human race. This is all I know how to say about my experience. Don’t pressure me to reveal more …

IX. PROTEST AGAINST FOLKLORE Yolanda Oreamuno Originally published as “Protesta contra el folklore” in Repertorio Americano 40.6 (1943). Translated from the Spanish by Janet N. Gold. Yolanda Oreamuno (1916–56) was a Costa Rican writer, perhaps best known for her experimental novel La ruta de su evasión (1948, The Route of Their Evasion), which is considered by critics to have been uniquely ahead of its time. While her first published works were short stories, Oreamuno was also a prolific essayist, with pieces appearing frequently in leading Costa Rican literary journals between 1936 and 1948. Her work most often entailed uncompromising critiques of Costa Rican life and culture, with a particular focus on the role of women in Latin American society. The present piece was originally published in Repertorio Americano, a cultural journal founded and directed by Joaquín García Monge from 1919 to 1958. The journal became an important nexus for cultural exchange and debate throughout the Latin American region, with key figures such as Gabriela Mistral (see essay 1.viii), Victoria Ocampo (see essay 1.vii), José Vasconcelos, and Pablo Neruda publishing within its pages. Oreamuno was a frequent contributor to Repertorio Americano, and enjoyed a close working relationship with García Monge whom she considered both a mentor and friend. In “Protest against Folklore” Oreamuno addresses a central tension that defined cultural production in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century: how to best account for and incorporate indigenous presences within national and continental forms of expression. Alongside the emergence of vanguard activities, the 1920s also saw the development of important works of Realist fiction classified as novelas de la tierra or regional novels, which prioritized agrarian themes and aimed to faithfully capture rural values and customs. Oreamuno’s “Protest against Folklore” fiercely questions the continued relevance and efficacy of such works of “local colour,” advocating for literature and art that showcases the diversity and challenges of the Latin American region within the modern age. CS

For days I have been trying, with the very best intentions, to finish a novel—a very good one, many say, the critics describe it as marvelous—which has definitely exhausted my patience. In the ranks of those books that attempt to get to the heart of the American agrarian problem—the suffering of the Indian and the exploitation of the peasant—this book is not only true, it is complete and, at times, brilliant. In spite of finding in it some literary absurdities such as the presence of a Lady of the Camelias,1 plump and consumptive, and a crudely drawn Robin Hood, if I examine calmly the aesthetic expression, I can recognize that the book is … good.

Reference to French writer Alexandre Dumas’ 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias—the eponymous character of which is a courtesan.

1

62

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Nevertheless, to arrive at this conclusion I have had to suppress something powerful in me, a definite and tenacious opposition that prevents me from finishing it happily and exhaling at the end an exclamation of satisfaction or sympathy. So I have searched patiently within myself to determine the source of this violent reaction, and I believe I am able to articulate it. The cycle of American folkloric literature scales heights of unsuspected magnitude, it extends powerfully through many decades and leaves engraved, in luminous letters, names that I will not repeat, since they are so well known. Every nationality has felt the historic imperative to make known the painful truth of the suffering of, respectively, the Indian, the decultured Indian, the peasant farmer, the half-breed, and the native of Spanish blood. The lexicon is swollen with words peppered with the indigenous atl, iztl, and chua2; we learn turns of phrase and feel the suffering as if we too were barefoot, with calloused palm and primitive mind. Geniuses work at drawing from the shadows humble figures that become realistic and colorful at their touch. And thus it has been for a very long time, through numerous artistic renderings. From every American ethnic group come one or more magnificent voices. The efficacy and good will of this work, whether spontaneous or deliberate, is indisputable. The intensity of this rending cry has shaken consciences, it has given birth to generous initiatives, and various wonderful realities have subsequently taken shape. American folkloric literature, energized through suffering, replete with individuality, is a done deed. But I hold that the climax of saturation has arrived, and I accuse folkloric literature of being one-sided. I believe that more folklore, seen as the only artistic current possible in America, signifies decadence. If, when they write, our authors feel the impulse to redeem, they have before them industrialization, which arrives with giant steps with its following of penury, crisis, and abundance; they have the cruel adaptation of our multifaceted and fantastic mestizo population to a scientific, mechanized reality. In what other flesh can the change from languor to forced activity, from a dream state to unexpected knowledge, come about with more rending than in our American flesh? The revolt against the anonymous face of merciless progress must be more cruel than that against the palpable presence of the criollo3 exploiter or the half-civilized overseer. This reality exists for those who find suffering a literary inspiration. And if we surrender before beauty, the urban landscape—at times situated in the heart of a voluptuous world of primal vigor and ferocity—attains visual forms of inconceivable brilliance. The civilized life of our continent, not separate from the Indians, the peasants, or the natives of European blood but hand in hand with them, is as rich and worthy of attention as the panorama offered by an exclusionary folklore. Our writers, with very few and usually unworthy exceptions, won’t condescend to get out of the valley that, for being so frequented, has become literarily and emotionally secure. In the modern asentimental environment, it is very hard to squeeze a tear from an audience desensitized by the proximity of tragedy. But the remote, distant portrait of the peasant, in which readers from the city have no direct participation and for which they hardly feel guilty, inspires sympathy without remorse and therefore more readily. By now all this ought to be so simple as not to tempt us.

Suffixes present in the indigenous languages Nahuatl (Central America) and Quechua (Andean region).

2

Here, the term criollo denotes those of European ancestry born in Latin America.

3

MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA

63

On the other hand, the city, the office worker, the growing bureaucracy, the semioriental sybaritic life of our bourgeoisie, the way our respective nationalities have adopted tendencies and fashions previously very European and now very Yankee, cry out for a voice, an accuser, a rebel, and someone to discover new beauties and old suffering. The very particular idiosyncrasy of our worker—so sadly molded to the factory and innately ill-equipped to assimilate to rhythm—demands, with all the force of an existing reality, a powerful, faithful, and talented hand to portray it. With the “excess of folklore” factor we advertise one element of our society that, although very powerful, is not the only one, and we feed the myths of the dominating foreigner and his traditional greed. Speaking of literature, I confess that personally I am fed up, in capital letters, with folklore. From this corner of America I can say that I am quite familiar with the typical agrarian lifestyle of almost all the neighboring countries, yet I know little of their other urgent problems. The local-color devices of this kind of art are worn out, the aesthetic agitation they used to produce no longer occurs, the scene is repeated with numbing synchronicity, and emotion flees before the inevitable boredom of what is seen time and again. We must end this calamity: the cheap devotion to the local-color writer, the abuse, the sloppiness, the one-sidedness and one-way vision that are the equivalent of artistic blindness. I think that from now on I will refuse to review poems, paintings, and books that foolishly insist on this theme. I will make a final effort to finish the book that was the source of these conclusions in the hope that it will be the last I encounter, at least for a while, whether it be good like this one or bad like the rest. I would hope with this to encourage some questioning and to fortify the protest that perhaps others like myself have considered but not dared to articulate. I am grateful to folklore for what it has contributed, I salute it as a past glory, and I look forward to the renovating breath of works in step with the modern American movement, so I may pay homage to them from a better literary future. San José,4 March 1943

Refers to the capital of Costa Rica.

4

64

CHAPTER TWO

Modernism in the Caribbean EDITED BY ALYS MOODY AND STEPHEN J. ROSS

In the 1968 appendix to his study The Black Jacobins (first published 1938), C. L. R. James offers a reading of the Caribbean sugar plantation as the first harbinger of modernity, characterized by the global circulation of goods, capital, and labor; the industrial organization of production; and the incipient conditions for a workers’ revolution. “The Negroes,” he argues, “from the very start lived a life that was in essence a modern life.”1 Thirty years later, Sidney Mintz developed this claim, arguing that the social and economic organization of the Caribbean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries represented an instance of a precocious modernity, an unanticipated (even unnoticed) modernity— unnoticed especially, perhaps, because it was happening in the colonies before it happened in the metropolises, and happening to people most of whom were forcibly stolen from the world outside the West. No one imagined that such people would become “modern”—since there was no such thing; no one recognized that the raw, outpost societies into which such people were thrust might become the first of their kind.2 With these arguments, James and Mintz turn the questions about priority and derivation that plague debates over modernity on their head, arguing that the Caribbean, not Europe, was the site of the first truly modern society. Moreover, they do so in a way that reposes not on a theory of multiple modernities, but on a vision of a singular modernity—the capitalist world-system—of which the Caribbean is taken as the first crucible. This claim, which has animated Caribbean thought in the twentieth century, seems to hold out the possibility of an account of modernism that also avoids the pitfalls of belatedness. Perhaps for this reason, the Caribbean was one of the earliest sites at which scholars theorized the relationship between decolonial literature and modernism, beginning in the 1990s with Simon Gikandi’s landmark study, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Nonetheless, the Caribbean’s precocious modernity tended to be seen as finding its outlet, not in an early flourishing of modernist art or literature, but in the cultural forms of dance and music. On the terrain of the more individualist “high”

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989): 392.

1

Sidney W. Mintz, “Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as Oikoumenê,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2.2 (1996): 298.

2

66

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

arts with which modernism is conventionally associated, there arises a gap between the experience of modernity and the expression of modernism in the Caribbean, even as writers such as Kamau Brathwaite return to the cultural forms produced by the region’s early modernity as inspiration for their writing. More work remains to be done on how to think about the gap between modernism and modernity in the region, although certainly questions of class, literacy, and leisure time must factor into this analysis. Broadly speaking, the gap is instructive in helping us to theorize the disjuncture, as much as the relation, between social and economic modernity, on the one hand, and cultural and aesthetic modernism, on the other. For the fact remains that from the 1920s to the 1940s, the common refrain among writers across the Caribbean was not a sense of dynamic modernist innovation but rather a repeated lament over what they commonly saw as the underdevelopment or even nonexistence of their literary and artistic culture, or its overreliance on British or French models. In this context, Caribbean modernism is best understood not directly as a response to their brutal “precocious modernity”—although this experience certainly underlies all the writing and art in this region—but as an attempt to found a more affirmative modern identity on the ruins of this experience. As such, modernism in the Caribbean, like modernism in other colonized parts of the world, is usually taken to evolve as part of the project of decolonization, and takes its cues from projects of national and racial affirmation. While this project was often characterized by a concerted attempt to think the Caribbean collectively, in practice the region might be better understood as having at least three modernisms, corresponding to the three major colonial languages of the region—that is, French, English, and Spanish. Modernist journals from the 1920s onwards frequently sought to break down these divides, seeking to publish work from across the Caribbean and often actively cultivating their publications as sites of cross-linguistic exchange. Nonetheless, the principal coteries and governing intellectual and aesthetic orientations of these writers and artists typically remained divided along linguistic lines. Within and across these linguistic groupings, the exchange between local and regional commitments, and an orientation toward the African diaspora elsewhere, was an enduring one. Hispanic modernism of the Caribbean, which shared a language and a literary tradition with much of Latin America, was as often oriented toward its fellow Spanish speakers on the southern continent than its island-dwelling neighbors. We have incorporated Cuban modernism, therefore, into the previous section, but encourage readers to read Nicolás Guillén’s piece (1.vi) as part of the present section as well. At the same time, much Caribbean writing in French and English often sought greater dialogue with Latin America, drawing on a shared experience of New World colonization, contemporary threats from US imperialism, and projects to reclaim indigenous art. For examples of writers seeking a rapprochement between Caribbean and Latin American perspectives, see our first and last entries in this section—Normil G. Sylvain’s introduction to La Revue indigène (2.i) and Aubrey Williams’ “The Artist in the Caribbean” (2.ix)—which together suggest the enduring attraction of greater exchange between the continent and the islands. Francophone modernism in this area is further divided between the poles of Haiti and Martinique. Haiti, which achieved independence from France in the world’s first successful slave revolt in 1804 but spent the years from 1915 to 1934 under US occupation, was both an anomaly in the region and a model of decolonization and revolution in which many colonized nations invested their hopes and fears. Haiti had a relatively early modernism, inspired by Latin American literary developments and French

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

67

far right politics, in the late 1920s, driven by intellectuals and writers who positioned themselves against the US occupation. Less than five years later, an alternate—and more widely known—modernist tradition sprung up among left-wing black Francophone expatriates in Paris. In this context, radical short-lived magazines such as Légitime défense and L’Étudiant noir provided a site that married anti-colonial and revolutionary Marxist political thought, in a context that took literary production as a key site of struggle and revolt. This is the milieu from which ideas such as negritude arose, and it shaped not only Caribbean, but also African, African American and black British writing throughout the twentieth century. This tradition returned to the Caribbean with figures like Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil during and just before the Second World War, joined briefly by French intellectuals fleeing the war, most famously and influentially the French surrealist, André Breton. Back in Martinique, this circle produced a transformative modernist poetics around the Martinican journal Tropiques in the early 1940s. Anglophone modernism in the Caribbean tended to be more cohesive across national lines, but distended over a longer historical timespan, beginning as early as the 1930s and extending through to the 1970s. Looking back on the development of (implicitly Anglophone) Caribbean literature in the introduction to issue 14/15 of Savacou, in 1979, Kamau Brathwaite provides a periodization that still reflects in broad terms the consensus of the field. Brathwaite suggests the first phase entailed a “nativization of consciousness,” animated by the anti-colonial consciousness of journals such as The Beacon, which began in the 1930s. This was eventually superseded by a “rapprochement of the formerly anglican artist with the people … resulting in the alienation of the artist/people from the Establishment,” from the mid-1950s onwards, a process that might be linked to the evolution of the long-running Barbadian journal Bim. Finally, the late 1960s heralded “the revelation of the word,” a process in which “The language, as Bongo Jerry predicted, had been unwhitened,” most commonly associated with the experimental oral poetics of Brathwaite’s own Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) and its journal Savacou.3 While scholars would surely want to challenge various aspects of this tripartite division, the narrative of radicalizing formal experiment, as part of a consistent project of anti-colonial and decolonizing cultural politics, is a consistent theme of Anglophone Caribbean literature, as is the sense that such a development divides roughly into three periods, focused in the 1930s, the decade or two post-Second World War, and the late 1960s and 1970s. What Brathwaite does not add, but what is clear from his own and others’ trajectories, is that this movement also maps onto an orientation away from Britain and toward the United States, in line with global shifts in power across this period. Cutting across these traditions are a number of structural impulses that shape modernism across the Caribbean, as they shape the modernisms of many other parts of the world. On the one hand, modernism in the Caribbean is unthinkable without the mass expatriation of intellectuals, writers, and artists toward colonial centers. In the pre-war period, the movement toward Paris of French intellectuals produced negritude and generated the conditions in which Caribbean writers’ and artists’ long-standing engagement with surrealism flourished. After the Second World War, the mass migration of Caribbeans to England as part of the Windrush generation shaped Anglophone Caribbean culture from the 1940s through to the 1970s, as writers and artists moved between London and their home islands, ultimately culminating in the transnational Caribbean Artists Movement.

Kamau Brathwaite, Untitled Introduction, Savacou 14/15 (1979): n.p.

3

68

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

On the other hand, little magazines and literary journals played a crucial role in forming coteries and networks of writers and artists, and in forging and maintaining links among people who were often geographically dispersed. In recognition of the centrality of such little magazines to modernism in the region, this section assembles introductions to many of the key little magazines: the Haitian Revue indigène (1.i); the Francophone expatriate journal Légitime défense (1.ii); the Martinican publication Tropiques (1.v); and the longrunning Barbadian journal, Bim (1.vii). Taken together, these introductions highlight the programmatism of many Francophone Caribbean journals, as well as the significance of little magazines as an engine for literary and artistic production, debate, and discussion across the period. AM

FURTHER READING Arnold, James A. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Brown, J. Dillon. Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Emory, Mary Lou. Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Etherington, Ben. Literary Primitivism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Kalliney, Peter. Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kaussen, Valerie. Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and US Imperialism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Noland, Carrie. Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print Culture: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pollard, Charles. New World Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.

I. LA REVUE INDIGÈNE: PROGRAM Normil G. Sylvain Originally published in French in La Revue indigène 1.1 (July 1927): 1–10. Translated by Alys Moody. La Revue indigène was a Haitian literary magazine that ran for six issues in 1927–8. Despite its short run, it exerted a significant influence on Haitian and Caribbean literature, acting as one of the earliest vehicles for Caribbean modernism. Produced during the US occupation of Haiti, which lasted from 1915 to 1934, it positioned itself against US imperialism by seeking to create a new Haitian national literature, one that, as its title declares, would be indigène, or native, to Haiti. In this sense, it develops a specifically Haitian form of indigenism, a term that is more commonly linked to Latin American art that draws on pre-Columbian indigenous traditions. In the Haitian context, however, the assertion is rather that the post-slavery culture of the nation was itself an indigenous culture, in contrast to the occupying US power. Although these forms of indigenism understand indigeneity quite differently, La Revue indigène’s commitment to this concept nonetheless generated a turn toward Latin America, again as part of their attempt to develop a counter-imperial American culture that would resist US hegemony. In terms of both the appeal to indigenism and the turn to Latin America, this essay is productively read alongside Aubrey Williams’ “The Artist in the Caribbean” (2.ix). This essay, written by editorial board member Normil G. Sylvain (1900–29) and opening its first issue, was the journal’s founding manifesto. Sylvain, who died young and also trained as a doctor, is a relatively unknown figure, but he played a key role as the chief theorist of La Revue indigène. Sylvain was the son of Georges Sylvain, the founding editor of La Ronde (1898–1902), an influential Haitian aestheticist periodical, and in this essay he seeks to position La Revue indigène as carrying on his father’s literary and cultural project. Insisting on the need to develop a literary culture in the context of what he took to be Haiti’s relative isolation and paucity of aesthetic production, Sylvain lays out an ambitious project for a Haitian literature that will take inspiration from their Latin American neighbors, then in the full bloom of modernism. At the same time, Sylvain insists on the need to draw on the island’s French heritage, most notably—and surprisingly, from a contemporary vantage point—through the essay’s persistent undercurrent of support for the proto-fascist, anti-semitic and monarchist group, Action Française, and especially its chief theorist Charles Maurras. In this sense, this essay underscores the forgotten but disturbing fact that interwar black diasporic modernism, like European modernism in the same period, was as often seduced by the “blood and soil” politics of the proto-fascist right as it was by the promises of leftist revolution. In this sense, Sylvain’s essay intersects with Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo’s Malagasy modernism (3.i and 3.ii), which shares Sylvain’s sympathies for Action Française, and serves as an important counterpoint to the more well-known leftism of Francophone Caribbean intellectuals such as Étienne Léro (2.ii) and Aimé Césaire (2.iii). This translation seeks to preserve Sylvain’s misspellings and idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization as far as possible. A digitized version of the journal in its original French is freely available online through the Digital Library of the Caribbean. Although this is,

70

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

to our knowledge, the first English translation of this essay, several other important texts from this periodical have appeared elsewhere in English: a selection of poems, translated and with a commentary by Kevin Meehan and Marie Léticée, appeared in Callaloo 23.4 (2000): 1377–90; and Jean Price-Mars’s essays Ainsi parla l’Oncle were published as So Spoke the Uncle, trans. Magdaline W. Shannon (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1983). AM

Georges Sylvain’s Dream During a lecture tour that he undertook in the south of the island, Georges Sylvain wrote to his collaborators at La Ronde of his impressions of the various towns he passed through.1 He concluded by giving his ideal of a Haitian journal that could serve as a link and a place of encounter for all the kindred souls haunted by the same dream of art and beauty. “To find a ground of understanding and of union for all Haitians of good will outside Politics; to make all the intellectual forces of the Nation work towards the civilization of the common Homeland; to make them aware of themselves by teaching them to know themselves better; to show new generations, who have come into the world at a moment of transition, their special mission, which is to prepare the future; to improve the people through the revelation of the artistic ideal of educating them through a gradual initiation into knowledge of the French language and culture, acquired with the aide of our Creole dialect; to save us, finally, from ourselves, by diverting in the direction of the Good all these unsettling activities that demand something to feed on, all these latent energies that wilt and sink in idleness. “There is one fact that none of us, if we pause to reflect, can avoid being struck by: the absence of cohesion in our society. We lack a sense of the whole, of the continuity of effort, because we do not know one another. The present lacks all knowledge of the past, and, even stranger, from one town to the next, we do not know each other. By spreading the taste for a national culture throughout the country, we will repair the broken tradition, unite the past with the present, and prepare the future. “The love of literature will therefore be a tie that binds hearts, a kind of religion that brings on the future of this Brotherhood that until now has only found room in official acts and newspaper columns. To popularize the work of our best authors, to help deserving young people become known to the public. Who can be blind to the hope that it is legitimate to conceive of such an enterprise … !” This will serve enough of a program, and will save my having to keep you longer, but it still remains to clarify our sympathies and to add some new thoughts to the old ideal.

Why we devote so much space to Poetry They said to me: “Are you joking? a journal of art and literature, now? what are you thinking? these are games and distractions for happy times, tasks for fortunate days, we have no heart for joy, you won’t rouse an echo, who reads verse in our busy time but Georges Sylvain (1866–1925) was a Haitian poet, lawyer, and politician, and the father of Normil G. Sylvain. The elder Sylvain was a militant activist who campaigned strongly against the US occupation of Haiti. He was also a key member of the aestheticist literary group La Ronde, which was influenced by French Symbolism and close in its sensibility to the Latin American modernismo movement.

1

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

71

young, romantic women and adolescents in love, come on it’s not serious, I don’t suggest you try it.” It’s true that it is not the time for laughter. And yet, don’t you think that, in the whirl of our existence, it might be pleasant to pause, to take a break in the shade to listen to the poets sing, before taking up the chains of our daily suffering2 again? Don’t you think that the burden will be lightened, that the road will seem less long, the sun less scorching? The song isn’t just a pretty tune that speaks of your joys and gives form to your miseries; it helps us to get to know the scene that we stare at with a distracted glance that glides over the surface of things, without trying, for a minute, to possess them. It allows us to better see inside ourselves, to enjoy the interior landscape, to enter into the mysterious domain of souls … Isn’t that the whole point? Poetry is a tool of knowledge. Bread isn’t all that you hunger for! The circle grows, we have become more human, more fraternal. Our hearts went like apostles Towards the shy and paralyzed hearts of others3 The fingers knotted for la Ronde. La Ronde around the world! … We want voices to answer from the whole country. Singers from the north and those from the south: they sing the Haitian country. They help us to know it, to love it by knowing it. They reveal us to ourselves and give us grounds for national pride. The ideas that we have about a country, true or false, are given to us by the poets, the novelists, the painters, and the sculptors, by their faithful images or deceptive scenes. The japonaiseries of Loti, the miniatures of Hokusai, have revealed a heroic and galant Japan …4 Kikou Yamato let us enter this Japanese soul as a woman and a sensitive poet, and the country of cherry blossom trees and blooming apple trees now lives in the imagination of thousands of readers.5 The people need advertisements: “A good name, says the old saying, is better than all the riches in the world.”6 The propaganda office was run during the war by respected writers. The greatest talents of the countries at war presided over this moral offensive of press releases. It was Giraudoux, I believe, one of the best and most subtle young French writers, who was in propaganda and foreign affairs.7 Literature is the unfailing expression of the soul of a people. “des peines quotidiennes.” Sylvain is punning on the religious phrase “notre pain quotidien,” our daily bread.

2

These lines are taken from poem XXVIII of Émile Verhaeren’s Les Heures Claires (The Sunlit Hours). Verhaeren (1855–1916) was a Belgian Symbolist poet who wrote in French.

3

Pierre Loti (1850–1923) was a French naval officer and writer. His novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887) is a foundational text of late nineteenth-century japonisme. Hokusai Katsushika (1760–1849) was a Japanese artist, known for his woodblock series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1831).

4

Kikou Yamata (1897–1975), which Sylvain misspells Yamato, was a Franco-Japanese writer, born in Lyon to a Japanese father and raised in Tokyo before returning to Paris in the 1920s, where she became a well-known literary figure. She published translations, poems, and articles in French, rising to fame with her novel Masako in 1925.

5

“Bonne renomée dit le vieux dicton vaut mieux que ceinture dorée.”

6

Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944) was an important French playwright and novelist who served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the First World War, becoming the first writer to be awarded the Legion of Honor in 1915.

7

72

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

What we want.—These are the testimonies of our era, of our generation. As we say in medicine or chemistry, they are our reactions, the reflexes of our sensibility as it comes into contact with things. We carry forth our message, regardless of whether anyone hears it, convinced that another age will come that will receive it; before entering into the night of oblivion, we want to hurl forth our true cry. One stormy evening, the waves stir a frenzy, the wind blows in gusts, the boat drifts having lost its mast. In his cabin the telegraph boy at his post sends his customary calls, calm amongst the tumult and the disarray. The captain at his command post takes the ship’s logbook, records his final observations and throws a bottle ashore into the sea. Our stubborn hopes send out a signal … this is our bottle in the sea … Together we want to try to rediscover reasons to love ourselves in the reasons to believe. To reunite in unanimous agreement all souls of good will who are looking for their path and groping around in the darkness, to reunite them through art, in Beauty. To rediscover the time when Haitians loved one another, when living was sweetness in our country, sweetness wrapped up in our calm countryside, between our blue mornes and the singing sea.

Our public … The reader that we choose, who is dearest to us, is the young man, twenty years old, transported by a noble and generous enthusiasm, who still has a mad and heroic soul, who is haunted by the summit, who is tortured by the desire for excellence, who dreams of the absolute … oh you, beautiful seed of future harvests, young man in whom our hopes are wrapped, I have faith in you.8 And you worried mothers, you fathers concerned that his pensive look is upsetting, that his fever and his exaltation are frightening—console yourselves that he has been born in order to accomplish great things. The young girls who do not yet worry about the painful problems of our oppressed existence, the mothers of tomorrow who will have to knead the soft clay, the fragile dough of unborn children’s souls, we want them to listen to us. We will try to hold their attention, to move them, to make them reflect with us on our collective tasks.

Our ideas: a doctrine.— Our country is sick, not only at heart but in the head. The problem is first one of Intelligence, and then one of sensibility. We must attempt a cure at home—a national renaissance—helping ourselves with a valiant effort, parallel to that carried out in France. There are currently too many false ideas on the market. We must reestablish the notion of order, a necessary hierarchy of foundations, a healthy logic, more just criteria. First establish the library of a gentleman, turn out the merchants of cheap trash, the fortune-tellers, the acrobats and the jugglers, get to know the respectable writers, the serious thinkers, who lay the groundwork in France for a healthy and vigorous youth.

The text here reads “j’ai con-/en vous,” as though the second half of the word beginning “con,” which ought to have followed the line break, has been inadvertently omitted. I have read this as “j’ai confiance en vous.”

8

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

73

The work of someone like Auguste Comte,9 with commentary provided by Maurras,10 Valois,11 Galéot,12 Daudet,13 Renan’s Intellectual and Moral Reform,14 Taine,15 Fustel,16 Barrès,17 Le Play,18 … I could go on. From these thinkers we will take their methods of reasoning and their modes of action. They will serve as models for us, allowing us to build an original doctrine.

Latin America and us In this Spanish and English America, we have the glorious destiny of maintaining, with Canada and the French Caribbean, French traditions and the French language—a fatal and perilous honor, for it has earned us a century of isolation … The Dominican Republic, which shares our territory, does not participate in this misfortune. It belongs to a Latin America of eighteen republics. Its writers speak to a public of 90 million men; their joys and their sufferings are recognized. We must get to know the literature and the soul of Latin America. These peoples have lived a life as difficult as our own. They have known the same trials and errors, the same vicissitudes, the era of caudillos19 and pronunciamientos,20 the period when the forces of anarchy and the forces of cohesion and order confronted one another, the difficult times of a young nation’s puberty. The historians who search for causes for their unhappiness attempt, like us, to explain race, this simple phenomenon of social physics, this game of antagonistic forces which collide with one another before balancing in a perfect equilibrium. They say we “have acted thus because Indians.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was a French philosopher and the founder of positivism.

9

Charles Maurras (1868–1952) was a French philosopher who founded the right-wing, anti-semitic, monarchist political group Action Française. He was influenced by Auguste Comte’s thought. All subsequent writers in this list are either contemporary writers associated with Action Française and the French far right, or earlier writers who had been enlisted as their precursors.

10

Georges Valois (1878–1945), like Maurras, was a French thinker linked to L’Action Française.

11

Antoine-L. Galéot (1884–?) was a French economist who advocated eugenicist policies.

12

Probably Léon Daudet (1867–1942), a member of Action Française and a vocal opponent of democracy, who would become a supporter of the Vichy regime during the Second World War. Sylvain could also have in mind Léon’s father, Alphonse Daudet (1840–97), a novelist who, like his son, was a monarchist and an anti-semite.

13

Ernest Renan (1823–92) was a French thinker, known for his theories of nationalism and the nation. His Intellectual and Moral Reform (1871), written in the aftermath of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, advocates for national regeneration through discipline and meritocratic hierarchy.

14

Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) was a literary critic and a sociological positivist, whose notion of “race, milieu et moment” in the study of literary works helped to found literary historicism.

15

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–89) was an ancient historian. The Action Française group considered him an important precursor.

16

Maurice Barrès (1862–1923) was a French writer and politician, who popularized the term nationalisme. He was close to Maurras and an important influence on the French interwar monarchists, including Action Française, although he himself was a republican.

17

Frédéric Le Play (1806–82) was a French sociologist and engineer. His conservative, counter-revolutionary politics made him a favorite with the Action Française group.

18

Personalist, authoritarian leaders in Spain or Latin America.

19

A form of coup d’état in which dissident members of the armed forces publicly declare no confidence in the government. Such coups were common in Latin America, especially in the nineteenth century.

20

74

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

We say, “because Negroes.”21 This is not the case at all. If we have suffered, if we have known the same agonies, placed under the same skies, in almost identical circumstances, it is neither because Indians nor because Negroes, but because men. All men, whatever they are, placed in the same climate, struggling with the same difficulties, will without doubt have acted or reacted the same … as men. Paul Morand, returning from a long trip, cried “nothing but the earth.”22 And another great traveller, asked for his opinion on what he had seen, answered, “I met men and women.” We must hold ourselves to account for our ignorance of Latin America, because our origins are similar and we are threatened by a common danger. The fight, first, between the Spanish Creoles of former vice-royalties and provinces of South America who want a less stifled civic life, and a metropolis having excessively reactionary methods of government, and then, with a youth burning with the impassioned declarations of humanitarian French thinkers of the eighteenth century, waited on by the naturally warlike indigenous masses: such is, in broad outline the history that repeats itself throughout the Americas. At first, just a revolt; then a war of emancipation. The Haitian adventure certainly acts as an object lesson, and it is all the more meaningful because it is not just one class claiming its share of the profits, but the irresistible push of an oppressed race, claiming and obtaining its right to a free life; like a flood bursting its dam. An episode in the struggle that carries humanity towards greater Justice … Its meaning for Latin America was as an object lesson, which, when it was put into action, became the daydreams of philosophers … The relationship between Miranda23 and Pétion,24 and then the great Bolivar,25 demonstrates the truth of this claim. “Brothers of the other race,” Latin American writers sometimes say, speaking of us, and the inherited prejudices set themselves against it. The language difference isolates us more than an Ocean. The pathos-filled and moving, mystical and amorous body of work of San Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican nun whose impassioned strophes resemble Saint Thérèse.26

Sylvain writes “parce qu’indiens” and “parce que nègres,” breaking with standard grammar here (in French, “parce que” is always followed by a clause, and never just by a noun or nominal phrase, much like “because” in English). He seems to have in mind here most obviously the Dominican Republic, which has a long history of denying the African ancestry of its population and instead identifying with the extinct Taino people—hence, attributing their experience of race to their supposed American Indian heritage. Dominican racism against Haitians is built on maintaining a distinction between their supposed Amerindian heritage and the Haitians’ African heritage.

21

Paul Morand (1888–1976) was a French author, most prolific during the 1920s and 1930s. His travelogue of a trip through America and Asia, Rien que la terre (translated into English at Nothing But the Earth), appeared in 1926.

22

Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816) was a Venezuelan military leader, who campaigned for the independence of the Spanish American colonies.

23

Alexandre Pétion (1770–1818) was the first president of Haiti. Under his government, he provided substantial support to the Spanish American campaigns for independence, including to Miranda and Bolívar.

24

Simon Bolívar (1783–1830) led the military campaign for the independence of Spanish America, and served as president of a number of states post-independence. He is regarded as El Libertador (the Liberator) by many in South America.

25

Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–95) was a baroque poet. Although Sylvain makes her a male saint here (“San”), she was never canonized and her proper title is “Sor” (Sister). The Saint Thérèse alluded to here is probably Thérèse de Lisieux (1873–97), a Carmelite nun hailed for her simplicity, whose collected poems were released in 1908 and again in a paperback edition in 1914.

26

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

75

Sarmiento, the great Argentinian poet, polemicist, man of action, having lived certain of his works, of which “Facundo o Civilisacion y Barbarie” does a wonderful job of explaining the beginnings of the great republic of La Plata.27 Lugones, Enrique Larreta present us with various aspects of Argentina’s multi-faceted soul.28 The Ecuadorian Montalvo, too often the biased adversary of Garcia Moreno, master of Castilian prose, vigorous polemicist.29 Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes gave unforgettable testimonies of Mexico.30 José Asuncion Silva, Santos Chocano, names that evoke wild lyricism and harmonious cadences.31 I know them too little myself. It’s my own fault, the meetings were brief, whenever I happened to read them in the captivating Revue de l’Amérique Latine,32 which all Haitian intellectuals should read, in the Revue de Génève,33 and in several journals from over there, El Hogar, Caras y Caretas, Nosotros,34 which kind friends send me. I was therefore able to appreciate the wonderful fecundity of a body of work and a spiritual life that is too poorly known here. Three names in the literary history of Brazil have stayed with me. Gonçalves Diaz,35 whose exquisite sense of nature—a certain tropical pantheism—has led to him being described as being “like one of these trees in the tropical forest, in which the beauty of the flowers mixes with the scent of the fruit, the coloring of the leaves, the song of the birds, and the muted music of the winds in a careful balance of unexpected correspondences.”36 Castro Alves, precocious genius, penniless in the full bloom of youth, ardent defender of the liberation of black slaves.37 Magalhaes, religious poet.38 Machado

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88)’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), one of the major works in Latin American literature, denounces strongman governance as part of a larger exploration of the relationship between civilization and barbarism in Argentinian history. The Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata (United Province of the Río de la Plata) is an older name for Argentina.

27

Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) was one of the founding figures of Argentine poetry. Enrique Larreta (1875–1961) is best known for La gloria de don Ramiro, an historical novel that is an important work of Latin American modernism.

28

Juan Montalvo (1832–89) was an Ecuadorian essayist. Gabriel García Moreno (1821–75) was a caudillo who twice served as the president of Ecuador. Montalvo’s writings against Moreno led to his exile to Colombia, and are sometimes credited with playing a part in Moreno’s assassination during his second term.

29

Amada Nervo (1870–1919) and Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959) were Mexican writers.

30

José Asunción Silva (1865–96) was a Colombian poet, sometimes described as modernist. José Santos Chocano (1875–1934) was a Peruvian poet.

31

A French-language periodical, published in Paris from 1922 to 1932, which sought to introduce a French audience to Latin American literature, culture, and politics.

32

A French-language Swiss literary magazine, with a Europeanist outlook, published in Geneva from 1920 to 1930.

33

El Hogar, Caras y Caretas, and Nosotros were popular weekly Argentine magazines, which played an important role in the dissemination of Argentine literature, both domestically and internationally.

34

Antônio Gonçalves Dias (1823–64) was a Romantic poet, associated with Brazilian Indianism, which takes the American Indian as the representative of the Brazilian nation.

35

Revue de l’Amérique latine 3 (1922): 62.

36

Antônio Frederico de Castro Alves (1847–71) was a Brazilian poet and playwright, whose abolitionist poems won him the sobriquet “the Poet of the Slaves.”

37

Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães (1811–82) was a Brazilian Romantic poet, whose writing is often concerned with religious themes.

38

76

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

de Assis,39 Nabuco,40 Ruy Barbosa,41 undertaking many activities as philosophers and men of state, are known as such. The “Profane Prose” of Ruben Dario, the inspired Nicaraguan, has not had its echo among us.42 The revelation that the bard of “Ariel,” José Enrique Rodo, was to Latin America, like a dream made flesh.43 “The noblest mind of the continent,” as Francis de Miomandre recently hailed him44—the leading representative of this continental spirit, which, overflowing the bounds of these little homelands, would create and wish for the Latin homeland. Against Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism, he believed in the comprehension of the beautiful, in order to allow the practice of the good, an ethics and an aesthetics inherited from ancient Greece and revived by Christian virtue. “Motivos de Proteo” and “El Micador de Prospero”45 are successive developments of the same literary and social doctrine, exalting the virtues of the race and underlining the importance of an autochthonous literature. A personality of considerable charisma, hailed as a “master” throughout Latin America, he is without a doubt a “continental” on the level of ideals, like Goethe, Henri Heine, Nietzsche were “Europeans.” He dreams of a “spirit” and a literature that would be open to all Latin America; and in the political realm, of vast recovered brotherhoods, as imagined by Bolivar’s “stormy heroism.”46 Ventura Garcia Calderon, although he sometimes fights it, represents another aspect of this spirit, and even the divisions of his “Democracies of Latin America” show how he understands the problem47: Gran Colombia: Equatorial Colombia, Venezuela. Peruvian Confederation: Peru, Bolivia, Confederation of La Plata: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay,

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely considered one of Brazil’s greatest writers. He founded and was the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

39

Joaquim Aurélio Barreto Nabuco de Araújo (1849–1910) was a Brazilian writer and statesman, and one of the country’s leading abolitionists.

40

Ruy Barbosa de Oliveira (1849–1923) was a Brazilian writer and politician. He was an important voice in the abolitionist movement, and also served as a senator for the Brazilian state of Bahia and as the Minister of Finance in the Brazilian government.

41

Rubén Darío (1867–1916) was a poet and the leader of the modernismo literary movement. Prosas profanas (1896) is one of his most famous collections.

42

José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917) was a Uruguyan essayist. Ariel (1900) draws on Shakespeare’s The Tempest as an allegory for Latin American nationhood. It is associated with the modernismo movement.

43

In his essay on Rodó in Le Pavillon du Mandarin (1921), Miomandre praises him as “un des hommes les plus nobles qu’ait produits, depuis la grande poussée de l’Indépendence, la sève du continent astral, et d’un de ceux qui ont eu la plus parfaite conscience de ses hautes destinées” (one of the most noble men that the sap of the astral continent has produced since the great thrust of Independence, and one of those who has had the most perfect consciousness of these great destinies): Miomandre, Le Pavillon du Mandarin (Paris: Émile-Paul Frères, 1921): 165. In the rest of this essay, Miomandre praises Rodó for his aestheticism, his love of aristocracy, and his commitment to hierarchy. Francis de Miomandre (1880–1959) was a French novelist who translated many works from Spanish into French, including Rodó’s Pages choisis (1918), which assembles a number of the Uruguyan’s most important essays.

44

Motivos de Proteo (1909; The Motives of Proteus) and El Mirador de Próspero (1913; Prospero’s Balcony), which Sylvain erroneously writes as El Micador … are essays by Rodó.

45

The quotation is from Rodó’s essay “Bolivar,” originally published in El Mirador de Próspero, and translated into French by Miomandre in the Pages choisis, where the line is rendered “héroïsme tempétueux,” not “héroïsme oragueux,” as Sylvain’s French has it. Rodó, Pages choisis, trans. Miomandre (Paris: Alcan, 1918): 109.

46

Ventura García Calderón (1886–1959) was a Peruvian writer who lived much of his life in Paris. Sylvain seems to be confusing him here however with his brother, Francisco García Calderón Rey (1883–1953), whose Les Démocraties de l’Amérique latine was written in French and published in 1912. Both brothers were associated with the Generation of 900, a group of Peruvian nobility, and Francisco also moved in Action Française circles in Paris. Francisco was a young disciple of Rodó.

47

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

77

Chile, Brazil, Central America, Mexico, the Antilles, international groupings of those that share common interests, vast communities as demanded by our age, which tends towards synthesis, towards the confederation of little nations, in order to resist the appetites of predatory powers. The dream of the historian and the thinker is the reality of tomorrow! All Haitians should be required to know and to ponder Manuel Ugarte’s beautiful and terrible book, “El destino de un continente.”48 The series of studies by José Vasconcellos, in which he denounces yankee hypocrisy, the rising tide of imperialism.49 Gabriela Mistral, the magnanimous Chilean, whose “Cry” rings through all the South American press, cry of the Latin race, justifiably scared of the Anglo-Saxon rush.50 Juana I barbouron, sensitive and quivering, “who writes on flowers with ink of dew.”51 Closer to us: Amerigo Lugo, Fabio Fiallo, the Henriquez family,52 and so many others of whom I remain ignorant, whose brotherly messages remain forever lost to us. We must make them aware of our contribution, no doubt still very slight, to the works of Latin civilization, which it would nonetheless be wrong to play down too much or to deny outright. It is up to us to show our qualifications, to prove ourselves. More human. — Finally, we must work to create the man to come,53 the citizen of the future, the citizen of humanity, of a renewed humanity. I hear the cries and the commotion of the Pharisees—for whom the restricted borders, the differences of race, the geographical positions are only necessary accidents, limiting the field that we can till, but who in no way seek to bring about the painful unification of consciousnesses. Here is what we are looking for: the man to come, which Massillon Coicou—friend, brother, for whom we have a ready-made affection—heralded and awaited.54 We try to create it in ourselves, around ourselves. But do not mistake our intentions and our thoughts; do not misrepresent us when you interpret us: the diversity of homelands is necessary. “Happy are those who died for earthly cities, for they are the body of the city of God,” said Manuel Ugarte (1875–1951) was an Argentine writer who campaigned strongly for the unification of Latin America and against US imperialism. His El Destino de un continente (Destiny of a Continent) was published in 1923, roughly the time he began turning away from his long-standing commitment to socialism and democracy.

48

José Vasconcelos (1882–1959), whose name Sylvain misspells here, was an influential Mexican writer, politician, and educator, who contributed to the development of the Latin American indigenismo movement and who sought to resist US cultural influence.

49

Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) was a Chilean poet and stateswoman. See her essay, “How I Write,” (1.viii) for more information. Her prose poem “El Grito” (1922; The Cry) calls for Latin American unity in the face of US imperial aggression.

50

Juana de Ibarbourou (1892–1979), whose name is misspelled in the original, was a Uruguayan poet and feminist, who wrote extensively about nature.

51

Américo Lugo (1870–1952), whose name is misspelled in the original, Fabio Fiallo (1866–1942), and the Henríquez family of Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal (1859–1935), his brother Frederico Henríquez y Carvajal (1848–1952), son Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946), and daughter Camila Henríquez Ureña (1894–1973) were all Dominican writers. Francisco Henríquez was the president of the Dominican Republic prior to US occupation.

52

“l’homme qui vient.” The phrase is a reference to Georges Valois’s 1906 book L’Homme qui vient: philosophie de l’autorité. Written as he was joining Action Française, this book argues for the necessity of authoritarian rule and suggests that the chef d’industrie is the figure best suited to wield this power in modern society.

53

Massillon Coicou (1867–1908) was a Haitian poet, known for his poems about Haitian national heroes. He was executed in 1908 after announcing that he intended to overthrow the government.

54

78

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Péguy.55 These are chosen lands, domains fated for the wonderful flowering of different yet closely related plants. What we aim to do with our journal. A faithful and lively picture of the varied manifestations of contemporary Haitian life and thought. Intellectual and artistic life, economic and commercial life. The Haitian perspective on certain questions, the way in which we see things, and—since the word indigène has been turned into an insult, we reclaim it as a badge of honor—the perspective of the indigène.56 A return to sincerity and to the natural, to the live model, to direct description, a scent more strongly accented with Haitianness—this is what seems to characterize our young poetry. Mr Thoby-Marcelin and Mr Roumer, whose work seems to us to become significant through different means; whose particular artistic temperaments render the landscapes of our home each in their own manner: one, Roumer, in vigorous painting; the other, our fragile Phito, in delicate miniaturism.57 We will rediscover, in Punch’s comedy, the echo of its good humor.58 The laughter in the fog, Dekobra called it; there is no fog in the soul of our friend.59 In our next installment, one of us will give a panorama of contemporary French poetry, in order to initiate the public of our homeland and to introduce this poetry into this chosen patch.60 We have selected the stories, and especially sought out those of our storytellers who knew how to see and understand Haiti. We start with an episode of peasant life, deliciously chewed over by this tender philosopher, this charming man of wit by the name of PriceMars.61 It is an extract of substantial tastiness, and a profound work by our friend, about Haitian folklore, old legends, and old customs, inherited from the African past and the colonial epoch. Stories by Marcelin, Hibbert,62 and others … we’re not getting ahead of ourselves … will help to fix the face of Haiti, its true face. Charles Péguy (1873–1914) was a French poet and essayist, who was committed to nationalism, socialism and, later in life, Catholicism. These lines come from his 1913 poem “Ève,” a theological account of civilization, written on the eve of his death in the First World War.

55

The closest approximation to indigène in English is probably “native,” with its derogatory and colonial connotations, rather than the more neutral “indigenous.”

56

Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904–75) was a Haitian poet and novelist, known in particular for the peasant novels that he co-wrote with his brother Pierre Marcelin. Émile Roumer (1903–88) was a Haitian poet and the director of La Revue indigène. Both writers have poems published in this issue, and Sylvain also has a short poem that he addresses to Thoby-Marcelin.

57

Given the reference to an anthology of British and American humor in the next line, the Punch referred to here is most likely the long-running British humor magazine. Planters’ Punch was also a Jamaican literary journal, although on the whole it was less humorous than the British publication.

58

Maurice Dekobra (1885–1973) was a French writer. In 1926 he edited Le Rire dans le brouillard: anthologie des meilleurs humoristes anglais et américains (The Laughter in the Fog: An Anthology of the Best English and American Humorists).

59

This article never eventuated, although subsequent issues carried short essays by contemporary French writers and critics Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) and Henri Brémond (1865–1933), as part of a series called “Quelques définitions de la Poésie” (Some Definitions of Poetry).

60

Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969) was a Haitian writer, politician, and medical doctor. His “Ainsi parla l’oncle: la famille paysanne” (So Spoke the Uncle: The Peasant Family) appears on pp. 31–41 of this issue, and was reprinted in the book Ainsi parla l’oncle, which appeared in 1928.

61

Frédéric Marcelin (1848–1917) and Fernand Hibbert (1873–1928) were two of the founders of the Haitian novel. It is not clear whether Sylvain is promising to publish their work in future issues, but no such stories ever eventuated.

62

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

79

Historical synthesis; the philosophy of events, their hidden reasons. The study of causes already undertaken by the great seers of the past—such as Edmond Paul,63 Justin Dévot,64 and Léon Audain65—will be continued with perhaps less joy, but with an equal good faith and the most complete frankness. We want to continue, to take our place in the series of those who toiled so that there would one day be a prosperous, happy, free Haiti.

Edmond Paul (1837–93) was a Haitian writer and politician, who advocated for Haiti’s economic selfsufficiency in his writings.

63

Justin Dévot (1857–1920) was a Haitian writer and lawyer, who shared many of Paul’s views on the desirability of Haitian autarky.

64

Léon Audain (1863–1930) was a conservative Haitian writer and politician who advocated for national renewal under a strong leader.

65

II. LÉGITIME DÉFENSE: DECLARATION Étienne Léro, Thélus Léro, René Ménil, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, Michel Pilotin, Maurice-Sabas Quitman, Auguste Thésée, and Pierre Yoyotte Originally published in French in Légitime défense 1, 1932. Translated by Krzysztof Fijałkowski and Michael Richardson.

The first and only issue of Légitime défense (Self Defense) appeared in Paris in 1932. Despite its very brief existence, limited print run, and poor circulation (the publication was apparently banned by colonial authorities and all but ignored by the Martinican people, as René Ménil explains in his preface to the 1979 reproduction of the magazine), it would exert an outsized influence on black diasporic writing and thought to come. Initiated by the charismatic and brilliant Étienne Léro (1910–39), who is renowned as the first black surrealist, Légitime défense is an important link in the chain connecting the bilingual French-English Revue du monde noir (1931–32) to later Francophone black diaspora little magazines such as L’Étudiant noir (1935) and Tropiques (1941–45).1 The explosive “Declaration” to this little magazine, co-authored by eight Martinican students, all under the age of 25, announces an anti-racist revolutionary program that merges Marxism, surrealism, and psychoanalysis. While there is a substantial archive of work by the eight signatories of the Légitime défense “Declaration,” and while many of them were involved with the Surrealists Group, we still know very little about the specific activities of the group. The “Declaration” that we do have provides a tantalizing glimpse of a strikingly assured and mature clique—self-identified as issuing from “la bourgeoisie de couleur française”—that considers itself “totally committed” to anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois struggle through whatever means necessary. SJR

This is just a foreword. We consider ourselves totally committed. We are sure that other young people like us exist prepared to add their signatures to ours and who—to the extent that it remains compatible with continuing to live—refuse to become part of the surrounding ignominy. And we’ve had it with those who try, consciously or not, with smiles, work, exactitude, propriety, speeches, writings, actions, and with their very being, to make us believe that things can continue as they are. We rise up against all those who don’t feel suffocated by this capitalist, Christian, bourgeois world, to which our protesting bodies reluctantly belong. All around the world the Communist Party (Third International) is about to play the decisive card of the “Spirit”—in the Hegelian sense of the word. Its defeat, however impossible it might be to imagine that, would be the definitive end of the road for us. We believe unreservedly in its triumph because we accept Marx’s dialectical materialism freed of all misleading interpretation and victoriously put to the test of events by Lenin. In this respect, we are ready to accept the discipline such conviction demands. In the concrete realm of means of human expression,

Note, for instance, that Suzanne Césaire adopts the title of her essay, “Poverty of a Poetry” (2.iv), from Léro’s essay in Légitime défense which analyzes why “[i]t is profoundly incorrect to speak of Antillean poetry.”

1

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

81

we equally unreservedly accept surrealism with which our destiny in 1932 is linked. We refer our readers to André Breton’s two manifestos and to all the works of Aragon, André Breton, René Crevel, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Péret and Tristan Tzara. We consider it to be one of the disgraces of our age that these works are not better known wherever French is read. And in Sade, Hegel, Lautréamont and Rimbaud—to mention just a few—we seek everything surrealism has taught us to find. We are ready to use the vast machinery that Freud has set in motion to dissolve the bourgeois family. We are hellbent on sincerity. We want to see clearly into our dreams and we are listening to what they have to tell us. And our dreams allow us to clearly perceive the life they claim to be able to impose on us for such a long time. Of all the filthy bourgeois conventions, we despise more than anything humanitarian hypocrisy, that stinking emanation of Christian decay. We despise pity. We don’t give a damn about sentiments. We intend to shed a light on human psychic concretions similar to that which illuminates Salvador Dalí’s splendid convulsive paintings, in which it sometimes seems that lovebirds, taking wing from assassinated conventions, could suddenly become inkwells or shoes or small morsels of bread. This little journal is a provisional tool, and if it collapses we shall find others. We are indifferent to the conditions of time and space which, defining us in 1932 as people of the French Caribbean, have consequently established our initial boundaries without in the least limiting our field of action. This first collection of texts is devoted particularly to the Caribbean question as it appears to us. (The following issues, without abandoning this question, will take up many others.) And if, by its content, this collection is primarily addressed to young French Caribbeans, it is because we think it opportune to aim our first effort at people whose capacity for revolt we certainly do not underestimate. If it is especially aimed at young blacks, it is because we consider that they in particular suffer from the effects of capitalism (apart from Africa, witness Scottsboro2) and that they seem to offer—in having a materially determined ethnic personality—a generally higher potential for revolt and joy. For want of a black proletariat, from which international capitalism has withheld the means of understanding us, we are addressing the children of the black bourgeoisie. We are speaking to those who are not already branded as killed established fucked-up academic successful decorated decayed provided for decorative prudish opportunists. We are speaking to those who can still accept life with some appearance of truthfulness. Determined to be as objective as possible, we know nothing of anyone’s personal life. We want to go a long way and, if we expect a lot from psychoanalytical investigation, we do not underestimate (among those initiated into psychoanalytic theory) pure and simple psychological confessions which, provided that the obstacles of everyday conventions are removed, can tell us much. We do not accept that we should be ashamed of what we suffer. The Useful is that convention constituting the very backbone of the bourgeois “reality” we want to dissect. In the realm of intellectual investigation, we oppose this “reality” with the sincerity that allows man, through his love, to disclose the ambivalence

The Scottsboro Trials were a notorious series of legal trials in the United States of the pre-Civil Rights 1930s. The “Scottsboro Boys” were nine African American teenagers and young men (ages 13–20) falsely accused in 1931 of raping two white women aboard a train near Scottsboro, Alabama. Their cases drew attention to the systemic racism of the US legal system and to the need to safeguard the rights to a fair trial and to an impartial jury. 2

82

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

that tolerates the elimination of that contradiction decreed by logic by which we are forced to respond to a given affective object either with the feeling defined as love or else with the feeling defined as hate. Contradiction is one of the tasks of the Useful. It does not exist in love. It does not exist in dream. And it is only by gritting our teeth horribly that we are able to endure the abominable system of constraints and restrictions, the extermination of love and the confinement of dream, generally known under the name of Western civilization. Emerging from the French mulatto bourgeoisie, one of the most depressing things on earth, we declare (and we shall not retract this declaration) that, faced with all the administrative, governmental, parliamentary, industrial, commercial corpses and so on, we intend—as traitors to this class—to take the path of treason so far as possible. We spit on everything they love and venerate, on everything that gives them sustenance and joy. And all those who adopt the same attitude, no matter where they come from, will find a welcome among us.3 Étienne Léro, Thélus Léro, René Ménil, Jules-Marcel Monnerot Michel Pilotin, Maurice-Sabas Quitman, Auguste Thésée, Pierre Yoyotte 1 June 1932

If our critique is purely negative here, if we put forward no positive proposals against what we irrevocably condemn, we apologize for the necessity to make a start, something that has not allowed a certain maturity. From the next issue, we hope to develop our ideology of revolt. [original authors’ note]

3

III. THE TIME HAS COME Hugh Stollmeyer Originally published in English in The Beacon 3.4 (November 1933): 85–6. Modernism in the Anglophone Caribbean is often traced to the publication of The Beacon, a short-lived literary magazine, which was published in Trinidad from 1931 to 1933. Edited by Albert Gomes (1911–78), who later went on to become Trinidad and Tobago’s first chief minister in the years leading up to the country’s independence, it understood literature as part of a larger anti-colonial and nationalist project, allied to left politics. Its literary sensibility took inspiration from both British modernists—and through C. L. R. James, was linked to the Bloomsbury set in London—and social realism, although the texts that it published were eclectic. Its essays were often pugilistic in tone, and it had a galvanizing and polarizing effect on Trinidadian society and literary culture, attracting much hostility and consternation. This poem, published in The Beacon’s correspondence pages, was part of a debate about the value of Trinidad’s literary clubs. In the 1920s and 1930s, literary clubs became an important vehicle for intellectual and cultural life on the island, embodying an Arnoldian view of culture and an Anglophilic and Victorian sensibility. While for their proponents, these clubs represented an attempt to civilize and bring culture to the island, to the editors of The Beacon, they embodied the worst of the country’s Anglophilia and Victorianism. The editors and their friends mounted a sustained campaign against these clubs, in a series of editorials and essays that appeared across several of their issues, provoking a letter to the editor from Levi A. Darlington (d. 1938), a black Tobagoan and vociferous defender of literary clubs. Darlington was responding to an earlier article by Hugh Stollmeyer (1912–82), a Trinidadian artist with literary and poetic inclinations, who was affiliated with The Beacon group; the editors accordingly gave Stollmeyer a right of reply. His response, written “curiously enough,” as the editors remarked, as a free verse poem, shows how modernist formal innovations, such as free verse, were here allied to a nationalist vision of Trinidad as a multicultural, multiracial society, affiliated not with its European but with its African and Indian roots. The ironies and discomfort that attend an Anglophilic black man debating a white man who calls on black and Indian people to embrace their heritage also reflect both the centrality and the complexity of racial politics in The Beacon group’s vision of modernist nationalism. AM

I hear it was said of me in the town That I criticised harshly, on false grounds Clubs of literary endeavour, art, And appreciation of the arts. It was said I did not know of what I spoke; That I was prejudiced, unkind, Unsuspecting of good works,

84

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Promotions of appreciation, uplift, Betterments, benefits, improvements Of artistic understanding, Freedom, love among the people Arisen by these clubs. But, my friends, you do not understand. It goes deeper than that: It is nearer and further than that. It is the entire spirit of your clubs— The sentiment, purpose, The fundamental idea Mistaken, sadly mistaken. I grieve. I see peoples enslaved, Dragged from their homes; Mother from son, Daughter from father, Brother from sister, Lover from lover torn; Forceful abduction, chains, The long, herded journey across the sea; The wailings, hearts wrung, Cruel strokes, Fetters cutting flesh, Starvation, nakedness; And the arrival at islands, Again the chains, the cruel strokes, And then the sale of human spirits at the mart; The depths of degradation, the filth The utter lack of love, kindness, humanity; The bleeding herd, the chains, again the chains— Chains of the brain, the spirit. A people Utterly enslaved. And then emancipation came. But you are not free, my people! Still do the fetters burn your brain, Your spirit—cutting deep, Biting your very being. You are not free! I see the stalwart, Lightly-clad bodies of African men in Africa; Their strong, stern, masculine culture; The tribal tradition, training, Free as the wind, untamed, Forceful, unyielding; I see the living sculpture, The tribal arts and crafts,

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

85

The images, the ornaments, Perfect in aesthetic beauty, Reflecting clearly, radiating Nature’s primal energy: Life at its strongest, purest, Most splendid countenance— The strength of perfect spirit And truest human culture Dead! O, dead in you, my people! I see before me plains of India, The high Himalayas, rugged, snow-capped; The pure, cold mountain air; The ancient seat of sages, philosophers, artists, sociologists unequalled, kings; The love of man for man and man for Nature, The freedom, peace, the understanding; The bursting forth in song, shattering silences; The deathless Epics, handed onward And sung, ecstatic, generations down; The ancient, undying carvings, Paintings, temples, music; Conceptions, unsurpassed, of intellect and poetry Of Cosmos: Buddha, Brahma, Nataraja, Shiva And the Nelli fruit,1 the symbol of clear insight, Which is India’s own proper signature Of her past greatness. All these I see, and more. O, you West-Indian man of India, Where is your strength and rightful pride In the sense of this honour of thine— The honour of your own great race And country’s famous heritage? I do not see it, and I know it is not there! And now I see the subject-races Indian and African West-Indian, Self-despising, hating, spurning, Seeking, yearning to re-earn their lost prestige And self-esteem; fighting hopelessly, they drown, The inferior-feeling dragging down And further down still in the vast morass Of false, vain pride, assumed to hide Their suffering for their lost pride of race. O, people, not in the unreal utterance

Also known as the Indian gooseberry or, in Trinidad and Tobago, the sour cherry, the Nelli fruit is a tart fruit found across South Asia, which was brought to the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century and is now grown in Trinidad and Tobago.

1

86

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Of high sounding phrases, names, knowledge, Not in the aping, monkey-like, of outward show, The Maya,2 the false appearance, The efflorescent poison Of alien culture, manners, customs, ideas; Cloaking your sin in ceremony And in rhetoric disguising emptiness of truth; Not there, but in your homes. O people, Lies your battlefield for freedom; There to teach the truth to little children, Bidding them ever reject false standards And despise loud drums of insolent, crushing might; Suspecting perfidious Britain’s false mirage Of empty glory. Teaching them to spurn The cruel master, and to serve the slave, Nor bend the knee to any save Those only whom they truly love. Be not deceived! The time has surely come! Arise! Rise up and learn to love Yourselves. Yourselves and others Of your race—to love them more, Not less, than those who seem above you, And who, you know well, crush you underfoot!

A Buddhist and Hindu concept that describes the outward appearance of the world.

2

IV. RACIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION Aimé Césaire Originally published in French in L’Étudiant noir 1.3 (May–June 1935): 1–2. Translated by Alys Moody. This essay was originally published in L’Étudiant noir, a journal edited by three young black students in Paris: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) of Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) of Senegal, and Léon Damas (1912–78) of French Guiana. This essay is believed to contain the first-ever appearance of the word “négritude,” providing the intellectual foundation of a movement that would have profound political, cultural, and intellectual consequences for Africa and its diaspora throughout the twentieth century. Whereas most accounts of negritude understand it as a kind of early identity politics—an attempt to develop an affirmative theory of blackness and a black essence around which peoples throughout the African diaspora might rally—this essay grounds its concern with black identity in an explicitly Marxist framework, and shows the concept arising from the attempt to ally revolutionary and anti-colonial politics. In this essay, as throughout negritude thought, culture becomes a crucial site for political mobilization. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that this essay should double as an early source for Césaire’s famous long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), which was drafted between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s and which reprises several of this essay’s turns of phrase. Until early in the twenty-first century, this essay was considered lost and possibly fictive. It has since been recovered and reprinted in a facsimile copy in Christian Filostrat, Negritude Agonistes, Assimilation against Nationalism in the French-Speaking Caribbean and Guyane (Cherry Hill, NJ: African Homestead Legacy Publishers, 2008): 123–6, and in a clean transcription, with very minor variants, in Les Temps modernes 676 (2013): 249–51. This translation, the first full translation in English, relies primarily on the facsimile of the 1935 text, but notes textual variants in the annotations. For a detailed account of this essay and how it revises our understanding of negritude, see Chrisopher L. Miller, “The (Revised) Birth of Negritude: Communist Revolution and ‘the Immanent Negro’ in 1935.” PMLA 125.3 (2010): 743–9. AM

The materialists do not claim that thoughts are devoid of practical consequences; they merely point out that neither the cause nor the effect of any thought is another thought. (Nizan, The Watchdogs).1 What revolution was ever made by a people innocent of curiosities?2 Who ever made a toy rise up against its owner? And yet, this is the feat that our black revolutionaries want

See Paul Nizan, The Watchdogs: Philosophers of the Established Order, trans. Paul Fittingoff (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971): 111.

1

This line is opaque in the original. The French reads, “Quelle révolution fut jamais faite par le peuple innocent des curiosités?” It probably involves a pun across different meanings of the word curiosité. In context, the

2

88

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

to achieve when they ask the Negro to revolt against the capitalism that oppresses him.3 What else could we possibly call an assimilated people,4 if not a toy? Dostoevsky said it already, or something like it: every race that believes that it has nothing to say to the world is only an “ethnic curiosity,” and every individual a toy, who believes that, at the place of exchange, his people arrive with empty hands.5 “Act,” we say to the Negro. But since to act is to create, and since to create is to knead his natural substance and make it rise, our Negro at home6—who is distracted from himself and who lives within himself7—will not act. A strange evil gnaws at us in the Antilles: a fear of oneself, a capitulation of being before appearing, a weakness which pushes an exploited people to turn their backs on their nature, because a race of exploiters makes them ashamed of it, with the treacherous aim of abolishing “the consciousness of the exploited.”8 The white exploiters gave us—we exploited black others—a culture, but a white culture; a civilization, but a white civilization; a moral code, but a white moral code, paralyzing us within invisible nets, in case we liberated ourselves from the more tangible material slavery that they impose on us. And they weave their web, patiently, tirelessly, by a diligent ruse, until we die to the knowledge of ourselves. Consequently, if it is true that the revolutionary philosopher is the one who develops techniques of liberation, if it is true that the work of the revolutionary dialectic is to disrupt “the myriad false ideas which prevent men from realizing how they have been enslaved,”9 must we not denounce the deadening culture of identification, and place, under the prisons that white capitalism erects for us, each of our racial values, like so many liberating bombs? Those who tell the Negro to revolt without first bringing him to

“peuple innocent des curiosités” carries implications of a people who are unable to revolt due to their lack of curiosity (although in French, as in English, curiosité would usually only be used in the singular in this sense); a people who are unable to revolt because they have been defined as curiosities, that is, as fetishes or trivial objects of (Western) interest; and a people who, as curiosities, are innocent of their own status as such, and so lack the self-knowledge that Césaire takes as necessary for the formation of revolutionary consciousness. As such, this line condenses the major themes of the essay in an elegant but knotty sentence whose dominant reading shifts as the logic of the essay unfolds. There is a debate among translators of Césaire about whether the term nègre is best translated as “Negro” or “nigger.”

3

“un peuple d’assimilés”: assimilation was a much-debated policy of the French empire, which suggested that colonial subjects could become French by adopting French culture and customs. In this context, an assimilé—an assimilated person—suggests someone who has not just assimilated culturally, but who has thereby become eligible to attain the rights of a French citizen.

4

Compare this article to Dostoeyvsky’s nationalist writings. See, for example, “Two Camps of Theoreticians (Apropos of Day and A Bit More),” trans. James P. Scanlan, Studies in East European Thought 59.1–2 (2007): 141–57, which shares Césaire’s claim that national or racial development is a necessary prerequisite to human universalism, arguing: “humanity will live a full life only when each nation develops on its own principles and brings from itself to the common sum of life some particularly developed aspect. Perhaps only then, too, may we dream of a full universal human ideal” (pp. 142–3).

5

“le nègre de chez nous.”

6

“vit à part soi” means to keep to oneself, but “à part” in other contexts means apart from or separate to. In this context, Césaire seems to be playing across these two meanings, to suggest an introversion that is also an alienation from oneself.

7

Nizan, The Watchdogs, 139.

8

Nizan, The Watchdogs, 139.

9

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

89

consciousness of himself, without telling him that it is beautiful and good and legitimate to be a nigger10—these people have therefore forgotten the most important thing. They have forgotten to speak to the Negro in the only language that he could legitimately hear, since, in contrast to “the clerk in Mr Gradgrind’s office,”11 the “Negro slave” still has blood rich with human affections, and it is out of his human affection, as Chesterton has noted, that he will love loyalty or freedom.12 The truth is that those who preach revolt to the Negro do not have faith in the Negro, and that, in their pride at being revolutionaries, they forget that they are Negro, first and always: slavery still, and of the most sterile kind. Paul Morand’s hero, the “assimilated” Occide, is also himself a revolutionary: thanks to him, Haiti has its Soviets, Port-au-Prince becomes Octoberville.13 What a great advantage, if he remains the whites’14 prisoner, a sterilely derivative monkey! Too bad for those who content themselves with being Occides, out of distrust of what they call “racism.” As for us, we want to mine [exploiter] our own values, to get to know our strengths through personal experience, to dig our own racial domain, certain that we will encounter, in the depths, the surging sources of the universal human.15 So, before launching the Revolution and in order to launch the revolution, — the real one —, the destructive tidal wave and not the trembling of surfaces, one condition is essential: to break the mechanical identification of the races, to tear up superficial values, to seize in us the immediate Negro [le nègre immédiat], to plant our negritude like a beautiful tree until it bears its most authentic fruits. Only then will we have consciousness of ourselves; only then will we know how far we can run alone; only then will we know when we are short of breath, and because we will have seized our particular difference and we “will loyally enjoy our being,”16 we will be able to triumph over all forms of slavery born of “civilization.” To be a revolutionary is good; but for we Negro others it is insufficient. We must not be revolutionaries who happen to be black, but genuinely Negro revolutionaries, placing the emphasis equally on the noun and the qualifier.

Cf, Césaire’s Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, where the speaker summons “the it-is-beautiful-and-goodand-legitimate-to-be-a-nigger dance.” See, Césaire, The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983): 82, 83.

10

Thomas Gradgrind is a character in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854). He is a businessman, politician, and schoolmaster, known for his rationalism and his promotion of a fact-based educational system that Dickens believed produced emotionally stunted and amoral adults. Here, he becomes the embodiment of rationalist capitalism.

11

“It is true that the negro slave, being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection of loyalty or a human affection for liberty. But the man we see every day—the worker in Mr. Gradgrind’s factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind’s office—he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom.” G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Bodley Head, 1908): 180.

12

See Paul Morand, “The Black Tsar,” in his collection Magie noire (1928), translated into English as Black Magic.

13

“White” is capitalized in the Les Temps modernes edition, but not in the original L’Étudiant noir text.

14

Cf. Senghor’s account of the relationship between humanism and negritude in “Negritude and the Concept of Universal Civilization” (3.iii).

15

“jouirons loyallement notre être.” Cf. Michel de Montaigne, “De l’expérience” (Of Experience), Essais III: “C’est une absolue perfection, et comme divine, de savoir jouir loyallement de son être.” (‘Tis an absolute and, as it were, a divine perfection, for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being.)

16

90

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

This is why, to those who want to be revolutionaries only in order to be able to look down on the Negro with the “well-flattened” nose,17 and to those who believe in Marx only in order to cross the line,18 we say19: Let us work to take possession of ourselves for the sake of the Revolution, by outclassing the official white culture, the “spiritual rigging” of conquering imperialism. Let us harness ourselves courageously to the cultural task, without fear of falling into a bourgeois idealism, the idealist being the one who considers the idea to be the daughter of the Idea and the womb of ideas,20 whereas we—we see there a promise which can only bloom in a flourishing of actions. Yes, let us work to be Negro in the certainty that we are working for the Revolution, for he who brings about the Revolution will be in full strength, and he who is in full strength is in possession of his true character.

The idea that Africans deliberately flattened the noses of their children was a mainstay of racial pseudo-science for several centuries. The idea can be found as early as Jean-Baptiste du Tertre’s Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1667–71), and persists in modified form into the work of influential race theorists, such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). Césaire reprises the image in the Cahier: “I accept … the determination of my biology, not a prisoner to a facial angle, to a type of hair, to a well-flattened nose, to a clearly Melanian coloring, and negritude, no longer a cephalic index, or plasma, or soma, but measured with the compass of suffering.” Césaire, Collected Poetry, 76, 77. 17

i.e., the color line, presumably.

18

The paragraph break appears only in the L’Étudiant noir text.

19

“Ideas” is capitalized in the Temps modernes text, but not in the L’Etudiant noir one.

20

V. TROPIQUES: PRESENTATION Aimé Césaire Originally published in French in Tropiques 1 (April 1941), 5–6. Translated by Alys Moody. Aimé Césaire co-edited eleven issues of Tropiques with Suzanne Césaire and Réne Ménil from 1941 to 1945. Conceived as a bulwark against the encroaching nightmare of European fascism and Vichy rule on Martinique, this literary and cultural review elevated French Surrealism’s notion of psychological liberté totale into an anti-colonial and antiracist program of art and thought. It was the preeminent modernist little magazine of the Francophone Caribbean, if not the entire world, during the Second World War. After the war, Tropiques’ editors and contributors were able to shift their “cultural combat” onto the political arena; in 1945, Aimé Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly for Martinique.1 In his “Présentation” to the first issue of Tropiques, Césaire defers the usual programmatic statement of aims and intent typical of modernist little magazines in favor of a more subtly ironized poetic prose decrying the “mute and sterile land” of a Caribbean plagued by colonialism. Césaire ingeniously evokes the entanglement of European, African, and Asian peoples and cultures in the Caribbean at the same time that he gestures toward the fascist occupation of these continents. If this text laments the fallow silence of Martinique among the nations of the world, it also revalorizes the empty spaces as the potential seeding ground of resistance: “Yet we are those who say no to the shadow. We know that the salvation of the world depends on us as well. That the land needs each of its sons, whoever they are. The most humble.” SJR

A mute and sterile land.2 It’s ours that I am speaking of. And through the Caribbean my ear gauges the frightening silence of Man. Europe. Africa. Asia. I hear the steel screeching, the tam-tam in the bush, the temple praying among the banyan trees. And I know that it is man who talks. Again and again, and I listen. But here: the monstrous atrophying of the voice, the ancient despondency, the prodigious muteness. No town. No art. No poetry. No real civilization—by which I mean the projection of man onto the world; the modelling of the world by man; the striking of the image of man onto the universe. A death more terrible than death, where the living drift. Elsewhere, the sciences progress; philosophy renews itself; aesthetic ideas replace one another. And on this land of ours, the hand sows the grain in vain. No town. No art. No poetry. Not a seed. Not a sprout. Or else the hideous leprosy of forgery. Truly, a mute and sterile land …

For a detailed account of this “cultural combat” as it relates to Tropiques, surrealism, and négritude, see Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, “Poetic Productions of Cultural Combat in Tropiques,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115.3 (July 2016): 495–512. 2 This phrase crystallizes much of Césaire’s thinking about his homeland in this period. He reprises the description of the Antilles as “mute” at several points in the Cahier, and describes the condition of its people as “sterile” there and in “Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution” (2.iv). 1

92

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

But it is no longer the time to be a parasite on the world. It is, rather, a question of saving it. The time has come to gird one’s loins like a brave man. *** Wherever we look, the shadow is gaining. One after another the hearths are extinguished. The circle of the shadow tightens, among the cries of men and the yells of wild beasts. Yet we are those who say no to the shadow. We know that the salvation of the world depends on us as well. That the land needs each of its sons, whoever they are. The most humble. The Shadow is gaining … “Oh! all the hope in the world would not be enough to look the century in the face.” Men of goodwill will make a new light for the world.

VI. POVERTY OF A POETRY: JEAN-ANTOINE NAU Suzanne Césaire Originally published in French in Tropiques 4 (1942): 48–50. Translated by Alys Moody. Suzanne Césaire (1915–66) was a Martinican teacher, writer, and feminist. Born in Poterie, on the south coast of the Fort-de-France Bay, she moved to France to study literature in Toulouse as a young woman, pursuing a degree at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1936 to 1938. In Paris, she met Aimé Césaire, whom she would marry in 1937. The pair would go on to have six children. In Paris, she worked with Césaire and Senghor on the magazine L’Étudiant noir, where the first declaration of negritude was published (see 2.iv), but her most significant contribution to Caribbean modernism came through her involvement with the journal Tropiques, published between 1941 and 1945 in Martinique. Césaire served as one of the journal’s chief theoreticians and as its editor, contributing significantly to both its intellectual development and its administration (a particularly crucial matter, given the political and practical difficulties of publishing during the war years). The journal ceased publication in 1945 and Césaire’s writing stopped along with it. After the war, as Aimé’s political career and status as a major intellectual of the African diaspora grew, Suzanne worked as a teacher and mother, while continuing to work as an activist with the feminist organization, Union des femmes françaises. This essay, drawn from the fourth issue of Tropiques, introduces many of Césaire’s key concepts. It is a polemical attack on what she calls doudou literature, a style of writing that sentimentalizes and idealizes the tropics. Her key example of this style is Jean-Antoine Nau (1860–1918), a French poet whose travels in Martinique and the West Indies in the 1880s furnished a career-long interest in the island. Césaire argues that this mood has infiltrated Martinican writing and calls instead, in a much-quoted closing line, for a new poetry, a poetry that “will be cannibal or it will not be.” This new form incorporates both the cannibalist aesthetics of Oswald de Andrade’s Brazilian modernism of 1920s (1.iii), and the strategic primitivism of Aimé’s own negritude, as expressed most influentially in his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, which he was then writing. This essay should be read against Suzanne Césaire’s other key theoretical contributions to Tropiques, which are collected in the volume, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941– 1945), ed. Daniel Maximin, trans. Keith Walker (Wesleyan University Press, 2012). For a recent reappraisal of Césaire’s contributions to the journal, see Anny Dominique Curtius, “Cannibalizing Doudouisme, Conceptualizing the Morne: Suzanne Césaire’s Caribbean Ecopoetics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115.3 (2016): 513–34. AM

94

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

The Martinicans have not forgotten him. No one has described our landscape more lovingly. No one has sung the “charms” of Creole life more sincerely: languor, sweetness, sentimentality too. Saint Pierre.... the volcano1... “the loftiness,”2 “the mornings of blue satin,” “the mauve evenings.”3 “Dressed in flashes of a red or smaragdine sun Winged djinns and dwarves pecked at bananas, Sweets heavy with ambrosia, And all the air was heavy with ambrosia, under the web Of long and sinuous vines.”4 and again, this sonnet, which delights idiots: The clean and floral sky, aware how it delights, A dome in ruby crystal, which rings to the song of bells, Sparkles, soft and luminous: at the foot of the rocks The blacks dive into the pink tide, which will turn blue. Fronds quivering in the tamarind trees: The clear throats of birds form semiquavers like pearls; The stiffened palms unfurl their listless feathers; The mother-of-pearl of Morning melts into sapphire. The good Negroes [nègres] sowed on the water like flies, A merry dark swarm of swift Skirmishes,— jeering at the flight of the long pointed canoes. The lammbi5 calls with the clamour of wild beasts; And the fishermen in the blue of the mad lost spray Watch, heavy-hearted, the dying mauve outcrops.6 This poem is called Antillean Dawn. And it has attracted followers—Naturally. See Soand-so. And So-and-so. And So-and-so. All “Martinican bards.” Are they talented? Of course, for people who are interested in that kind of thing. But what a pity! Saint-Pierre is a town on Martinique’s north-west coast. In the nineteenth century, it was Martinique’s cultural center and most important city, known as “the Paris of the Caribbean.” In 1902, the city was totally destroyed and 28,000 people killed when the nearby volcano Mount Pelée erupted. Jean-Antoine Nau’s “Choses mortes,” (Dead Things), published in his 1904 collection Hiers bleus, laments the city’s demise. Nau, Hiers bleus: poésies (Paris: Librairie Léon Vanier, 1904): 157–8.

1

Original reads, “la hauteur.” Cf. Jean-Antoine Nau, “Sur la hauteur (Martinique),” in Hiers bleus, 154–6, from which the next few quotations are drawn.

2

“Par les matins de satin bleu et les soirs mauves/Des formes d’une brune pâleur/Hantaient la tiédeur mystérieuse des allées.” Nau, “Sur la hauteur,” 155.

3

Nau, “Sur la hauteur,” 155.

4

Usually spelt “lambi,” this is a term for the conch, used throughout the French-speaking Caribbean.

5

Césaire reproduces this poem in full. In the original text, it is dated, “Martinique 1885.” Nau, “Aube antillaise,” in Hiers bleus, 20–1.

6

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

95

It passes him by. He looks. But he does not “see.” He pities the Negro. But he has not known the Negro soul: Under the dark pecan trees, mirrored In the glassy water of the bayous, edged with huts, Lily, were you the piccaninny from the South, A luminous black, almost golden with such shine, Black sun with a white sun for a smile? Were you the little prey, tracked, forced By the old white hunters, obscene and hairy, The favourite animal, cuddled then beaten, The exciting doll soon broken That is buried one night, poor slender thing, Near a jade swamp where7 the tree frogs sing Under the grinning moon?8 And he evokes the mornes9: … O the white laughter of the mornes In the fragrant night of vegetation The soft swell of the coconut trees on the shore, — The rhythmic flowering In the breeze, — night of the multicoloured Madras10 On the stalks of beautiful balanced bodies!11 But the “marvellous”12 of the morne? Its malefic aura? Its harsh promise? The dynamite of the morne?13 Instead of that: swoons, shades, style, words, soul, blue, golds, pink. It’s nice. It’s polished. Is it literature? Yes. Hammock literature. Sugar and vanilla literature. Literary tourism. Guide Bleu14 and C. G. T.15 Not poetry. Nau’s original has “où,” but Césaire’s text omits the accent, making it “ou” (or), which is almost certainly an error.

7

Nau, “Lily Dale,” in Hiers bleus, 152.

8

A word of Creole origin, used to describe the volcanic hills in Martinique and other parts of the French Caribbean.

9

The Madras is the national dress for women across much of the French-speaking Caribbean, named for the brightly colored madras fabric from which it is made. The headscarf that is part of the outfit can be folded to reflect the woman’s sexual availability.

10

Nau, “Courants Antillais,” in Hiers bleus, 101.

11

“Merveilleux.” “Courants antillais” continues: “Et les formes et les coleurs/Ne voguent pas seules au devant de ma pensée:/Le fleuve de saphir roulant la vie en sa tiédeur/Victorieuse des colères de l’abîme/Paraît dégager l’atmosphère merveilleuse …” (And the shapes and the colors/Do not sail alone to the front of my thought/The sapphire river rolling life in its balminess/Victorious in the rages of the depths/Seems to clear the marvellous atmosphere.)

12

Compare Césaire’s treatment of the mornes here with Aimé Césaire’s account of them in the opening sections of his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, where they similarly appear as a threatening and ominous presence on the island.

13

A series of French travel guides.

14

Several translations and glosses give this as the Confédération générale de travail, a French trade union, but given the context, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (also known in English as the French Line) seems much more likely. The latter CGT was a French shipping company, famous in the interwar years for its ocean liners, which ran ships between France, the Caribbean, and the United States.

15

96

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

And I’m talking about Nau! I have not said anything about one Leconte de Lisle!16 about a José Maria de Hérédia!17 about a Francis Jammes.18 The colonial professors continue to find them rather good. Poor ninnies! the “jaguar,”19 the Manchy,20 the Trophées21 … And this: “ Oh father of my father, you were there before my soul which was not born and, under the wind the dispatch boats glided in the colonial night…”22 Come on, real poetry is elsewhere. Far from the rhymes, the laments, the trade winds, the parrots. Bamboos,23 we declare the death of doudou literature.24 And damn the hibiscus, the frangipane, the bougainvilleas. Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not be.25

Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle (1818–94) was a French poet, born in La Réunion and associated with the Parnassian movement. His second collection, Poèmes barbares (1862), in particular, focuses on exoticist and Orientalist topics.

16

José María de Heredia (1842–1905) was a Cuban-born French poet. Like Leconte de Lisle, he was a Parnassian who wrote exoticist poems about the tropics.

17

Francis Jammes (1868–1938) was a French poet, known for his lyrical verse and pastoral themes. Although he never travelled to the Caribbean, he was a significant proponent of a symbolist, exotic vision of the islands through his poetry.

18

Leconte de Lisle has two poems about jaguars, both of which appear in Poèmes barbares: “Le Jaguar” and “Le Rêve du Jaguar.”

19

Leconte de Lisle’s poem “Le Manchy,” from Poèmes barbares, is one of his best-known poems. Set in Madagascar and strongly orientalist in tone, it describes his cousin’s journey on the eponymous “manchy,” a Malagasy sedan chair, on her way to Sunday mass.

20

De Heredia’s 1893 collected poems Les Trophées (Trophies) consist mostly of sonnets. Among sections on nature and classical Greece and Rome, he also includes a section of poems on “The Orient and the Tropics.”

21

Francis Jammes, “Quand verrai-je les îles?” (When will I see the islands?), in De l’Angelus de l’aube à l’Angelus du soir (1898).

22

“Bambous.” Apparently used here as an address to her fellow Martinicans, by way of a stereotyped image of the tropical exoticism.

23

Doudou is a diminutive term in French, used to describe a child’s stuffed toy or security blanket—the kind of thing that becomes a “transitional object” in Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic thought. In the Caribbean, doudou is also a slang term for a woman. In dismissing this writing as “doudou literature,” Césaire suggests that it is infantile and infantilizing, feminized in a derogatory way, and overly sappy and sentimental.

24

Cf. Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1.iii).

25

VII. BIM: AN INTRODUCTION George Lamming Originally published in English in Bim 6.22 (1955): 66–7. Bim was a Barbadian little magazine, established in 1942 under the editorship of Frank Collymore (1893–1980). During the 1940s and 1950s, Bim provided one of the most influential sites for the publication of Anglophone Caribbean literature, and is generally regarded by scholars either as one of the key venues for Caribbean modernism in the immediate post-war years, or as a key precursor to a slightly later flourishing of modernism in the region (or both). Bim’s initial focus was firmly local, as its name—a local Bajan term for Barbados—suggests, and its house style was eclectic. Publishing throughout the period of the Windrush generation, characterized by significant Caribbean emigration to the UK, it gradually came to publish many expatriate writers, as well as those from across the Caribbean. Throughout its run, however, it remained a firmly Barbadian publication, supported by large numbers of advertisements for local businesses and household goods, as well as by subscriptions from an increasingly international readership. This introduction to the journal was written by Barbadian novelist George Lamming (1927–) on the invitation of the editors. As the introductory “Notebook” which precedes this introduction declares, “Editors by force of circumstance rather than by persuasion, we have thus far consistently avoided the writing of any foreword which might be termed ‘editorial.’ We have preferred to let the contents of Bim speak on our behalf.”1 By inviting Lamming, a regular contributor who did not serve on the editorial board, to write this introduction, the editors continue to avoid programmatic statements (and indeed, Lamming’s own text emphasizes the journal’s heterogeneity and lack of programmatic direction). Lamming’s essay reflects many of the journal’s own preoccupations: an orientation that is at once local, regional, and cosmopolitan; and a vision of literature and the little magazine that takes its inspiration more from the tradition of T. S. Eliot (a towering presence in post-war Anglophone Caribbean literature) than from the polemicism and programmatism of the avant-gardes. AM

This issue of Bim, Vol. VI, No. 22, appears in the twelfth year of the magazine’s existence. It has been an odd and unpredictable survival: odd, because of the circumstances of its birth, and the gradual, unsuspected changes of emphasis and direction which have followed; unpredictability is part of the heritage it shares with any literary review of its kind. It started as a club magazine which would provide members and their friends in Barbados with a typical afternoon of entertainment.2 It was an easy, unproblematic paper without any claim to a serious purpose. There was no conscious intention behind it; and in the nature of the circumstances its contributions were drawn invariably from the life and interests of that club. On the whole, the writers would have been the members. Bim was, indeed, Bim.3

“Notebook,” Bim 6.22 (1955): 65.

1

Bim was initially founded as the publication of the Barbados Young Men’s Progressive Club. Bim is a term for Barbados used in the local Bajan language.

2 3

98

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

To-day after fairly consistent appearances over twelve years, it astonishes the visitor and the editors themselves by the scope and diversity of its contributions. These have been coming, in recent years, from almost every territory in the Caribbeans—British, French, and Spanish—as well as from countries which are not directly involved in the interests and problems of the Caribbean. Writers from Germany4 and East Africa have sought publication in these pages, and shown both by letters and subscriptions their personal concern for the future of Bim. And what is really odd about this story is the curious accident of change and evolution which it symbolises. It has not been the result of any change of policy or of editors, and there has never been any desire on the part of the editors to forget or abandon their original benefactors. And yet this diversity has not disturbed the underlying pattern of the magazine, for what emerges from the varied contributions of prose and verse is a certain unity of concern which an American or a European intelligence would immediately recognise as regional. It is clear that Bim has its roots in a particular region, and that the change which has evolved and which has increased its range and significance is a part of the changes which have come abut in the West Indies during the last ten years. The magazine has been a kind of barometer which registered through its writers the climate of feeling and opinion which occurred in a particular place at a particular time. In that sense it is a regional magazine, and it is precisely that fact which ensures its authenticity. But the editors have never supplied their contributors with prescriptions. Themes have never played any significant part in their consideration of a writer’s work. They have always regarded the magazine as an occasion for bringing together a collection of the best writing they could attract. And it is this consideration, more than anything else, which has helped to protect Bim from the inhibiting provincialism of the intentional and consciously purposeful review. It has been my intention to point, so to speak, to the social implications of a magazine whose emphasis was never on social analysis or political prediction, and I have tried to emphasise the point of that unconscious change and development because of the tendency of groups among us to plan and organise what they call their culture. And an obsession, on the level of the individual or the group, with that kind of undertaking is always likely to be a threat to a particular and concrete activity. It is the business of the novelist, for example, to write novels, just as it is the business of the painter to paint pictures, and of the critic to make an evaluation of the work under consideration. Each must function in his own way and leave the meaning and the significance of the total result to people who are concerned with analysing such things. The meaning of Bim, in other words, is, for every writer, simply the unconscious background which he, through his particular contribution, has helped to make. But Bim has a direct literary value which we can see more clearly if we take a look at T. S. Eliot’s stated conception of the function of a magazine. In his introductory message to the editors of the new literary review, The London Magazine, he writes: “The first function of a literary magazine is, surely, to introduce the work of new or little-known

Janheinz Jahn (1918–73)’s essay, “The Contribution of the West Indies to Poetry,” appeared in the previous issue: Bim 6.21 (December 1954). Jahn was a well-known critic of African literature, and here extends his interest to the Caribbean.

4

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

99

writers of talent ….. and the new writers, whose work it introduces should be writers who deserve the attention of writers and of readers of literary magazines in other countries.”5 There are not many West Indian writers to-day who did not use Bim as a kind of platform, the surest, if not the only avenue, by which they might reach a literate and sensitive reading public, and almost all of the West Indians who are now writers in a more professional sense and whose work has compelled the attention of readers and writers in other countries, were introduced, so to speak, by Bim. But in a community like ours, a community which has not developed to a satisfactory degree the habit of reading, writers will find themselves caught in a disturbing isolation, and one of the ways of refreshing their energy and reinforcing the validity of their work is to carry on a free, easy and continuous dialogue among themselves. They should get to know, not only each other’s names, but each other’s thought and concern. In this respect, correspondence is invaluable. To those who are primarily readers of the magazine as wel as to those who have only got as far as feeling a vague inclination to read it, Mr. Eliot’s judgment, expressed in the introduction I mentioned earlier, should seem at once heartening and severe: “Without literary magazines the vitality of the world of contemporary letters is very gravely reduced. If our society cannot provide for such a magazine, a circulation large enough to justify its existence—and a subscription, it must be remembered, is not merely an act of financial support but a declaration of moral support—then the outlook for our civilization is all the more sombre.”6

T. S. Eliot, “A Message,” The London Magazine 1.1 (February 1954): 16. Eliot, “A Message.”

5 6

VIII. JAZZ AND THE WEST INDIAN NOVEL, I L. Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite Originally published in Bim 12. 44 (1967): 275–84. Kamau Brathwaite (born Lawson Edward Brathwaite, 1930) is a Barbadian poet and scholar whose work is foundational to the fields of postcolonialism, Caribbean studies, and African diaspora studies. In his scholarly essays and monographs, Brathwaite has established himself as a world authority on creolization, nation language, and AfroCaribbean folk culture, subjects he has explored and synthesized within his magisterial poetic oeuvre. After graduating from Cambridge University in the early 1950s, he worked for eight years as an Education Officer in Ghana and saw it gain independence from the UK in 1957. He returned to England and co-founded the London-based Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in 1966, the same year he earned his doctorate from the University of Sussex. In 1967, he published Rights of Passage, the first volume of his “new world trilogy,” The Arrivants (1973), a poetic masterpiece that inaugurated a lifelong project of traversing the times and spaces of the African diaspora in the vernacular and musical forms of the diaspora itself. Brathwaite first published “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” in three installments between 1967 and 1969 in the influential Barbadian little magazine Bim (see also George Lamming’s introduction to the magazine, 2.vii). In this essay, Brathwaite attempts to delineate an “alternative” mode of Afro-Caribbean art-making that can be understood apart from the hegemonically imposed European cultural tradition. Taking American jazz as his archetype, Brathwaite theorizes the emergence of “New World Negro” art forms that draw from a double African and Euro-American inheritance. In part one, Brathwaite begins by inquiring into the peculiar absence of West Indian jazz, which he ascribes to several factors, including the majoritarian status of black people in the Caribbean, the differences between Caribbean and American slavery, and the lack of major cities like New York and Chicago. At the same time, he asserts the “correspondence” between American jazz music and the “words” and “rhythms” of modern West Indian literature, especially fiction. The essay is notable not only for its use of Cambridge-style practical criticism to advance its argument about the common African elements in “New World” art but also for its transvaluation of Western high modernism through that element. The text below reproduces part one as it first appeared in 1967. A reprint of “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” in Brathwaite’s essay collection, Roots (1986), restructures the essay to be a continuous thirteen-section text. Brathwaite also revises the text in places, notably by inserting two pages at the end of the fourth section distinguishing between E.M. Forster’s concept of “rhythm” and Brathwaite’s own, as observed in George Lamming (Barbados), Gabriel Okara (Nigeria), and James Baldwin (US). All notes to this essay are Brathwaite’s, drawn from the 1986 Roots edition of the essay. SJR

The blues is a special kind of music which, although it uses more or less accepted musical conventions and can therefore be more or less generally understood, cannot, however, be fully appreciated and felt unless listened to within the context of Negro American music. It is, in other words, the artistic expression of a particular kind of Negro—the Negro

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

101

slave and his descendants under the geographical and social conditions of the American South. It is, furthermore, a specialized kind of expression, since the Negro slave had several other forms of musical expression available to him: the shout, the holler, the worksong, not to mention the spiritual and other sorts of European-derived Church and secular music which, in a sense, had an equal, if not a more general application to his conditions as a slave. Jazz, on the other hand, is not ‘slave’ music at all. It is the emancipated Negro’s music: hence its brash brass colouring, the bravado, its parade of syncopation, its emphasis on improvisation, its swing. It is the music of the freed man who having left the countryside of his shamed and bitter origins, has moved into the complex, high-life town. The first music originating in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of New Orleans and the towns of the Mississippi delta, contains that original shout of joy, mixed with the disappointment and the growl of protest of the liberated, urbanized Negro of the United States coming into contact with a new, exciting, mixed and mixed-up society of Latin and Anglo-Saxon influences which he had up till then been taught to regard as ‘superior’ and which was now receiving and rejecting him. Jazz, in fact, started as a brilliant amalgam of late 19th century New Orleans musical culture: the French quadrille, the tango tinge, Catholic liturgical harmonies, brass band and military music, boat songs, shanties, sankies, traditional Euro-American fiddle tunes, all superimposed on African rhythms and the Afro-American slave musical scale. It was, and in many ways continues to be, the perfect expression for the rootless, ‘culture-less’, truly ex-patriate Negro. Unlike the spiritual which was quickly absorbed, sentimentalized and capitalized upon by white American musicians and composers, jazz retained its essential negritude, and is now being increasingly recognized as the one peculiarly Negro contribution to Western music and culture.1 There is however nothing suggestive of racial exclusiveness or of esotericism about jazz. Many white musicians play jazz, an increasing number play it well, and a few have contributed, in many ways, to aspects of its development. But its accents, its rhythms, its treatment of notes, expressing as they do certain sociological factors that Negroes in America are involved with, have been transformed through their particular African genius and heritage into modes of expression best interpreted by Negro artists. And the importance of this sociological-aesthetic background becomes more meaningful when it is understood that jazz is one of those forms where creation and performance are simultaneous. The jazz man composes as he plays. What he plays—based on some basic chord structure or agreed-on theme—is peculiar to himself and to each performance. Each performance is different in some way because of its improvisational character; and each successful improvisation is a true creation and is an expression not only of the individual artist or artists, but of the group of which the artists are part. Aesthetically, in other words, we are speaking of ‘folk’ culture: the group, the individual-in-the-group, the group-individual improvisation: these are common features of the majority of folk music and arts. The ‘modern’ movement back to folk music, painting, poetry, ‘the happening’, serve to underline this, and perhaps help to explain the world-wide widening interest in jazz. But while ‘modern folk’ is mainly cerebral, a Among the best books on jazz are Andre Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, trans. (New York, 1956); Henry Pleasants, Death of a Music? (London, 1961). Leroi Jones, Blues People (New York, 1963). For the spiritual, see N. N. Fisher, Negro Slave Songs in the United States (New York, 1953) and for black folk music generally, Harold Courlander, Negro Folk Music, U.S.A (Columbia University Press, 1963).

1

102

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

desperate effort of the over-urbanized to escape ‘civilization,’ a conscious neo-primitivism; jazz is an example of a living, active folk expression on easy terms with all the world. While retaining its basic blues idiom, it is also, at the same time, capable of exploiting the extremes of contemporary sophistication. In fact it has contributed to the development of certain areas of our contemporary tastes. It was no accident that Norman Mailer (‘The White Negro’) and the Beats, beautified the Negro and especially the Negro jazz musician into ikons of the modern world. The ‘secret’ lies in the origin of the music: cry/laugh, slave/free, country/urban, Africa/Europe, and the resolution of the swing. So that the jazz musician of today will use the serial technique of Boulez (say), the drone of Indian ragas, while at the same time freeing (at last) his rhythm section from the 4/4 traditions of the military drum into something more nearly approaching African complexities. We have with this, also, a philosophical and moral correlation: a music which expresses something of the modern ‘problem’ of the individual personality vis-a-vis the group; and at the same time a collective effort which expresses the individuality of the group—and in American terms an oppressed minority at that—within the context of a wider society. Jazz has been from the beginning a cry from the heart of the hurt man, the lonely one. We hear this in the bass and drums, piano comping, and in the full ensemble which hints sometimes at chaos, sometimes at anarchy. But the chaos is always resolved into order. The social sense retains its grip on anarchy. The individual, it says, still has his place within the whole, even if, for now, it is a minor segment of that whole. So the trumpet calls, the ensemble answers, comforts, screams out its tight collective protest against the (white) withholding world.

II Jazz then is a music of protest. It is also in many ways a music of comfort and protection: a shield of sound behind which the individual and the group have been able to protect their spirit. As expressed, say, in Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, it is also, often, the sheer affirmation of the joy of living. It is, in other words, a music of remarkable range and resilience expressive not only of Negro problems, but of the problems of the whole civilized complex of living in the post-Faustian, post-Freudian world. Because of this, we would expect that other great creolized and Negro society of Americas—the Caribbean—also to have its jazz. But there is no West Indian jazz. The urban emancipated Negro musical forms in the West Indies, where they appear at all—the calypso in Trinidad, the ska in Jamaica, and the similar, related forms in some of the Spanish and French islands—are concerned with protest only incidentally. They are essentially collective forms, ridiculing individualism, singing the praises of eccentricity, certainly; more often celebrating their own peculiar notions of conformity. The West Indian musical form, where it has any general area of application at all, is basically a music for dancing: a communal, almost tribal form.2 There is no suggestion of alienation, no note of chaos in calypso. This is no longer (1983) the case. Jamaican reggae, emerging out of the cultural revolution of the ’60s, especially under the aegis of its ikon, Bob Marley, has transformed Caribbean musical expression and nativized it in form, content, and symbolization. Similar, if less dramatic developments also took place in the calypso, not only in the nature of the lyrics, but in the intensifications of musical form. See for instance, Sparrow’s “How you jammin’ so?” (1976). These developments have profoundly affected Caribbean literary—and popular—aesthetics (see my “History of the voice” (below) and “The love axe/1,” in Reading Black (Cornell, 1976): 20–36, reprint Bim 61, 62 (June, December 1977), 63 (June 1978) and the work, generally, of the Guyanese literary critic, Gordon Rohlehr). “Brother Mais” (below) is a look at this material from the perspective of these developments.

2

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

103

There are no doubt several explanations for this. In the first place, the general sociological position of the Caribbean Negro is very different from that of his American cousin. He is simply not, in the West Indies, part of a minority group. Also the scale and nature of slavery in the West Indies differed in many important ways from slavery in the American South. And unlike the American, the West Indian Negro had no New Orleans, Chicago or New York to mix with, learn from, be hurt by, or protest against during the critical post-emancipation years. This isn’t to say that there was (or is) no protest tradition in the West Indes. The history of the area from Tacky, Toussaint to the political ferment of the 30’s is available in the archives and the books. But West Indian post-emancipation protest, being not concerned like the American with ‘civil rights’, the place and status of a black minority in a white world, but rather with subtleties of caste and colour, of West Indian against West Indian, has achieved little or no liberating, self-creative expression. There has been, it is true, with the increasing urbanization of Kingston and Port-of-Spain, a growing element of protest (and comfort) in the calypso and the ska. But it is still too early to see this as a positive contribution; and the development here has been mainly literary: in the words, the lyrics, not in the impulse of the music itself; not, that is, in the beat, the notes, the harmonies (though even here, now, one could present a few exceptions.)3 And yet it is here, in the new literary elements in the calypso and ska, and of course in the more sophisticated and elaborate structures of West Indian poetry and novels, that we can find a connection, (or rather a correspondence) between jazz (the American Negro expression based on Africa), and a West Indian Negro expression based on Africa. It is not of course quite as simple as this. Jazz is one medium; literary expression another. And not all West Indian artists are Negro. But to make ‘sense’, they have to write about their society, which is predominantly Negro. And taken all together, we can, I think, begin to discern certain fundamental elements and essences these different media—jazz and literature—and this will also include that produced by American Negroes—have in common. We will, in other words, be looking for some mode of New World Negro cultural expression, based on an African inheritance, no matter how unconsciously; but also (and this goes without saying), built (increasingly firmly?) on a superstructure of Euro-American language, attitudes and techniques. Jazz, for instance, is played in an Africanized manner on European instruments. An awareness of this double inheritance may or may not set up tensions within the New World Negro artist, depending on his degree of awareness of it as a ‘problem.’ The jazz musicians have, on the whole, been content simply to ‘play’, despite recent talk from some moderns about ‘the black music’. And this talk is really to do with American civil rights politics, not with the music itself.4 James Baldwin, also aware of the dichotomy, has appeared able, so far to integrate it into his vision of the American Society. LeRoi Jones, on the other hand, in his more recent work, has been concerned to stress the Negro (but American) aspects of his art, while Aimé Césaire, from the southern French Caribbean introduced with his concept of negritude, a rejection of European civilization and an

See Gordon Rohlehr’s “Sounds and pressure”, … and listen to the ska “007” for instance, and “Everything crash” and a great deal of recent Rastafari and Sufferers music. In the 1970 Carnival in Trinidad on the eve of the February Revolution, there was a resurgence of the African drumbeat and the militant calypsos. See also note 2, above. 4 I would say now (1970) that “black music” is no longer exclusively concerned with civil rights. It is now an aspect of black consciousness—an important departure from and development out of “protest”. 3

104

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

affirmation of Africa, and poets from the Spanish Antilles like Guillen and Palos Matos did the same.5 For Derek Walcott, however, the double inheritance has, so far, remained just that. Writing about the Kikuyu/European conflict in Kenya, he asks: I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they gave? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?6 But my concern, at this point, is not with the problems of New World Negro expression, but with the (British) West Indian contribution to the general movement of New World creative protest of which I regard jazz as the archetype. I am asking here whether we can, and if it is worthwhile attempting to, sketch out some kind of aesthetic whereby we may be helped to see West Indian literature in its (it seems to me) proper context of an expression both European and African at the same time. And if in this essay I stress the African aspects of this literature, it is not, I submit, because I am not aware of the other, but because in most of the critical work so far available on this subject ‘Africa’ has been neglected in a way which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to view the West Indian contribution in a meaningful, West Indian way. The West Indian writer is just beginning to enter his own cultural New Orleans. He is expressing in his work of words that joy, that protest, that paradox of community and aloneness, that controlled mixture chaos and order, hope and disillusionment, based on his New World experience, which is at the heart of jazz. It is in the first place mainly a Negro experience; but it is also a folk experience; and it has (or could have, depending on its own internal integrity, as we have seen with jazz), a relevance to the ‘modern’ predicament as we understand it today.

III Words, then, are the notes of this New Orleans music. As George Lamming put it at the First International Conference of Negro Writers in Paris, in 1956: For the writer, his private world is his one priceless possession. It is precisely from this point that everything else will proceed…Nothing can take its place. It is his initial capital. He may gain by it, or lose by it; but without it he cannot function. Why he should be possessed in this way is a matter one does not wholly understand. We must accept it as part of his experience. But it is this possession which is responsible for his relation to words…7

See G. Coulthard, Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature (London, 1962): 40–50. LeRoi Jones (now called Imamu Amiri-Baraka) has also moved into an Afro-American negritude form of expression in his latest poetry. See Black Magic Poetry (Indianapolis, 1969). It’s Nation Time (Chicago, 1970). Baldwin, in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (New York, 1968) also appears to be moving in this direction.

5

Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa,” in In a Green Night (London, 1962).

6

George Lamming, “The Negro Writer and His World”, Presence Africaine XVIII–XIX (1956): 330–1.

7

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

105

This is an ‘obvious’ statement and at the same time one which must be desperately repeated. It concerns Lamming at a Conference of Negro Writers, and it is applicable also to craftsmen everywhere. William Carlos Williams, for instance, says very much the same thing: For everything we know and do is tied up with words … It’s the words, the words we need to get back to, words washed clean. Until we get the power of thought back through a new minting of the words we are actually sunk. This is a moral question at base …. but a technical one also and first.8 Selected Essays But there is a crucial difference here. For Carlos Williams it is above all a technical problem. The concern is with discarding trying to get back to Eden. ‘Trying to learn to use words’, in Eliot’s phrase. For Lamming, starting from scratch, the word is Logos, a possession; and is connected with: “The word is for all in this world; it must be exchanged, so that it goes and comes, for it is good to give and receive the forces of life’ (from the Bantu philosopher Ogotommeli)’9; with passages in Tutuola and Camara Laye’s The Dark Child, on the one hand; and with passages in Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Ellison’s Invisible Man,10 also celebrating the mystique of the word. Derek Walcott, faced with the harsh, hopeless fact of peasant impoverishment in St. Lucia cried out: All that I have and want are words To fling my grief about …. And Frank Collymore,11 in Barbados, more gently touched the need with: Words—words are the poem, The incalculable flotsam; That which bore them vanished beneath The hurrying drift of time. How shall they speak, how tell Of the ship and the lost crew …. It is the folk imagination that reminds us that ‘In the beginning was the Word.’

IV Words, then, are the notes of this new New Orleans music. The ‘personal urge for words’, the West Indian writer’s trumpet. But the ‘jazz’ sound of these novels is not expressed in words alone. There is a strong rhythmic element in much West Indian—as indeed there is in a great deal of Negro writing generally, and in the work if people like Faulkner and

William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays …

8

See Conversations with Ogotemmeli, trans. Marcel Griaule (Oxford University Press, 1965): 204.

9

“Choc Bay,” Caribbean Quarterly 3.2 (1953): 89.

10

“Words Are the Poem,” in Collected Poems (Bridgetown, 1959): 13.

11

106

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Paton (of Cry, the Beloved Country) for instance, whose work is clearly influenced by a Negro environment. One wonders too about Ernest Hemingway. Is not one of the great attractions of his style, for West Indians, his sense of rhythm? ‘Don’t look that way, Harold,’ his mother said. ‘You know we love you and I want to tell you for your own good how matters stand. Your father does not want to hamper your freedom. He thinks you should be allowed to drive the car. If you want to take some of the nice girls out riding with you, we are only too pleased. We want you to enjoy yourself. But you are going to have to settle down to work Harold. Your father doesn’t care what you start in at. All work is honourable as he says. But you’ve got to make a start at something. He asked me to speak to you this morning and then you can stop in and see him at the office.’ ‘Is that all?’ Krebs said. ‘Yes. Don’t you love your mother, dear boy?’ ‘No,’ Krebs said.12 (In Our Time). In While Gods are Falling, Earl Lovelace does something very similar, based on his own Trinidadian speech-rhythms: ‘Three years now I living here and this is the worst time I’m seeing now. I don’t know what’s wrong.’ ‘Too many things,’ the one-legged one says. ‘Mr. Cross, it’s like nothing is nothing …. Like – I mean – like there’s no meaning to anything.’ ‘You’re not wrong, Castle. But it’s so all over the world. I hear is the same thing in London and the States. Is the way of the world. It’s progress. Is this kind of living like there’s no tomorrow. It’s this great hurry, this feeling that the world going to blow itself to pieces any minute, any day. Many things involved, Castle.’ ‘It’s damn sickening, though. You paying rent and you can’t have a moment peace in this place.’ ‘You telling me, Castle. Is fifteen years now I here.’ ‘And, Mr. Cross, the trouble is a man like me can’t do anything about it. Only one thing – run. Pack up an’ leave the place. Leave it to the hooligans.’ ‘Castle, I have one foot. A man can’t run with one foot.’13 There are connections here, also, with the by now familiar passage in Selvon’s Lonely Londoners: ‘Under the kiff-kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode …14; and this, from My Girl and the City: All these words that I hope to write, I have written them already many times in my mind. I have had many beginnings, each as good or as bad as the other. Hurtling in the underground from station to station, mind the doors, missed it! there is no substitute for wool: waiting for a bus in Piccadilly Circus: walking across Waterloo bridge …15

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (New York, 1925, 1953 ed.): 99.

12

Earl Lovelace, While Gods Are Falling (London, 1965): 11.

13

The Lonely Londoners (1956): 170. The entire sequence is on pp. 164–71. Samuel Selvon, Ways of Sunlight (London, 1957): 181.

14 15

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

107

The movement of the rhythm here, based on the cadence and intonation of Trinidadian speech, is subtle and inevitable. Wilson Harris, whose ear for dialect has not yet been noticed in critical assessments and appreciation of his work, is equally effective: His mother was sadder still. “Is best you go,” she said. Her lips were torn and they looked burnt with the sun. “I don’t want to leave she,” Carrol cried. “I can tek she with me and tek care of she and she tek care of me.” He cried to her louder than ever. “Your stepfather would forbid it,” his mother said passionately. “I can carry she and look after she,” Carroll said sullenly. “You think life so simple’? his mother pleaded with him. “You got to earn your fortune, lad. Sometimes is the saddest labour in the world.” “You mean if I mek a million dollar and come back I can claim she as me wife?” Carroll said. “If you mek a million dollar you think you can fool the living and bring the dead alive?” His mother spoke strangely. “Is not money make me flesh and fortune.”16 Not only the rhythms here, but the quiet repetition of word and variation of rhythm, take us straight back to jazz and establish correspondences. Even the word ‘lad’, in the fifth paragraph, though perhaps ‘wrong’ for Guyanese speech, fits correctly into the pattern and so passes along. But not all west Indian rhythm passages are so successful. When the folk speech is left too far behind, and the writer attempts inventions of his own, a certain strenuousness may arise, as for instance in Vic Reid’s early (1950) experiments in New Day: Tomorrow I will go with Garth to the city to hear King George’s man proclaim from the square that now Jamaica-men will begin to govern themselves. Garth will stand on the high platform near the Governor and the Bishop and the Chief Justice, and many eyes will make four with his. Garth will stand proud and strong, for mighty things ha’ gone into his conception. This is nearer in its rhythmical insistence to, say, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, than it is to any of the passages so far quoted in this essay. Also in Edge up yourself sharp, Coney Mount tenor-man! Roll it out, big-bone bass man from Cedar Valley! Roll it out for the girls from Morant fishing beach must ha’ something solid to pour molasses from their throats on. Sing, my people, for good this is …17 the rhythm and the strong imagery of ‘solid’ and ‘pour molasses from their throats on’, seem to collide, setting up ripples of distraction.18 In The Leopard (1958), there is much greater rhythmical control, though still, because of the insistent images that go along with this, a continuing hint of strain: His head was filled with the hills, light green hills and dark ones, hills were buttercups blazed like yellow fires at dusk; hills that were long-drawn-out shrieks on whose slopes

Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London, 1960): 87–8. Since this piece was written, Harris’ use of dialect has been noticed by one other critic, Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London, 1970): 106–7, 112–14. [K.B. note in Roots]

16

New Day, p. 14. [K.B. note in Roots]

17

For a good look at Reid’s language in New Day, see H. P. Jacobs’ “The Dialect of Victor Reid,” West Indian Review 1 (May 1949): 12–15, 19. [K.B. note in Roots]

18

108

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

the best would buckle; and the wrinkled, mean, nut-brown ones that would twist your ankle and your soul. Still, it is not without significance that The Leopard is set in (East) Africa even though, at the time, it was an African of imagined landscape. Reid, when he wrote this book, had not yet, it appears, visited Africa. Nor had George Lamming when he created this rhythmic evocation: …. time was I see by the sun how the season sail and the moon make warning what crops to expect. Leaf fall or blood stain by the edge of the sea was a way of leaving one thing for another. Wood work in the morning and the tale at night was the way we walk the world, and no one worry what wonders take place on the top of the sky. Star in the dark and stone in the shine of the sun sideways speak nothing but a world outside our world and the two was one. Fire heat in the daytime and the colour that come later to take light from the eye make small, small difference to my people. The children was part of the pool ….19 (In the Castle of my Skin). But the connections are there with this, for instance, from the Nigerian Gabriel Okara’s: When Okolo came to know himself, he was lying on a floor, on a cold cold floor lying. He opened his eyes to see but nothing he saw, nothing he saw. For the darkness was evil darkness and the outside night was black black night …. (The Voice) and Baldwin’s: And a voice, for the first time in all his terrific journey spoke to John, through the rage and weeping, and fire, and darkness, and flood: “Yes,” said the voice, “go through. Go through.” “Lift me up,” whispered John, “lift me up. I can’t go through.” “Go through,” said the voice, “go through.” Then there was silence. The murmuring ceased. There was only this trembling beneath him. And he knew there was a light somewhere. “Go through.” “Ask Him to take you through.”20 (Go Tell it on the Mountain)

V But word, image and rhythm are only the basic elements of what, within the terms of my definition, would go to make up a jazz aesthetic in the Caribbean novel. What determines the shape and direction of a jazz performance, given the basic elements, is the nature of its improvisation. And pursuing our correspondences in this matter, it is to this, we must now turn in our examination of the West Indian novel. (To be continued)

George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (London, 1953): 209–10.

19

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York, 1952, 1954 ed.): 174–5.

20

IX. THE ARTIST IN THE CARIBBEAN Aubrey Williams Originally presented in English at the First Caribbean Artists Movement conference, University of Kent, 1967. This text was first published in Savacou 2 (1970): 16–18. The Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), founded in London in 1966, represented a momentous event for Caribbean modernism. A diasporic and transnational movement, it produced some of the most distinctively experimental and innovative works of the long history of Caribbean modernism. As Kamau Brathwaite writes in his essay “Timehri,” which also appears in this issue of Savacou, “The object of CAM was first and foremost to bring West Indian artists ‘exiled’ in London into private and public contact with one another.”1 It was a self-consciously multi-arts movement, and over time it extended to encompass artists, writers, and intellectuals still resident in the Caribbean, as well as those who returned, becoming a multi-centered movement with bases in London and Kingston, Jamaica. Aubrey Williams (1925–90), a Guyanese painter, was one of the central figures of this movement. Resident in London since 1952, Williams had studied at St Martin’s School of Art before establishing himself as an important Caribbean painter. From the 1970s on, he moved frequently between the UK, Jamaica, and the United States. This essay is drawn from the second issue of Savacou, the publication of the Caribbean Artists Movement, as part of a special issue collecting papers delivered at the First Caribbean Artists Movement conference, held at the University of Kent in 1967. This important meeting helped to consolidate the movement, with contributions from writers including Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, C. L. R. James, and many others. Savacou itself began publication in 1970 and ran for fifteen issues until 1979. A larger and more luxurious publication than earlier periodicals, it eschewed the local advertisements (or indeed, any advertisements) of the earlier texts, and was far more carefully and intentionally curated than a publication like Bim. Its masthead, which advertised its location as “Kingston and London,” reflected CAM’s transnational orientation. The issue following the one in which this essay appeared, no. 3–4, “New Writing 1970,” is its most famous, publishing a selection of highly experimental poetry that played with oral forms and rhythms in dazzlingly (and controversially) new ways, building on the affinity between music and literature that Brathwaite develops in “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” (2.viii). Williams’ essay was printed in issue 2, which collected papers from the first CAM conference and which in some ways serves as a manifesto or statement of purpose for the movement as a whole. Over Savacou’s run, the journal became increasingly academic, and by the late 1970s read as something between a literary magazine and a scholarly journal. This essay, “The Artist in the Caribbean” (which takes its name from a C. L. R. James lecture of the same title), offers an innovative approach to modernism in the Caribbean. Echoing both the indigenism and the Latin American orientation of La Revue indigène (2.i), it links the emphasis in European and American modernism on abstraction and antinarrative to the specificities of the Caribbean and Latin American landscape. Williams, whose work takes inspiration from Amerindian designs and crafts, sought to implement this approach in his own distinctive Caribbean modernist art. AM

Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, “Timehri,” Savacou 2 (September 1970): 41.

1

110

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

I was very disturbed, intellectually, by Professor Elsa Goveia’s talk this morning.2 She made it clear that we have just done a very difficult thing in breaking out of one phase of our development and entering the new freedoms of the different islands and countries in the Caribbean. We will also at the same time have to move from colonialism into the 20th century in one jump, and we will have to do this in our creative arts first. It always seems in the history of man that the arts give the direction for the technology, the philosophy, the politics and the very life of the people. Art is always in the foreground; it is the true avant garde. The visual arts, being the simplest and the most direct, should be a little ahead of literature, because with emerging peoples you have the problem of illiteracy, and direct contact is the natural level of communication in this society. We have considered the strength of folk lore in emerging societies. We know that this is direct contact. It is one man or one person sitting in front of a group of other persons. Painting is this kind of direct contact in that the artist must see the object before he can contemplate it, and before it can enter his state of being. Writing will be less effective until we achieve a higher level of literacy. Now, I am worried about a prevalent conception that good art, working art, must speak, it must be narrative.3 I do not see the necessity for art to be narrative, in that in thinking about the past and man, art has never been “narrative” to any great extent. I would not call primitive art in any sense directly representational or figurative. The arts of past civilisations were to a great extent non-figurative. One does not question the validity, or the strength of impact, of so-called primitive abstract designs on shields, on houses, in pottery in the weave of fabrics; one just accepts them. But strangely in the West today, one makes demands upon the visual artist, demands that I think are not warranted in many cases. (It was a bit sad for me to see that it was our elder statesman in letters, C. L. R. James, who has turned over the past two years, into being a champion for the more advanced and adventurous avant garde in the visual arts.4 I would have thought that our young writers would have footed the bill far easier as they should be involved in the tensions that would produce an avant garde art in the Caribbean.) If our intellectuals have not got an automatically functioning visual chain reaction going yet, what must we hope for from our people at home? When I was last in Guyana

Elsa Goveia (1925–80) was a historian of the Caribbean, and the first female professor at the University College of the West Indies (now the University of the West Indies). Her talk, “The Social Framework,” also published in this issue of Savacou, discussed how the history of race relations still structured West Indian society. She concluded by calling on artists and writers to play a key role in dismantling what she calls the “inferiority/superiority ranking” of racial hierarchy in favour of a more fully democratic and egalitarian society, effectively making a case for socially and politically engaged art and literature.

2

The dominant interpretation of modernism in the visual arts follows Clement Greenberg’s account of modernism as the attempt to purge painting of “literature,” by which he usually means narrative. In his rejection of figuration and narrative, Williams initially allies himself to Euro-American modernism, although he complicates this perspective and challenges Greenberg’s anti-representationalism later in the essay.

3

C. L. R. James (1901–89) was a Trinidadian writer, known for his prodigious influence on Caribbean and black diasporic literature and for his life-long commitment to Marxist socialism. Given his enormous and wideranging output, his contribution to art criticism is often neglected, but he was a strong supporter and perceptive analyst of the visual arts. Williams likely has in mind James’ lecture “The Artist in the Caribbean,” from which Williams takes his title. James’ lecture was delivered in 1959 at the University College of the West Indies, Mona, and has been reprinted in The Future in the Present: Selected Writings (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1977) and in Caribbean Quarterly 54.1–2 (2008): 177–80. James was also present at the CAM symposium, and the paper he delivered there, “Discovering Literature in Trinidad: The Nineteen-Thirties,” about the Beacon group (see 2.iii), appears in this issue of Savacou.

4

MODERNISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

111

at the celebration of Independence,5 I was stopped in the street by a man driving a dray cart that was loaded with people who had come all the way from a village named Buxton on the east coast of Demerara. They had come to Georgetown. And this man came up to me. I was taking photographs, and he made himself known. I did not know him and he told me how glad he was to meet me and he told me of a new function in his life, one that gave him great pleasure. He said to me “You see that dray cart there. One day every month I load it up with people from my village and I bring them down to look at your paintings.” I felt very crushed and humble, and I just didn’t know what to say. I said to him, “They are abstract, people say they are abstract.” He used a very strong Guyanese cussword. He said “Abstract, what is that? I don’t understand abstract. When I look at your paintings I can think about my days in the bush.” And I thanked him and I went up to the dray cart and I shook everybody’s hand and I spoke to the children for a while. And it was one of the most touching episodes of my visit back home. I am not trying to ask Caribbean intellectuals to consider abstraction as “high art”, or the “art of the future” or anything like that. As a matter of fact I don’t even think of my paintings as being abstract. I can’t really see abstraction. Abstraction to me would be two colours on a surface, no form and no imprint of the hand of man. I do not think that painters paint abstraction, nor do I think that sculptors sculpt abstraction. I am not very sure that I understand the meaning of the word. Another much abused term is “modern art.” We should see to it that this awful virus does not get a foot hold in the Caribbean — the attitude to the visual arts that automatically attaches labels to what we see when we look. Much of my work has come out of a long contemplation and a search into the pre-Columbian civilisations in the New World — primarily, the Aztec, the Maya, the Toltec and the Inca. Also, a long immersion in the work of our South American Indians in Guyana. I firmly feel that such art should be automatically appreciated by people from the Caribbean and from Guyana because they share the same environment. The South American and the Caribbean environments as compared with the ordered environments of much of the rest of the world, appears naturally ‘abstract’. It is yet, thank Heavens, not rearranged too much by the hand of man. We are losing it fast, but we are lucky to have our roots still in the earth of the Caribbean. We are still in a position to contemplate terrestrial reality. Ours is a beautiful landscape; unbelievably beautiful in some cases; but, as compared with the ordered landscapes in the countries that have been over-lived in, bizarre, unreal, incongruous. It is a very strong landscape and the primitive art that came out of this landscape remains unique. We should be proud of our non-figuration. We should be proud of the essences of human existence that the people from that neck of the woods has produced in the world. We should be very proud of people like the Tamayo from Mexico.6 We should be proud of people like the Matta from Peru.7 We must become more involved with the visual

Guyana achieved its independence from Britain on May 26, 1966, the year before this talk was given.

5

Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) was a Mexican painter and printmaker. His works draw on pre-Columbian forms as well as European modernist influences. Williams adds a definite article to his name (and to Matta’s in the next sentence), creating the impression that he is speaking about an indigenous people, although there are no such groups in Mexico.

6

Williams is probably referring here to Roberto Matta (1911–2002), one of Chile’s best-known artists, who, like Tamayo, drew on both European surrealism and pre-Columbian Andean textiles in his work. Although Matta travelled to Peru, he was not however Peruvian.

7

112

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

output of our artists in the Caribbean, because they are going to change the real seeing of the world. They are going to do it just as the politicians and the writers will do it. And I would be far happier if I could see a greater interchange between all the arts in the Caribbean. Caribbean art seems to me up to now terribly isolated. Everybody is in his niche, using up endless energy working alone without the help of his colleagues. We should have more interchange, we should have dialogue between the novelist and the painter, the musician and the dancer, the potter, the weaver; even the artisans should be included in this. And the dialogue with the people would then be automatic. We come from this environment, we came out of this environment, and we produce the things that belong back to the environment. If our painters must grope and search and forge ahead, we do not as yet know the language they should speak. We will have to grow into this language and it is a movement from a great state of frustration into one of a growing norm. I hope that we will eventually reach what can be called a norm visually, but we must not be too impatient, and I would hope that the interchange between all the arts would promote an atmosphere in which the Caribbean people will find a greater intimacy with the visual arts.

CHAPTER THREE

Modernism in Sub-Saharan Africa EDITED BY ALYS MOODY

The question of whether modernism exists in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, has been one of the most hotly debated controversies in the field of global modernism. Conventionally, the controversy is traced to Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah’s blistering attack on critic Charles Larson who, in his 1971 study, The Emergence of African Fiction, purported to show the influence of James Joyce on Armah’s writing. In a scathing review of this study, Armah retorted that Larson’s attempt to read him as a modernist sought “to annihilate whatever is African in me and my work,” reflecting a political imbalance within which “Africa is inferior; the West is superior. As African Literature develops, the best of it must become less African, more Western.”1 Armah’s outrage at what he punningly calls Larson’s “Larsony” gives voice to a still-widespread anxiety in global modernist studies: that by applying the term “modernism” to times and places outside the West, we are enforcing a Western template on non-Western literatures, inevitably casting those outside Europe and the United States as belated and derivative, and reinforcing a view of literature within which the West is the gold standard to which other cultures aspire. Armah’s polemic reflected a widespread skepticism in African literature toward both Western scholars who sought to find “modernism” in Africa and African writers whose literary affiliations hewed more to European than African sources (Chinweizu’s essay in this section, 3.vii, encapsulates the terms of this latter debate). In this context, scholars of African literature have been hesitant about the application of the term “modernism” in the African context. With the rise of global modernist studies, scholars have begun to revise this position, albeit with considerable caution. While Western modernism did have a certain purchase on some African writers in the 1960s and 1970s, the force of Armah’s position continues to generate a widespread skepticism of influence studies or formalist accounts as a way of understanding African modernism. Instead, scholars who suggest that modernism is a useful frame for the analysis of African literature typically do so on the basis of accounts of modernism that take the term to suggest a set of literary or artistic responses to modernity, either from a world-systems theory perspective, as in the work by the Warwick Research Collective, or by examining the institutional structures by which modernism

Ayi Kwei Armah, “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction,” Asemka 4 (1976): 9, 12.

1

114

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

was disseminated globally.2 For most of these scholars, modernism arises as the literature of African decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s, in tandem with the emergence of new African nations. This volume broadly follows this accepted periodization, and the majority of the texts in this section were published between 1963 and 1973. To this, however, we also add an important earlier outlier from the colonial period: Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, a Malagasy poet, active in the 1920s and 1930s, who is often described as Africa’s first modernist poet. For Rabearivelo, as for his later heirs, modernism in sub-Saharan Africa remains intrinsically bound up with the problem of tradition in the context of colonization and its aftermath, and with the dilemma of how to produce or register a specifically African modernity in literature or art. One of the effects of the later periodization of modernism in Africa is that the institutional landscape is markedly different than it is for pre-Second World War modernisms. Much African modernism takes place in the context of the twin pressures of the cultural Cold War and the exigencies of nation-building. As a result, institutions— from state-sponsored art organizations and national universities, to transnational organs for the global dissemination of modernism, such as the CIA-funded Congress for Culture Freedom (CCF)—play a central role in the development of African modernism. The importance of institutionalized conferences and arts festivals, as well as the centrality of journals such as the CCF-funded Transition and Black Orpheus, and, in French, the tremendously influential Présence Africaine, reflects the role that modernism played in both African nation-building and Cold War geopolitics. While in places such as Nigeria, Senegal, and Zaire, modernism was part of a nationbuilding project, even these projects developed within a larger pan-African worldview, which tended to dominate African cultural production in this period. The legacy of negritude was particularly important to the development of African literature and art, especially in the Francophone world. The idea was far more controversial among Englishspeaking writers, but even there, modernism developed as a regional undertaking, often in conversation with the African diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean. As a result, modernism in sub-Saharan Africa most frequently understood itself as a regional— if not always a fully diasporic—project, in which individual national concerns formed part of a larger project of African cultural realization. The dominance of the term “African” over that of specific nationalities or ethnic groups reflects this categorization, and has determined the shape of this section. Nonetheless, African modernism was not a monolith. As this section reveals, language and colonial history presented a major point of cleavage within African literature in this period, although the visual arts—no doubt for obvious reasons—tended to be less divided on these grounds. Francophone and Anglophone Africa not only spoke different languages, but developed quite different theories of the role of culture, influenced above all by the disagreement over the role of Senghorian negritude in decolonial African consciousness. Many of the major conferences and some of the journals in this period actively sought to bridge this divide, and did so with a more concerted effort than occurred in, say, the Caribbean. Nonetheless, Francophone and Anglophone modernisms developed as,

Neil Lazarus, “Modernism and African Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 228–45; Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015); Peter Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

2

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

115

to some extent, parallel projects. This section includes examples from both traditions, allowing readers to trace the parallel but intertwined evolution of these two approaches. Senghor’s essay (3.iii) provides a brief account of their divergence. In addition to language, there were also substantial regional differences within Africa itself. The most marked is the break at the Saharan desert, a cleavage that this volume follows. North African writing is discussed in more detail in the next section, on modernism in the Arab world, reflecting the increasing orientation of literary and artistic circles in North Africa over this period toward the Middle East, as well as the usual scope of “African” conferences and journals in the period, which tended to focus on sub-Saharan Africa. But even sub-Saharan African literary and artistic culture was divided amongst itself. It tended to be dominated by work from West Africa: in the Anglophone world, by writing and art from Nigeria; in the Francophone world, by the towering figure of Léopold Senghor, who as Senegal’s first president set the intellectual agenda for Francophone African modernism throughout the continent. Despite the fact that Transition, one of the major periodicals of the period, was based in Uganda until the late 1960s, East African writers and artists worried about what they often described as their literary and artistic underdevelopment in this period. Kenyan/Tanzanian artist Elimo Njau’s essay (3.iv) in this volume discusses this concern, and provides representation from the East. Southern Africa produced a different set of problems again, reflecting a different colonial history. During the colonial period, both East and West African nations had had only small white settler colonial populations, and most countries from these regions achieved independence during the 1960s: Nigeria, Senegal, and Congo in 1960; Tanzania in 1961; Uganda in 1962; Kenya in 1963, and so on. In southern Africa, however, the situation was quite different. Larger white minorities in first Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and then South Africa declared independence unilaterally without ceding any power to their indigenous populations. Instead, they instituted highly oppressive segregated systems of apartheid, designed to ensure the continued grip of the white population on power. In this context, the majority of indigenous African writing and art in southern Africa during this time was highly politicized, and explicitly framed in opposition to modernism, which was increasingly seen as self-indulgent and irresponsible under the oppressive political conditions that prevailed in these countries. Conferences of African writing regularly discussed South Africa as developing along a different trajectory, and depicted its writers and artists as engaged in a quite distinct set of struggles that left far less space for the more explicitly literary or artistic questions about the emergence of national culture that preoccupied the rest of the continent. In South Africa, the most influential nation to follow this trajectory, modernism was associated almost exclusively with the writing of white South Africans, such as André P. Brink and his Sestigers group in Afrikaans (3.v) or J. M. Coetzee in English. For this reason, although this volume reflects both East and West African writing, it omits black southern African literature, which has not normally been a major part of discussions about modernism in Africa. Readers who wish to pursue this, however, might investigate journals such as South Africa’s Staffider magazine, or Zimbabwean writers such as Dambudzo Marechera (omitted here simply for the lack of available writings suitable for this volume). The texts that we have assembled here together suggest the viability—even the productivity—of modernism as a concept for analyzing literature and art in sub-Saharan Africa. Chinweizu’s essay, which calls for “modernists of Africa” to replace the derivative “modernists of the West” that his essay rails against, articulates a sentiment that runs

116

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

throughout this volume. Across the geographical and linguistic differences that separate the writers here, the central preoccupation of this section is how literature and art can respond to the demands of a modernity that has been forcibly produced through the travails of colonialism, in terms that do not reproduce the West’s cultural dominance. The answers provided here are varied, but each gravitates around a problematic of how to reconstitute a disrupted tradition, a problematic that has been central to an influential strand of modernism that unites European and American conservatives like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound with writers as diverse as Lu Xun in China, Rabindranath Tagore in India, and Albert Wendt in the South Pacific. In this sense, sub-Saharan African modernism emerges as the decolonial modernism par excellence, and one of the central traditions of post-Second World War modernism. AM

FURTHER READING Brown, Nicholas. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Harney, Elizabeth. In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960– 1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Jaji, Tsitsi Ella. Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kalliney, Peter. Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kalliney, Peter. “Modernism, African Literature, and the Cold War.” MLQ 76.3 (2015): 334–68. Larson, Charles. The Emergence of African Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Lazarus, Neil. “Modernism and African Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Mark Wollaeger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 228–45. Okeke-Agulu, Chika. Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Van Beurden, Sarah. Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). Van Beurden, Sarah. “The Zairian Avant-Garde: Modes of African Modernism.” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 151–8.

I. IN SEARCH OF THE LOST! Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo Originally published in Malagasy in Ny Fandrosoam-Baovao, Nouvelle Série, Vol. 2, no. 28, Antananarivo, February 24, 1932. Translated by Matthew Winterton. Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1903–37) is sometimes hailed as Africa’s first modernist. Born in 1903 just north of Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, he was an illegitimate child born into a royal but impoverished family. After leaving school at 13, he taught himself French and from his late teens regularly wrote and published poetry and other writing in both French and Malagasy. Although he never left Madagascar, his work circulated widely in his lifetime, and his short but prolific career had a profound impact on both Malagasy and Francophone African literature. His reputation as a writer is reflected in an invitation to contribute an essay on the history of Madagascar to Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology (a contribution that was translated from the French by Samuel Beckett). In the Francophone world, he was an important influence on Léopold Senghor, and featured in Senghor’s influential 1948 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de la langue française, to which Jean-Paul Sartre’s important essay “Orphée noir” (Black Orpheus) served as an introduction. Rabearivelo’s suicide in 1937, at the age of 34, has been widely mythologized, construed, especially in the decades after the Second World War, as a tragic act of anticolonial defiance. In fact, Rabearivelo’s politics—like those of the Revue indigène group in Haiti (2.i)—are difficult to reconcile with contemporary understandings of anti-colonial resistance. Like Normil G. Sylvain and his peers in Haiti, Rabearivelo was strongly influenced by Charles Maurras and his monarchist, anti-semitic, and proto-fascist group Action Française. His somewhat ambivalent attitude toward French colonialism was paired with his nostalgia for a lost royal line, to which he saw himself to be the tragic heir. This attempt to balance a Malagasy heritage with the French colonial influence, which he understood as a given of the modern world, underpins the ambivalent nostalgia of the two texts published here and the complex negotiations that Rabearivelo seeks to perform between tradition and modernity, and between Malagasy poetic heritage, and French and Western influence. The title of the first piece foregrounds this ambivalence, evoking Proust in its nostalgia for a lost Malagasy culture.1 These texts, translated into English from Malagasy for the first time, are Rabearivelo’s most well-known and widely quoted manifestos. The first, published in 1932, sets out a project that the 1934 reply suggests has been achieved. Both first appeared in Ny Fandrosoam-Baovao, a Malagasy opinion newspaper that was published from 1931 to 1959, and which was known for its relatively accommodating attitude toward the French colonial powers. The notes to this essay are the translator’s. AM

Our translation of this title takes its warrant from a letter to Pierre-Louis Flouquet, dated February 27, 1932, in which Rabearivelo proposes translating the title into French as: “À la recherche de l’Enfant perdue, en l’espèce la Poësie” (In Search of the Lost Child; in this case, Poetry).

1

118

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

We have neither sufficiently questioned nor examined ourselves, with regard to poetry. Yet within each poem lies a portion of ourselves; therein lies the true mirror image of our hearts and what is concealed by the soul. Perhaps the reason is that we still focus on its exterior, searching only for lullabies within the stanzas of the poetry we read. The significant yet unfortunate consequence is that we neither make progress nor fall behind but are as the kankafotra2 year-round. Decades ago, models and rules from abroad were instilled within our poetry. These were adopted wholeheartedly and followed indiscriminately. Too eager to fit in,3 we did not fully consider whether the new styles would harmonize or clash with the music of our words, or whether they would benefit or destroy them. And so ours were left behind, forgotten even, mocked for their age, criticized as archaic. Our ears began to change, and our hearts also; ultimately came the loss4 of simple poetry, replaced with nonsensical rhymes. *** It is these foreign models and rules that we believe (along with Ny Avana and Ch. Rajoelisolo5) to be the source of the disappearance6 of real poetry. But we will arm ourselves with proverbial muskets7: using this same foreign poetry we will seek and restore it again! Those of you who have lent your ears away and no longer perceive the mellifluous voices8 of the poems of our forebears, we invite you: open the Bible and read from Paul and the Psalms and the Hymns—these are true poems even if the verses do not rhyme.

From the Malagasy proverb, “Volan-kankafotra ka ny omaly tsy miova ihany” (lit., “Like the call of the cuckoo; [that which was] yesterday has not changed at all”). The kankafotra, or Madagascan cuckoo (Cuculus rochii), is known for its characteristic unchanging and punctual call (at the beginning of spring and fall). Thus, volan-kankafotra, or “words like the kankafotra” signifies monotonous, repetitive, or uninteresting speech.

2

Miova randrana (lit., “to change hairstyles” or “to change braids”). Malagasy hairstyles are unique among the eighteen or more different ethnic groups found around the island. Thus, changing one’s hairstyle here is akin to turning away from one’s cultural roots.

3

At the time of Rabearivelo, fahaverezana conveyed not only loss but also a sense of enslavement.

4

Ny Avana Ramanantoanina (1891–1940) and Charles Rajoelisolo (1896–??) were other Malagasy writers, sympathetic to Rabearivelo’s project. Their names are signed to the companion piece, “The Lost Is Found” (see below).

5

Again, the reference to the enslavement of real poetry is also implied here.

6

The original Malagasy text, “Hataonay vavabasy” comes from “manao vavabasy,” an abbreviated form of, and allusion to, the Malagasy proverb, “Toy ny vavabasy: ka izay idirany no ivoahany” (lit., “As the rifle: that which enters also comes out”). This proverb refers to muzzle-loading rifles, i.e., the shot that is loaded [entered] is also that which is expelled upon firing. Thus, to manao vavabasy is to use the original object or idea to counter itself. Here, Rabearivelo indicates that he will capitalize on the foreign influence which prevailed among his contemporary Malagasy poets to expose and counteract its effect.

7

The original Malagasy text is a play-on-words; mandre feo manga is “to hear a beautiful voice”; manga feo is the native adjectival phrase which literally characterizes one’s [usually singing] voice as euphonious.

8

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

119

In addition, we intend to translate and showcase9 selected poems from those written around the world. We will not publish them by year or country, but we will intermix them to appreciate the various visages of the man Poetry. And if you let your ears return to their natural state, we are sure you will find that which has been lost. J. J. Rabearivelo

The original Malagasy text is a play-on-words; tapia-tononkira is the possessive compound of tapiaka and tononkira. Tapiaka is a word that describes a harsh noise, often paired with the colloquial description of “nails on a chalkboard.” Here, continuing the theme of music and sounds, Rabearivelo purposefully describes foreign poetry as cacophonous.

9

II. THE LOST IS FOUND Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo Originally published in Malagasy in Ny Fandrosoam-Baovao, Nouvelle Série, Vol. 4, no. 141, Antananarivo, June 13, 1934. Translated by Matthew Winterton. When we previously spoke of poetry here in F.B.1 we used the words: In Search of the Lost. We insinuated that real poetry had become lost due to the intrusion of Western versification. We no longer search for what has been lost as true2 poetry has begun to appear: the reveries of the heart stirring the hearts of others, the songs of the soul quaking the souls of others. It has been some time since we have shown ourselves. We sowed the ideas and allowed them to germinate a little. We are happy to see that our seeds have now begun to sprout, and that the first to introduce versification here, M. J. Rainizanabololona, publicly declared that mere rhyme is not poetry. He wrote in Antananarivo (no. 96 F page 3 column 3): “In my opinion, it is better, by far, to have poetry with real substance which moves the heart, even if it does not follow the rules, than verses which rhyme but lack a deeper meaning, leaving one empty3 like those who try to fetch water with woven baskets.” In fact, this is exactly our opinion too. Poetry in and of itself by definition is the essence of poetic art. The prosody of rhyme is merely the clothing that adorns it. We simply peeled back the layers so as to give clarity to those minds acclimated to seeing its clothing as its body; we laid bare the real poetry for those seeking the truth. We have found the genuine poets, that is to say, those people who have the poetic soul and spirit, and who share our opinion. And we are thrilled to show the reader some of their works. Here is one that we will demonstrate which will prick the hearts of those who wish to lift all real poetry and together spread their wings to soar through the spacious skies of the reveries of the heart, limitless and free. Ny Avana Ramanantoanina, Charles Rajoelisolo, J. J. Rabearivelo

Abbreviation of Fandrosoam-baovao, the name of the journal in which Rabearivelo was publishing these pieces.

1

Rabearivelo makes use of wordplay again, using tapiaka to allude to the cacophony of foreign poetic influence as described in his first passage. Here, however, he characterizes the “sound” of Malagasy identity (true poetry) as tapiaka, but gives it the opposite sense. Thus, Rabearivelo implies he has fulfilled his intent to manao vavabasy through his use of foreign poetry to expose and counteract its deleterious effect on the Malagasy identity.

2

Another wordplay: miala maina is “to leave dry,” which phrase figuratively means “to be unsuccessful” or “to leave empty-handed.” Here, the phrase is used literally in describing one who seeks to fetch water using a woven basket riddled with holes between the weaves.

3

III. NEGRITUDE AND THE CONCEPT OF UNIVERSAL CIVILISATION Léopold Sédar Senghor First presented in French as the opening address of the Seminar on African Literature of French Expression, University of Dakar, March 26, 1963. Originally published in French as “Négritude et Civilisation de l’Universel” in the French edition of Présence Africaine, nouvelle série, no. 46 (2e trimestre, 1963): 8–13. This uncredited English translation first published in the English edition of Présence Africaine, no. 18 (2nd quarter, 1963): 9–13. Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) was a poet, literary and cultural critic, and the first president of Senegal. In these roles, he became the dominant figure of Francophone African literature and culture for much of the twentieth century. While studying in Paris in the 1930s, Senghor and fellow students Léon Damas and Aimé Césaire edited the short-lived student newspaper, L’Étudiant noir, in which the principles of negritude were first developed (see Césaire’s essay in this volume, 2.iv). Like Césaire and Damas, Senghor went on to develop a reputation as both an influential poet and a leading political figure in the independence struggle and post-independence government of his home country. His volumes of poetry, including Chants d’ombre (1945), Hosties noires (1948), and Éthiopiques (1956), for which he is credited in the byline to this essay, seek a poetics of negritude. As president of Senegal after the country’s independence in 1960, he made culture a central component of the African republic. This speech reflects the state-sponsored, institutional forms that negritude took under the leadership of Senghor in post-independence Senegal. It was delivered as the opening address of the Congress of African Writers of French Expression, an influential conference that was sponsored by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom. The proceedings— including this essay—were subsequently published in both French and English translation in Présence Africaine, likely the most important Francophone literary magazine of the African diaspora. We reproduce here the uncredited English translation of this text, alongside notes that indicate where the English diverges in significant ways from the French. The translation loses much of Senghor’s linguistic playfulness and stylistic elegance, but is itself an important document, reflecting the role of translation practices in the development of an African literature. This essay is fruitfully compared both to the earlier articulations of negritude in, for instance, Aimé Césaire’s founding document of the movement, “Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution” (2.iv), as well as the contemporaneous debates in Anglophone Africa, including Chinweizu’s (3.vii) and Enwonwu’s (3.vi) essays published here, around the role of colonial languages and state-sponsored arts in post-independence Africa. This essay reflects the emergence of negritude as a significant line of demarcation between French- and English-speaking African modernists in this period; the proceedings of the twinned conferences of African writers of French and English expression, to which this essay is a contribution, frequently reflect this cultural and ideological divide. AM

Once again in Dakar, men and women of various continents, races and civilisations are arriving to keep a rendez-vous. For what reason have they come except to consider their human condition and through this to bring their own contribution to the building of the

122

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

world — the new world? This gathering to study African literature written in French can have no other interpretation. I realise that many people1 will unthinkingly speak of exoticism, for here it is a question, not of any French literature, not even of Negro literature, nourished by the sap and juices of Negritude. I have used this word which you did not want to include in the title of this seminar, and I understand why. You did not want to attract the tourists with their pith helmets and their dark glasses. The intention was praiseworthy and it met our need. Once again in Dakar, where the winds blow from all points of the compass, in this crossroads open to the sea and the land, we have to build and realize the concept of Universal Civilisation.2 If we speak of building we must consider the raw materials; since it is a question of literature it is also a question of Man. And if Man is concerned, the Universal conception can only be universal if it is coloured by humanity and rooted in Man. Not Man as he exists in categories, outside Time-Space, but the living man,3 made of blood and bone, thoughts and passions. Man from a continent, from a race, if not from a nation, placed exactly in Time-Space. This is the object of my speech. The Universal trend of the literature which is the subject of this Seminar is best proved by its being written in French. Paradoxically, its new humanism is proved by its Negritude. This needs explaining. The Anglo-Saxons, above all, have criticized us for having chosen French as the means of Negro-African expression.4 It is a case of being more royalist then the king. I say that we did not choose, and if it had been necessary to choose, we would, perhaps, have chosen French, not as a result of sentiment but of reason. I repeat, we did not choose. It was our situation as a colonised people which imposed the language of the colonisers upon us, or rather their policy of assimilation.5 This policy based on the “immortal principles” of 1789 was not all bad.6 The pity was that these principles were not applied completely and without hypocrisy. Fortunately, they were applied in sufficient measure so that their virtues, among which can be numbered the French language, could bear fruit. For Negritude is a fruit of the Revolution, through action and reaction. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, we have taken up the weapons of the coloniser and turned them against him.7 “Miraculous weapons” as Aimé Césaire calls them.8 “les distraits” (the absent-minded)

1

The French reads simply: “la Civilisation de l’Universel,” and does not specify “the concept of,” either here or in the title, although its treatment of the adjective “universel” as a noun implies that it is the concept that is in question. 2

“l’homme concret, vivant” (the concrete, living man).

3

“On nous a reproché, singulièrement du côté anglo-saxon d’avoir choisi le français pour exprimer le Négroafricain.” (We have been reproached, above all from the Anglo-Saxon side, for having chosen French in order to express the Negro-African.)

4

Assimilation was the official French colonial policy, which aimed to turn colonized peoples into French people through education in French and adoption of French culture and values.

5

The phrase “immortels principes de 89” often appears in French literature with a heavy dose of irony. See, for example, Charles Baudelaire, “The Mirror,” in Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose, trans. Keith Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009): 79; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Penguin, 2003): 72.

6

“Léro was the precursor; he invented the exploitation of surrealism as a ‘miraculous weapon’… … In Césaire, the great surrealist tradition is realized, it takes on its definitive meaning and is destroyed: surrealism—the European movement—is taken from the Europeans by a Black man who turns it against them and gives it a rigorously defined function”: Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” trans. John MacCombe, The Massachusetts Review 6.1 (1964–5): 32, 34.

7

Les Armes miraculeuses is the title of Aimé Césaire’s 1946 poetry collection. It was published by Gallimard and assembled most of the poetry that he had published in Tropiques.

8

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

123

This is why if we had the choice we would have chosen French. Firstly it is a language which has enjoyed a far-reaching influence and which still enjoys it in great measure. In the eighteenth century French was proposed and accepted as the universal language of culture. I know that today it comes after English, Chinese and Russian in the number of people who speak it, and it is the official language of fewer countries than English. But if quantity is lacking, there is still quality. I am not claiming that French is superior to these other languages, neither in beauty or richness, but I do say that it is the supreme language for communication: “a language of politeness and honesty”,9 a language of beauty and clarity. I will not develop this point which I have already dealt with in an issue of the review Esprit, and to which I refer you.10 It is a fact that French has made it possible for us to communicate to our brothers and to the world, the unheard-of message which only we could write. It has allowed us to bring to Universal Civilisation a contribution without which the civilisation of the twentieth century could not have been universal. This warmth, which forms a part of the true soul of Man would have been lacking. Others, from Rimbaud to Breton, have said it before me that European civilisation which was presented to us as the civilisation was not yet worthy of the name, since it was a mutilated civilisation deprived of the dormant energies of Asia and Africa. In fact, it could not be called humanism, since it excluded from participation in the Universal two-thirds of Humanity — the “Third World”. Since the beginning of the century this gap has been narrowed progressively as the result of three factors: the extension of European colonisation, the intensification of inter-continental relationships, and the independence of former colonies. The cumulative action of these three factors has thrown the races closer together, showing them their brothers in a new light, and the complementary values of their different civilisations. It is in this context that we must study Negritude, so that we may understand its values and measure its strength of renovation. This, to me, should be the object of this Seminar. I know that the word frightens delicate souls who are as afraid as microbes of pure air and who confuse vulgarity with authenticity. As if literature was a manual of cookery recipes, and not the living expression of living men! Once again, Negritude is not racialism11 or vulgar contortions. It is, quite simply, the synthesis of all the values of civilisation in the Negro World. Not the values of the past, but of authentic culture. It is this spirit of Negro-African civilisation, based on the earth and Negro hearts, which

“une langage de gentillesse et d’honnêteté.” This line is drawn from Jean Guéhenno’s article “Si j’avais à enseigner la France..…,” published in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française in 1954. Drawing on his travels in Africa in the early 1950s, the essay writes against negritude and tries to find a pedagogy appropriate for black African students. He advocates teaching them the French language, “qu’ils ne pourraient plus se soustraire à ce que mille années d’usage ont inscrit de gentillesse et d’honnêteté dans la langage de mon pays” (so that they could no longer escape from the politeness and honesty that a thousand years of usage had inscribed in the language of my country). Senghor was obviously taken or troubled by this phrase, and he returned to it on numerous occasions, beginning in a postface to his 1954 collection Ethiopiques. Jean Guéhenno, “Si j’avais à enseigner la France… …” [If I had to teach France… …], Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française 10 (1953): 585, rept. Guéhenno, La France et les noirs [France and the Blacks] (Paris: Gallimard, 1954): 139.

9

10 Esprit, November 1962 (Le français, langue universelle). [note in original] Senghor returns again to the line on the “gentillesse et honnêteté” of the French language on p. 842 of this article. Esprit is a French literary magazine, associated in the post-war period with the New Left.

“racisme.”

11

124

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

is offered to the world — both beings and things — to unify it, to understand and to show it.12 This spirit of civilization, this culture, will be found ex-pressed13 in all the works presented here, with greater or lesser success, and greater or lesser talent. You will also find it expressed in the works which we shall present in Dakar in 1965, at the Festival of Negro Arts.14 I come back to a persistent misunderstanding in order, I hope, to clear it up permanently. To call Negro Art — and good literature is art — reactionary or revolutionary, as has been done, is to delight in confusion. Every culture is revolutionary in the sense that it is, in Time-Space, the integration of Man and the world, and of the world and Man.15 But Negro Art does not lie within the realm of ideas and feelings but with their expression.16 One has only to listen and look at the Guinean National Ballet, who sing and dance the Guinean revolution.17 In this measure they are works of beauty, they bring to life the virtues of millenary Negro art; they are living, rhythmic, singing images. Once again I want to illustrate my point with a reference to European literature, or more generally, to European art. In contrast with African art which is permanence, European art is change, at least since the Renaissance, which freed the mind from rigid forms. On one side France, on the other Egypt. The French artist or writer sets out to create “what can never be recreated”.18 This leads to an incessant renewing of ideas, feelings and forms [des sentiments-idées et des formes], which explains the renovated borrowings from abroad, which represent France’s main contribution to Universal Civilisation. In another sphere — the industrial sphere — the same development can be seen in North America, the daughter of Europe. The example of France typifies Europe. In this case therefore, permanence, stemming from repetition is condemned as antiart. Here, the ideal of the poem, like that of the novel, with the originality of ideas and

“C’est cet esprit de la civilisation négro-africaine, qui, enraciné dans la terre et les cœurs noirs, est tendu vers le monde—être et choses—pour le com-prendre, l’unifier et le manifester” (bold in original, rendered as italics in this translation). “Com-prendre,” translated here as “understand,” also contains a pun on the prefix “com-” which, in French as in English, signifies togetherness or combination, with the verb “prendre,” to take. It implies that understanding is also an act of unification or bringing together. “Esprit” can be translated as mind or spirit.

12

“ex-primée.” “Primée” is the feminine past participle of “primer,” to prevail over, take first place, dominate. The emphasis is omitted in the translation. The translation breaks “expressed” across a line and it is not clear whether this is an intentional attempt to preserve the pun or not.

13

See Ben Enwonwu’s essay (3.vi), which was first presented at this festival.

14

“l’intégration de l’Homme au monde et du monde à l’Homme” (integration of Man into the world, and the world into Man).

15

“Mais l’art nègre ne se situe pas dans le domaine du sentiment–idée; il est dans l’ex-pression du sentiment– idée.” Senghor uses the compound “sentiment-idée” (feeling-idea) frequently in this essay; it is always rendered by the translator as “feelings and ideas.” Subsequent uses marked in the text.

16

Les Ballets Africaines, Guinea’s national dance company, was founded by Fobéda Keita in 1948, and toured Europe and the United States in the 1950s. After Guinean independence in 1958, it became the national ensemble of the new state.

17

“ce que jamais on ne verra deux fois” (what will never be seen twice). The quotation is from “La Maison du Berger,” an 1844 poem by French Romantic poet Alfred de Vigny, which exhorts readers to “Aimé ce que jamais on ne verra deux fois.”

18

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

125

feelings [des sentiments-idées], is the dramatic progression of rhythm, and ultimately, the lack of rhythm. Here the poem becomes a discourse.19 The Egypt of the pharaohs presents a perfect example of African art and literature which preserved an impassive face for four thousand years. This is not in the least surprising because Negro blood circulated in the veins of the Egyptians. However we have no need of Egypt to support our thesis. If we review ten thousand years of Negro art,20 from the frescoes of Tassili21 to the canvases of Papa Tall,22 we shall discover the permanent features which typify the originality of Negro literature in the French language. I said earlier that Negro art does not lie in the sphere of ideas and feelings [des sentiments-idées], but this is only partly true. In the works considered here you will discover a remarkable permanence of themes: beyond the revolt of the colonised peoples, the call of man to Man, to the major elementary needs of Justice, Brotherhood and Love. The “immortal principles” are only the popular expressions of man’s timeless aspirations to human dignity; to Life. It is remarkable that anger is neither hatred nor a grimace; that the racial feeling is anti-racial.23 But it is true that this is not the essence of literature or of Negro art, even of French expression. It lies in the forms, or, more precisely, in the spirit of the forms; in the participation of the man and the artist, of man and the world, of the subject and the object; in this identification through analogous imagery and symbolism, but in a sung and rhythmic form.24 For the Negro conception of forms is tightly bounded by emotion,25 a loving confusion of the boundaries between You and Me. There is no need to develop this theme which I have already treated in an article which appeared in the review Diogène several years ago.26 In a word, the Negro poem, the Negro novel, even Negro speech is not a monologue but a dialogue, not a lesson but a tension, not a distance. I would call it a presence and a caress. From this springs the concept of communication27 through rhythmic imagery. Negro work is music, a lasso, a knot of an image, which, as in a symphony, unites the complementary themes and bodies in a rhythmic dance, a dance of love. And the poet sings amant alterna Camenae.28 For the food of the soul lies in these primordial rhythms of the Lover Earth, which, at regular intervals, joins like to like and gives fullness and eternal joy. “Ici, le poème est dis-cours.” “Cours” in French is a course or a class. As in English, “dis-” is a prefix signalling negation. “Dis” is also the first and second person (singular/informal) present, and the informal imperative conjugations of “dire,” to say.

19

“les œuvres de la Négritude” (the works of negritude).

20

Tassili n’Ajjer is a national park in the south-east of Algeria, in the Sahara Desert. It contains some of the world’s most important prehistoric rock art, dating to the Neolithic era.

21

Papa Ibra Tall (1935–2015) was a Senegalese artist, whose bright, surreal paintings were influenced by negritude.

22

“que le sentiment racial soit antiraciste.”

23

“Dans cette identification par l’image analogique, par l’image-symbole, mais chantée, rhythmée.”

24

“Car l’esprit nègre des formes est étreinte.” “L’esprit,” translated here as “conception,” means mind or spirit. “Etreinte,” translated here as “tightly bounded by emotion,” means “embraced.”

25

Léopold Senghor, “L’Esthétique négro-africaine,” Diogène (October 1956). An English translation was published soon thereafter: Senghor, “African-Negro Aesthetics,” trans. Elaine P. Halperin, Diogenes (December 1956): 23–38.

26

“com-préhension.” See note 12.

27

“The Muses love alternating verses.” See Virgil’s Eclogue 3.59.

28

126

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Now you can understand why this Negro literature is a major contribution to generalized literature; to Universal Civilisation. By communicating through French, it forms a symbiosis of the two extreme aspects of human genius and therefore is integral humanism. In this way it enriches French literature while enriching universal literature. In this way it is animated by revolutionary dynamism. Its revolution consists in breaking down sterile opposition, or, more precisely, in transcending false dilemmas; in resolving fertile contradictions by not avoiding them but by integrating them. To put it into political jargon, it corrects deviations, clears scleroses, and restores man to Man. It restores him to his human nature, by giving him, with his vital needs, the archetypal images29 and the primordial rhythms, which alone are capable of calming the hunger of spiritual starvation. Every true revolution is a return to the sources, to the living Man. To paraphrase André Gide, the most nationalist and the most racial literature is at the same time the most universal literature.30

“les images-archétypes”

29

The French has “la littérature la plus nationale,” not “nationalist.” Cf. André Gide’s argument in “Nationalism and Literature,” where he writes: “What is more national than the work of Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, Goethe, Ibsen, Dostoevsky? What is more broadly human? And also more individual? For it should be clear by now that the three terms can be superposed and that no work of art has a universal significance if it does not have first of all a national significance; nor a national significance if it does not have first of all a personal significance.” Gide, “Nationalism and Literature,” trans. Angelo P. Bertocci, in Gide, Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, ed. Justin O’Brien (London: Routledge, 2011): 109.

30

IV. COPYING PUTS GOD TO SLEEP: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE TRUE AFRICAN AND ART Elimo Njau Originally published in Transition 9 (June 1963): 15–17. An earlier version was presented at the first Congress of Africanists held in Accra, Ghana in December 1962. Elimo Njau is an influential East African painter. Born in 1932 in Tanzania, he studied at Makerere Art School in the 1950s, and has lived and worked in Kenya and Tanzania in the years since. As an artist, he is best known for the Murang’a Murals (1959) in the Church of Saint James and All Martyrs Memorial in Murang’a, Kenya. These murals were commissioned by the Anglican church during the Kenyan Emergency to commemorate those killed during the Mau Mau Uprising. They depict scenes from the life of Jesus, in an African context. In addition to his role as an artist, Njau is also an important gallerist, establishing Kobi Gallery in Moshi, Tanzania, in 1965, and serving as the director of the Paa Ya Paa Art Centre in Nairobi, Kenya’s longest running art gallery. This essay, written on the eve of Kenyan independence, reflects the ongoing anxieties about the relationship between the artist and the community in Africa in this period, while engaging two of the central debates of decolonial African modernism: debates about East African art and the role of religion. Throughout the 1960s, East Africans worried that their artistic and literary cultures were underdeveloped with respect to those on the west of the continent, a position exemplified by Taban Lo Liyong’s influential essay “Can We Correct Literary Barrenness in East Africa?” published in the East Africa Journal in 1965. In this essay, Njau offers a more optimistic account of what East African culture can bring to the table. At the same time, he intervenes in the ongoing debates about the relationship between religion and modern art. In the debate between Chinweizu and Soyinka in the 1970s (3.vii), for instance, Christianity was a point of contention, with Chinweizu and his co-authors calling for the expulsion or indigenization of Christianity, while Soyinka, embracing the abolition of Christianity as an ultimate goal, nonetheless defended its role in contemporary African culture. Njau offers a strikingly original perspective on this debate, wholeheartedly embracing Christianity as the source of an African modernism. This essay was published in Transition, a central periodical for the development of postcolonial African literature and culture. Established in 1961 by Rajat Neogy and published in Uganda, it was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom until the revelation of the CCF’s CIA links in 1967. It published articles on politics, culture, and the arts, as well as original literature and art from the continent. After Neogy’s arrest on sedition charges related to the magazine in 1968, it moved to Ghana. From 1973 to its demise in 1976, it was edited by Wole Soyinka. It has since resumed publication, and the full back catalogue of the magazine can now be accessed through JSTOR. AM

As an artist and teacher I see African arts and music today in two levels. First the past that has been and is still being lived and recorded and, secondly, the present that is projecting itself outwardly into the future and has yet to be lived by us as true Africanists. By true

128

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Africanists I mean African realists embracing the ideology of the living God and His creative power through the mind, souls and bodies of real people in present Africa. I must confess, I am chained to the present. I cannot escape it. As a realist and a true Africanist by the above definition I must also confess I have very little reliable knowledge of the arts and music of the other parts of Africa apart from East Africa. The reason for this is threefold. First it is a problem of communication and contacts with other parts of Africa. Secondly, the scarcity of reliable literature on these subjects. With most of the available literature it is difficult to discriminate between truth and speculation. I am much too good at speculating to trust other people’s speculations. The third reason is the fact that the arts and music must be lived to be believed. It seemed from my first visit to West Africa that there was a tremendous wealth of the past African heritage, which is still part of the present-day life, and there seems to be a much stronger movement towards unearthing the past than there is in East Africa today. This is a great gift and I can foresee great future African historians, collectors and curators of museums, librarians, great custodians of African symbolic art and music in West Africa. But there is one thing we mustn’t forget lest we turn a gift into a curse. And that is this: In digging and proving our past contribution to world culture we must not forget to live our own present life and make our own unique contribution to the modern world. This is what concerns me very much and I believe that if we face it, the new African culture may be the salvation of the rest of the world today. This is where East Africa comes in, I think. East Africa has not yet got much of the recorded past African heritage. We have had more of teachers and politicians and not enough of research fellows. There is plenty of material still to be unearthed from the past but true African research is just beginning in the field of music and arts. The one great gift to the East Africanist as compared to West Africa is that in East Africa we are challenged to accept the fact that cultures must mix in order to grow. Preserve a culture and you offset its decay. Cultures must mix but people must be real and always open minded. This may superficially appear to be a contradiction to the Africanist movement. But I want us to see this as a truth and a major part of the wisdom of the true Africanist. In East Africa nationalism is also asserting the Africanists pride in his past. But the Western and Eastern cultures have also made their mark and this we cannot deny or escape. As East Africanists what we are doing is to make our own new and most powerful mark out of the natural intermarriage of cultures. Some people may say that this sort of thing will produce a diluted form of Africanism. On the contrary, this natural intermarriage of cultures will produce a more powerful and really contemporary Africanist. His power will lie in his unity and range of thought and feeling. He will not be a second-class African, or third class European or third class Asian.1 The fact that I love and cherish the directness, simplicity and rhythm of past African patterns in art does not necessarily make me a robot of my African past. The fact that I love a Rembrandt painting of Christ and the woman taken in Adultery does not necessarily turn me into a Flemish painter. The fact that Omari2 loves the Prophet Mohammed does “Asians” refers to the significant South Asian population in East Africa. Many Indians came to the region during the British colonial period, as workers helping to build the railways, as soldiers suppressing African rebellions, and as merchants and traders. By the decolonial period, they held positions of economic and social power relative to many black Africans, and they suffered considerable persecution after independence, including the expulsion of Indians from Uganda in 1972.

1

A talented young sculptor. See Transition 6/7 [Note in original] Omari Athamani (1945?–) was a student of Njau’s at the Makerere Demonstration School. His sculpture “Interdependence” is reproduced in Transition 6/7 (October 1962): 8.

2

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

129

not necessarily turn him into a native of Mecca. The truth of the matter is that what I love and admire from my past African Heritage is what I share with my great grandfather, and perhaps what I also share with true fellow Africanists elsewhere in the continent. What I love in a Rembrandt painting is not just the paint; it is the fact that we share a common faith in Christ and in the human being. Let us face it, the human spirit tends to go closer to the unity of mankind while the human body retards this tendency. The arts and music of Africa are becoming more and more accepted as part of this unity of mankind. I must confess again I am chained to the present. I am a child born of the present cultural conflicts and frustrations, the present challenges and hopes. That is why I want us to ask ourselves as realistic Africanists in the field of arts and music the following question: Where are we now and where are we going? If the subject matter of what I say does not convince you of the need for urgent and drastic change in our educational philosophy and system, as well as a change of outlook towards our African arts and music, at least, I will have succeeded in presenting myself as a case study to the distinguished scholars of “the new African personality.”3 Before African art was known as art in its own right, before African music was known as music in its own right, African art and music were the true cement of the African community. It was so much part and parcel of the daily life of the Community that when you talked about art and music you actually talked about the people themselves, their daily activities, their day to day aspirations as a community, their joys together, the enemies they fought together and the tears they shared together. When you talked of African art and music you talked about a common language that expressed the body and soul of an African Community as well as a language that expressed their faith in the God that made them, the God that gave them fertility and food, the God that protected them from the cruel forces of nature which were mysterious and frightening. It expressed their faith in man as a component part of his small community and proved the inadequacy of the individual by himself. What of the present Arts and Music of Africa? Other cultures of the world have come to Africa. As might be expected, they have exploded the community which was the foundation of the past. The past community was basically founded on a common faith largely inspired by fear of the fierce Gods and the devils that surrounded it. Today these fears that held the community together are no longer there. Today this community has exploded into free individual units. These are the Artists and Musicians of Africa today. They have been detribalised into a bigger tribe. But, alas, it is a big tribe of a chaotic people who have not yet found a new philosophy to bind them together. But being the children of Africa, they inevitably share a common sense in physical form, rhythm and the direct ruthlessness of the African sun. Most of them appreciate the past The concept of the “African personality” was first coined in 1893 by Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912), a West Indian writer and politician who emigrated to Liberia and is known as an early proponent of pan Africanism. It was revived during the period of decolonization by Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72), a Ghanaian revolutionary and politician who served as Ghana’s first prime minister and president. Nkrumah’s “new African personality” understood African identity as arising from socialist, Christian, and Islamic sources (Nkrumah was himself a staunch socialist and a Christian). He distinguishes this idea from negritude, which he casts as more emotional and literary.

3

130

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

African Heritage in the arts and music. But they refuse to see the religious or spiritual background and the faith that brought these works of art into being. They refuse to see, or cannot see, this because they don’t believe in God. They believe in themselves and individual freedom without direction. They create their works at random. There is hardly any sense of direction in them: you can see suffering, conflict and a division of personality. For want of a common faith to reunite the new tribe they seek and believe in slogans and transient art movements. They are afraid of reconstructing their new God because superficially they believe that new scientific knowledge has displaced their God of fear and unity. In fact, to them the word God is superstitious. So they don’t believe in God. Yet they pretend to believe in their past African heritage which was religiously inspired. They pretend they are scientific. They see a dew drop on a leaf. They say, this is H2O. They dismiss the mystery and wonder which is embodied in this dew drop — and as a result they throw away inspiration. Some of them, like some art students, believe that to be an artist you only have to learn about composition, techniques, design, a good knowledge of history of art, know all the art values that have existed in the past, and you simply have to put two and two together and make your four. As a result of this kind of thinking we have quite a lot of artists but not as many real people. And, we have a lot of successfully executed masterpieces of technique but very few real and inspired works of art. When you question these artists about their work they hide in their borrowed or concocted art slogans. Some of them in selfdefence dismiss a questioner by saying this is “Art for art’s sake” you cannot understand it, this is “surrealism”, this is futurism”, this is “cubism,” this is “abstractionism.” They take the details of art and magnify them imagining these aspects to be the whole of life itself. They forget that in the works of our ancestors there was just as much surrealism, abstractionism, cubism and even futurism. But all these aspects were part of a whole, and not entities in themselves. I do not believe in art for art’s sake when it means the pursuit of “isms” and movements. I believe in art with meaning and purpose. To me art is a direct enrichment to human life and as such art must communicate. Our art is dead if it doesn’t communicate. As artists we must never escape the call to live more fully and truly in our local surroundings. True art grows from the soil and the full community that we live in. But where is the community? This is what we must create. Before we can create it we must create a new philosophy and a new understanding of God. This will be the new cement and unifying force to our community. We remember that our old small community was inspired and bound together largely by fear of fierce surroundings. Our new community is inspired by freedom and love of our new surroundings which we no longer fear. When I finished my studies at Makerere College,4 5 years ago, I was puzzled by the present artistic chaos in East Africa and the world at large. I said to myself: “Here I am with all my qualifications both as an artist and teacher but I don’t know where I am. How can I teach my pupils if I don’t know where I am going? I must look for some concrete

Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, established in 1922 as a technical school, became the University College of East Africa in 1949. It served students from across East Africa, and from 1950 granted degrees from the University of London. Njau studied in the Art Department, also known as the Makerere Art School, which had been established by Margaret Trowell in 1937. Under Trowell, the Makerere Art School provided training that saw art and religion (she was a devout Christian) as intimately connected, and that sought to blend African and European artistic sensibilities.

4

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

131

philosophy to guide me both as an artist and as a teacher.” I looked for this philosophy in the modern Western art, in vain, I looked for it in the past African art and I only found part of it. I found a sense of purpose and a powerful symbolism related to African way of life. I looked for it in the contemporary Asian artists in East Africa, I found the artists just as confused as myself. At last, one day, I saw that the pumpkins in my mother’s garden were never exactly alike. At the same time I remembered twins who were at school with me, I realised they were not exactly alike. I looked at my sister, she was not like my mother. I examined myself in a mirror, I found that I was not identical to my father or grandfather. I looked at the young babies being born. I found that every baby was a new creation, Then why should I copy anybody? I discovered God’s creative secret. God is omnipotent as well as omnipresent. Then he must be in me and his power must be in me because he did not create me in the image of anybody else but Himself. In all my creative efforts therefore I must keep Him alive. I believed that as time went on, He would be so much part of me that I would be able to fill up Africa with vigorous and fertile young artists who would prove to the world, God’s full presence in Africa. For my own guidance and as a warning to my pupils I formulated the following policy, “do not copy. copying puts god to sleep”. With this policy I started my career as an artist and teacher. I felt the new gate was opening for Africa. The new African child can no longer be locked up in small traditional huts. Tribal fears have been dispelled. All the tribes now belong to the child. All the insects, birds, the wild animals of Africa, the varied plants, savannahs, forests, the beautiful earth colours and all the African landscape and life, are his own. These are his new sources of inspiration. His motto is “Freedom, Exploration, and Love of my New African Surroundings.” As a result of this new approach school children ranging from the age of 13 to 18 have produced original works of art that have astounded grown artists. The children, by trying to explore their surroundings have discovered for themselves original techniques and methods using banana fibre, bark cloth, natural earth colours, feathers, local clays, bead-work, seeds, gourds and various other tactile materials in their local surroundings. When studying qualities of sculpture they looked at old tree trunks, ant hills, rocks and shells of the sea. When studying pattern they also turned to African natural surroundings, feathers, patterned snakes, leaves, seed-pods, etc. This approach has given the children a growing knowledge, understanding and love of local forms, hand in hand with a vitality and confidence in their free expressions of life. Their awareness is growing sharper, and sharper each day. Their observation is not just confined to the class-room and school compound. They are excited not only by the colourful sight of a casual butterfly or a convolvulus chamelion but by the sounds, the smells and textures of life from the dust as well as from their local city. Some children have even attempted making pictures for the blind. Why not! The blind can read with their hands. They should also enjoy pictures through their hands. The topics depicted in their works range from the African insects, plants, shells, politicians, the clergy, religion, the poll-tax defaulters, thieves, folk stories of the ordinary day to day activities of the people in their homes today. All the children’s emotions can be seen clearly in their work — their fears, joys, sorrows, anger and even their love. They are ruthless in their expression.

132

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

I believe that if we want a new integrated African personality our educational policy must be revised. We must place a greater emphasis on the things that build the soul of man and not just in technology and economics. Politics and Economics today are ahead of wisdom. They are ahead of the human spirit that is why there is so much discord in the African personality today. The African artist and the musician is the only true symbol of the African Soul or the African personality. That is why we must pool all our resources to restore the soul of this vital man — the artist. If he has no soul, Africa has no soul, if he has a split personality the African personality also gets split.

V. ON THE THRESHOLD, VIII André P. Brink Originally published in Afrikaans in Sestiger 1.3 (1965): 14–21. Translated by Klara du Plessis. André P. Brink (1935–2015) was a white South African novelist who wrote in English and his native Afrikaans. He received masters degrees in Afrikaans and English at Potchefstroom University before moving to France to study comparative literature at the Sorbonne in 1959–61. On his return to South Africa, Brink, along with a number of other Afrikaans writers, including Breyten Breytenbach, Jan Rabie, and Etienne Leroux, founded the Sestigers (Sixties) movement, which drew heavily on European modernist form and aesthetics to rejuvenate Afrikaans literature. In the aftermath of 1968 (which he spent in France) and in light of the growth of the apartheid state, Brink—like almost all of his peers—turned away from the autonomous aesthetics of the Sestigers. By the early 1970s, his novels reflected the growing political engagement of the South African literary field as a whole. His 1973 novel, Looking into Darkness, which dealt with apartheid, was the first Afrikaans novel to be banned in South Africa. This text is the last of eight sections of Brink’s essay “On the Threshold,” which appeared in the third issue of the journal Sestiger in 1965. The essay responds to attacks on modern art in parliament and the press, especially the accusation that modern art represents an outrage against the South African nation in its critical attitude toward Christianity and its embrace of sexual themes. In response, Brink argues that it is the artist’s role to be an “enemy of the people” declaring, “We want to be free in our art.” His essay is one of the most influential defenses of the European modernist-influenced autonomous art for which the Sestigers are remembered. This final section distills the essay’s argument in a poetic form that displays its surrealist influences and avant-garde tendencies. It appears here in Klara du Plessis’ new translation. AM

We have duly waited for something to “happen” in Afrikaans prose writing, but nothing did. A new era has dawned. And whether the “nation” likes it or not, we are the new generation. We aren’t “anti” the nation or “anti” anything at all. In fact, we are deeply aware of our connection to both nation and time (“no man is an island entire of itself”1). We emanate from the nation; as does, in a sense, our art. But we don’t write “for” the nation. Art is not a way to address people: it is a way of life. And the murky mélange of the masses (the so-called “scorned bourgeoisie”) and the process of making art, have always been separate entities. For those who knock mindfully and with honesty, the door of art

John Donne, “Meditation XVII,” Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624).

1

134

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

will always swing open. But those who beat at the door with sticks, and shout like the throngs in front of Lot’s home, will remain blind.2 What are we looking for? Art. Art is a breeze that blows through a musty house and knocks down an ornamental urn and playfully ruffles the curtains. Art is a muttered incantation in a primeval cave. Art is a scream: of birth, and of copulation, and of death. Art is a young woman who walks bare-breasted through a temple. Art is the clay shard with which Job scratches his wounds.3

Cf. Genesis 19:4 – 11. Cf. Job 2:8.

2 3

VI. THE AFRICAN VIEW OF ART AND SOME PROBLEMS FACING THE AFRICAN ARTIST Ben Enwonwu Originally presented at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar, Senegal, April 1–24, 1966. Published in the proceedings of this conference. Ben Enwonwu (1917–94) was one of Nigeria’s most important modern painters and sculptors. Educated in Nigeria and the UK, he held degrees in art from the Slade Art School and in anthropology from the University of London. From the 1940s onwards, he exhibited widely in Nigeria and internationally, representing Africa at the 1946 UNESCO-affiliated International Exhibition of Modern Art in Paris. Already a wellestablished artist at Nigerian independence in 1960, Enwonwu became a major figure in the post-independence art world, holding a number of influential governmental positions and speaking and writing extensively about the future of Nigerian and African art. This piece was delivered as a speech at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966. Organized by Léopold Senghor (see 3.iii) and supported by UNESCO, this festival was a major event in African arts, bringing together leading cultural figures from across the African diaspora. A state-funded event, it gestures toward the importance of the relationship between arts and the state for the development of modernism in post-independence Africa, a topic that Enwonwu takes up in this talk. In the course of this piece, Enwonwu carefully positions himself within the key debates raging about art, both nationally and in the diaspora as a whole. At the national level, his talk offers a rebuke to his younger colleague, Uche Okeke, another influential artist of post-independence Nigeria, who advocated for a modernism of “natural synthesis” that would bring together old and new. Enwonwu argues that any such synthesis must be intellectual and conceptual before it is practical. At the same time, he nods repeatedly to the influence of the negritude of Aimé Césaire, who attended the conference, and, especially, Senghor, its organizer. His arguments, however, reject the deliberate embrace of irrationalism and emotion that he believes characterizes negritude, instead insisting on the logic of the African mind, and arguing for an African modernism that would cleave more closely to realism than abstraction. AM

The role of art in Negro-African society is an important one for all who are concerned with the advancement of African Culture, African Thought and The African Personality. It should also concern the present generation of Africans whether they are interested in Art for art’s sake or not. In fact, no emergement African State today, can afford to ignore the urgent role of Art. We march towards renaissance.1 For the Art of Africa is no longer

Cf. Uche Okeke, a fellow Nigerian artist, whose influential 1960 manifesto, “Natural Synthesis” declared, “Nigeria needs a virile school of art with a new philosophy of the new age—our renaissance period.” Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, ed. Clémentine Deliss and Jane Havell (Paris: Flammarion, 1995): 208.

1

136

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

looked upon as “fetish”, as it had been during the early days of European exploration of the Continent; it is longer treated with the patronising attitude that was the case when the first missionaries, anthropologists, and travelers collected old pieces of “objects d’art” and mixed them up with what was genuine; nor does African Art only enjoy the reputation of its influence as a result of its historic impact upon modern art. The terms African Negro Art, African Traditional Art, Primitive Art, Tribal Art, and all such aesthetic cliches which have become the currency of aesthetic evaluation of works of African Art must now be reconsidered in the light of the present African view. These cliches, together with the influences they exert on the critical mind, should now be regarded as part and parcel of the evangelical, educational, social, economic, and even the political chapters of the Colonial past; because Art in present day Africa is seeking a new role, and this role that must be given to it by the Africans themselves, will determine the form that it should take as the mirror of the aspirations of Independent African people. Art is not sattic. Like Culture, Art changes its form with the times. It is setting the clock back, to expect that the art-form of Africa today, must resemble that of yesterday otherwise, the former will not reflect the African Image. African Art has always even long before western influence, continued to evolve through change and adaptation to new circumstances. And in like manner, the African view of Art has followed the trends of cultural change up to the modern times. But it now appears that the young African painter and sculptor distorts his work deliberately so as to achieve Africaness, or else, that if he does not do so, his work will be imitative of European art. The craftsman cum artist on the other hand struggles between reality only with what he possesses of the old technique. This situation represents the psychological effects of Colonialism. It has no African Directive. In the passing African social context, the African view of his art was a view which was identified with other aspects of the African life. It was not an objective or an analytical view of Art. The realities of life were expressed in the symbolic structure of the work of art, Image, being the link. Artistic view did not spring from Art itself but from the totality of religio-social significance of the art functioning in the group-mind. For this reason, the African view of Art was an inner knowledge, and a spiritual participation rather than a result of a critical or analytical attitude. One is inter-related with Art, while the other is detached from it. A Western art critic writes of Art, of which he may not be a participant in the creative process of representational Image; but the African is an observer as well as a participant or even the creator of his Image for the group. What we accept as Art in the western sense is not the same as what Art is in the African sense. As a result of Western contact, those most keen as well as most influenced by the works of African Art adapted their own view and centred it mainly on the features of African traditional sculpture particularly, the images of ancestral gods, and went onto press and exploit the “Image—Form” which has become an enviable revitalising primitiveness sought after by the highly developed civilisations. It seems absurd that present-day African painters and sculptors should support and sustain this psychology of the Western view by imitating an attitude derived from the influence of African art works upon the Western aesthetic tradition. Many books have been written about the type-form of African Art as acceptable to the West. Although this view has the highest respect for African Sculpture it is also in itself the central focus of Western aesthetics of African Art and, furthermore, has remained unchallenged in spite of the rapid developments in Africa today. In the most part, such books together with articles, journals, magazines and illustrations, have followed more

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

137

or less the trend of thought engendered through the memoirs and the reports by some explorers, travelers, and missionaries, in thus stabilising an aesthetic cannon for Art in Africa which is alien to the realities of African Culture. Except for the more erudite and scholarly writings of such men as Leo Frobenius2 and some protest African writers of today, it might have been very difficult to challenge even the writing by such men as Levi Bruhl who treated the subject of the African Mind as though it was a strange question of homo sapiens.3 While others like Burton4 carried the colonialist theory that “never the twain shall meet”5 much too far. The rest were blind to the unique differences that do exist. I believe in the difference between Black and White, but it should be complimentary and not opposed to each other. No books to my knowledge have appeared on great issues about the Art of Africa by Africans. The reason may be due to the problem of thought translation of such an abstract subject as Art, from one language to another. Or else, that the question of writing on the subject of African Art by Africans is a subject of writing about Creative Imagery. African Art is so identified with socio-religious concept that it spontaneously exercises the fullest measure of its view point through recreative activities. Even story telling in a family group was socio-educational. It was handed down orally rather than written. But until the necessity for the African to write fully about his Art made itself felt, it would amount to forcing an analytical approach in a cultural milieu that does not require it. But to speak about the Art of Africa today automatically means The Traditional; The Ancient; The Tribal and The Primitive as characterised by the Western view of African Art. This must not be the African view today. The first time we Africans received the word ”ART” as applied to the Creative Imagery of our Ancestors, was at the beginning of European colonisation of the African Continent. Through the teaching of the English language by the British, the word ”ART” was adopted, as were indeed many thousands of other English words, by use of the language. The word ”ART” has its limitations when defined, to mean the same sense as for instance the Ibo word ”NKA”. Art is defined in the English Dictionary as ”human skill as opposed to nature; skillful execution of an object in itself; skill applied to imitation and design as in painting etc.; thing in which skill may be exercised; certain branches of learning serving as intellectual instruments for more advanced studies as Batchelor, Master of Arts, one who has obtained a standard of proficiency in these; black magic; practical application of any sciences; industrial pursuit, craft, guild; company of craftsmen; Fine—s. those in which the mind and imagination are chiefly concerned; knack; cunning; stratagem”. Art so defined, provides divergent meanings none of which is the same thing as the world ”NKA”.

Leo Frobenius (1873–1938) was an influential German ethnologist. His sympathetic appraisal of African culture, at least compared to his European contemporaries, made him an important influence on the negritude of the Césaires and, especially, Senghor.

2

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) was a French anthropologist, sociologist, and philosopher. He developed a theory of the “primitive mind,” which he took to be superstitious and irrational, in contrast to the “modern mind,” associated with logic and reason.

3

Richard Francis Burton (1821–90) was an English explorer and Orientalist who, as part of the British army, travelled widely in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. His record of his travels in Africa tends to see the Africans as a natural laboring class.

4

Cf. Rudyard Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” (1889), which opens with the refrain, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

5

138

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

”NKA” may be understood to mean “making”; of which doing; the making of; doing; of a particular kind; the object of which is specifically artistic; and making; is personified i.e., the professional of ”NKA”; and so particularised; the object of ”NKA” is specific, and so does not refer to any other kind of making, or doing; it is strictly art, only by professional competence; again, ”NKA” bears a traditional significance as an art handed down from generation to generation—thus it is inheritable of family or even village groups such as in the known case of Benin6; ”NKA” does not mean human skill as opposed to nature, but does imply identification with the nature of doing, or of Image. Art is subjective and therefore infinite. ”NKA” is an objectification of Image more through the senses than through cunning of hand. Such definitions of Art as the art of running, swimming, black magic, of photography, stratagem, or as the art of doing anything do not refer to ”NKA”. The prefix ”OME” further explains the identification of a second person i.e., OMENKA—he is the maker of Nka. Both the maker of, and the art of what is being made. NKA, strictly speaking, has traditional and religious associations. Thus the field of socalled African Art is really the realm of the Ancestral world of Images so confined as it were to creativity in a spiritual sense. In terms of reference then, African Art is not really Art in the Western context, but an invocation of ancestral spirits through giving concrete form or body to them before they can enter into the human world. An illustration of this idea can be summarised in a short story, but which may be taken from the end of it. “Juwa took away the spiritual body of his dead father with which the father performs the traditional act of transforming his spiritual body into the human body and vice versa. When his father returned on his way to go back to the spiritual world in which he dwelt, he could not find his spiritual body. Then he sang a song—Juwa Juwa Oh, Nyem Ofo Mo, Ofo’n ji eje Uwa, Onye eji mia elu Mmuo, Uwa dede!7—his father calling Juwa, to give him his spiritual body, the body with which he comes into the human world; because he who has not got it, cannot return, to the spiritual world”. The word ART is therefore only a classic term. When we Africans speak of Art, therefore, we are thinking of its manifestations from the Western view. We are not thinking of ”NKA”, and what it includes. ”NKA”, which is an Ibo word, satisfies the African meaning and the purpose of ART. The problem of translating the word ART into a neo-African concept is primarily a linguistic one. So that some research and study are necessary into the diverse African languages and dialects to collect from every region or tribe the words that can mean the same thing as ”NKA” with the prefix, ”OME”. Depending of course on the tribal groupings, and the possibility of unification, we can begin to translate Art into an African term as signifying more, or less the same thing. Since those of us who have come under

The Kingdom of Benin was a kingdom in what is now southern Nigeria. When it was invaded by the British in 1897, they looted huge quantities of art from the city, including exquisite ivory carvings and, most famously, brasscastings, known today as the Benin Bronzes. The Benin Empire was a subject of considerable scholarly interest in this time. Enwonwu may have in mind the work of R. E. Bradbury, an ethnographer who did extensive work on pre-colonial Benin in this period. Note that the Benin Empire should not be confused with the present-day country of Benin, which was not named such until 1975, and which has no connection to the precolonial empire. 7 Nkiru Nzegwu gives the following translation: “Juwa Juwa O,/Give me my ofo/Ofo by which I travel to the world/Without it one cannot enter the Spirit/The world.” Nzegwu, Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art (Binghamton, NY: International Society for the Study of Africa, Binghamton University, 1990): 165. 6

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

139

British rule have become accustomed to the use of the word ART, so have those of us who have come under France, Belgium, Germany and other European countries, become accustomed to their equivalent term for Art. So, at least, we can begin by laying the foundation upon common regional linguistic translations. However, this is mainly a problem for the students in languages to tackle first. It is necessary therefore that the creative art of Africa today, should be practiced with well defined means and aims so as to reflect, not spurious effects of the very vital qualities of the old vision and cunning of hand of our ”OME-NKA” but the trends of African changing situations as a result of our assimilation of Western culture. This means that more than a synthesis of old and new is to be achieved if a new concept is to follow.8 It is to be regretted that the African painter and sculptor today are not facing the realities of the African situation in their artistic expressions. While they must derive inspiration from the old art of ”NKA”, they must also make use of the inner knowledge so as to arrive at the meeting point between inspiration and ideas. They should neither imitate western Art, nor copy their old Art. The opinions expressed by European anthropologists, collectors of old African sculptures, and the critics may be valid aesthetic considerations. But the concept and philosophy of these opinions are so remote from the African concept that they can no longer serve as the aesthetic cannons or judgement of what Art is, or should or should not be, in the present African situation. Nor can much of European interpretation of African Art today be valid anymore. The colonial status imposed such authority as civic or educational, which are conditions for the existence of art in any country. The Independence of African countries should now remove such conditions even by exercising political power. Self-appointed art critics whether they are Europeans or Africans by either political or civic authority can influence the trend of artistic change in African countries. Their opinions matter, and can encourage or discourage artistic output, and even artistic thought, that may depend for its growth upon Government generosity.9 The press serves as a medium of publishing the works of the present-day African painter and sculptor as opposed to the communal use of the masks and figures of ancestors in the dance and the shrines of the old society. This borrowing of Western media of publicity can be highly effective as a means of communicating as well as disseminting artistic thought and appreciation of the functions of art in contemporary African society, but at the same time, it can, and has been misused to play politics Art. Where artistic opinions are fallacious or prejudiced, this medium of the press can only do great harm. Dennis Duerden, an English art critic of African modern art, who was once Art Master in Norther Nigeria, writes a great deal about the current trends of aesthetic manifestations in the art works of Africa today.10 In the Times Literary Cf. “Our new society calls for a synthesis of old and new, of function art and art for its own sake.” Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” 208.

8

In the wake of Nigerian independence in 1960, the government was an important source of financial support for the Nigerian visual arts. As a major cultural figure at independence, Enwonwu himself was a significant player in the state-funded arts, acting as art supervisor to the federal government, serving on the Nigerian Arts Council, and, in 1968, becoming a cultural advisor to the federal government.

9

Dennis Duerden (1928/29–2007) lived in Nigeria in the 1950s, first as an Education officer in the British colonial service in Nigeria and then as assistant curator at the Jos museum. On his return to the UK in the 1960s, he worked for the BBC World Service, and established the Transcription Centre, a Congress for Cultural Freedom-funded enterprise that produced and distributed radio programs in Africa. Throughout this time, he wrote about African art and culture. His first book on this topic, African Art, was published in 1968.

10

140

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Supplement of September 13th. 1965, Mr. Duerden described Art in Africa Today as ”Art That Does Not Conform”. He did not explain further as to what the art does not conform with. Mr. Duerden writes from London without keeping in close touch with the rapid social, economic, educational, and even religious changes that have been taking place in the African countries since he left Nigeria. Valid artistic criticisms must be based on philosophical ideas. For this to be feasible, speculative methods of approach must precede what contentions an art critic may hold, upon the appearance of works of any kind in Art since the appearance of art works must serve as what the eye can see, the perception of which depends on many social, economic and other cultural forces. The critic must know the mind of the artist whose works he writes about. If we should take such art critics as Mr. Duerden to task, we would first be reminded of Levi Bruhl’s contention, when wrote that the ”Mind of the Primitive”—meaning the African Mind—was incapable of logic. That it was pre-logical, meaning that the African mind works in a different orbit from that of the European by arriving at conclusions illogically.11 Research in the science of biological evolution has since proved that the races of mankind are basically the same. The African Philosophy of Negritude, with due deference to President Senghor and Aimé Césaire,12 has defined the kind of “knowledge” that characterised the African spirit and mind. It is a capacity to identify self with object which has advantage in the preservation of “the mystique”, or the vital force in the creative exercise of Art—especially in ”NKA”. This has nothing to do with Mind in so far as the human mind is free to exercise action by receiving and giving its attributes in the process of analysis of matter and objects, or of identification with these. The integration of many aspects of the African life made coexistence of mind and matter possible, in the preservation of the vital force of the inner mind or the Inner Klang.13 That does not mean that the human mind, of any particular race of man is so characterised to be capable of doing only one kind of exercise on matter, but incapable of extending into other things outside its orbit. Analysis of matter depends on objectivity or a detached outlook, and time is one of the means of effecting change in the human outlook whether in the early stages of the human existence or now. Once the human is involved in emotional problems of expression, whether in sorrow, grief, or joy, the reaction is spontaneous. Spontaneity carries with it the spiritual force with which man is endowed by the divine power. Change can only affect the human mind, and at all times, whenever objectivity is a necessity for self-preservation, the preservation of history of Art, or of any matter as a result of the manifestation of the human Mind on things of the outer world. The identification of persons with inanimate objects particularly in the creative exercise of Art or ”NKA” gives to the art works the “mystique” and vital force otherwise known as Magic. Such great African scholars as President Senghor have explored the subject of African Negro Inspiration, Religion, and Ontology that this subject must be left to particular fields of studies in African Culture.

See Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, trans. Lilan A. Clare (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966 [1923]).

11

See Césaire, “Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution,” (2.iv); Senghor, “Negritude and the Concept of Universal Civilisation” (3.iii).

12

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) uses the term “innerer Klang” (inner sound, or inner resonance) in his booklength essay on art, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) to describe the way a work of art achieves a spiritual resonance.

13

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

141

What concerns the African artist today who is facing the dual responsibility of his needs, is to find a new aesthetic creed or philosophy as a guide to his revolutionary ideas. Artistic revolutions do not occur merely by the capacity to adapt one form of art to another, but through revolutionary ideas. First, there must be a protest period, when the artists of a generation reject an aesthetic principle as a guide to their creative exercise. Then speculations and arguments. A revolution must be an intellectual rather than a practical solution. The well sought after synthesis between the old and the new, between the indigenous and the effects of western civilisation in African Art today must depend for its realisation, not upon imitating works of any kind that come to the mind of the artist, but through discussions of ideas. In this way, a new school which will allow for individualism can emerge. At the present stage of change in African Art, it is a common experience to find that all so-called progressive African artists are expressing, not a concept of the European school of thought which resulted from ideas as well as the influence derived from the old African works of art. Practically every progressive African artist today has a tendency towards abstractionism. And this looks more like modern European expression both in ideas and technique. It is not African. African art of today does not have to conform to non-representation in order to maintain the name African. It should, in fact, become a startling realism since the problems of the African locale today are realistic and are faced from the most logical and realistic manner. Political meetings in African countries reflect the state of the African mind. They show a balance of thought and a maturity that are typical of an old people. When African countries are described as “young”, it can only mean in the sense that science and technology have just begun to find their way into the schemes for rehabilitation and advancement along modern lines. This does not mean that what had existed in Africa had not reached stages of advanced sophistication; it would also be wrong to condemn African aristocracy because it does not resemble that of Europe. Alien concepts must be sorted out and analysed before they can be acceptable in our new societies. The African must find a solution to the economic problems facing his present-day art, for that has a tremendous influence on the process of change. If art is not used, it cannot go on. The educated or the intellectual African today must equate the financial value of art to the monetary system of the West. To say that a work of art is too expensive is not only to give a higher value to mass products of Western science, such as motor cars having mose importance than Art, but also to negate the very intellectual assessment of art of which he is either convinced, or else dabbling in, so as to appear highly educated. If the comparison of money and art presents a difficult problem to the African intellectual, then his convictions are no realistic or honest. Here the importance of the economic aspect of African art today must also be considered along the civic importance of art. African Independent Governments must seek the proper place for artistic manifestations, not merely by the use of art or the teaching of it in Colleges, but by realising the connection between political Independence and Cultural Freedom. Political Freedom in Africa particularly must clothe itself with the colours of culture so as to present the true Culture of the African peoples in pagentry, buildings, and other means by which the prestige of Government makes itself felt. Apart from the problems of the African artist today being primarily connected with artistic matters and their dependence on outside forces, which means that he must first retain some of the ideas of the old art namely, the sub-realism of Image, Rhythm and

142

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Form—African Governments must see African Art as part of the political matters which concern them. To do nothing about imitating Western or colonial pageantry inherited by the African Independent Governments is to perpetuate Colonialism. Since no African Government apes Western democratic systems, it should now be possible for them all to carve out a place of honour for the African Art of today so that it will mirror our political, social, civic, educational, religious, and cultural aspirations and in this way serve the artists of Africa with some of their greatest needs for the solution of these problems in independent African countries.

VII. PRODIGALS, COME HOME! Chinweizu Originally published in Okike: An African Journal of New Writing 4 (December 1973): 1–16. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, debates about the relationship between contemporary African writing and pre-colonial African languages and cultural traditions structured the Anglophone African literary field. This essay, by Nigerian writer Chinweizu (1943–), launches the most famous exchange on this topic, between Chinweizu (later joined by several co-authors) and the Nigerian poet and playwright, Wole Soyinka (1957–). Chinweizu was at this time a graduate student in American studies at SUNY Buffalo— his dissertation would be published in 1975 as The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite—and had already been living and studying in the United States for several years, having attained a bachelor in mathematics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967. As a Nigerian who lived in the United States through the civil rights movement and the Biafran war, his thinking accordingly reflects the influence of the US black power movement, as well as the debates about African literature raging on the continent itself. The essay printed here is a forerunner to the critical intervention for which Chinweizu is most well-known, the polemic, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, which he co-wrote with Onwuchekwa Jemie (1940–) and Ihechukwu Madubuike (1944–). This book, completed as early as 1972, was published by Fourth Dimension Publishers in Enugu, Nigeria in 1980, and achieved an international audience with its publication in 1983 by Howard University Press in the United States. An earlier essay of the same title and with the same co-authors was serialized in Okike 6 and 7, in December 1974 and April 1975, and reprinted in full in Transition 48 in 1975, alongside a response by Wole Soyinka. Further responses by Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike were published in the misnumbered Okike 14 and 13, which appeared in September 1978 and January 1979, respectively. Together these essays are often taken as the key debate in African modernism in English. In “Towards the Decolonization of African Literature,” Chinweizu and his coauthors polemicize against difficult, European modernist-influenced poetry—Soyinka’s is taken as a prime example—arguing that “An African poetics must be grounded in an African sensibility, and the incontestably uncontaminated reservoir of African sensibility is the African oral tradition.”1 Soyinka’s response, “Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of a Pseudo-Tradition,” argues against what he takes to be the construction of an artificial African tradition, and defends the right of African writers to reflect a modern Africa of “precision machinery, oil rigs, hydro-electricity, my typewriter, railway trains (not iron snakes!), machine guns, bronze sculpture etc., plus an ontological relationship with the universe including the above listed [in a quote from Chinweizu] pumpkins and iron bells.”2 “Prodigals Come Home!” reflects many of the convictions that animate

Chinweizu, Onwuchewka Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike, “Towards the Decolonization of African Literature,” Transition 48 (1975): 36.

1

Wole Soyinka, “Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of a Pseudo-Tradition,” Transition 48 (1975): 38.

2

144

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Chinweizu’s co-written polemics, but seeks to think them through more explicitly in terms of an “African Modernism,” which he contrasts with “Modernism in Africa.” As such, this essay suggests that the Chinweizu/Soyinka debate, often framed as a debate between Soyinka’s modernism and Chinweizu’s traditionalism, might best be understood as a debate between two different forms of modernism. This essay and several of the others in the debate were first published in Okike, an important Nigerian literary journal founded by Chinua Achebe in 1971 and still publishing through the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where Achebe worked for many years. Early issues were supported by Ulli Beier, a German Jewish critic and editor who founded Black Orpheus and played a key role in the development of African and later Papua New Guinean literary culture. Key writers of the African diaspora, including Wole Soyinka and Kamau Brathwaite, were listed as part of its early editorial board, and Chinweizu served the journal as associate editor throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The key later essays in this debate have been digitized as part of the full run of Transition by JSTOR and can now be read online with an institutional subscription. For a recent treatment of the debate, see Neil Lazarus, “Modernism and African Literature,” in Mark Wollaeger, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 228–45. AM

Consider the following questions: should we have Modern Art in Africa or Modern African Art? Modern Poetry in Africa or Modern African Poetry? Should we import Modernity into Africa, or create an African Modernity? Are we committed to the erection of Modern Culture in Africa or to the Modernization of African Culture? If one should ask: “But what is the distinction? Isn’t this merely a semantic exercise?” one would be confessing to unawareness of this widespread danger of cultural servitude masquerading as cultural development; this danger of cultural death wearing the mask of “civilization”; this danger from which we all are already half dead. But how do we make clear this distinction loaded with consequences of life and death for African Culture? Beier and Moore have, correctly, given the title “Modern Poetry from Africa” to their anthology of poetry written in European languages by contemporary Africans.3 One thing this anthology is not: it is not an anthology of poetry written, spoken or sung by Africans working today on extended seams of the African poetic tradition, tuning their voices to echoes from our tradition in order to sing of our world of now and here. And that they are written in European languages is not even the point! For their forms, as well as the sensibilities and the attitudes that inform their treatment, remain, for the most part, outside the African tradition. For exemplars of Modern African Poetry, poetry written today in styles informed by traditional African poetics, for poetry written today that

Ulli Beier and Gerald Moore’s anthology Modern Poetry in Africa was first published by Penguin Books in the UK in 1963 and was republished in 1984 as The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry. Beier (1922–2011) and Moore (1924–) were both influential white critics and editors, living and working in Africa and engaged in the promotion of African literature. Beier was a German Jew who moved to Ibadan in 1950, having lived in Palestine and London. In 1957, he founded Black Orpheus, the first Anglophone African literary journal. He moved to Papua New Guinea in 1966, and also played an important role in the development of Papua New Guinean literature (see Albert Wendt’s essay 14.v for more information about this literary field). Moore is a British scholar and editor, who taught at a number of universities in Nigeria and Uganda. His writing about contemporary African literature was very influential in the development of the field.

3

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

145

continues and develops the African tradition we must look to Ahmad Nassir’s Gnomic Verses (Swahili),4 to p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (Acoli and English)5 and to Okigbo’s “Path of Thunder” poems (English).6 No matter in what language they are written, these poems stand as prototypes of what a Modern African Poetry might be like.7 Unlike Modern Poems from Africa, these Modern African Poems, even when they are written in English, are within the poetic traditions of indigenous African cultures. Though Modern Poetry from Africa is poetry written by Africans, it is poetry dominated by modern European sensibility. Modern African Poetry, on the other hand, is poetry written by Africans, and, above all else, dominated by a sensibility derived from the African tradition. And to get a flavor of that tradition we might consult Beier’s Yoruba Poetry,8 his African Poetry,9 and Andrezjewski and Lewis’s Somali Poetry.10 In them we find translations of traditional African poetry. These traditional works, whether handed down from antiquity or written and collected in the past century, distinctly convey the

Ahmad Nassir bin Juma Bhalo was a Kenyan poet. His Poems from Kenya: Gnomic Verses in Swahili was published in a bilingual edition with Lyndon Harries’ English translations by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1966. Swahili is the first language of the East African Swahili people, and is used as a lingua franca through large parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa.

4

Okot p’Bitek (1931–82), a Ugandan poet, was one of the most important East African writers of the period. Song of Lawino is an epic poem, initially written in the Southern Luo dialect of Acoli, spoken in northern Uganda. It depicts a debate between the eponymous Lawino and her husband Ocol, and in so doing stages the debates about tradition and modernity in decolonial Africa. As Chinweizu indicates here, it was influential not just for its content, but also for its innovative use of Acoli oral traditions and performance. Its publication in the author’s English translation in 1966 as part of the East African Publishing House’s Modern African Writers series was a major event for East African literature. It was subsequently published in an American edition in 1969 by the World Publishing Company. The original Acoli version, which had been refused publication repeatedly in the 1960s, first appeared in 1971.

5

Christopher Okigbo (1932–67) was a major Nigerian poet and a towering presence in the African literary field of the 1960s. Known for his opposition to negritude, his poetry remains some of the most important of this period and is often discussed as one of the key exemplars of African modernism. The “Path of Thunder” sequence, written between 1965 and 1967, was published in his posthumous collection Labyrinths, which appeared as part of Heinemann’s African Writers Series in 1971. At the outbreak of the Biafran war in 1967, in which the eastern, predominantly Igbo provinces of Nigeria attempted to secede and form the new nation of Biafra, Okigbo joined the Biafran military. He was killed in battle in the same year.

6

Debates about whether African literature should be written in colonial or indigenous languages had raged in Africa since the early 1960s, finding its most canonical expression in the debates surrounding the 1962 Congress for Cultural Freedom-sponsored Conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda. Obiajunwa Wali’s 1963 review of this conference, “The Dead End of African Literature?,” published in Transition 10, offers a canonical account of the case for writing African literature in the continent’s indigenous languages. It is available online as part of JSTOR’s digitization of Transition.

7

Beier was active as a translator and collector of Yoruba poetry. With Bakare Gbadamosi, he published the collection Yoruba Poetry in 1959, which was billed as a “special publication of Black Orpheus” and published in Ibadan. Yoruba is the language spoken by the Yoruba people of West Africa. It is one of the four official languages of Nigeria.

8

Beier’s African Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional African Poems was first published by Cambridge University Press in 1966. It assembles poems—mostly transmitted orally—from East, West, and South Africa, as well as ancient Egypt. The texts are drawn from a range of sources, including German anthropological texts, collections of poetry assembled and translated by poets and scholars, texts published in contemporary literary journals such as Black Orpheus or Présence Africaine, Beier’s own translations, and oral exchanges with African poets.

9

B. W. Andrzejewski's and I. M. Lewis’s collection Somali Poetry: An Introduction was published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press as part of the Oxford Library of African Literature series in 1964. This scholarly text includes an extensive introduction, followed by facing page translations in Somali and English, and facsimile copies of a number of Arabic religious poems.

10

146

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

traditional African voice. And even these English translations cannot but convince us that the mark of un-Africanness is not simply language, but rather the form, the attitude and the sensibility that go into the treatment of a poem. Lest the language or the sheer talent of the poet confuse this issue of sensibility, I shall use poems written in English by one distinguished African poet to illustrate the vast distance between Modern Poetry in Africa and Modern African Poetry. Okigbo’s poem “Watermaid,” a section of his five-part “Heavensgate,” begins as follows: Eyes open on the sea, eyes open, of the prodigal; upward to heaven shoot where stars will fall from.11 But by the time Okigbo gets to his “Path of Thunder” poems, the anemic modernity of his early “Heavensgate” is abandoned. One result is his “Elegy for Slit-drum.” And it begins: Condolences ... from our swollen lips laden with   condolences: The mythmaker accompanies us The rattles are here with us Condolences from our split-tongue of the slit drum condolences one tongue full of fire one tongue full of stone — condolences from the twin-lips of our drum parted in     condolences12 The tired syntactic jugglery of “Watermaid” is gone. Vanished! And in its place? Stirring sequences of rhythmic lament; the towncrier’s clear and unambiguous declaratives, each short line a complete and telling expression, firm in tone, ending on a highlighting stress; each stanza of short lines followed by one long line, an echoing variation anchored on the rhythms of condolences. And to anyone familiar with the recurring chorus lines of African folk tales, children’s stories and songs of lamentation, familiar with the rhythmic phrasings of Ikoro drumming,13 the basic African influences on “Elegy” are not mysterious. (To determine the tradition to which “Elegy” partly belongs one should re-examine various popular recordings of the ‘50s and early ‘60s in which deceased notables were lamented. Onwu Nwapa and Odoemezina are two Igbo laments that come to my mind right away. The declarative lines, the one-or-more-line refrains are all there in these Igbo songs of lamentation). One could use Okigbo’s “Elegy” at a wake, the short declarative lines going to a lead singer, the long “Condolences” lines going to the assembled mourners! Here is Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths (London; Ibadan; Nairobi: Heinemann, 1971): 10.

11

Okigbo, Labyrinths, 68.

12

The ikoro is a slit drum used by the Igbo people of south-eastern Nigeria, to whom Okigbo belonged. It was typically mounted in the village square and used to send messages to the community over long distances.

13

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

147

a powerful use of traditional form in a non-traditional poem in English; an enrichment as well as an extention of African poetry in English by elements from the African tradition. In considering Okigbo’s “Hurrah for Thunder,” another poem in his “Path of Thunder” sequence, the juvenescent influence is even more readily presentable. From “Hurrah for Thunder” we have: Whatever happened to the elephant— Hurrah for thunder— The elephant, tetrarch of the jungle: With a wave of the hand He could pull four trees to the ground; His four mortar legs pounded the earth: Wherever they treaded, The grass was forbidden to be there.14 Now compare that with the following lines from the Yoruba oriki “Erin”15: Elephant, a spirit in the bush. With his single hand He can pull two palm trees to the ground. If he had two hands He would tear the heavens like an old rag. ……………………………………………. With his four mortar legs He tramples down the grass. Wherever he walks, The grass is forbidden to stand up again. —Tr. by Ulli Beier & Gbadamosi Taken from 300 Years of Black Poetry Edited by Lomax and Abdul, Fawcett16 The blurb on the back cover of the African edition of Labyrinths says that Okigbo’s “Path of Thunder” sequence of poems “shows a new fierceness which held the promise of remarkable development.”17 That is an unavoidable impression. I have pointed out some of the African sources of this outbreak of new poetic power. This triumphant juvenescence is not a mere matter of rhythms. (It is that too!) It is not a mere matter of formal imitations and direct borrowings and close adaptations. It is far more a matter of his having abandoned what Okigbo, Labyrinths, 67.

14

An oríkì is a Yoruba praise chant, devised for children at birth and added to over the course of the individual’s life.

15

The citation here contains a misprint: the title of the anthology is actually 3000 Years of Black Poetry. It was edited by Alan Lomax, a white US ethnomusicologist and Raoul Abdul, a black US music critic and singer, and published in 1971 by US publisher Fawcett Publications.

16

The “African edition” referred to here is probably the Heinemann African Writers Series edition, which was published in London but widely distributed in Africa through Heinemann’s offices in Ibadan and Nairobi. This quotation appears on the back cover blurb of Labyrinths’s first edition in this series.

17

148

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Leroi Jones called the “meta-language and shallow ornament of contemporary academic British poetry,” (Leroi Jones, in Home).18 Okigbo abandons it for a language of African particulars; he accepts an African poetic landscape with its flora and fauna—a landscape of elephants, beggars, calabashes, serpents, pumpkins, baskets, towncriers, iron bells, slit drums, iron masks, hares, snakes, squirrels; a landscape that is no longer used as an exoticism for background effect, no longer used for exotic references sprinkled among anemic images, but a landscape which has been moved to the dramatic centre of his poetry; a landscape portrayed with native eyes to which aeroplanes naturally appear as iron birds; a landscape in which the animals behave as they might behave in African folk-lore, of animals presented through native African eyes.19 And “native” is not a pejorative! And this juvenescence is clearly a result of his consciously working within African traditions and of his bringing to his work valuable lessons he had learned from other traditions, Western Modernism not excluded. Whereas in “Heavensgate” we find … a Modern European poem made exotic, and find in “Hurrah …” an apprentice poem whose traditional models show too clearly through gaps in the stiches, in “Elegy …” we find a poem which, though written in English, owes nothing to modern European sensibility; a poem at the third transmuted corner of a cultural triangle at whose other corners stand the African Traditional and the Modern European sensibilities; but still a poem whose African lineage is beyond dispute. This distinction between Modern African Poetry and Modern Poetry in Africa, based as it is on continuities or discontinuities with the poetic traditions of Africa’s indigenous cultures, is a paradigm of the distinction between African Modernity and Modernity in Africa, (i.e. Western Bourgeois Modernity in Africa). A Modern African Culture, whatever else it is, must be a continuation of Old African Culture. Whatever else it includes, it must include seminal and controlling elements from the Old African tradition, elements that determine its tone, hold it together and give it a stamp of distinctiveness. The problem of an African Modernity is the obverse side of the problem of African

LeRoi Jones (1934–2014), known since 1965 as Amiri Baraka, was an African American writer. This quotation appears in his 1964 review essay, “A Dark Bag,” originally published in Poetry in 1964, and reprinted in Jones’ 1965 essay collection Home. The review laments the generally poor state of black writing globally, through a discussion of Arna Bontemps’ anthology American Negro Poetry, Langston Hughes’s Poems from Black Africa, John Pepper Clark’s verse play Song of a Goat, Christopher Okigbo’s collection Heavensgate, Léon Damas’s African Songs of Love, War, Grief, & Abuse, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo’s 24 Poems, Jacob Drachler’s anthology of poetry and criticism African Heritage, and Lyndon Harries’ Swahili Poetry. This quotation is taken from a discussion of the Hughes anthology, where Jones compares Anglophone African writing unfavourably with its Francophone counterpart, writing, “Almost all the African poets writing in English included in this collection, with the general exception of the writers I mentioned [ie, John Pepper Clark, Christopher Okigbo, and Ezekiel Mphalele]—and their work is not entirely free of it—employ the meta-language and shallow ornament of contemporary academic British poetry with, a great deal of the time, the same dreary results.” Jones continues later in the paragraph—in a claim to which the rest of Chinweizu’s paragraph seems to respond—“But even so, many times these poems seem interesting for a time, if only because of the bright, sometimes exotic, backgrounds and references.” Indeed, Chinweizu’s opinions in this essay generally concur with Jones’s. Later in the essay, for instance, Jones offers a mixed review of Okigbo’s Heavensgate, which concludes, as Chinweizu does, that “at this moment, Mr. Okigbo’s reading is weakening most of his poems,” and praises instead writers like Clark, who he judges offer “an African experience.” LeRoi Jones, “A Dark Bag,” Poetry 103.6 (March 1964): 398, 399.

18

Soyinka quotes this passage at length in “Neo-Tarzanism,” taking it as reflective of “the troika’s [ie, Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike’s] concept of the African poetic landscape with its flora and fauna.” Soyinka retorts: “I am not at all certain how this proves more acceptable than the traditional Hollywood image of the pop-eyed African in the jungle—‘Bwana, bwana me see big iron bird’”: Soyinka, “Neo-Tarzanism,” 38. These images, including the iron bird, are all taken directly from Okigbo’s “Paths of Thunder” sequence.

19

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

149

traditions. Those who deny to African traditions—and traditional Africa—a controlling place in their consciousness have no alternative but to formulate African Modernity in Western Bourgeois terms. Echeruo’s discussion of Nigerian poetry is a case worth considering. He is a modernminded Nigerian, a poet as well as a critic. He discussed the problems of Nigerian poetry in a paper he read at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1966; a paper which was published in Nigeria Magazine#89 and has been acclaimed in African and Africanist literary circles. In this paper “Traditional and Borrowed Elements in Nigerian Poetry,” he contends that one of the problems facing the Nigerian writer today in transferring from indigenous to modern poetry is that of suppressing the over-explicit nature of traditional reflective poetry, and of encouraging a more subtle complicating of narration, reflection and resolution.20 Echeruo also contends that both modern European and modern Nigerian poetry shun explicit moral tags, “preferring for the most part to fuse setting and reflecting into one single poetic moment.” Let me point out, right away, that he misses the real problem of the contemporary Nigerian writer, be he modernist or traditionalist. The traditionalist, —such as the late Fagunwa who wrote in Yoruba,21 and Tutuola who writes captivatingly in English without abandoning his traditionalist imagination22—is content to work in his tradition, and is not transferring to anything, let alone to “modern poetry” if he is a poet. He cannot therefore be said to be faced with Echeruo’s problem. The modern Nigerian writer—such as Okigbo at the end of his career—is transferring from “modern poetry” to the tradition of indigenous poetry (i.e. if he is a poet). His problems are those of journeying in the opposite direction from that claimed for him by Echeruo. Whose problems then is Echeruo concerned with? They are precisely those of any Nigerian writer who seeks to abandon the indigenous tradition and write modern European poetry. In other words, the problems of a would-be “modern poet,” i.e. the would-be modern European poet, who happens to have been brought up in the African tradition and must overcome that “handicap”; the problems of the writer of African extraction who wants to abandon his tradition; the problems of the “de-tribalizing” African writer.

Michael Echeruo, “Traditional and Borrowed Elements in Nigerian Poetry,” Nigeria Magazine 89 (June 1966): 142–55. Echeruo (1937–) is a Nigerian literary critic, educated at the University College, Ibadan and Cornell University, where he received a PhD in 1965. He taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and the University of Ibadan, before becoming the William Safire Professor of Modern Letters at Syracuse University in 1990. Nigeria Magazine, whose epigraph advertises it as “a quarterly magazine for everyone interested in the country and its peoples,” has been published by the Nigerian government since 1960. In “Neo-Tarzanism” Soyinka defends Echeruo’s basic point while conceding the imprecision of his wording, arguing that African modernity “may result in a subtle complication in the ‘narration, reflection and resolution’ of these phenomena but emphatically denies the deliberate complicating of them. Echeruo alas, chose his wording most unwisely and Chinweizu & Co., can hardly be blamed for seizing that big stick to hit their unfavourite poets over the head”: Soyinka, “Neo-Tarzanism,” 38. 20

Daniel O. Fagunwa (1903–63) was a Nigerian writer, credited with writing the first Yoruba-language novel, Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale (1938), which Soyinka translated into English as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons in 1968. He was known for his use of Yoruba folk tales and folk philosophy in his writing.

21

Amos Tutuola (1920–97) was a Nigerian novelist who, like Fagunwa, drew on Yoruba myth and thought in his work, but who wrote in English. His novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) is among the most influential works of African literature.

22

150

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Echeruo’s usage of the expressions “modern European poetry” and “modern Nigerian poetry” is cause for alarm! These terms are wielded as if they denoted two animals, different and coequal. But what really is this “modern Nigerian poetry” of his but modern European poetry, alias modern poetry, written by Europeanized sensibilities in Nigerian skin? Poetry written by Nigerians who are disciples of modernist European poetry? But from the way Echeruo denotes them one could get the impression that they shun the same things because both are modern, though independent and different. Which is not the case. In actual fact one, the Nigerian, shuns whatever it is said to shun, not because it is “modern” in some culturally neutral way, but just because the other, the European mentor, shuns those things. The impression that they are two different but equal things, two things which by virtue of some common modernity share some common attitudes— that impression vanishes! The derivativeness and dependency of the Nigerian imitation now stands out to be dealt with. And once we have stripped modernity of its cultural commitment to the West, once modernity ceases to be an alias for Western Modernity, it becomes much easier to attack the substantive issue raised by Echeruo’s claims. Is there anything modern, in a culturally neutral non-Western sense, about a “subtle complicating of narration, reflection and resolution?” But first, let us detour and understand what Western Modernity is all about. A good reference for that would be The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts, edited by Irving Howe.23 In his introduction to this anthology—an anthology in which outstanding Western critics and writers tell us what Modernity (or Modernism) is in the literature and arts of the west,—Howe lists some of the attributes of modernism. Now Howe, writing as he is for members of his Western culture, does not bother to say: the idea of the Modern in the Literature and the Arts of the West. But any non-Westerner who wants to keep his own cultural perspectives straight must supply for himself the appropriate modifiers. And in my recapitulation of what he has to say I shall supply such modifiers whenever necessary. Among the reasons why modernism emerged are: 1.  The Avant-Garde came into being as a special caste in Western society, a caste at its margins, a caste alienated from it and its traditions. 2.  This Avant-Garde criticised the classical Western idea of esthetic order and either abandoned or radically modifies it. In the process naturalism was out and 3.  Nature ceased to be a central subject and setting for Western literature. Also, 4.  in contradistinction to the classical western hero, a whole new sense of character, structure and the role of the protagonist or hero appeared in the Western novel. And foremost among the literary attitudes and values which emerged triumphant from all this are: 5.  Perversity – which is to say: surprise, excitement, shock, terror, affront 6.  Primitivism – which is to say: a fascination with what in Western tradition has been considered primal, decadent or atavistic (e.g. Negro art!) Irving Howe (1920–93) was a prominent US literary critic and democratic socialist politician. The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts is an edited collection, published by Horizon Press in 1968, assembling essays on modernism and/or the modern by writers, critics, and philosophers, including Stephen Spender, Lionel Trilling, David Jones, José Ortega y Gasset, Evgeni Zamyatin, Marcel Raymond, Albert Camus, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre. An earlier version of Howe’s introduction, “The Idea of the Modern,” was published in Commentary magazine in November 1967.

23

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

151

7.  Nihilism – which is to say: a breakdown and accepted loss of belief in traditional values as guide to conduct, together with a feeling that human existence is meaningless. These became dominant motifs and central preoccupations of modern Western literature. And the kind of literature that these attitudes brought into being, the modern or modernist literature of the West, is almost always difficult to comprehend. “That is a sign of its modernity,” Howe assures us. That a literature of this kind should become dominant in the West at the time that it did can be accounted for by looking closely into Western literary and social history. There was a specific burden of tradition that Western modernism reacted against in its revolt. But however familiar we may be with all that; however familiar we may be with that tradition or with the various modernist revolts against it (Symbolism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, etc.) they are not part of our history. They do not belong to our past. The individual African writer may school himself into all that knowledge (just like his Western contemporary), but the fact remains that (quite unlike his Western contemporary) none of that revolt affected and went directly into the constitution of our culture. But which culture? The African or the European? And this raises the question: who do our writers work for? Who are their audience, their listeners, the responding part of their cultural community? The Europeans—and the Europeanized—or the African? Which community and tradition do they elect to function in? Are they Africans or Europeans? Or more exactly, are they Africans influenced by Europe, or are the Black Europeans influenced by Africa? Which do they prefer to be? We must stop thinking that the past trajectory of Western history, literary or otherwise, is our own. We may have been hit over the head by the West; but that does not make us Westerners—at least not yet. It should be obvious by now that the attributes Echeruo considers “modern” are merely attributes of “modern Western literature”; are culturally determined by the history of the Western tradition, and cannot be regarded as modern in any culturally neutral nonWestern sense. Since their taste was cultivated on that modern Western tradition, our Nigerian “modernists” derive their attitude to explicitness and complex obscurantism wholly from the West. By becoming “modern” in the way of the West, any Nigerian or African writer would be inheriting the distinctly Western, as against the distinctly African, tradition. Since African society is far different today from Western society in its hallmarks, attitudes, and crisis, in its sense of problems and fulfilments; since our crisis of values consists in our having to make hasty choices while reeling from confusing blows from the West, blows that are dislodging us from the equilibrium of our traditions, would our communicators of values not be avoiding their responsibility to our community if they, rather than be clear and accessible, preferred to emulate the Western fashion and be perversely difficult and irrelevant? Let us assume (and is that an unwarranted assumption?) that these African poets are writing primarily for us Africans. Then, as regards most of the works of those “Western modernist” poets who happen to be African, I must join Ama Aidoo24 in saying:

Ama Ata Aidoo (1942–) is a Ghanaian writer, known for her depictions of the lives of African women and her commitment to a concept of African identity. Her best-known novels include her début Our Sister Killjoy (1977) and Changes (1991), which won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

24

152

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

“We are waiting around for answers and praying that those who can see things will sometimes speak in accents which the few of us who read English can understand. For we are tired of betrayals, broken promises and forever remaining in the dark.” Ama Ata Aidoo entered this plea while reviewing Wole Soyinka’s Idanre in West Africa #2641.25 But that plea could have been, and still could be, entered with equal aptness in reviews of the many more Western modernist poets among us. Another reviewer of Idanre remarks in Nigeria Magazine that Soyinka is in that work “at once snobbishly detached from and convulsively involved with the goings on around him,”—as perhaps befits any disciple of Western modernism. He says the work is difficult, obscure and (perhaps therefore?) a work of genius! —a remark that might be expected from a reviewer unsure of his African responsibilities when faced with the glamour of Western modernist attitudes. (Which is not to say that Soyinka does not have genius— whatever that is. Look at his drama! Excellent and compelling. Look at his early poetry before he abandoned the transparency and humor of “Telephone Conversation”26 and chose to wallow in dense obscurities! It is just that “genius” is not a word I like to use. It is too damned up-cloud elitist for me. It sticks in my teeth. Art for me is craft, not a romantic wet-dream!) Whereas explicitness is a hallmark of African poetry, the obscurity we find in many of our poets, the obscurity they impose upon their poems out of that creed that demands a “subtle complicating of narration, reflection and resolution,” this obscurity is a badge of Western modernism. And while talking about explicitness, clarity and obscurity let me, in passing, note that there is a distinction between an obscurity, explicitness or clarity of surface and those of depth. And I am talking of the former. In this distinction lies, perhaps, the root of Echeruo’s error. Let me quote Pound against Echeruo. Pound warns: “Obscurities not inherent in the matter, obscurities due not to the thing but to the wording, are a botch… the work lives not by them but despite them.” (Italics mine) (In the essay “Early Translators of Homer.” See Literary Essays of Pound p. 268) And the vice of Western modernist poetry that Echeruo bids us cultivate is precisely this obscurity of surfaces. Joyce made a virtue of that vice; he pulled it off. How many others have, or can? Let it be noted then that when Echeruo encourages us to complicate and obscure our diction he is advising us to abandon the African tradition for the Western, and for what is not even the best in that Western tradition. He is inviting us to desert our cultural responsibility to speak intelligibly to our communicants in African culture and to instead speak to the communicants of Western culture. Echeruo again decries explicitness when he puts down the “ ‘responsible’ moral tag.” His example of this—“Fate is a fully determined thing”—is from an Old English poem called “The Wanderer.” The effect of Echeruo’s razor, were it to cut into Nassir’s poetry, would be to rob his fine stanzas of their last lines:

Idanre is a long poem, initially commissioned for the Commonwealth Arts Festival in 1965 and subsequently published in Idanre and Other Poems in 1967. It draws on Yoruba religion, especially the god Ogun. West Africa was a London-based weekly news magazine, which published news and cultural pieces about West Africa.

25

“Telephone Conversation” is an early poem by Soyinka, first published in Moore and Beier’s Modern Poetry from Africa anthology.

26

MODERNISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

153

The male lion is on the path listen, O babbler do not criticize me secretly while ostensibly supporting me it is better to master yourself so restrain yourself such behavior is like finishing up the firewood a bone is not cookable. Reflect and take measure of the world though you talk nonsense don’t do what is meaningless these things are not proper for a man don’t shame yourself I give you what is true though you put wood on the fire a bone is not cookable. — From “A Bone is not Cookable” Tr. by Lyndon Harries from Nassir’s Swahili. But, of course, Echeruo’s modernist temper would frown on this kind of writing altogether. Well, well, what shall Africa not hear from her learned children! The Western Modernists among us are firmly in the Western camp. They show little interest in the African poetic traditions; they disdain them, and make little effort to learn from them. If they have their way we must desert our habits and surrender ourselves at the alter of the West, there to be killed, skinned and repackaged under Western labels! To Echeruo and other African critics of his persuasion (and they abound in our universities and on our magazines—Echeruo is just a good example of a very bad thing!) I say: the problem of the Modern African Writer, trained as he usually is in the Western Modernist attitudes, is to reconnect with, to transfer back into, not transfer out of, his indigenous tradition. His problem is to understand his tradition, learn from it in humility, in order to become a true participant in African Culture; his task is to imitate Nassirs, p’Biteks and Okigbos of the continent and to cease to be a modern Western writer who happens to be born African. Nassir has not left home: p’Bitek has never wandered off a prodigal. Okigbo did. But after Pound and Mallarme, Lorca and Cowley and Tagore had left their imprints on his voice, he staggered towards home. And on the eve of his homecoming he asked: “And how does one say NO in the thunder?” (Lament of the Silent Sisters).27 And reaching home he sat at the feet of the Orikis, humbly sat and closely listened, and practised what he heard. When he got home he did not treat what was his own as curios; he did not treat them as exotica fit only to be delighted in after the fashion of the ethnologist. He treated them the way we should—as his mentors, as ancestral guides who would teach his feet to wander no more; as the dibia28 who would cure him of his long demonic “pursuit of the white elephant,”29 the pursuit which had taken him through “Heavensgate,” through “Limits,” and through “Distances.” He treated these embodiments of an African tradition as the masters from whom he would learn how to say NO in the thunder to those temptresses

Okigbo, Labyrinths, 39, 43.

27

In traditional Igbo religions, dibia are healers and teachers, said to act as intermediaries between the human and spirit worlds.

28

This quotation is taken from Okigbo’s discussion, in his 1965 “Introduction” to Labyrinths, of the poetic sequence “Siren Limits,” from the collection Limits: “‘Siren Limits’ presents a protagonist in pursuit of the white elephant.” This line is actually quite a literal description of the subject matter of “Siren Limits,” but Chinweizu repurposes it to describe the poet’s career as a whole. Okigbo, Labyrinths, xi.

29

154

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

from another culture. He listened, he practised, and he was born again. And he became a true native, a true son; and he rejoined his kind and spoke in his voice of thunder. If the careers of Nassir and p’Bitek have nothing to teach our cultural exiles, Okigbo’s certainly does. For he had been one of them; had been foremost among them; yet he found a way home to his cradle. But if it is already too late for them to wander back home, let our prodigals stop masquerading. Let them declare themselves for what they are—modernists of the West, not modernists of Africa. Let them acknowledge what they are and cease and desist from influencing and advising us and our posterity in the wrong directions. If and when, like Okigbo, they return home, we shall gladly celebrate their homecoming. For we cannot reject our prodigals if they come home.

VIII. MANIFESTO OF THE ZAIRIAN AVANT-GARDISTS Les avant-gardistes zaïrois Published in French in Contribution à l’étude historique de l’art plastique zairois moderne by Badi Banga ne Mwine (Kinshasa: Editions Malayika, 1977). Translation by Sarah Van Beurden. In 1973, a group of artists in the Zairian capital of Kinshasa united under the name “AvantGardistes Zaïrois,” intending to create a new, national, modern art. The initiative came in response to critiques of modern Zairian art, which was deemed derivative. Members included sculptors Liyolo Limbe M’Puanga and Tamba Ndembe; painters Lema Kusa, Mokengo Kwekwe, Mayemba ma Nkakasa, and Mavinga ma NkondoNgwala; ceramicist Bamba Ndombasi; and art critic Badi-Banga ne Mwine. The artists situated their initiative in the context of the politics of authenticité (authenticity), designed by the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko1 to create a unifying national culture based upon so-called indigenous values and cultures. The work of these artists developed in interaction with other African modernisms of the era and circulated in the global south but they gained only limited success in the West. The movement itself was short-lived yet many of its members had a long-term influence on academic art in Zaire through their positions at the Fine Arts Academy in Kinshasa and the fact that their work was favored by the regime. SVB

The conditioning that surrounds the creation of art is intimately tied to the historical evolution a society undergoes politically, economically, socially and in terms of religion. We, modern Zairian visual artists, cannot neglect the inestimable values of our ancestral heritage which we must use not only as a solid foundation but also as a fertile source of inspiration. This means that, in a country like ours, where a complete revolution is desired, art must be at the forefront of the fight; this explains the need to channel [our] gifts and talents toward the nurturing of a new, avant-garde, revolutionary art. Furthermore, inspired by the teachings of Guide MOBUTU SESE SEKO, we believe that we are contributing more positively to the national cultural revolution by revolutionizing our art. Put simply, this means that Zairian art must present itself to the world as an art endowed with young blood and animated by a magical spirit. We would like our art to completely recover its autonomy and its intrinsic identity through a divestiture— brutal if needed—of all stereotypical formulas of foreign origin. We legitimately believe that Guide MOBUTU SESE SEKO’s philosophy of Authenticity will be the beacon that enlightens the artists, and thus, supports them in the very exhilarating mission that is theirs, namely: to enliven the hearts and sprits with the ideals of Zairian humanism, thanks to their creative genius.

Joseph-Désiré Mobutu gained power in Congo through a coup in 1965. (After an earlier coup in 1961 he had returned power to a civilian government.) The former Belgian Congo was renamed Zaire during his rule, which lasted until 1997 and was characterized by an increasing totalitarianism.

1

156

CHAPTER FOUR

Modernism in the Arab World EDITED BY STEPHEN J. ROSS AND ALYS MOODY

Modernism in the Arab world has its origins in the nahḍah (“awakening,” “renaissance”) of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning in Egypt and later spreading east to other Arabic-speaking Ottoman regions, the political and cultural transformations of the nahḍah signaled the emergence of Arab modernity and (pan) Arab nationalism out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the incursion of Western imperialism. While the “Arab Renaissance”—and the related Ottoman tanzimat (“reorganization”) of 1839– 76—involved the fitful adoption of Western political ideals such as democracy, rationalized government, egalitarianism, and religious freedom, it also triggered the regeneration and renovation of Arab culture at every level. Nowhere were these energies more keenly felt than in the classical Arabic poetic tradition, a perpetually replenishing fund of formal rules and structures that has stood at the center of Arab culture since pre-Islamic times. This tradition would first be mobilized in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century neo-classical revival to consolidate Arab identity and political self-determination, only to become ground zero of modernist renewal in the mid-twentieth century and after. Given poetry’s privileged place in the Arab cultural and political imaginary, this section’s selections emphasize poetry’s luminously compressed path to modernism and modernity (ḥadāthah), though we are also mindful to include representative statements from adjacent modernist practices, tied to internationalism and liberation struggle, in the visual arts. Stimulated by the renascent energies of the nahḍah, Arabic poetry rapidly evolved during the first half of the twentieth century.1 “Within a mere five decades or so,” Salma Khadra Jayyusi observes, “Arabic poetry had passed through almost all the phases of development which western poetry experienced over three centuries.”2 Arabic poetry became modern during this time by assimilating—in quick and overlapping succession— modes that Jayyusi identifies as neo-classical, romantic, symbolist, surrealist, and modernist. The neo-classical revival of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, spanning Egypt and Lebanon to Iraq, linked classical Arabic poetics to the struggle for modern Islamic and Arab self-determination. The turn to classical poetic grandeur and rigor was a “pointedly anti-colonialist” effort to summon “a glorious past to indict the The compressed timeline in which Arabic poetry “modernized” itself is a phenomenon mirrored elsewhere, as in the staggering emergence of Yiddish literature practically ex nihilo.

1

Salma Khadra Jayyusi, “Modernist Poetry in Arabic,” in The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M. M. Badawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 138.

2

158

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

present.”3 Egyptian poets such as Maḥmūd Sāmī al-Bārūdī (1839–1904) and Aḥmad Shawqī (1868–1932), among many others, were pioneering figures in the effort to recover Arab-Islamic political independence through the poetic tradition (al-Bārūdī also notably served, briefly, as Egypt’s fifth prime minister). The reaction against neo-classicism in the first half of the twentieth century entailed efforts to bring Arabic poetry down to earth and imbue it with modern reality and structures of feeling. Given the totalizing, perfected stasis of the classical poetic tradition, this reaction would also manifest as resistance to the perceived continuities between neoclassicism and political authoritarianism. The “romanticism” of the Dīwān School and the later Apūllū (i.e., Apollo) group, or of an influential figure such as the émigré Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān (i.e., Khalil Gibran, 1883–1931), brought new forms of feeling and desire into Arabic poetry. Against the backdrop of the neo-classical revival, Arabic poets of the early-mid twentieth century sought to bring everyday life and individual experience more emphatically into the poem. As Muhsin J. al-Musawi argues, “The modernist drive in the late 1940s to implicate the poetic into common life beyond the nineteenth-century revivalist rhetorical grandeur was part of a broad social and political consciousness,”4 one which linked the breaking of classical form with resistance to political domination. Indeed, along with the drive to bring “common life” into poetry, it was the revolution in poetic form itself—specifically free verse (al-shʿir al-ḥurr) but also prose poetry (al-shʿir al-manthūr) and the prose poem (qaṣīdat al-nathr)—that would mark the most significant modernist departure from the classical poetic tradition. “We are still gasping for air in our poems, shackling our emotions in the chains of the old meters and the creaking of dead expressions,” writes the Iraqi poet Nāzik alMalāʾikah (1923–2007) in the introduction to her collection, Splinters and Ash (1949). The free verse that al-Malāʾikah and fellow Iraqi contemporaries such as Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (1926–64) and ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (1926–99) began to compose from the 1940s onward signaled a break not only with neo-classicism but with Arab-Islamic traditionalism itself. Free verse innovation in Arabic poetry coincided with the broader historical and political rupture of the Second World War and the Nakbah in 1948, a period marked by Arab nationalist despair and the call for socialistic “engagement” (iltizām) in literature. At the same time, the Arabic free verse movement did not simply jettison the classical tradition, nor was a poet like Nāzik al-Malāʾikah untouched by romanticist mood and theme. Arabic free verse does not dispense with classical meters (Arabic “prose poetry” is a closer approximation of Western “free verse”) but varies the number of feet per line, constructing new poetic forms out of classical raw material. In doing so, it ventilates the poem and makes room for more nuanced personal expression, while remaining anchored in the classical tradition. The innovative break, therefore, lies in the assertion of a continuity with tradition to be determined not by that tradition’s changeless conventions (“the system created by al-Khalīl” in the eighth century CE, as al-Malāʾikah writes in her introduction) but by the poet herself. In this sense, the Arabic free verse movement was not merely a pivot away from neoclassicism but was also tied to the nahḍah project of Arab nationalist transformation and regeneration. These experiments would be published and theorized in important journals circulated (and censored) throughout the Arab world such as al-Ādāb (founded in 1953

Muhsin J. al-Musawi, Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2006): 8.

3

Ibid, 11.

4

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

159

and published in various forms until 2012) and, slightly later, Shiʿr (1957–70). Where the former was a very influential platform for the discussion and dissemination of literature (all genres), culture, and political thought in the Arab world, the latter, started in Beirut by Yūsuf al-Khāl (1917–87) in collaboration with the Syrian poet Adūnīs (i.e., Adonis, born ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd Isbir, 1930–), was an explicitly avant-garde organ of Arabic poetic experimentalism, notably associated with innovation in the Arabic prose poem form.5 Adūnīs, the guiding light of Shiʿr, would become one of the most consequential thinkers about Arab modernism and modernity. In his view, it is misleading to construe the importation/imposition of Western-style modernity on Arab political, economic, and cultural life as the whole of “Arab modernity,” since a deeper “modernity” (ḥadāthah) has abided within and propelled the Arab tradition for over a millennium. Thus, he argues in the final chapter of his Introduction to Poetics, poets of eighth- and ninth-century Baghdad such as Abū Nuwās and Abū Tammām are far more “modern” than neo-classical revivalists like al-Bārūdī and Shawqī, since the latter do not produce new knowledge within the matrix of the Arab tradition but instead merely imitate Western models of nationalistic poesis. We find a similar torqueing of familiar Western concepts and aesthetic modes elsewhere, as in the Egyptian visual artist Kāmil al-Tilimsānī’s (1915–72) “On Degenerate Art” (1939). In this text, al-Tilimsānī responds to a critic who had charged his group with being derivative of French by demonstrating the internationalist character of the surrealist movement and asserting the deep historical legacy of surrealism in Egyptian art and culture going back to the pharaohs. The post-war, post-Nakbah decades brought revolution not only to Arab literature and art but also to its politics. Between 1952 and 1962 Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, and Algeria decolonized and gained independence; it was a moment in which “the Arab imaginary was seized … by the imperatives of rapid anti-colonialism, modernization, and liberation and the advent of nationalist culture.”6 Out of this moment’s revolutionary optimism—which soon faded in the face of various disappointments and obstacles7— arose new forms of liberation struggle tied to nationalism, pan-Arabism, and Third Worldism. In this section we have included two texts that speak to the crisis in the social function of art which faced revolutionary artists of the period. Moroccan poet and activist Abdellatif Laâbi’s (1942–) prologue to the inaugural issue of Souffles (1966), a highly influential French-language journal of experimental literature and global LeninistMarxist and Third Worldist thought, makes the case for the “cultural decolonization” of Morocco and the Maghreb more generally. Laâbi’s inclusion in this section also speaks to the reconfiguration of geographies that attended this political crisis, as the countries of the decolonizing Maghreb sought to reorient themselves toward the Arab world as part of their resistance to Western colonialism. Although Laâbi’s contribution was written in French, within a few years, Souffles had reached a crisis and relaunched as Anfās, an The Arabic “prose poem” is more or less analogous to the Western concept (i.e., poetry usually formalized in blocks or paragraphs), while Arabic “prose poetry” roughly equates to Western free verse (i.e., poetic lines with varying and irregular syllables).

5

Ussama Makdisi, “The Making and Unmaking of the Arab World,” in Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, ed. Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nadia Shabout (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018): 32.

6

“The overtly anti-colonial regimes lost their way, faced with severe economic and social challenges of rapidly growing populations with rising expectations, the military threat of Israel (in the case of Egypt), the hostility of the Saudi-centric, conservative pro-Western petroleum order, and the insidious narcotic of power itself.” Makdisi, “The Making and Unmaking of the Arab World.”

7

160

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Arabic-language publication, cementing this configuration. At the heart of much of this turmoil in the Arab world in the 1960s is the contested political position of Palestine. The defeat of Arab nations fighting in the Six-Day War in 1967 marked a radicalization of Arab politics and with it literature. If Laâbi’s essay captures the moment immediately before this crisis, the final text in this section captures its aftermath. In “Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution” (1971), the last and most recent text in this section, Palestinian visual artist Kamāl Bullāṭah (1942–2019) foresees the coming of “Palestinian art in the revolutionary period … an art that nobody has seen, for it has not yet been born.” SJR8

FURTHER READING Badawi, M. M. The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Modern Arabic Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Bardaouil, Sam. Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2017. Bernard, Anna. “The Crisis of the Present: Literature in the Middle East and North Africa.” In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren. New York; London: Routledge, 2015. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry. 2 vols. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977. LaCoss, Don. “Egyptian Surrealism and ‘Degenerate Art’ in 1939.” The Arab Studies Journal 18.1 (Spring 2010): 78–117. Meyer, Stefan G. The Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the Levant. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. al-Musawi, Muhsin J. Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition. London; New York: Routledge, 2006. Al-Tami, Ahmed. “Arabic ‘Free Verse’: The Problem of Terminology.” Journal of Arabic Literature 24.2 (July 1993): 185–98.

This section largely follows the Library of Congress transliteration guidelines for Arabic, with some exceptions.

8

I. ON DEGENERATE ART Kāmil al-Tilimsānī Originally published in Arabic in al-Risālah, no. 321 (August 28, 1939): 1701–3. Translated by Mandy McClure. Art and Liberty (known as Art et Liberté in French and al-Fann wa-al-ḥurrīyah in Arabic) was an Egyptian surrealist group, formed in Cairo in 1938. Their manifesto “Long Live Degenerate Art!” released as a pamphlet in French and Arabic in Cairo in December 1938 was the first statement of their position, written as war approached in Europe.1 Developed in solidarity with André Breton’s and Diego Rivera’s anti-fascist group, the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, and responding to the Nazi government’s suppression of so-called “degenerate art,” the manifesto positions modernist experimentation as the anti-fascist, internationalist response that a world on the brink of war demanded. In this sense, the members of Art and Liberty understood themselves to belong to an international milieu of revolutionary artists. They participated actively in debates in European, especially French, periodicals, and, as this essay shows, their thinking was shaped in dialogue with the latest developments in French, British, and other international artistic and political thought. In July 1939, the Egyptian periodical al-Risālah published an essay by ʿAzīz Aḥmad Fahmī, the journal’s arts critic, reporting the group’s demise and reflecting on its inevitability, given what Fahmī took to be the inherent contradiction in terms of “degenerate art.” This essay sparked a heated exchange that lasted three months, as members of the group and its critics engaged in a bitter back-and-forth. The group’s critics attacked them for their embrace of “degenerate art,” as well as for their movement’s commitment to what was portrayed as a foreign, mostly French, movement. In the essay reproduced here, Kāmil al-Tilimsānī (1915–72) seeks to defend the group’s position, explaining the connection between politics and art that underpins their thought, and refuting the accusations that they are merely replicating a French movement by emphasizing both surrealism’s own relation to Egyptian tradition, and surrealism’s internationalism. For a detailed account of the debate in al-Risālah, see Don LaCoss, “Egyptian Surrealism and ‘Degenerate Art’ in 1939,” The Arab Studies Journal 18.1 (2010): 78–117. For a book-length account of the Art and Liberty group, see Sam Bardaouil, Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (I. B. Tauris, 2017). AM

This pamphlet is available in English in Franklin Rosemont and Robin Kelley, eds., Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009): 148–9; reprinted in Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, eds., Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018): 94–5.

1

162

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

We read in issue 319 of the esteemed al-Risālah an article titled “On Degenerate Art: A Final Word” a response to what a distinguished author had written about the Art and Liberty group, and a response to a dispute with Anwar Kāmil, a member of the group, who, in his response to [Naṣrī ʿAṭā Allāh Sūsah], purposefully avoided artistic details and any mention of names and dates.2 In this article of his, the distinguished gentleman [Sūsah] mentioned the name of author and poet André Breton, and translated an old passage of Breton’s on Surrealism, adding his own commentary to it. For this reason alone, I find myself compelled to correct his erroneous statements concerning Breton and his movement, so that the esteemed readers do not come away with a distorted and disfigured image of this international movement, which expresses the highest and noblest human feelings in the current century and, by its path of artistic civilization in poetry or modern painting, reached its highest level, thereby laying a foundation for the contemporary school of free verse and depiction based on intuitive thought and modern psychoanalysis. Perhaps the opponents among our colleagues will hereafter take pains to quote from more recent and credible sources on this rejuvenating moment, which even today is expanding and renewing itself, and before whose vigor no stagnant thought or indolent research and inquiry can stand. It is apparent from his writing that the distinguished author acquired all his information about Surrealism—“art far removed from apparent reality”—from a few paragraphs in [Sisley Huddleston’s 1928] book Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris. We believe that simply reading a few paragraphs such as these, written several years ago, does not give him the right to speak of that about which he spoke, and that this is an offense against both the thought and the author whom he mentions. It is also an offense against al-Risālah, given its influence and reach, which does not stop at Egypt, but extends to the entire Arab East! We must therefore have a “final word” here in response to his article. We will not return to the matter henceforth, except perhaps in detailed analytical publications or in public exhibitions and lectures that may be accommodated in the coming winter season. Over the past five years, Surrealism has undergone many essential and far-reaching developments. In this period, André Breton has published several successful statements about the movement, the innovations occurring in it, and the opinions and thought it has acquired. The most recent of these developments is Breton’s brilliant article in the latest issue of his journal Minotaure, which the gentleman in question must read, along with the articles preceding it.3 Breton’s article offers a lucid exploration of the most recent directions in Surrealist painting and writing by leading French and English critics, poets, and authors of the movement. Surrealism is not “a purely French movement,” as the gentleman claims. Rather, it is a movement whose most distinctive feature is the internationalism of its thought and means. Its character is not local or nationalist in any way, whether major or minor. It is truly strange and astonishing that the gentleman [Sūsah] permits himself to fall into such obscene error in his writing. I advise him here to read what the great English critic Herbert Read wrote in his book on Surrealism regarding the internationalism of this free movement,4 These essays are available in English translation in Modern Art in the Arab World, ed. Lenssen, Rogers, and Shabout, 95–100.

2

André Breton, “Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste,” Minotaure, 3rd series, 12–13 (Paris, May 1939): 16–17.

3

See Herbert Read, “Introduction,” in Surrealism, ed. Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1936): 19–91. Reprinted with some changes as “Surrealism and the Romantic Principal” in Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art: Collected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) and Herbert Read, Selected Writings: Poetry and Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1964).

4

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

163

and [to consider] the utter improbability of the gentleman’s accusation that it is purely French. In fact, I would like to inform him that there is not a single Frenchman among the leading Surrealist painters. The painter Giorgio de Chirico is Greek-Italian; Salvador Dalí is Spanish, as is Picasso himself; Paul Klee and Max Ernst are from Germany5; Penrose is English, as is Henry Moore. As for Paul Delvaux, he is Belgian, and Chagall is a Russian national, and so on. These, my good sir, are the leaders of the movement, and it is ironic that there is not a single Frenchman among them! Art has no country, my friend. You erred when you wrote: “I believe that artistic currents cannot move so easily from one country to another, to say nothing of character and inspiration.” There are comparable movements in England, Mexico, Belgium, the United States, Holland, etc. Do you believe, sir, that it is a disgrace that some Egyptian paintings draw from or are influenced by this school? We want a civilization that moves with the world. We do not want to stand still while everyone else moves on. Concerning this same topic, I also advise you to read the editorial in the January 1939 issue of Clé, so that you can learn for yourself, in silence, how little understanding you have of this school.6 Have you seen, sir, the four-armed sugar mawlid doll? Have you seen the Karagöz shadow puppets? Have you listened to the stories of Umm al-shuʿūr, Clever Ḥasan, and others from local folk literature?7 All this, sir, is Surrealism. Have you visited the Egyptian Museum? Much pharaonic art is Surrealism. Have you visited the Coptic Museum? Much Coptic art is Surrealism. We are not imitating any foreign schools, but rather creating an art that arises from the brown soil of this country and has coursed in our blood from the first day we lived with our unrestricted thoughts up until this very hour, my friend. Concerning this supposedly French movement, you say, sir, that “its prime impetus is the theory of the scientist Sigmund Freud.” This is a generalization that contains much hyperbole and seeks, without basis, to draw plaudits from the public—presuming as it does that the public is largely ignorant of such matters. Such words are a far cry from accurate analysis. Freud is valued by the public and by the entire free democratic world, which enjoys freedom of thought. Is it a crime, sir, for analysis based on Freudian theories to enter into painting, just as it has already entered into literature and poetry in this free and democratic country of ours? Egypt is not yet part of Germany, and Italy has yet to colonize our country—so Freud’s works need not yet be burned in our public squares amid cries of joy and savagery!8 No sir, Egypt is still democratic, and you must suppress the influence of fascist, Nazi thought on your view of our art, and discern the straight way for yourself. Do you know, sir, that the paintings of Maḥmūd Bāy Saʿīd, the greatest of painters,9 are all

Klee was actually Swiss German.

5

Clé was the journal of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI). It was published in Paris and ran for only two issues, in January and February of 1939. The second issue, in February, carried an announcement of the launch of the Art and Liberty group, as well as an essay by Georges Henein.

6

Here, al-Tilimsānī is identifying toys, activities, and folklore characters from popular arts in Egypt—that is, cultural practices that exhibit qualities of free imagination and stylistic exploration. [Translator’s note]

7

Freud’s works were among those burned by German students during the Nazi book-burnings in 1933.

8

Maḥmūd Saʿīd (1897–1964) was a modern Egyptian painter (“Bāy” is an honorific title, traditionally appended to his name). His work is modernist and nationalist, although not terribly influenced by surrealism. By 1939, he already had a substantial reputation both domestically and internationally, in Europe and the United States.

9

164

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Freudian, as are most of the writings of Mr. Maḥmūd Taymūr Bāy,10 Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm,11 and others? That our art relies on Freud’s theories—if this is partly true for some of us—is no reason to call such art “degenerate” at the top of your lungs. Here I advise you, sir, to become acquainted with the material before writing that this is the relationship of these paintings to the scientist Sigmund Freud. On this relationship, I point you to an enjoyable section in the book Art and Society by the critic Herbert Read, or to what that same English Surrealist has recently written in issues of the London Bulletin.12 Among the things cited in your article, you mentioned “automatic writing.” Are you aware, sir, that the time of this automatic writing has come and gone already? A living thing is perpetually and spontaneously renewed. My friend, there is no need to mention, today, something that you’ve only learned a little bit about after those concerned have already abandoned it—the form of such writing has since changed. Have you read, my good sir, André Breton’s What Is Surrealism? I am sure you have not. Otherwise you would not have quoted the words you did today—which Breton spoke several years ago—without mentioning what he said to introduce those words, and without noting what he said after them. Perhaps you will find an image that will please you, sir, in a lecture given in French by the Egyptian poet Georges Henein, a member of the group, reproduced in the October 1937 issue of Revue des Conférences Françaises en Orient, which is published in Cairo.13 Finally, do you know, sir, that the leading critic in Egypt, Aḥmad Bāy Rassim—a man who has expressed his opinions on art ever since art was destined to emerge in Egypt— spoke of three members of the group, painters, in several articles?14 In the last of these, in the September 17, 1938, issue of al-Ahrām and the October 15, 1938, issue of al-Balāgh, he mentioned the influence of folk art and Eastern art on the works of these artists, who include Kamal William, Fatḥī al-Bakrī, and the author of these very lines. Some of the members of this group, such as Abū Khalīl Luṭfī and Ḥusayn Yūsuf Amīn, have reached a high degree of refinement in local folk art. Their art reveals both imagination and an individual thought that is by no means Surrealist, although it does share in some of the associations and fundamentals of Surrealism, particularly the engravings of the sculptor Abū Khalīl Luṭfī. As for the paintings of Yūsuf al-ʿAfīfī and Fuʾād Kāmil, they are straight from the heart: their lines are composed of their very nerves and blood. The art of both of them is strictly individual, with no one but themselves having any direct link to it in any way. I would like to answer you here with what our master Yūsuf al-ʿAfīfī once

Maḥmūd Taymūr (1894–1973) was an Egyptian novelist who, in the 1930s, wrote novels in the style of naturalism. 11 Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987) was an Egyptian playwright and novelist. His plays were influenced by the theater he encountered while studying in Paris in the 1920s, and left a particularly significant mark on Egyptian writing. 12 Art and Society was first published in 1937. London Bulletin was an influential English surrealist magazine, which ran from 1938 to 1940, to which Herbert Read was a regular contributor. 10

Georges Henein, “Bilan du mouvement surréaliste,” Revue des conférences françaises en Orient 8 (October 1937). 13

Aḥmad Rassim (1895–1958) was an Egyptian poet and diarist, as well as an art critic, who wrote in French and Arabic.

14

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

165

said to a critic who opposed his theory: “Surrealism is nothing but a modern academic term for what we call imagination, freedom of expression, freedom of style. From time immemorial, the East has been home to all of this.” We shall not return to this again. Perhaps what I have briefly mentioned here will inspire the esteemed readers of al-Risālah to read some of these authors and critics.

II. INTRODUCTION TO SPLINTERS AND ASH Nāzik al-Malāʾikah Originally published in Arabic as the introduction to Shaẓāyā wa-ramād (Splinters and Ash), Beirut, 1949. Translated by Emily Drumsta. Nāzik al-Malāʾikah (1923–2007) was an Iraqi poet, credited as one of the pioneers of Arabic free verse. Born in Baghdad and raised in a wealthy family, she was trained in the classical Arabic tradition, publishing her first poem at the age of 10. As a young woman, she developed an interest in British and Arab Romanticism, nurturing her interest in the English literary tradition during two periods of study in the United States: as an undergraduate at Princeton in 1950–1, and as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she earned a masters degree in 1956. Her career as a poet spanned the late 1940s into the 1970s, and was bolstered by her significant contributions to the theorization of the poetic innovations that accompanied the flourishing of Arabic modernist poetry in this period. This text is the introduction to her second volume of poetry. In it, she lays out a program for writing free verse in Arabic, a form that, as this text makes clear, differs from English free verse in its continued commitment to a relatively strict metrical form. Instead of doing away with meter, al-Malāʾikah advocates for a form that keeps alive the traditional Arabic metrical foot, but that varies the number of feet in each line. In this way, she seeks to tread a line between the rich tradition of Arabic poetry, which had a continued popular resonance in Arab societies, and the desire to innovate and make new. This mediation between innovation and tradition characterizes al-Malāʾikah’s approach to poetry throughout her career, and would later attract criticism from writers like Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, who considered her too invested in meter. As a nationalist writer who was committed to pan-Arabism, however, al-Malāʾikah’s metrical decisions are also political ones, aimed at keeping the role of poetry alive as a popular, national form. This introduction too might be understood as part of that project, aimed—like texts of Anglophone modernist literary criticism, such as Laura Riding and Robert Grave’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry—not just at describing a new form, but at teaching its readers how to read this new poetry, and thus at producing a readership for modernist poetic innovation. This translation by Emily Drumsta brings this foundational text of Arabic free verse into English for the first time. All notes in the text are the translator’s. AM

In poetry, as in life, Bernard Shaw’s expression—“The golden rule is that there are no golden rules”—still holds true, and for good reason.1 Poetry is born from life’s events, and life’s events do not follow any specific rule of organization, nor are life’s objects and feelings arranged according to any particular color scheme. Still, this view does not contradict the tendency to divide poetry into schools and sects such as “Classical,”

George Bernard Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists,” in Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1903): 227.

1

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

167

“Romantic,” “Realist,” “Symbolist,” “Surrealist,” etc., which is common among many literary critics. These divisions do not, after all, represent rules; they are only judgments. Many might agree with my opinion that Arabic poetry has not yet stood on its own two feet, after the long slumber in which bygone centuries weighed heavily on it. For the most part, we are still prisoners, held captive by the rules our forebears established in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods. We are still gasping for air in our poems, shackling our emotions in the chains of the old meters and creaking, dead expressions. No sooner do some of us try to disobey than we are met with the resistance of a thousand jealous protectors of our language, a thousand guardians of the poetic traditions invented by one ancient man who understood what suited his time and whose invention we have since solidified and adopted as custom. It is as though language cannot be safe unless it is frozen in the state in which it existed a thousand years ago, as though poetry cannot be poetry if its metrical feet diverge from the system created by al-Khalīl.2 Some might ask: what’s wrong with al-Khalīl’s method? What’s wrong with the language our ancestors have used for centuries? The response to these questions is beyond the scope of a short introduction to a poetry collection such as this. What’s wrong with al-Khalīl’s method, you ask? Hasn’t it grown rusty from the palpations of so many pens and lips over the years? Haven’t our ears grown so accustomed to it, our lips so constantly repeated it, and our pens so thoroughly gnawed at it that they’ve finally spit it out? For centuries, we’ve been describing our emotions using the same style, and now that style no longer has any taste or color. Life has changed; images, colors, and feelings have been turned on their heads, and despite this fact our poetry is still variations on qifā nabkī and bānat Suʿād.3 If the meters remain, and the rhymes remain, won’t the general idea be the same as well? Some might ask: what is language? Why is it necessary to give it new horizons? They forget that if language doesn’t keep pace with life, it dies. The reality is that the Arabic language does not yet possess the life-giving strength necessary to confront the cyclones of fear and fire that fill our souls today. It was once an inspiring language: moving, laughing, weeping, and storming. Then generations of specialists embalmed and petrified its expressions, turning them into readymade facsimiles which they distributed to writers and poets without realizing that one poet can do for language what a thousand grammarians and linguists together could never do. The poet, with his sharpened sensibilities and careful linguistic ear, can stretch words to accommodate new and unheard-of meanings. Driven by his artistic sensibility, he might tear up a given rule, not to do harm to language, but to urge it forward. The poet or man of letters, then, is the one in whose hands language develops. As for the grammarian and the linguist, they have nothing to do with it. The grammarian and the linguist have one important duty: to notice things, and to extract general rules from the writers and poets with the sharpest sensibilities. The man of letters whose sensibilities we will agree to call “sharp,” however, must have a deep cultural education whose roots extend to the innermost core of his native literature, ancient and modern alike, and to some familiarity with the literature of at least one foreign country as well. This education should instill him such a strong linguistic sensibility that everything he creates will be beautiful and exalted. Whenever he tears up a Al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī (718–86 CE), an early Arabic lexicographer and philologist who is credited with standardizing Arabic prosody or ʿarūḍ.

2

These are the opening words of two pre-Islamic “hanging odes” or muʿallaqāt by Imrūʾ al-Qays and Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr, respectively. The odes are considered the oldest and most revered poems in the Arabic tradition.

3

168

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

rule, adds new color to a word, or creates a new expression, we feel it is the best possible innovation, and we begin to treat it as a new “golden rule.” But the sharp litterateur’s occupation will not be limited to breaking a rule here and adding new meaning there. He will have a more specific responsibility than this—one which the nature of living human languages will impose upon him. He will have to insert a key change into the literary dictionary of his era. He will have to disregard many of the words used in past centuries and create in their place new words that have never been used before, because words grow old in the same way that everything touched by the fingers of use in this ever-changing life grow old. As the years pass, words can take on hardness through repetition and gradually lose their many-branching meanings. They come to have single, fixed meanings that paralyze the writer’s feelings and inhibit his freedom of expression. There is another important justification for this attempt to distance ourselves from frequently used words and expressions: the human ear is bored by familiar images and repeated sounds. Such repetition can strip words of their vitality and their multiple meanings. For example, we Arab poets now naturally avoid words such as “amber,” “camphor,” “benzoil branch,” “crescent moon,” “lovelocks,” “oud,” “narcissus,” “pearls.” These are words that, in certain previous eras, seemed refined and poetic. Perhaps at the time they were only used by the most innovative poets. Throughout my study of contemporary literatures, however, I’ve noticed the following curious thing: that we, in this era, have forgotten the specialized lexical meaning of the word badr (full moon), almost disregarding it completely. In its place, we use the word qamar (moon), and very few contemporary poets use the word badr except in rare instances. I confess that I myself sometimes go to great pains not to use badr, and there is a psychological explanation for this: my peers and I doubtless remember dozens of tone-deaf, distasteful verses left to us by the poets of a bygone era who used the word badr so much they stripped it of its beauty, extinguishing its flame and leaving behind little more than their own shadows. Perhaps this is what psychologists call “association” (and perhaps they have a different explanation for it)4 and has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. The important thing is that words rust and erode; they need to be replaced from time to time. And we have seen that this process of exchanging and replacing is the work of the litterateur, who carries it out while he is “half-conscious,” because complete consciousness rarely ever yields anything of value. *** Let us return to meter. In this collection of poetry, there is a simple kind of “departure” from the customary rules in poems such as “The Woman Who Gathers Shadows,” “Let’s Be Friends,” “Elegy for an Unimportant Day,” “Song of the Chasm,” and others. I should say here that I do not count myself among the poets with “sharp sensibilities” about whom I spoke earlier. I only feel that this new style of ordering al-Khalīl’s metrical feet can free the poet’s wings from a thousand restraints. In what follows, I will try to lay out the particularities of this style and why it is preferable to al-Khalīl’s style. The following lines belong to the meter that al-Khalīl called al-mutaqārib, “the tripping,” which contains only one foot: faʿūlun, repeated four times in each hemistich (eight times in each complete line): ‫يداك للمس النجوم‬ ‫ونسج الغيوم‬ The word “association” is written out in Latin characters in the original.

4

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

169

‫يداك لجمع الظالل‬ ‫وتشييد يوتوبيا في الرمال‬ Your two hands touch the stars weave the mist Your two hands gather dark build utopia here in the sands.5 Now, if I had used the style of al-Khalīl, could I have expressed my ideas with such brevity and facility? Certainly not. I would have been forced to complete each line with a second hemistich, thereby fabricating meanings different from and extraneous to what I originally intended, simply to fill up space. Perhaps the first line would have gone like this: ‫يداك للمس النجوم الوضاء   ونسج الغمائم ملء السماء‬ Your two hands touch the stars shining bright and weave fabric from clouds in the sky The two-hemistich line does criminal injustice to the original image. Observe how we added the adjective “bright” (al-wiḍāʾ) onto “stars” without any reason dictated by the meaning, but simply to fill out the first hemistich with its four feet? See also how we replaced the expressive word “mists” (ghuyūm) with the heavy synonym “clouds” (ghamāʾim) even though it doesn't actually mean the same thing. Then there is this needless expression “in the sky” (malʾ al-samāʾ), which we have patched onto the image simply for the meter’s sake. Where our original intent was to create a gentle pause in the line's music, with this expression we have actually given it crutches! This is what happens if we work with the mutaqārib meter. If we choose the ṭawīl (“long”) meter, however, the travesty becomes even worse. This meter elongates the crutches and widens the patches, such that the general idea of the line shrivels up and withers away: ‫يداك للمس النّجْ ِم أو نسج غيمة   يس ِيّرها اإلعصار في كل مشرق‬ Your hands, when they caress the stars or clouds, blow them in tempests every day at dawn.6 The reader must notice the stupidity of the expression and the hardening of the image, as well as its distance from our first set of lines:

The lines in Arabic contain a single foot— faʿūlun, the base foot of the mutaqārib meter—repeated an irregular number of times in each line: line 1 = three feet, line 2 = two feet, line 3 = four feet, line 4 = four feet. I have tried to replicate the foot meter with the anapest in English. The Arabic lines rhyme aabb. 6 The ṭawīl or “long” meter is one of the most highly regarded and widely used in classical Arabic poetry (particularly in the pre-Islamic “hanging odes” or muʿallaqāt). Unlike the mutaqārib, the ṭawīl meter combines two feet in its pattern as follows: faʿūlun mafāʿīlun faʿūlun mafāʿīlun (caesura) faʿūlun mafāʿīlun faʿūlun mafāʿīlun. To replicate the social function and centrality of the ṭawīl meter in English, I have used iambic pentameter. 5

170

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Your two hands touch the stars and weave the mist Your two hands gather dark and build utopia here in the sands. We must also remember that this new style is not a departure from al-Khalīl’s way, but rather a modification of his method, necessitated by the way ideas and styles have developed throughout the ages that separate us from al-Khalīl. al-Khalīl made the pattern of the kāmil or “perfect” meter run like this: ‫كفاي ترتعشان أين سكينتي؟   شفتاي تصطخبان أين هدوئي‬ (‫)متفاعلن متفاعلن متفاعلن)    (متفاعلن متفاعلن متفاعلن‬ My hands are trembling, where is my stillness? My lips are clamoring, where is my silence? The meter is focused on the foot mutafāʿilun, which Arab poets are used to repeating three times in every hemistich. All we will do now is play with the number of feet and their arrangement in each line, such that the poem will sometimes follow the meter and sometimes not. Take, for example, this excerpt from the poem “Walls and Shadows:” ‫وهناك في األعماق شيء جامد‬ ‫حجزت بالدته المساء عن النهار‬ ‫شيء رهيب بارد‬ ‫خلف الستار‬ ‫يدعى جدار‬ ‫أواه لو هدم الجدار‬ Something solid lurks there in the deep and its apathy hides day from night something frightening and cold cloaked in veils called a wall how I wish it would fall If we metered these lines, they would run as follows:

Some/thing /so//lid lurks/ there// in/ the/ deep// and/ its/ a//pa/thy /hides// day/ from/ night// some/thing/ fright//ning/ and/ cold// cloaked/ in/ veils// called/ a/ wall// how/ I/ wish// it/ would/ fall//

‫متفاعلن متفاعلن متفاعلن‬ ‫متفاعلن متفاعلن متفاعلن‬ ‫متفاعلن متفاعلن‬ ‫متفاعلن‬ ‫متفاعلن‬ ‫متفاعلن متفاعلن‬ (3 rough anapests) (3) (2) (1) (1) (2)

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

171

The significance of this new model is that it liberates the poet from the tyranny of the two-hemistich line which, with its six fixed feet, forces the poet to cap off his words when the sixth foot arrives, even if the idea he wants to convey could be expressed in four. The new style, by contrast, allows him to stop wherever he wishes. *** We must also speak about rhyme, this stone which clogs up every line of poetry composed in traditional prosody. It has been said that Arabic is a broad, rich language, and that this justifies its having been the only language that adopted mono-rhyme as a custom in its poetry. It is easy to forget, however, that no language, no matter how broad or rich, can create an “epic” that rhymes on a single letter, no matter which letter it is. Those who extol the richness of Arabic do not realize that this is one of the reasons why there are no epics in Arabic literature, unlike in the literatures of its neighbors, the Persians and Greeks. This is not the place to discuss the heavy losses that mono-rhyme has inflicted on Arabic poetry throughout the many eras of the past. What I do want to stress, however, is that this form of rhyme gives the poem a monotonous quality that bores the listener and makes him feel that the poet has overworked his lines in his desperate hunt for rhymes. Mono-rhyme has most certainly strangled many poets’ sensibilities and buried innumerable ideas (maʿānī) alive in their hearts. This is because in true poetry, “musicality is special, and Arabic poetry is almost all musical.”7 Poetry can only be born from the first burst of feeling in the poet’s heart, and this burst is likely to dry up at the first impediment to cross its path, like a dream from which a sleeper quickly wakes. Mono-rhyme has always been this impediment. No sooner has the poet felt the poetic state descend upon him, grabbed his pen, and begun writing some lines, than the fruits of his labor begin to calcify with stilted rhymes. He must divide his mind between the diametrically opposed tasks of expressing his feeling and thinking about rhyme. Soon the trance-state has left him, and its spontaneity is gone. The poet is merely sorting words into lines and arranging rhymes without feeling. This is why, in our ancient literature, we rarely find poems with a single, unifying meaning, or poems dominated by a single expressive atmosphere from beginning to end. The poet is forced to fabricate rhyme, and I know many poets who choose a rhyme first and then write lines in conformity with it—proof that rhyme, this jealous goddess, exercises a tyrannical rule over our work. Fortunately, our contemporary poets have lessened the power of rhyme and departed from it by using the quatrain and other forms. Such forms of versification have even become widely accepted, for the most part. There is no longer any objection to the rhymes in this poetry collection, for example, though I admit that I have sometimes played with my rhymes more than others. In the poem “Nails,” for example, the rhyme scheme is: aba bcb cdc ded efe … etc. In the poem “Ashes,” I have used the quatrain form, making the rhyme scheme abba. In “Strangers,” I have used the “stanza” form,8 so the rhyme in every stanza is as follows: aabbab. As for the poem “Cholera,” the stanzas in it are slightly longer than custom dictates, and they rhyme as follows: abbccbdbeeee. Elsewhere, I have liberated several poems from rhyme completely, as in “The Train Passed By,” “The End of the Stairs,” “Fairy Tales,” “Walls and Shadows,” and others. In these last poems, I have left the rhymes to repeat as the context dictates, rather than making them conform The quote is unattributed in the original.

7

“Stanza” is written out in Latin characters in the original.

8

172

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

to a set pattern. Perhaps this is the last step separating this verse from “Blank Verse.”9 As for the poem “The Angry Wound,” I should point out that its novel way of arranging rhymes is based on the style of the American poet Edgar Allan Poe in his innovative poem “Ulalume.” *** I have said that the Arabic language does not yet have the power to give new life because its writers and its poets have only recently learned how to make the best use of the powers hidden behind words (alfāẓ). Throughout the many centuries of the “dark,” stagnant period, words were only used to denote their most common meanings (maʿānī). This may explain the Arab masses’ strong tendency to reject those poetic schools that rely on the revivifying strength of words—such as Symbolism and Surrealism—believing that these schools tend to overload language with denote symbols, ineffable emotions, detours of the subconscious, and dreams with hidden meanings. Such things can only be expressed in a language that has reached the pinnacle of its development. The reality is that the Arab reader flees from Symbolist poetry because when the language is faced with the prospect of expressing such obscure feelings, it resists at first, and it is not strange that it should hesitate. But to explain this situation by saying that the Arab mind, in its very nature, flees from symbols and finds no beauty in the tortuous corridors that wind behind the senses, or in hidden worlds that are difficult to apprehend—this is something that I personally do not believe. For the human soul in general is not clear; it is always wrapped in a thousand veils. And it often happens that the self expresses itself in indirect ways governed by thousands of half-effaced memories that have lurked in the depths of the rational mind, hidden for years and years. The soul might speak in hundreds of fleeting images that the conscious, rational mind dismisses, but that the hidden mind seizes upon and stows away like buried treasure, along with millions of other passing images it has locked up in hidden rooms. Then, when it senses a lapse in the conscious mind, it releases this treasure in a stream of formless, indistinct images. These strange feelings are not peculiar to any one person more than another; it is only the ability to express them that differs. A regular person sees them in his dreams. An artist, however, expresses them in his both his art and his dreams. It is not strange, for example, to wake up in the middle of the night having dreamed of running barefoot through an old tunnel that was part of a house you used to live in and haven't seen in person for eighteen years. Yet despite not having seen the house in all this time, in the dream you notice the same minute, trivial, half-effaced details that you saw in bygone years—like that crooked old nail in the wall with the same pale, old thread still dangling from it. And there, a few meters up, the water pipe that you used to climb as a child. As I said, we do not find these things strange in a dream, so why can't we accept them when a poet describes them in a poem? The true poet is one who observes himself attentively, as though he were monitoring a surging, limitless, bottomless sea. He cannot flee from such faint, faded images, because they follow him always and everywhere, and he must describe them in his poetry. Obscurity is essential to the life of the human soul; we cannot avoid confronting it if we want an art that describes and touches the soul in all its particularity.

“Blank Verse” is written out in Latin characters in the original.

9

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

173

And yet obscurity is not an end in itself, but rather one of many forms that life can take. For this reason, it is rare to find a poet who writes exclusively complex, ambiguous verse. As for those who intentionally aim for complexity in their poetry, Aldous Huxley requested forgiveness for them when he said that contemporary writers and artists flee into obscurity in fear of the obviousness that is the fundamental characteristic of popular literature.10 In explaining Surrealist and Symbolist forms of expression in this way, I do not aim to say that a portion of the poems in this collection belong to this school or that. Rather, I want to clear space for the kinds of poems that deal with the states of the hidden self at times, and with the subconscious at others. These are states of mind into which Arabic poetry has ventured only very rarely in its long history, choosing instead to focus on the external behaviors of mankind. In my poem “The Thread That was Tied to the Cypress Tree,” I tried to paint a poetic image of the feelings and thoughts passing through the mind of a young man who has just heard news of his lover’s death. You will notice that the love story in this poem is secondary to the thread tied to the tree and the afflicted young man's distraction, in the state of internal chaos that has befallen him. The conflict of the poem is built around the state of mind that descends on a person who hears devastating, tragic, and unexpected news. He is deeply distracted, as though he hasn’t heard the news at all. He looks around, and his eyes fixate on the first trivial thing they see. He is submerged in thinking about it. The trivial thing in this poem is the thread tied to the cypress tree next to the door. The devastated mind is occupied with thinking about this thread, and it continues to be occupied until his conscious mind reawakens and brings home the gravity of the tragedy that has befallen him. The reader will also not find anything provocative in the poem “The Train Passed By” if he expects to find in it a description of a train or a journey by train. My main intention in writing this poem was to express the vague feelings of a person traveling in the third class car of a train at night. There is the state of utter exhaustion in which a person finds himself in that situation, mixed with a kind of languor and slackening. There is the monotonous sound of the train wheels that never changes, and the color of the dust that covers everything, suitcases, faces, and clothing. There is the sight of the other travelers, strangers whom the train car has gathered into rows. And the train whistles from time to time, causing strange feelings in the soul. And yet despite all of this, silence fills the train car, as most of the passengers sleep sitting up in their seats. And from time to time, a strange and unknown traveler suddenly yawns or asks coldly and distractedly, “What time is it?” or “When do we arrive?” or “Where are we?” or something similar. If the reader of “The Train Passed By” feels something of this environment, that is enough for me. In the poem “The Viper,” by contrast, I tried to express the occasional, vague feeling that one is being chased by a great, unfathomable power. This power is often an agglomeration of sad memories or regrets, or something we hate about ourselves, or a frightening image we have seen and cannot forget, or the soul with all of its desires and weaknesses and uncertainties, or anything else, depending on the reader. This doesn’t mean that I am describing my own personal “vipers” in the poem; this is a secondary concern. The important thing, rather, is the idea that this viper continually chases after

A reference to Aldous Huxley’s essay, “Sincerity in Art,” from the volume On Art and Artists (1960).

10

174

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

us, and that it is futile to flee, such that we are driven into a “Labyrinth” of thought,11 that maze which a person enters and finds he cannot leave, so complex are its paths and so numerous its doors, until he begins to use the method of autosuggestion, as I wrote in the poem: ‫إنه لن يجيء‬ ‫لن يجيء وإن عبر المستحيل‬ ‫أبدا لن يجيء‬ No, it will not come. It will not come, even if it crosses the impossible it will never come. The final result is that the viper does indeed come in the end, and we quickly scream out, “It has come!” In the poem “Fairy Tales,” meanwhile, the reader will find what I feel, and what many other people also probably feel, whenever silence fills a place. When this happens, we begin to hear with the ear of the spirit, and the objects lying motionless around us tell a thousand stories. The fence speaks and revives all of its pale, dead memories, and “stories written on pages torn to shreds by ruin” tell moving tales of times long gone and forgotten. “Dust” and “chairs in ancient rooms” tell of a generation of people who lived among them for a day then moved on into distant, unknown horizons. And so on, such that a sensitive person cannot see anything around him without hearing its murmured, whispered speech. *** I believe that Arabic poetry today is on the brink of a decisive, powerful development that will leave nothing of the old styles in its wake. The rules of all of the old meters, rhymes, and schools will be shaken to their core, and language will expand to include new horizons with fuller powers of expression. Poems will delve quickly and directly into the interior of the soul, where before they tended to revolve around it at a distance. I say this after having carefully studied the trajectory of our contemporary poetry, and I say it because it is the logical result of our willingness to read European literatures and study the latest theories of philosophy, art, and psychology. The reality of the situation is that those who want to unite modern culture with the traditions of ancient poetry are like those who try to live a contemporary life while wearing the clothing of the first century of Islam. We are facing a choice: either we learn these new theories, allow ourselves to be influenced by them, and implement them for ourselves, or we don’t learn them at all. We would do well to remember that developments in the arts and humanities across history have almost always grown out of contact between two or more nations. The sensibilities of a specific nation can die out and lie dormant for many centuries as a result of specific circumstances. Subsequently, a vigorous and energetic time comes to wake that nation from its sleep, and it begins to move, bustle, and stir restlessly, staring at the world around it and starting to incorporate the cultures that have come into contact with it. It begins to benefit from the experiences of a nearby nation that remained productive and continued to add new, Written out in Latin characters in the original.

11

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

175

illuminating chapters to the book of human thought. No sooner has a half century passed than the dormant nation has ended its period of assimilation and begun to pick up where the productive nation left off. It begins to augment the products of its neighbors. This is the way development has always worked in the history of nations, such that no school of thought, invention, or theory pioneered by one nation has not benefitted from the experiences of others. The last thing I want to say in this introduction is that I deeply and fervently believe in the future of Arabic poetry. I believe that it is pushing forward—with all the strength, inspiration, and possibility embedded in our poets’ hearts—to occupy a prominent place in world literature. A thousand greetings to the poets of tomorrow.

III. PROLOGUE TO SOUFFLES Abdellatif Laâbi Originally published in Souffles 1 (first trimester, 1966). Translated from French by Teresa Villa-Ignacio. In 1966, the Moroccan poet, novelist, playwright, translator, and activist Abdellatif Laâbi (1942–) founded the revolutionary literary and cultural journal, Souffles (“breaths”), with Mostafa Nissabouri (1943–) and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–95). Published a decade after Morocco achieved independence from France and in the aftermath of King Ḥasan II’s brutal crackdown on student protests in Casablanca in March 1965, Souffles began as a radical poetry revue that aimed to stimulate a new, modernized Moroccan literature resistant to colonial French and Arabic influences. It soon expanded into a highly influential journal of global Marxist-Leninist and Third Worldist commentary and thought. Closely aligned with the anti-colonial and decolonial projects of the time, especially the work of Frantz Fanon, Souffles was intimately concerned with what Laâbi called “cultural decolonization” in Morocco and the Maghreb more broadly. It was also a lightning rod of mid-late 1960s pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism; writers and thinkers from across North Africa and the Middle East as well as the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and North and South America appeared in its pages. In 1971, Laâbi and his Souffles collaborators founded a parallel Arabic monthly, Anfās, dedicated to far-left liberation struggles across the Arab world. Threatened by Anfās’ explicit opposition stance, Moroccan authorities shut down Souffles- Anfās after eight issues of the latter, and imprisoned and tortured Laâbi in 1972. He was released in 1980 and has lived in France since 1985. Souffles stands in the same company as Tropiques (Martinique), Mawāqif (Lebanon), and Présence Africaine (France) as a world-historical modernist literary and cultural organ aligned with liberation struggle. (“Our Maghribī, African, European, and other writer friends are fraternally invited to participate in our modest enterprise,” Laâbi writes.) Twenty-two issues appeared between 1966 and 1971, the first being inaugurated by Laâbi’s rousing “Prologue,” reprinted below. This text, the working manifesto of the Souffles group of writers and artists, announces a departure from “stagnant French models and Arabic canons in order to forge new artistic forms and literary languages in dialogue with the rest of the decolonizing world.”1 The question of language becomes a particular point of concern in this essay. Morocco’s indigenous languages—the vernacular Moroccan Arabic (Dārijah) or Berber (Tamazight)—were primarily oral, while its literary languages (French and Standard Arabic) were both colonial impositions in this region. In this context, the choice to write in French was one that required some defense and Laâbi attempts such a defense in this essay. The turn to Arabic with Anfās in 1971 reflects the reconfiguration of language politics in the region, as pan-Arabism became linked to an anti-colonial impulse in the aftermath of

Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016): 2.

1

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

177

the Six-Day War (1967). In both cases, however, what is at stake is an attempt to lay claim to and transform the colonial languages that shaped Morocco’s destiny. Regarding the pressing practical matter of “communicating this poetry,” Laâbi asks, “Why then resign ourselves to an even more overwhelming, sterile silence,” echoing Césaire’s lament of his own “mute and sterile land” in the introduction to the first issue of Tropiques in 1941. In both cases, the recourse to the language of the colonizer is not a capitulation to colonial rule but a crucial step toward the liberatory transvaluation of it. All notes to this essay are the translator’s. SJR

The Poets who have authored the texts of this, the manifesto issue of the journal Souffles, are unanimously aware that publishing in this venue means they are taking a stand at a moment when issues pertaining to our national culture have attained a degree of extreme tension. The current state of literary affairs is not characterized, as some might believe, by a proliferation of creativity. The cultural disturbance that some individuals or groups are hoping will pass for a literary growth spurt is, in fact, only the expression of our ongoing stagnation or a certain number of misunderstandings about the deeper meaning of literary activity. Petrified contemplation of the past, sclerosis of forms and themes, shameless imitation and forced borrowings, and the misplaced vanity of false talents constitute the adulterated daily bread with which the press, journals, and the greed of our rare publishing houses bludgeon us. Even when we leave these multiple prostitutions out of the discussion, literature has become a form of aristocratism, a rosette on display, a force of intelligence and cunning. This is not a quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. In fact, the literature ravaging the country today most often conceals a shocking eclecticism of heritages and borrowings from hearsay. It would even be possible for an objective critic to study outdated literary trends here where they are still in vogue. And since the tourist brochures speak of a “land of contrasts,” one will find in this literature whatever is needed to satisfy all curiosities, all nostalgias: the residue of classical medieval poetry, Oriental poetry of exile, Western romanticism, symbolism from the turn of the century, social realism, not to mention the results of existentialist indigestion. As a result, “representatives” of “Moroccan literature” occupy a special place at international gatherings, and congresses of writers are held in our country. The reader is at once disoriented and nauseous. His dissatisfaction is all the more justified in that he can find some of his problems echoed in foreign literatures, those that various “missions” have benevolently placed at his doorstep. We can explain the oft-commented complex of our national literature by its current incapacity to “touch” the reader, to gain his attachment, or to provoke in him some kind of reflection, a wrenching away of his social or political conditioning. On an entirely different level, Maghribī literature in French, which at one time gave birth to so much hope, is currently stalled and seems, according to some observers, to belong to the domain of history. This literature must, however, be called into question today.

178

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Two of its most brilliant representatives prematurely celebrated its demise with touching funeral ceremonies.2 Analyzing the situation of the colonized writer, his linguistic dramas, his lack of true readers, they concluded that this literature was “condemned to die young.”3 Others have abstained from falling into this pathetic determinism. But they are all ready, despite their lucid self-critique, to entertain the paradox of a suicidal literature that keeps going, in spite of everything, albeit in slow motion, along its path. A glance through the most recent publications in French reveals that those who have pronounced the imminent death of this literature have come to this conclusion too quickly. Although we should in no way ignore the issue of the very status of Maghribī literature in French. This is a delicate issue, and we must approach it prudently while excluding all tendencies toward generalization. In fact, the situation of writers of the previous generation (Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri, Albert Memmi or even Driss Chraibi),4 reveals itself to be closely tied to the colonial experience in its linguistic, cultural, and sociological implications. From the pacifist autobiographies of the 1950s to the protestatory and militant works from the period of the Algerian War, we may remark that despite the diversity of talents and creative power, this production was entirely inscribed within the framework of acculturation. It perfectly illustrates the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer within the cultural sphere. Thus, even when a Maghribī was represented in these works or when autochthonous writers spoke up to denounce abuses, this literature almost always remained a one-way street. It was conceived for the public of the “Métropole” and destined for foreign consumption. That was the public it aimed to move to pity, in which it sought to awaken solidarity; that was the public to whom it needed to demonstrate that the fallāh in Kabylia or the factory worker in Oran were not so different from the farmer in Brittany or the dockworker in Marseille. Today one has the impression that this literature was a kind of immense open letter to the West, or something like a list of Maghribī grievances. Of course this enormous deposition has proven its usefulness. These Maghribī works caused a scandal and accelerated a coming-to-consciousness among progressive milieux in France and elsewhere. In this sense they were revolutionary. In order to avoid making generalizations of our own, we should point to the exceptional work of two or three writers who surpassed all the limiting frameworks of their time, even if their work initially arose from these common preoccupations. We must admit that this literature now only concerns us in part; in any case it is hardly able to satisfy our need for a literature that bears the burden of our current realities, of wholly new problematics in the face of which disarray and savage revolt are gripping us. Writers have had to attain a certain level of putrefaction, or maturity, if you will, in order to be able to formulate what you will read in these texts.

See Malek Haddad, “Les zéros tournent en rond” [The zeroes go round in circles], in Écoute et je t’appelle [Listen and I’ll call you] (Paris: Maspero, 1961), and Albert Memmi, “Portrait du colonisé,” in Portrait du colonisé, précédé de Protrait du colonisateur (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1957). Translated as The Colonizer and the Colonized by Howard Greenfeld (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1991). [TVI]

2

Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 130. [TVI]

3

Kateb Yacine (1929–89), Mohammed Dib (1920–2003), Mouloud Feraoun (1913–62), Mouloud Mammeri (1917–89) were Algerian novelists. Albert Memmi (1920–) is a Tunisian novelist. Driss Chraïbi (1926–2007) was Moroccan. All wrote in French and most were already in their 40s or older when this Prologue was written.

4

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

179

The poets who clamor here have not been able to avoid their elders’ agonies, but it has fallen to them to rigorously delineate the limits of the arduous task they have inherited. They intend to demonstrate that they are less continuers than they are initiators. Amidst the chorus of insults about our underdevelopment and current humiliations, these poets have seen with the eyes of peace and mutations of a society that has too often been taken for a testing ground or a storehouse of legends. They are its witnesses and its leading actors. Despite the kaleidoscope of tones, their voices come together in fierce alarms. Hypotheticals remain to be leveed, contradictions to be sealed up and surpassed, but complexes are being swept away, a new circulation is gaining momentum. At this point we can already guess what charges will be made against us, notably our choice of language. Without wading into the murky waters of false issues, let us respond for now that four of these poets discovered their literary vocation through the French language. There is no drama or paradox there. This situation has become too common in today’s world. The priority is to arrive at a correspondence between written language [langue] and the poet’s inner world, his intimate, emotive language [langage]. Some are not able to achieve this. Others, even those who write in the national written tongue remain at the surface of their selves and of the reality they wish to theorize and put into question. Despite their linguistic disorientation, the poets in this collection succeed in communicating their most profound feelings through a language filtered through their history, their mythology, their anger—in short, through their very selves. The issue of communicating this poetry remains. On the one hand, and this has already been said (but strangely never taken seriously), there is the possibility of translating these works if one even briefly considers that they have their place and their role to play in the context of our national literature. On the other hand, the particular issue of communicating our literature in its entirety is not as simple as one might think. Putting aside questions of appreciation, interpretation, or critique of literary works, the Moroccan public that is even capable of reading such works is exceedingly limited. Illiteracy on the one hand and a superficial culture on the other has limited this readership to a nearly derisory residue. Another paradox, but one that derives from a global social situation that can’t be overcome through reasoning or some kind of magic trick. Why then resign ourselves to an even more overwhelming, sterile silence? The poet’s language is first of all “his own language”: the one that he creates and elaborates in the heart of linguistic chaos, the manner also by which he re-imagines the veneer of his world and the dynamics that coexist in him. Why should we be distressed about this situation, as if we suffered an infirmity, when we must by all means make up for the delay we have incurred and respond to the urgencies of the moment? Perhaps the next generations will resolve this issue, though they will already bear witness to their own world, a world that will no longer be ours though we are selfconsciously striving toward it. What is most important is that the one-way communication of past works is abolished. The era of managers and masters of thought is finished. We can no longer tolerate limitations due to favoritism or territorial taboos. Something is about to happen in Africa and in the rest of the Third World. Exoticism and folklore are being toppled. No one can foresee what this “ex-pre-logical” thought will be able to offer to us all. But the day when the true spokespersons of these collectivities

180

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

really make their voices heard, it will be a dynamite explosion in the corrupt secret societies of the old humanism. We have had to exercise strict patience and rigorous self-control in order to produce this journal, which above all views itself as the vehicle of a new poetic and literary generation. Souffles is not here to swell the ranks of ephemeral journals. It responds to a need that we can no longer ignore. If the journal finds its public, as we are hoping it will, as long as resources are available, it will become a flashpoint for debates on issues in our culture. All the texts that come to us will be examined with objectivity and, if they are accepted by our editorial board, published. Souffles is not sponsored by any niche nor any minaret and does not recognize any frontiers. Our Maghribī, African, European, and other writer friends are fraternally invited to participate in our modest enterprise. Their texts will be welcome. It is still necessary to juggle with words tarnished by dint of being dictated. The act of writing cannot depend on any tabulations of income, nor concede to fashion, nor to the tear-jerking needs of wealthy demagogues hungering for power. Poetry is all that is left to man to reclaim his dignity, to avoid sinking into the multitude, so that his outcry forever carries the imprint and attestation of his inspiration [souffle].

IV. ART IN THE TIME OF THE PALESTINIAN REVOLUTION Kamāl Bullāṭah Originally published in Arabic in Mawāqif 3.13/14 (January/February 1971): 176–9. Translated by Katharine Halls. The Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel defeated a coalition of Arab nations, led by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, was a significant turning point in the history of the Arab world. In the aftermath, between 280,000 and 325,000 Palestinians were forced to flee from the occupied territories, leading to a majority of Palestinians living, for the first time, outside the borders of the former Mandatory Palestine. In this context, and against the backdrop of decolonization in many other parts of the world, Palestine became a focal point of Arab identity and anti-colonial sentiment. The heightened political context that attended this historical moment led to a radicalization and politicization of art and literary practice across the Arab world, as artists and writers mobilized in support of Palestinian statehood and a broader commitment to liberation and revolution in the region. This essay by Palestinian artist and art historian Kamāl Bullāṭah (1942–) reflects the demands placed on artists by this revolutionary moment, even as it suggests that the intense political demands of the post-1967 Palestinian situation can only be met through new forms of art-making. In a 2005 essay, “Innovation in Palestinian Art,” Bullāṭah provides more context for this early text, reflecting on the different positions available to Palestinian artists in this period. In this later essay, he draws attention to the distinction between Palestinian artists who remained in historical Palestine, under Israeli military occupation and those who were forced into exile—and again, between cosmopolitan experimentalist artists based especially in Beirut, and more marginalized artists living in refugee camps. Bullāṭah himself was living in exile at the time of writing, completing his studies at the Corcoran Art Museum School in Washington, D.C. “Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution” was published in Arabic in Mawāqif, a Beirut-based cultural journal that was formed in 1968 by Adūnīs and others in his circle, including Bullāṭah, in response to the events of 1967. Like the journal, this essay seeks to find a way of developing a revolutionary art that is equal to its political moment. Written by an experimentalist exile and intervening in Beirut art circles, this essay praises the art of Palestinian children in the camps as the ideal form of revolutionary art, reflecting the period’s hope that innovation in art and radical politics might converge in the form of a revolutionary modernist art. All notes to this text are the translator’s. AM

I There are two figures in society whose words are less important than their deeds: the politician and the artist. An Arab painter who sits holding forth about art instead of actually painting is much like the Arab politician who stands at a podium lecturing us about our future history as we lie in our beds. Both cases are equally concerning.

182

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

One of the factors that has held back the energies of the Arab avant-garde is the chasm between the words and the deeds of Arab politicians. As a painter, I see my duty as being to paint rather than to talk about art, thereby avoiding the mistakes of Arab politicians; but the nature of this period of struggle requires today’s painter to be a critic, an artist, a politician, a human, a lover, and a warrior all at once. The artist’s first calling has always been a single occupation: not painting, composition, or creation, but always sincerity, absolute sincerity. His raw material? Life. Here, then, I will permit myself to speak of art in our times in accordance with my responsibilities as an artist: aware of the bloody nature of reality, forcing myself to boldly face its truths, and trusting that you will forgive me for offering you words rather than colors.

II When I speak of Palestinian art in the revolutionary period, I refer to an art that nobody has seen, for it has not yet been born. It is the all-encompassing revolution that creates revolutionary art, not the inverse: there can be no political revolution without social revolution, no social revolution without moral revolution, and, indeed, no moral revolution without revolution in art. There have been martyrs and merchants of revolution in many other times and places. The Palestinian revolution is still a bud that is only just forming. Much of the Palestinian art you see is simply traditional art leeching off the revolution; it belongs ultimately to the old world, because it has only traditional visions to offer. It is a superficial art rather than a transformative, revolutionary, artistic activity that encompasses both art and society. Most of the Palestinian works we have seen so far profess an art of “return” to Palestine. For us to call this revolutionary art is contradictory, because return is a retrograde motion, whereas revolution propels us forward. The dangers faced by Palestinian art today have a dialectical relationship to the dangers faced by the Palestinian revolution. For a painting to be sold for hundreds of dinars, due to its alleged revolutionary Palestinian credentials, is a betrayal of the people and the revolutionary cause, a case of profiteering from the sacrifices of those who die to further that revolution. That kind of artistic production is an accessory for bourgeois salons, a luxury to be enjoyed by one class of Arab society while remaining beyond the reach of others. The first duty of a revolutionary Palestinian artist is to blast away these standards of painting and art.

III Life is the pulse of existence and the axis around which creation revolves. We are all here because we have chosen life, and we live, work, and struggle for a life that is better. The life of three-quarters of the world is threatened with annihilation by the governments of the remaining quarter, and the peoples of some oppressed countries are today rising up to reject death. Revolution is the only way to achieve a better life for the Third World and bring an end to the tyranny of man over fellow man. The harsh, savage, armed struggle that has been imposed upon us is not in itself the revolution we aspire to, but it is life’s path toward the revolution. The revolution begins after the victory of that struggle. No revolution aims to change the “form” of society; instead the aim is the transformation of the “content” of the individual within society. This transformation of the “content” of the individual entails a radical transformation of all the inherited concepts and preexisting values that have shackled humans and contribute to the debasement of their humanity.

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

183

The life that surrounds the artist in the Third World calls upon him as a person whose craft is distinct from that of others in a single way—in the fact that the raw material of his craft is life. The deeper the artist plunges into the sea of life, the higher his art rises in the firmament of creativity and eternity. (One day I was in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, standing enraptured by the extraordinary artistry of the tender, soft flesh of a marble statue by Canova. I don’t know how long I stood there, mouth agape and eyes transfixed by the splendor of that carvedout specimen of beauty. Suddenly I became aware of the presence of a young woman behind me who was trying to look at the statue from my angle. I heard the rustling of her legs as she moved in her tight clothing, and I could smell the feminine scent of her perfume, but I didn’t immediately turn around to look at her. The choice before me at that moment was this: to sup the elixir of an immortal masterpiece of artistic creation, or turn to see a perfectly ordinary young woman standing next to me. At that moment, the statue went back to being a lump of rock. Ever since that day during my studies, I have understood what one of the great artists of our age meant when he said: If I saw moths eating the Mona Lisa to survive, I wouldn’t stop them.) The life that surrounds the artist in the Third World calls upon him, as a human being, to join the revolution. His works help transform the content of the individual. Revolutionary art is not a product of revolutionary doctrines but of a revolutionary life and revolutionary actions. Revolutionary actions do not transform content without form or form without content in works of art, but rather transform the two together in an innovative approach that arises naturally out of a transformed society; moreover, they transform the inherited place of art in society. The art world in the West developed in parallel with the bourgeoisie and capitalism (the writings of John Berger, Ernst Fischer, and Herbert Marcuse are among the most important on this subject). In the Socialist bloc, meanwhile, Stalinism has mounted an all-out assault on the free nature of art. Major works of art are now no more than investments for dealers and the rich, and art consists of acrobatic forms that take up evergreater expanses of canvas while their actual artistic content diminishes ever further. Art is stripped of its humanity when the artist becomes a cog in the capitalist regime, or is crushed under the boots of Stalinism in Russia.

IV Art and society in the Third World, particularly the Arab word, have not yet been polluted by the inhumanity that characterizes contemporary Western art, because the history of studio art here is not yet even a hundred years old. The question of form and content in art, which has been a major point of contention in the West for centuries, still manifests in the works of Arab artists as a mere reverberation and echo of Western trends. We possess neither the concept of the “gallery” nor the figure of the art dealer, the collector, or the philosophizing critic who holds forth on the subject of content and form in painting as if he were speaking about music. This is where the greater responsibility of the Third World artist lies. His new contribution, far from the bourgeois conception of art, is not confined to consoling and encouraging his nation, but resides in his ability to create new art for the world. With regard to his nation, his presence is necessary, even if it is not thought essential. A revolutionary artist in an inhumane world is a hero, as much as his colleague who wields a machine gun on the hilltops to defend against the brutal enemies of the people.

184

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

For historical, political, technological, and economic reasons, the modes of oppression and tyranny and the mechanisms of repression and exploitation have changed, just as the weapon used against the victim has changed. In the face of this change, our conception of the resistance hero has also changed with the times. He is no longer a figure of the chivalric ʿAntar type1 who joins his nation’s army ready to face death alongside ranks of his fellow soldiers; guerrilla fighters must avoid death. The hero today is someone who resists without falling into the chasm of death: a warrior who clings to life, like Job, through distress and hardship. Revolutionary leaders from Vietnam to Guatemala, Angola to Palestine, repeat to the public in a single voice: “Our first aim is to remain steadfast.” Today, then, we live at the beginning of a long path that stretches the length of an entire age before us: this experience was only a chapter in the life of Jonah. This is a harsh reality, and we must acknowledge it if we are determined to live and create history. The era of Fatah2 is the era of Job and Jonah, not ʿAntar.

V The Palestinian works of art we have seen so far are mirror images of Palestinian reality, whereas [true] art transcends reality so as to re-create it. In this view, the drawings created by the children of Palestine in the camps are the only truly revolutionary Palestinian art to have appeared during this short period of revolution (see Mona Saudi’s In Time of War: Children Testify, Beirut: Mawāqif, 1970) because these works are not the art of society, but a vital urge expressing the reality truly lived by each child, and realized in new artistic forms. That Palestinian child whose hands are still too small to carry a weapon has picked up a brush instead, but in the future he alone will be the warrior-artist, and then we will be able not merely to speak of but to see and experience revolutionary Palestinian art within Palestinian Arab revolutionary life. Ernst Fischer says: “All art is conditioned by time, and represents humanity in so far as it corresponds to the ideas and aspirations, the needs and hopes of a particular historical situation …. Art also creates a moment of humanity, promising constant development.”3 I hope that my works will one day be considered “a moment of humanity” in the history of our nation and “promising [of] constant development,” and that the direction of my life as a human being will be an example of the steadfastness we so desperately need in order to make the revolution a reality.

ʿAntar (alternatively, ʿAntarah) is the hero of the epic Story of ʿAntarah, who overcomes lowly origins with bravery and genius, as such becoming a popular model of heroism in the Arabic-speaking world.

1

The Palestinian national liberation movement.

2

The quotation is from Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art, Eng. trans. Anna Bostock (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1963); first published in German as Von der Notwendigkeit der Kunst (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1959).

3

V. FROM POETICS AND MODERNITY Adūnīs Originally delivered as a lecture at the Collège de France in 1984; first published, in French, as Introduction à la poétique arabe (Paris: Sindbad, 1984). Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham. In addition to being one of the most important modernist Arabic poets and translators, Adūnīs (i.e., Adonis, born ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd Isbir, 1930–) has made major scholarly contributions to the study of Arab literary history and culture from pre-Islamic times to the present. Born on a farm in northwest Syria, he was not formally educated until the age of 14; even so, he began publishing poems under the pseudonym Adūnīs as a teenager. After earning his degree from Damascus University, he became involved with a secular nationalist political group and was imprisoned in 1955. He immigrated to Lebanon in 1956, just before the Suez Crisis, and became a citizen in 1961. The founding of the Beirut-based avant-garde journal Shiʿr (Poetry, 1957–70) with Yūsuf al-Khāl (1917–87) precipitated his rise to prominence as one of the most consequential practitioners and theorists of the “New Poetry” and of Arabic modernism more generally. In particular, he is noted for his innovations in Arabic free verse and prose poetry as well as his ingenuity with classical forms. From 1968 to 1994 he and a group of artists and intellectuals published another highly influential cultural review, Mawāqif (Positions). He has lived in Paris since 1975. In 1984, Adūnīs gave a series of talks on Arab poetics at the Collège de France—later published in English as An Introduction to Arab Poetics (1990)—that distilled over a quarter century of research. The text below, excerpted from the fourth and final lecture, “Poetics and Modernity,” elaborates Adūnīs’s subtle theory of “Arab modernity” as a force that has been endemic to Arab culture for over a millennium, rather than a relatively recent phenomenon originating in the West. In Adūnīs's account, the Arab tradition is constitutively riven by an internal conflict between the “ancient” and the “modern,” a crisis that plays out specifically in the domain of knowledge. The sticking point is the convention that knowledge itself is contained within and emanates from the Qurʾān: “to believe in the pronouncements of modernity,” he writes, “is to believe in things that have not been known before. Seen in this light, the new reveals a certain failing or lack in the old. Modernity therefore constitutes an attack on the fundamentals.” According to Adūnīs, it is possible to view poets of eighth- and ninth-century Baghdad such as Abū Nuwās and Abū Tammām as “modern” in their orientations to urban life, hedonism, and autotelic poetic form (Adūnīs credits his reading of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and the French Surrealists with helping him achieve this insight). Crucially, Adūnīs views Western modernity as “illusory” and “specious” when applied to the Arab world—a phenomenon confined to superficial mimicry of Western consumerism in the public sphere and, in the arts, a hollow repetition of Western modernist technique. Torn between the reactionary draw of the “ancient” and the lure of incongruous Western modernity, the Arab world has lost touch with its deeper, authentic tradition of modernity and invention. Adūnīs affirms the submerged presence of this truer modernity in the Arab tradition’s ongoing vexed dialogue with itself. SJR

186

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

We will only be able to reach a proper understanding of the poetics of Arab modernity by viewing it in its social, cultural and political context. Its development in the eighth century was bound up with the revolutionary movements demanding equality, justice and an end to discrimination between Muslims on grounds of race and colour. It was also closely connected with the intellectual movements engaged in a re-evaluation of traditional ideas and beliefs, especially in the area of religion. The dominant view held that the state was founded on a vision or message which was Islam. On the one hand, this state was constituted as a caliphate, in which the designated successor not only followed on from his predecessor but preserved the heritage and conformed to it in both theory and practice; on the other hand, it was a state formed of a single community, meaning that unanimity of opinion was an essential requirement. Politics and thought were religious; religion was one and permitted no divergence. This explains why for the most part those in power fought against these revolutionary and intellectual movements. Politically, they were considered as a rebellion against religion because they attacked the caliphate, which represented religious authority. From an intellectual and philosophical point of view, their adherents were seen as heretics and apostates, either for restricting the role of religion in the teaching of virtue, or for denying the role of revelation in knowledge and saying that knowledge and truth were the business of reason. The authorities viewed the mystical elements in these movements as constituting an attack on the law and practice of Islam; this was because they made the distinction between “the evident” (al-ẓāhir) and “the hidden” (al-bāṭin), or between “the law” and “the truth,” asserting that knowledge and truth come from “the hidden,” hence the possibility of achieving a kind of unity or union between God and existence and between God and man. To put it another way, those in power designated everyone who did not think according to the culture of the caliphate as “the people of innovation” (ahl al-iḥdāth), excluding them with this indictment of heresy from their Islamic affiliation. This explains how the terms iḥdāth (innovation) and muḥdath (modern, new), used to characterize the poetry which violated the ancient poetic principles, came originally from the religious lexicon. Consequently we can see that the modern in poetry appeared to the ruling establishment as a political or intellectual attack on the culture of the regime and a rejection of the idealized standards of the ancient, and how, therefore, in Arab life the poetic has always been mixed up with the political and the religious, and indeed continues to be so. The problematic of poetic modernity (ḥadāthah) in Arab society goes beyond poetry in the narrow sense and is indicative of a general cultural crisis, which is in some sense a crisis of identity. This is linked both to an internal power struggle which has many different aspects and operates on various levels, and to an external conflict against foreign powers. It would appear that the return to the ancient has been more eagerly pursued whenever the internal conflict has intensified or the danger from outside has grown more acute. In Arab society today we find a powerful extension of this historical phenomenon which confirms our observation. Perhaps this helps to explain why the current of modernity in Arab society sometimes flows strongly (as was the case in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries) and at other times abates and recedes (as it did in the following centuries), according to whether the double-sided conflict, internal and external, is at a high or low point. It may also explain why modernity has tended to be a force which rejects, questions and provokes without entering in any conscious, radical way into the structure of the Arab mind or into Arab

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

187

life as a whole. Perhaps, finally, it may go some way to explaining the dominance of the traditionalist mentality in Arab life and in Arabic poetry and thought. The retreat of Arab society from the ways opened up by modernity began with the fall of Baghdad in 1258.1 With the Crusades came a complete halt, prolonged by the period of Ottoman domination. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth—the time of Western colonialism and of contact with its culture and its modernity, the period known as the nahḍah (renaissance, a name which merits a detailed study in itself)2—the question of modernity was revived and the debate resumed over the issues which it provoked. Opinions were divided into two general tendencies: the traditionalist/conformist (uṣūlī) tendency, which considered religion and the Arab linguistic sciences as its main base; and the transgressing/non-conformist (tajāwuzī) tendency, which saw its base, by contrast, as lying in European secularism. It is the first philosophy that has prevailed, especially at the level of the establishment, encouraged by economic, social and political conditions, both internal and external. According to this interpretation, the ancient—be it in religion, poetry or language—is the ideal of true and definitive knowledge. This implies that the future is contained within it: nobody who is a product of this culture is permitted to imagine the possibility of truths or knowledge being developed which would transcend this ancient ideal. According to this theory, modernity—as established in poetry by Abū Nuwās3 and Abū Tammām,4 in thought by Ibn al-Rāwandī (d. 910), al-Rāzī (d.1210) and Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (d. 815),5 and in the nature of visionary experience by the mystics, and which assumes the emergence of new truths about man and the world—is not only a criticism of the ancient but a refutation of it. In other words, to believe in the pronouncements of modernity is to believe in things that have not been known before. Seen in this light, the new reveals a certain failing or lack of the old. Modernity therefore constitutes an attack on the fundamentals. On this basis we can understand the connection made between innovation in poetry, which violates the ancient, and heresy, and also why words like ḥadīth (modern) and iḥdāth (innovation), originally religious terms, could be carried over into the domain of poetry. This traditionalist culture is embodied in the uninterrupted practice of an epistemological method which sees truth as existing in the text, not in experience or reality; this truth is given definitively and finally and there is no other. The role of thought is to explain and teach, proceeding from a belief in this truth, and not to search and question in order to arrive at new, conflicting truths. It was therefore natural that this culture should reject a theory that was fundamentally opposed to it, especially those aspects of it which might have led people to doubt its religious vision and its cultural and intellectual apparatus.

Baghdad, the seat of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate, was sacked in 1258 by the Mongols. This cataclysmic event hastened the end of the Islamic Golden Age, which extended from the eighth to the thirteenth century.

1

The nahḍah refers to the cultural renaissance of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that involved political and cultural reforms in Egypt and Arabic-speaking Ottoman regions.

2

Abū Nuwās (c.757–c.814): an early Abbasid poet and folk legend renowned for his classical poetry on urban themes, wine, and hedonism.

3

Abū Tammām (c.804–c.845): a highly celebrated figure most famous for the Ḥamāsah, an anthology of early Arabic poetry.

4

Notable polymaths and freethinkers of medieval Islam.

5

188

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Because of the dominance of this “fundamentalist” knowledge at the level of the establishment and those in power, the Arabs find themselves—in spite of all the changes of the past fourteen centuries—moving on a stage where history is repeating itself with just one objective: the continual actualization of the past. The reason this approach has gained in ascendancy is because “modern” Arab thought has not confronted it in an analytical and critical manner and dismantled it completely. Perhaps it has not dared to, or perhaps it has preferred to work some kind of magic to make it vanish into thin air, which has quickly had the opposite effect. This may go some way towards explaining why “modern” Arab thinkers have adapted to the shock of modernization from the West by treating modernity primarily as a technological achievement. For this reason modernity in Arab society has continued to be something imported from abroad, a modernity which adopts the new things but not the intellectual attitude and method which produced them, whereas true modernity is a way of seeing before it is production. From an artistic and poetical point of view the dominance of traditionalist or fundamentalist culture led to a return to the values of pre-Islamic orality. Most of the poetry written after the so-called Arab renaissance (nahḍah), by such poets as al-Bārūdī (1838–1904),6 Shawqī (1882–1932)7 and their contemporaries, was no more than a ritual consolidation of this return. The poets who opposed the ancient, claiming to be modernizers, did not turn to Arab modernity as manifested in the poetry of Abū Nuwās and Abū Tammām or the mystic writings, nor did they refer to the theorization of the new poetic language carried out by al-Jurjānī.8 Instead, they began to imitate modern Western poetry. Thus the crisis of modernity appeared at its most complex during the nahḍah, a period which created a split in Arab life, both theoretically and practically. On the one hand, it was a revival of forms of expression developed in past ages to respond to present problems and experiences, which was also a resuscitation of old ways of feeling and thinking and methods of approach. It therefore helped establish these forms as absolute inviolable principles, to be eternally perpetuated as the single true poetry. The result was that the Arab personality, as expressed through this poetry, appeared to be a bundle of self-delusions, and Arab time to stand outside time. On the other hand, at the level of practical politics and daily life, the age of the nahḍah was set in motion in a state of almost complete dependency on the West. In this way the period laid the foundations of a double dependency: a dependency on the past, to compensate for the lack of creative activity by remembering and reviving; and a dependency on the European-American West, to compensate for the failure to invent and innovate by intellectual and technical adaptation and borrowing. The present reality is that the prevailing Arab culture derives from the past in most of its theoretical aspects, the religious in particular, while its technique comes mainly from the West.

Maḥmūd Sāmī al-Bārūdī: Egyptian politician and poet who served as prime minister of Egypt from February to May 1882.

6

Aḥmad Shawqī (1868–1932): major Egyptian poet and pioneer of Arabic poetic drama. Note that he was born in 1868, not 1882, as Adūnīs has it.

7

ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078): an influential linguist whose magisterial theory of “construction” anticipates by nearly a millennium aspects of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics, such as the idea that language is a system of relations and that the linguistic sign is arbitrary.

8

MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD

189

In both cases there is an obliteration of personality; in both cases, a borrowed mind, a borrowed life. This culture teaches not only the consumption of things but also the consumption of human beings. Since the 1950s the cultural background of Arab poets and critics has derived from two divergent traditions: that of the self (ancient, traditionalist) and that of the other (modern, European-American). These two traditions blur or blot out the values of modernity and creativity in the Arab literary heritage. The first does so on the pretext of a return to original sources; the second does so perhaps out of ignorance, or is so dazzled by the other that it cannot perceive its own particular nature, and what distinguishes it from the other. I should acknowledge here that I was one of those who were captivated by Western culture. Some of us, however, went beyond that stage, armed with a changed awareness and new concepts which enabled us to reread our heritage with new eyes and to realize our own cultural independence. I must also admit that I did not discover this modernity in Arabic poetry from within the prevailing Arab cultural order and its systems of knowledge. It was reading Baudelaire which changed my understanding of Abū Nuwās and revealed his particular poetical quality and modernity, and Mallarmé’s work which explained to me the mysteries of Abū Tammām’s poetic language and the modern dimension in it. My reading of Rimbaud, Nerval and Breton led me to discover the poetry of the mystic writers in all its uniqueness and splendour, and the new French criticism gave me an indication of the newness of al-Jurjānī’s critical vision. I find no paradox in declaring that it was recent Western modernity which led me to discover our own, older, modernity outside our “modern” politico-cultural system established on a Western model. The problem here is that the modern Arab poet sees himself in fundamental conflict both with the culture and the dominant political system, which reclaims the roots in a traditionalist manner, and with the images of Western culture as adapted and popularized by this system. The system separates us from our Arab modernity, from what is richest and most profound in our heritage. It is in collusion with the prevailing traditionalist tendencies and also with the cultural structures which came into existence in the climate of colonialism, imposing this relationship with the technical and consumerist forms of Western achievement upon us. The most disturbing aspect of the problem is that the modern Arab poet lives in a state of “double siege” imposed upon him by the culture of dependency on the one hand, and the culture based on a foetal relationship with the traditionalist past on the other. What makes this aspect of the problem more serious is the position of the Arabic language itself. The Arab has grown up in a culture which views language as his speaking image, and himself as its feeling, thinking reflection. It is a union of reason and sentiment, the chief symbol and assurance of Arab identity. It is as if language “created” the Arabs, through instinct in the Jāhilīyah,9 revelation in the prophecy, and reason in Islam; as if originally in the Arab consciousness language was the Supreme Being itself, and its science the science of this Being. From the “materialness” of this created language the rhythm of existence explodes and its essence pours forth. In this context we can understand the significance of the case endings (i‘rāb): they represent the purest principle of language, the sign of unity between the static and the moving, the spoken word and the breath. If

Jāhilīyah (“ignorance”) refers to the time and state of affairs in pre-Islamic Arabia.

9

190

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

language is the rhythmic musical form of nature, then this form only reaches a proper state of wholeness and unity with inflexion. Language, viewed from this perspective, is not a tool for communicating a detached meaning. It is meaning itself because it is thought. Indeed, it precedes thought and is succeeded by knowledge. This implies that the criterion of meaning was contained in language itself, and was defined by the rules of language. The problem here is that this language which is regarded in theory as the essence of Arabness appears in practice to be an amorphous heap of words, which some use imperfectly, others abandon in favour of a dialect or foreign tongue and few know how to use creatively. It is like a huge storehouse which people enter, acknowledging their need for it, only to escape from it on some pretext or other. A gap exists between the language and those who speak it. What was once an end is now only a means. How can there be any accommodation between a past which made language the essence of the human being, and a present which sees it only as an instrument and does not hesitate to call for its structure to be modified and for dialects to take its place? If we remember its relation to the sacred, and more precisely to the Qurʾān, can we not see in the current ignorance surrounding its usage or in the call for it to be modified by dialectical structures which separate it from the sacred, a sort of declaration of a changed awareness and identity? The problematic of modernity at the present time thus becomes clearer at the level of language. What was the first sign of the presence of the Arabs and their creativity is being corrupted and degraded. The Arab of today is in the process of forgetting the fundamental element through which he knew existence, and which established his presence in history. He has lost the sense of language, as defined by Ibn Khaldūn,10 and appears ignorant of what has given him his identity, or of who he is.

Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406): major Muslim thinker and historian of the fourteenth century whose corpus anticipates, among much else, the modern disciplines of history, social science, and economics.

10

CHAPTER FIVE

Modernism in Turkey EDITED BY KAITLIN STAUDT

Modernist literature in Turkey suffers from a curious paradox: while Turkish modernity is widely recognized as a project of state-sponsored, Westernizing reform that spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the existence of a corresponding literary modernism is frequently overlooked. Despite this paradox, the link between the rise of modernity in the Ottoman Empire’s late reforming period and unprecedented change in OttomanTurkish literary culture is well-established. While previously Ottoman literature had been a predominantly poetic tradition with its own specific forms and conventions, patronage networks, and means of circulation, the introduction of modernizing reform produced new and hybrid literary forms. Scholarly histories of Turkish literature generally begin in 1833, which saw the founding of the Translation Office (Babıâlî Tercüme Odası) which ushered in a new order of scribes and bureaucrats who had stronger knowledge of European languages and Europe than their predecessors. As a result, new translations of European novels alongside prose-influenced narratives gained an ever-greater cultural influence. The literary movements of the time aimed to introduce the public to Western literary forms and themes, while simultaneously emphasizing language reform as essential to concepts of citizenship and equality before the law. The end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century saw the establishment of the Empire’s first newspaper, the rise of the Empire’s original novels, the expansion of the press, and the reform and simplification of poetic forms. After the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, state-sponsored historiography presented Ottoman history as an ideological problem, decreeing that the Ottoman Empire could not be regarded as the legitimate predecessor of the Republic. The political and cultural reforms led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk were an effort to replace Ottoman-Islamic cultural and political loyalties with modern, Western values taken from Enlightenment rationalism; positivist and materialist notions of progress; and ideals of citizenship and fraternity taken from the French Revolution. This series of radical reforms encompassed nearly every aspect of life, including legal, political, cultural, economic, and social policy. While poetry had long been part of the Ottoman-Turkish literary tradition, the rise of ethnic Turkish nationalism following the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 corresponds to literary movements that hailed the realist novel as a pedagogical vehicle for social reform. As a genre, the novel in the early Republic was under extreme pressure to participate in Turkey’s modernization projects by producing progressive, rationalist, and realist aesthetics that were deemed suitably “Western” and authentically Turkish, while also serving as an instrument for modeling new concepts of Turkishness, citizenship, womanhood, and above all, modernity.

192

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

The different political values ascribed to the genres of novel and poetry under the political and cultural reforms which spanned the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic have had a lasting impact on scholarly engagement with the concept of modernism in Turkish poetry and prose. The overwhelming critical consensus states that while modernism arose in Turkish poetry contemporaneously with its European counterparts in the first half of the twentieth century, the Turkish novel belatedly adopted modernism’s visible aesthetic markers in tandem with the development of post-modernist narrative techniques in the 1970s. For poetry, scholars offer a plethora of possibilities for modernism’s advent: they cite poet Yahya Kemal (1884–1958) and his concept of beyaz lisan, or white language, as a “guiding light” of modernist Turkish poetry; emphasize the influence of Futurism in Nazım Hikmet’s poetry of the 1920s, particularly his 1923 poem Makineleşmek istiyorum [I want to become a machine]; or select either the Garip [Strange] and İkinci Yeni [Second Renewal] movements in the 1940s and 1950s, respectively. Turkish poetry’s modernist credentials are affirmed on the basis of a shared commitment to renewing or destroying poetic forms inherited from the Ottoman Empire, and on the basis of its similarities with Continental avant-garde coterie movements such as futurism, Dadaism, and surrealism. While critics focusing on poetry use Continental European aesthetics as an affirmative benchmark which Turkish poetry successfully achieved, a different kind of negative comparison has generated what Nurdan Gürbilek calls a “criticism of lack” surrounding the Turkish modernist novel. In an article on modernism and the Turkish novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk programmatically claimed that in Turkey, “we did not have modernism in the true sense of the word.”1 Pamuk’s critical statement on the non-existence of the Turkish modernist novel is representative of a wider, long-standing academic stance that dismisses modernism as an inappropriate theoretical paradigm for understanding Turkish novels of the early twentieth century. This critical interpretation cites a lack of visibly modernist aesthetic markers, such as stream of consciousness, experimentation with language and form, and a valorization of aesthetic autonomy. Turkish modernism’s belatedness vis-à-vis European literature is a commonly repeated aphorism in Turkish criticism on the modernist novel, which heralds the appearance of visibly modernist aesthetic practices with the publication of Oğuz Atay’s 1972 novel Tutunanmayanlar [Those who can’t hold on]. This timeline emphasizes the contemporaneity of modernism and postmodernism in Turkish novels, and stresses modernism’s late adoption in Turkey. Revisiting the link between Turkish modernity and the Turkish novel in light of modernist scholarship’s global turn can, however, yield a re-evaluation of this accepted narrative. Inherited scholarly narratives of modernism’s belated adoption in Turkey emphasize Anglo-European modernism’s aesthetic markers without accounting for the fact that these aesthetics are deeply linked to Anglo-European experiences of political modernity. Instead, we might prefer to examine how Turkish authors attempted to account for and literarily represent the Turkish experience of political modernity, such as the rupture between Empire and Republic, the importance of the Ottoman literary tradition in the face of modernity, and gendered experiences of Kemalist modernity.

Orhan Pamuk, “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Türk Modernizmi [Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Turkish Modernism],” in Bir Gül bu Karanlıkta: Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar, ed. Abdullah Uçman and Handan İnci (Istanbul: 3F Yayınevi, 2008): 434–448. 1

MODERNISM IN TURKEY

193

These aspects of modernity all led to aesthetic innovations that are recognizable to modernist scholars trained in the Anglo-European tradition, but not exact replicas of the aesthetic innovations of elsewhere. The selections for this section reflect the difference in approach taken by poets and novelists in their aesthetic response to modernity. Turkish modernist poetry is represented by an article by Ahmet Haşim, a poet who was greatly influenced by French symbolists, and the Garip Preface, a manifesto that advocates for the destruction of Ottoman poetic forms. Both selections emphasize simplified language, a new poetic expression, and the rejection of the Ottoman poetic forms in the modern age, echoing the concerns of modernist poetry in Arabic and Persian literature. It is likely that the modernist credentials of these poets are affirmed in Turkey because these issues were also at the forefront of Kemalist interventions into language and literature as part of the modernization project. In contrast, the article “The Change of Civilization and Inner Man” by novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar explores how the loss of Ottoman cultural institutions created discontinuity and fragmentation in Turkish mental life. While Tanpınar’s stance regarding the Ottoman past has led to an understanding of his work and thought as conservative, his concern for the Ottoman literary past is evocative of larger modernist debates on the importance of the literary tradition in the face of modernity, both in Europe and in parts of the world as diverse as the Arabic-speaking Middle East, Africa, and China. Indeed, Tanpınar’s refusal to participate in the production of the grand narrative of Turkish modernity as distinct from the Ottoman tradition raises important definitional questions regarding the critical function that literary modernism performs in relation to locally constituted modernity. Attending to the interaction between Turkish political modernity and its aesthetic dimension reveals a Turkish modernism not only contemporary with the period in which Turkey was most fully experiencing its own process of modernity, but also in resonance with wider modernist traditions. KS

FURTHER READING Ertürk, Nergis. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Evin, Ahmet Ö. Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel. Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1983. Göknar, Erdağ. Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel. London: Routledge, 2013. Gürbilek, Nurdan. “Dandies and Originals: Authenticity, Belatedness and the Turkish Novel.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102.2/3 (2003): 599–628. Holbrook, Victoria. The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Parla, Jale. “The Wounded Tongue: Turkey’s Language Reforms and the Canonicity of the Novel.” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 27–40. Seyhan, Azade. Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008.

I. SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT POETRY Ahmet Haşim Originally published in Turkish as Şiirde Mânâ ve Vuzüh (Meaning and Clarity in Poetry) in Dergâh vol. 1 (1921). Reprinted with some amendments as Şiir Hakkında Bazı Mülâhazalar (Some Thoughts about Poetry) in Piyâle (The Wine Cup), by Ahmet Haşim (1926). Translated by Kaitlin Staudt. Ahmet Haşim (1883–1933) was a Turkish poet and prose writer whose works spanned the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. Born in Baghdad to a governor of the Ottoman province, he relocated to Istanbul in 1893. There he graduated from the Mekteb-i Sultanî, a French-language high school better known as the Galatasaray Lycée which was responsible for the education of many Ottoman bureaucrats as well as influential poets such as Tevfik Fikret and Nazım Hikmet. In his early years he was a member of the Fecr-i Ati (Dawn of the Future) movement, along with other prominent novelists and poets including Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu and Refik Halit Karay. The movement drew inspiration from the French symbolists, proclaiming in a 1910 manifesto published by the Servet-i Fünun journal that “Art is personal and sacred (Sanat şahsi ve muhteremdir).” Later, he worked with poet Yahya Kemal and Yakup Kadri on the journal Dergâh, a bimonthly volume which ran from April 1921 to January 1923. The journal’s print run corresponded to the years of Turkey’s National Struggle, and the journal published new poetry, prose, philosophy, and psychology by the country’s leading authors. Many of Haşim’s poems were published in Dergâh, including poems collected for his fist volume, Göl Saatleri (Hours of the Lake) (1921). Similarly, while his influential article, “Some Thoughts about Poetry,” is best known for serving as the introduction to his volume Piyâle (The Wine Cup) (1926), it originally appeared in Dergâh under the title “Meaning and Clarity in Poetry” in 1921. KS

When the poem titled “Desire at the end of the day,” which the reader will read in this book, was first published, its meaning was considered by some people to be more cryptic than necessary, and in connection with that, many things were said and written about the “meaning” and “clarity” in poetry.1 At this time, you will remember none of it.2 How can we remember these things, some of which were said and written with expletives and contempt and some of which were a sort of daily-newspaper nonsense? Due to differences of opinion, the offense passed like a dishonorable inheritance, a rusty weapon which had been used by us all along, from generation to generation between kindred spirits who took up the pen. For this reason, literary generations are unacquainted with these types of

The poem “Bir Günün Sonunda Arzu” was first published by Dergâh on April 15, 1921. The “meaning” and “clarity” Haşim references refer to this essay’s original title, “Meaning and Clarity in Poetry [Şiirde Mânâ ve Vuzuh].”

1

Here Haşim is referencing the five years between the poem and article’s publication in Dergâh and its appearance as the introduction to Haşim’s 1926 volume, Piyâle.

2

MODERNISM IN TURKEY

195

discussions. Especially in the academic and literary fields there are vile and wanton types, sometimes they are in the guise of scholars, critics, or artists; it would be a childish naïveté to hope to see humane morals respected in the exchange of ideas. We will content ourselves with expressing our own views and opinions about the value of “meaning” and “clarity” in poetry, while not finding it necessary to remember those lines of verse that we have read and heard before so that neither nursery rhymes nor a contemptuous argument form the basis for the conversation. Let us admit first that in poetry we do not know what is being implied by meaning. Those who say “thought,” do they mean a pile of banal opinions, or narrative, or theme, and is “clarity” understood as the ordinary perception of these things? There are those who compare heaps of figures of speech like the history of poetry, philosophy, discourse, and rhetoric with what is truly considered poetry; and those who don’t distinguish between its true face and signs. The fact is that poetry is understood in this manner because it is does not possess special tools whose use is tied to a skill like brushes, paints, notes, and pens which are unique to arts like painting, music, and sculpture; and also because it needs to borrow its expression from spoken language. For this reason, inadequate people who are timid and deferential in the face of notes which their eyes don’t know how to read or brushes which their fingers don’t know how to use, judge poetry with impertinence without finding it necessary to take further preparations as they consider poetry, which they regard as comprised of words they themselves use, the same as ordinary “language,” and regard it only from this point of view. However, a poet is neither a messenger of truth nor a person who speaks rhetorically; neither are they law-makers. A poet’s language exists not in order to explain like prose, but to almost evoke sensations, it is a language between music and words, on average it is closer to music than words. Because “prose” consists of style, none of its obligatory components are a matter for poetry. Poetry and prose are two separate forms: they do not share proximity or concerns, they are tied to separate orders, exist in separate fields, arise from separate magnitudes and forms. Reason and logic generate prose; whereas poetry is a sacred and nameless source, buried within nights of mystery and the unknown outside the fields of perception, which on occasion reflects the light of enlightened waters onto the horizons of our perception. The dreary nakedness of a shadowless poetry which merely borrows the clarity and consistency of prose is able to attain a falseness which mimics poetry’s conditions and operations. It could be said that poetry is verse which could not be converted to prose. A few months ago, in a famous critical debate about “pure poetry” Abbé Henri Brémond said something which interested the entire world of civilized thought: A sentence which includes qualities like judgement, logic, rhetoric, coherence, analysis, simile, metaphor, and all other similar features among its components, without altering its true nature or changing form through poetry’s magical effects which gives a rosy pinkness to everything it touches like the light of dawn, is nothing different from ordinary prose.3 Moreover, if poetic flow, which is a kind of electric current, is cut off for an instant, all of these elements are immediately silenced through their inherent ugliness. Poetry is not a tale, poetry is a song.

Abbé Henri Brémond (1865–1933) was a French literary scholar and member of the Académie française whose work on romanticism and symbolism in the 1920s aimed to demonstrate a mystic dimension to poetry which was akin to certain kinds of prayer.

3

196

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

My inner life is not far off from my cry But the light to see is not in ear or eye.4 To search for “meaning” is to exhume poetry, as necessary as killing for meat a poor bird whose song makes the stars in the summer night shiver. Can a morsel of meat fill the place of that enchanting voice which has been silenced? In poetry the thing that is most important is not the meaning of the word, but the value in saying the verse together. Poetry’s ideal is to express according to a sweet, secret, soft, or harsh voice which emerges from a mysterious coalescence and from connections and collisions that will form with other words and to devise, while harmonizing the cadence of all sorts of words with the verse’s general tempo, a limitless and effective expression from the verse’s musical undulation, for sinuous or effluent, dark or light, heavy or quick emotions, in addition to the words’ meanings. If, between changes in words and consideration for harmony “meaning” becomes obscure, it compensates with the pleasure of “spiritual” harmony. Truth be told, what is “meaning” beyond the inspiration to create harmony? In poetry, for a poet the “subject” is only a reason to recite poetry and to dream. Just like a porcelain jar full of honey which has been left in the middle of a laurel forest, meaning is not visible to all eyes as it is concealed within the leaves of poetry and only processions of dreams and words fly around the environment, like buzzing bees. Readers who don’t see the porcelain jar take pleasure in listening to the music of the bee’s wings which dulls the intellect. Because for them the entire mystery of the red flowered, black laurel forest is the sound of these silver wings. Apart from this definition there is no poetry. If there were a poetry which asserted it was not like that, then it is not poetry and those calling it poetry are strangers to the concept. We are of the opinion that it should not be declared that as yet no great poet is well understood outside a limited community, nor should it be hoped in vain that poetry is a common language. Among Hamid’s thousands of admirers, though not even ten out of a hundred of them read him, those who understand him are not even one in a thousand.5 “Fame” drags meagre souls behind currents of excitement which over flow from two or three powerful souls and provide them with energy. Otherwise fame is opprobrious for a noble and honorable soul. It can be said without exaggeration that poetry which can be understood by everyone is only the work of a poet of the lowest level. The gates of great poetry, like the sturdy city gates made of bronze, are very secure; it cannot be pushed open by just any hand and those gates sometimes stand closed for centuries. In recent years, it was after one of our historians left ajar the doors of the castle which had hidden Nedim from stupidity that dwarves were able to enter those gardens of poetry. But, like dirty handprints on the Great Wall of China, the comprehension of most of those who entered only sullied Nedim.6 Is there a need to search for more sufficient evidence than this to the fact that every poem obtains meaning in various extents according to the standard of one’s spirit? Haşim is quoting line seven of Rumi’s “The Song of the Reed” (Masnavi, Book 1: Lines 1–34). Translation from Victoria Holbrook, 2010.

4

Abdülhak Hâmid (1852–1937) was a poet and playwright.

5

Nedim (1681?–1730) was an Ottoman poet writing during the reign of Ahmet III. He is considered one of the most important poets of the divan tradition.

6

MODERNISM IN TURKEY

197

People who spout out questions like “What is it? What does it mean? Can such a thing be possible? It resembles something! It doesn’t resemble anything!” in the face of whatever variety of art and express an opinion according to that are parasites which will not be able to learn anything from the artists and will carefully avoid entering into a connection; which remains covering the spiritual world. In works of art, these parasites which cannot find nourishment due to their own obtuse nature and which are widespread in all corners of the earth, are the mortal enemies of artists in every period and every country. In my life time because of them artists sometimes become sycophants, sometimes sacrificial innocents. Alongside these disorderly hangers-on, there are even civil servants of art who transform art concepts into an incomprehensible state; the example of this in literature is the “literature teacher.” It is an astonishing thing that these men whose title and character are reassuring at first glance, are considered in truth as empty as a “literature course.” Literature teachers, who teach their students beautiful sentiments and perceptions while remaining tied to a secondary education program are, like the legendary merchants who produced moonlight and sold air, unnecessary educators who create and determine today’s mistaken educational administration. They are neither able to interpret or explain the poetry of poets nor the art of artists. For this reason, literature teachers in all countries are neither poets, nor writers of prose, nor are they people connected to art in any other dimension. For the most part, in the eyes of these people who are connected to the teaching of reading, writing, and grammar, poetry which is not suitable for translation into prose or grammar exercises, because it does not have value beyond other question-and-answer reading material, is a dangerous and bad example for young minds. As long as meaning can be found, for the literature teacher there is no difference between works of the master and the student, between good writing and works whose language is praiseworthy. Now no solitary word of poetry remains which can be recited from a lectern that cannot be explained as a grammar and syntax issue due to teachers who are deprived of the most basic neurological equipment to hear poetry without explaining how they themselves understand things like the glance of a dark eye or the smile of a fresh mouth. However, even if for one minute we could agree that “clarity” is necessary in poetry it is first necessary to understand what is meant by clarity. What kind of understanding of mentality thinks meter necessary for clarity? There is no need for poetry which is considered clear for one person to be the same for another. There are consciousnesses which are dark mirrors thrown into the middle of the universe. What they do not understand is not only this or that poetry; dense forests made of unknowns surround these consciousnesses and spirits on all sides. Like a fire which burns in the night, how indispensable can meaning which is clear to one standing on a hill be for what is invisible to the one standing on a cliff. A poet enriches words which have been expelled from general language with new meaning, rings out new harmonies for every letter, organizes tempo and phrase according to a different scale; the clarity of their work begins to change according to the reader beginning from the moment a personal language is created full of beauty, color, and imagination. Because, just as clarity is unique to a particular work, it is also an issue concerned with the reader’s consciousness and spirit. For us, as it is everywhere, a reader who becomes lazily accustomed to daily newspapers will not find an easy pleasure in poetry. In order for poetry to be understood it wants a difficult preparation beyond the talents of spirit and intelligence, it wants even the help of a number of outside factors like the conditions of light, weather, and time. Poetry is that which like water becomes colorful of an evening or like trees which cast shadows in the

198

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

moonlight. In the light of day that same poetry can’t breathe, it vanishes into thin air. Is our spirit of summer nights which wants to weep while listening to a faraway gardener’s song or shepherd’s pipe the equal of that heavy and languid spirit which we haul in the noontime heat? The most beautiful poetry is poetry which takes its meaning from the spirit of the reader. In poetry the fact that some passages remain ambiguous and uncertain, far from being a mistake and a deficiency, on the contrary, it is necessary for poetry’s beauty. As Ruskin the English aesthete said, a deadening clarity in style leaves nothing to the imagination and any help which would come from the reader’s spirit which is the artist’s most valuable ally is lost.7 An artwork’s biggest goal is to bind itself to the power of imagination. Works which are not successful in achieving this, despite their merit and virtue, cannot be works of art. The issue is like a rose in the night, if it can be left in a state of sensation as a half clear form in the darkness of the clause’s harmony and in the excitement which exudes a good smell, the power of imagination fills in places which remain empty and the rose gains an existence more exciting than reality. The beauty of what remains, of voices which come from afar, of unfinished paintings, of roughly-hewn statues is all due to it. No face is as beautiful in reality as it is seen in dreams. Who has not experienced a disappointment seeing in daylight the city whose doors they entered for the first time at night? The power of imagination, like a bat, is able to fly only in the half darkness of poetry. In summary, poetry, like the words of the prophet, must be vested with sufficient breadth of meaning for a variety of interpretations. As a poem’s meaning becomes conducive to alternative interpretations everyone who reads it is able to give it meaning in their own life and in this way, poetry is able to attain the distinction of being a language of common emotion between the poet and people. The richest, deepest, most effective poetry is that which will be understood in a style which everyone desires and therefore whose breath will encompass infinite sensibilities. What is a poetry which remains limited and trapped within only one meaning in the face of that that ambiguous and flowing poetry whose borders encompass the mass of human emotions?

John Ruskin (1819–1900) was an art critic in England during the Victorian era famous for his championing of the Pre-Raphaelites.

7

II. THE GARIP PREFACE Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, and Oktay Rifat Originally Published in Turkish in Garip: şiir hakkında düşünceler ve Melih Cevdet, Oktay Rifat, Orhan Veli’den seçilmiş şiirler. Istanbul: Resimli Ay Maatbasi, 1941. Translated by Sidney Wade and Efe Murad. Translation first published as “Garip: A Turkish Poetry Manifesto” in The Critical Flame, 8 November 2015. Together with Melih Cevdet (1915–2002) and Oktay Rifat (1914–88), Orhan Veli (1914–50) was a founding member of the Garip Movement, a small group of poets who promoted the use of simple language in a radical break from the elevated rhetoric of the classical Ottoman poets. While poets of the earlier twentieth century such as the humanist Tevfik Fikret, the modernist Ahmed Haşim, and the lyrical Yahya Kemal laid the foundations of modern Turkish poetry, they still did not break completely from all aspects of the Ottoman tradition. It wasn’t until the advent of the Garip Movement that this total break was achieved by repudiating the older tradition in every way. The classical tradition had relied heavily on the lavish use of language as well as high forms of Ottoman poetry such as aruz (an historically Arabic meter that depends on the arrangement of open and closed syllables) and the traditional Persian literary forms of the ghazal, the beyit (a couplet form), and the mesnevi (an epic form in couplets, used most often to recite romantic and panegyric tales). In rejecting the elitism of court poetry, the Garip poets wrote simple poems in the vernacular about the ordinary details of the lives of common people, subjects not considered of interest in the classical tradition. With their use of simple imagery and pared-down language, taking as their subjects the objects and events of daily life, and eschewing meter and formal rhyme schemes, the Garip Movement poets directly opposed the unities of traditional Ottoman couplets in bringing everyday lightness and randomness into their verse. The impact of Garip’s preface was immense in its day. The great literary critic of the time, Nurullah Ataç immediately wrote in support of the poems. Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, a scholar of Persian and Ottoman classical poetry as well as an expert on the Rumi corpus, criticized and subsequently rejected the aesthetics of Ottoman court poetry as elitist and offered Garip’s manifesto as an alternative poetics in 1945. Of course the Garip poets experienced swift opposition to their manifesto as well, especially from a literary group formed around the literary journal Mavi (Blue) in the 1940s. Headed by the romantic socialist Attilâ İlhan, the Mavi group accused Garip poets of avoiding social realism and concentrating instead on the more frivolous aspects of life. Another powerful critique of Garip was brought by the İkinci Yeni (the Second New) generation, which has been so far the most influential generation of poets in Turkish literature. İkinci Yeni sees Garip poetry as mundane and strives consciously to break from the plain syntax and narration inherited from their predecessors. Today, Garip’s influence is still widely visible. Orhan Veli’s poems are some of the most studied works of poetry in Turkish schools, and the popularity of Garip has never waned. SW & EM

200

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Poetry, the art of rhetoric and figures of speech, has undergone many changes in its journey to its current stage. At this point we understand that poetry is very different from proper spoken language. Turkish poetry, in its current form, differs from natural, or unaffected and ordinary language, and offers its readers a relative strangeness (garabet). Yet it is interesting to note that this strangeness has created a new set of conventions of its own in poetic language, which removes the very strangeness, or peculiarity, from poetic speech. The child who is being educated by today’s intellectuals perceives the world from a conventional or traditional point of view, and so the new poetry will sound strange (garip) to the child. The new poetry will show him the relativity of poetic language so that he can question what he has been taught. For centuries, convention preserved poetry in verse form. The principle elements of verse are meter (vezin) and rhyme (kafiye). Rhyme was first used by poets as a mnemonic device, and they later developed aesthetics in its use and came to consider the use of rhyme and meter a skill. At the root of poetry, as is often the case in other art forms, there is a fundamental desire for playfulness (oyun arzusu). For earlier poets, this desire was significant, but poets have changed a great deal over time. Today’s poets find fewer aesthetics and excitement in the use of meter and rhyme. They more often consider that if there is a sense of harmony (âhenk) to be acknowledged in a poem, it is not meter or rhyme that hold it. That sense of harmony already exists in spite of the meter and rhyme. However, it is meter and rhyme that makes it evident to the average reader. I will now explain why the belief that poetic harmony is dependent on meter and rhyme is needless and harmful. We do understand that meter and rhyme are registers of language. But the syntactic (nahiv) oddities or irregularities in standard poetic language were mostly created because of the necessities of meter and rhyme. When narrow-minded opinion asserts that poetry is dependent on meter and rhyme, it will accuse the new Garip poems of sounding too much like our spoken language. The poetics rooted in the use of meter and rhyme will find relative oddities in the new poetry, which concerns itself more closely than traditional poetry with the realities of everyday life. Meaning (mâna) and figures of speech (lâfız) often take advantage of the mind’s altering and destructive force on nature. Simile (teşbih) is the act of showing something in a different light. Today’s intellectuals consider those who refrain from using simile and metaphor (istiâre) in poetry as “strange” or “weird” (garip). The mistake here is that those who believe this understand the classical view of poetics as truth. From the day when writing was first invented, a great many poets have used similes in their verse. What does adding more examples of simile and metaphor bring to poetry? Simile, metaphor, overstatement (mübalağa) or a poetic vision that could develop from the combination of all of these, I hope, would be able to satisfy the greedy eyes of history. There have been many developments in form in the history of literature, and these changes have always been adopted and approved, years after being considered garip. The hardest changes to accept are those belonging to aesthetics. Traditional poetry, a slave to bourgeois culture today and to religion and feudalism before the Industrial Revolution, has always appealed to the upper classes. The prosperous do not have the need to work every day and have comprised, for centuries, the ruling classes. However, the aesthetics of a new poetry should represent the common laboring man. The laboring classes today have established their right to live after a long tug-of-war. The new poetry is theirs and should appeal to them. This should not mean they have to use the tools of past literatures in order to generate their own. The problem is not about defending the needs of a class; it is about looking for and finding its own aesthetics.

MODERNISM IN TURKEY

201

The new aesthetics will only be achieved with new ways and vehicles. There is nothing new or artistic in squeezing certain ideologies into already accepted forms. The structures should be changed completely. In order to get away from the prosaic and suffocating influence of literatures that have for centuries shaped and ruled out our will and aesthetics, we must reject everything those literatures have taught us. If possible, we should discard the language itself that limits our creative activity. Those regarded highly by history are those who find themselves at major turning points in history. They demolish one tradition and create a new one. Actually, they discover a new system of registers that emerges naturally from within the old one. It becomes a tradition when it is transmitted to the following generations. The great artist exists only within the context of literary or artistic registers. The new artist is the one who looks always for more than what he has seen in books, who tries to bring new registers to the art. Seventeenth-century French classicism was full of principles or norms, but was never traditionalist. It established its own principles. The eighteenth-century French writers were traditionalists, but they never established rigid principles or norms, because they did not feel the need of new registers; instead they learned them from previous conventions. Writers feel or do not feel the necessity of new literary registers. Those who feel the necessity are called founders, and those who feel it is needless are demolishers. In the end, both of these groups are more beneficial than those who continue previous conventions without adding anything new to it. Both of these groups cannot be successful all the time. Permanently valuable artistic works should follow changes in the social structure and be relevant to them. One of the reasons literary movements are sometimes unsuccessful is that their programs do not match with the realities of their times. One may not be able to make what he has founded complete, but entrusts a good share to those who will follow his new literary conventions. He might discover a new paradigm or assert that the old paradigm is wrong. This person is the flag-bearer, the bodyguard of a struggle in literature. Someone who has the courage to be a martyr should be regarded highly, because many would never risk losing power within their conventional frameworks for an ideal. I am not a supporter of the interdisciplinary in art. Poetry should be regarded as poetry, painting as painting, music as music. Each of these arts has its own specific traits and vessels of expression. They explain their purpose through these vessels, and not only do they limit themselves with these vessels and their respect for past values, but they also make room for challenge and labor. This is very difficult. Music in poetry, painting in music, or literature in painting are simply tricks of those who cannot establish norms within one artistic convention but feel they must establish an interdisciplinary approach. When certain arts are combined with others, they lose their essence. For instance, we cannot compare the singular music of poetry that has been created as particular words come together in harmony, with a musical piece with all of its variations in music and the richness of its scores. To bring words that have the same sounds together is a cheap trick that creates artificial harmony in poetry. In general, works of art that are easily accepted and liked by the common people are those that are most easily understood. For instance, those who appreciate aesthetics in music might listen to the themes in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture as if it were a painting depicting events during Napoleon’s Moscow campaign. Those with this sort of aesthetic might consider Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre,” a piece that tells the story of corpses rising from their graves after midnight and then returning to their graves after finishing their dances, and Borodin’s “On the Steppes of Central Asia,” which tells the story of a caravan moving slowly along the river with the sound of water,

202

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

the greatest of all musical pieces. This is a cheap trick. Using such a vast art, music, as a simple tool of illustration is a great weakness. No great artist should use intertextual imitation to attract the common person’s appreciation. An artist needs to discover the unique essence of his own art and demonstrate his skills via this essence. Poetry, at the end of the day, is a form of speech that unveils its essence in the way it expresses itself (eda). In other words, it is only made out of expression. Meaning does not appeal to one’s five senses; it appeals to the soul. Poetry, whose real value resides in its meaning and its relation to one’s soul, might be taken for granted if one depended on the cheap and secondary slights of hand like the musical quality of its language. Apollinaire, in his book Calligrammes, combines poetry with another art, that of painting. Here he formats the lines of a poem about rain vertically. Similarly, there is a poem in the same book about a journey in which Apollinaire positions letters and words as if composing a painting in front of us, with wagons, telegraph poles, moon beams, and stars. I confess, these tricks do in fact give us the sense of rain and journey; Apollinaire’s artificial tricks do help us get into the mood of the poems. Apollinaire is not the first poet to achieve this effect. Many have brought the aesthetics of painting into poetry through the use of visual shapes. For instance, Japanese poets often gave words the shape of reeds, lakes, moon rays, and sailboats, depending on the themes of their poetry. Ahmet Haşim introduced some magic into the word “flame” when he wrote with Arabic characters. Poetry has, in fact, made use of painting as it has used music in the past. Why wouldn’t a poet who accepts that one might make use of music in poetry consider making use of sculpture or architecture? Picasso, who extended his paintings into the realm of sculpture eventually came to believe that it had been a mistake. Poetry that makes use of painting does not appear to have many supporters today. Some poets consider any writing full of descriptive imagery (tasvir) to be poetry. Descriptive imagery is a natural element of poetry and each poem is more or less descriptive at heart. Words are symbols of either things or ideas. Abstractions sometimes seem irrelevant to the natural world; however, we all think the most abstract (mücerret) thoughts along with the concrete (müşahhas) and make them correspond to matter and things. The riches of poetry do not consist only of a natural world described in words. Poetry may contain descriptive imagery, yet this is not the fundamental element of poetry. What makes a poem a poem is the characteristics of its manner of expression (eda) and the meaning it conveys. As the French poet Paul Éluard says, “The time will come when poetry will only be read in the head, and literature will have a new life that day.” Every new movement in the history of literature has brought new paradigms to poetry. We are lucky to have had the opportunity to expand the limits of literature to the maximum and to finally release poetry from these limits. In one of his letters, Oktay Rifat attempts to explain this view when talking about the notion of schools in literature: “the idea of a ‘school’ represents a break (fasıla), or a static position in the historical trajectory, as opposed to the idea of speed (sür’at) and movement (hareket). The school of literature that does not go against the dialectical mind is the movement of anti-schools in literatures.” Can the idea of limitlessness or anti-schools in literature exist in poetry? Without a doubt, no! However, this notion will help people discover new fields and will greatly enrich poetry. What the Garip group has given to poetry is the expansion of purity (safiyet) and plainness (besatet) in the art. The desire to find poetry in purity and plainness brought us closer to the world of the subconscious (tahteşşuur). It is only here that nature

MODERNISM IN TURKEY

203

is unchanged by mental activities. The human soul is found here in its most primordial sense, characterized, paradoxically, by intricate plainness and simplicity. We find purity and plainness in childhood memories, unburdened by either intricacy or abstraction. The image of God as a white-bearded old man, or of djinns as red dwarves or nymphs as ethereal girls in white dresses indicate how a child’s mind cannot bear abstraction. One should not mistake the act of stirring up one’s subconscious to find poetic purity and plainness with that of the Symbolist idea of touching the cords of the secret self, or the act of transcending consciousness which Paul Valéry uses as a definition of creative activity. The artistic movement closest to our taste, in fact, has been Surrealism. The Surrealist poets who made automatic writing (ruhî otomatizm) the foundation of their idea set and artistic understanding also jettisoned the practice of writing in rhyme and meter. However, even as we favor Surrealist practices and ideas, we do not have any relationship with them and consider ourselves unaffiliated with any literary school. Automatic writing is only the starting point of Surrealism. The act of emptying one’s subconscious, considered the real function of poetry by Surrealists, is different from the ecstatic outpouring of one’s self. If this were the case, everyone would be an artist. The artist-poet is the one who can use an acquired faculty outside the context of dreaming. The worth and grandeur of a poem can only be measured by the manner in which the artist acquires and uses this faculty, as described many years ago by the great Doctor Freud and as skillfully demonstrated by the great Surrealist poet André Breton. What, more particularly, is this faculty? Control of consciousness exists in the act of mining the inner, or spiritual world. In normal conditions, it is impossible to translate the subconscious into writing. It is not simply the emptying of one’s subconscious; it is, rather, the act of representing the subconscious. The subconscious feels everything deeply, and the great artist is the perfect imitator of this world. Plainness and simplicity bring the genuine aesthetic touch to a work of art. However, one should not accuse poetry written in this manner of being “plain” or “primitive.” If you see a poet who has suffered much and overcome many obstacles in his art, do not be judgmental about his work. You might think he is writing like an amateur; in fact, he has perfectly imitated and thereby mastered the qualities of plainness and simplicity. Art is not only about automatism, it is about struggle and talent. Artists are those who make us believe that what they say is absolutely sincere. One of the assumptions poets often make is that the line (mısra) is the perfect unit. This is a bad habit. Orhan Veli understands the wish to produce the perfect line as a pernicious addiction. A poem should not rely on perfect lines, but on an overarching theme whose meaning is conveyed through its lines. A poem is a literary convention of wholeness and unity. The idea that the line should be taken as the basis of a poem makes us pay attention to each word and analyze it as the unit of a line. This practice encourages us to think of words as abstract entities in a poem and to assign beauty or ugliness to the words. However, words, like bricks in a building, are never beautiful. Plaster is never beautiful. It is only an architecture composed of these elements that is beautiful. If we beheld a building made of agate, heliotrope, and silver but which had no overarching aesthetic beauty, it could not be considered a work of art. If the words of a poem simply sound good but do not add anything of beauty to the poem itself, the poem is not a work of art.

204

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Certain words, by long usage and convention, are considered “poetic” (şairane). We are engaged in a struggle to bring a new vocabulary to poetry and hope to rise above the old conventional use of “poetical” words. We do not confine ourselves to the old order but hope to bring fresh meaning and energy to poetry. If the reader cannot accept the use of words such as “corns,” or “Süleyman Efendi,” he or she is only interested in the passé and should confine his reading to poetry that abides by old and stale conventions.1 We will work against everything that belongs to the past and all outdated notions of “poeticality” in poetry.

Here they are referencing not a specific “Süleyman Efendi,” but rather making a distinction between spoken and written conventions for referring to a person.

1

III. THE CHANGE OF CIVILIZATION AND INNER MAN Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Originally published in Turkish as “Medeniyet Değiştirme ve İç İnsan” in Cumhuriyet newspaper on March 2, 1951. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62) is one of the most significant novelists and theorists of twentieth-century Turkish literature, in addition to being a distinguished poet, newspaper columnist, literature professor, and briefly a member of parliament. His writing on Istanbul and his friendship with poet Yahya Kemal figures prominently in Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s writing on Turkey’s literary past. Tanpınar’s novel, Huzur (A Mind at Peace) has been hailed as the “Turkish Ulysses” for his use of mystic Turkish poetry as a framing device and for its circadian structure. His critical work of Turkish literary history, XIX. Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (19th Century Turkish Literary History) is an influential account of literary history in the late Ottoman era and remains an important monograph for scholars of Turkish literature. Writing the bulk of his novels in the 1940s and ’50s, Tanpınar’s writing about cultural duality and civilizational change after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was in direct opposition to calls for Turkish literature to break with the Ottoman tradition. For this reason, despite his modernist credentials and canonical status, Tanpınar remains known in Turkey largely as a mühafazakâr, or conservative, due to his belief that the Ottoman past is a crucial cultural repository for the formation of modern Turkish identity. “The Change of Civilization and Inner Man” partakes in Tanpınar’s obsession with cultural duality, exploring how a lack of continuity between the Ottoman past and the Turkish present has created a psychological illness in Turkish citizens that manifests itself most obviously in the literary tradition. KS

Translated by Kaitlin Staudt. A few weeks ago, in an article which recently came out in this column, I said that since the Tanzimat,1 we were unable to bring any particular order to the fields of ideas and art.2 I gave examples, gathered indiscriminately and cursorily, of issues which were discussed in various establishments. I said that this discontinuity has, in truth, prevailed over our entire lives, and has created a crisis of mentality and inner life. The reason for this crisis is the duality which was brought about when we moved from one civilization to another. It caused us to be suspicious of not only the works we created, but also of the principles which the Tanzimat reformers implemented quickly; which caused us to engage with things so unsubstantial they could be considered a joke instead of our important and vital concerns, or which turned the essence of these important and vital concerns into a joke.

The Tanzimat, which means reorganization, refers to a period of reform in the Ottoman Empire that began in 1839 and ended in 1876 with the establishment of the first Ottoman constitution.

1

The article Tanpınar is referring to is “Kültür ve Sanat Yollarında Gösterdiğimiz Devamsızlık” [Discontinuities that we display in the course of culture and art] published on January 25, 1951, in Cumhuriyet newspaper. “The Change of Civilization and Inner Man” was published in the same paper just over one month later, on March 2, 1951.

2

206

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

This duality began in public life, later divided our society into two by mentality, and finally the processes deepened and altered and settled into us on an individual level. At first glance it seems strange, the fact that a movement which was necessary to push towards good, towards enlightenment, towards a complete and contemporary understanding of ourselves, produced this kind of result. But what can be done, it is a reality which will make us uncomfortable as long as we deny it. In this reality that took shape across time, the fact that the Tanzimat began without an agenda, lacking information, in short without an explicit aim was in large part due to the financial collapse that took an increasingly ferocious turn in the years following 1850 and due to political incidents which were determining factors for this collapse. In what follows, I will discuss this period whose causes and consequences constantly traded places with one another, each one affecting the other’s appearance. There remains a fact that I will call the sickness—if I were brave, I would say psychosis— of civilizational change, which takes the form of a struggle between the New and the Old, which is maybe not well constituted, or maybe not so precise, or changes its nature according to its current phase in progression; this struggle continues through contrived terkip3—in the form of a psychological richness, even—which does not constrain the communal life generated by this struggle. But the matter is completely the opposite. Today it is as if we are virtually deprived of the conditions necessary to complete a process of any kind in our communal life. We are neither able to demonstrate resistance in the face of things which will change us, nor are we able to completely surrender to them. It is as if we have lost our existence and our historical essence; we are in a crisis of values. We accept everything which adds nothing to ourselves in the big picture and we hide everything we have accepted locked away in a corner of our minds. A civilization is a whole. Its institutions and ruling values develop together. They are not found superfluous, nor are they doubted. Just as we inhabit our organs without considering how our hands, our feet, our ears fit together, we live like that with them. As communal life changes, civilization changes alongside its institutions and ruling values. Sometimes a portion of them are dissolved. But all of these changes occur together with people. Small and large crises, misunderstandings, anxieties, revolutions in periods of change, technical innovation, discovery and natural growth all contribute to these dissolutions. In the West the person of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of the Industrial Revolution, of today are real and historical facts which are together composed of civilization and its institutions. We too were like that within our old civilization. The people who forced the doors of Anatolia in the Selçuk period,4 the first founding generations who made our homeland theirs, to Ottoman conquerors, those who gave us the genius of Itrî and the language of Nailî5 despite all of these political upheavals were not the same; indeed our pleasure

Terkip is a cornerstone in Tanpınar’s theory of Turkish identity. Meaning both synthesis and composition, terkip refers to the melding of Turkish, Ottoman, and Western identities within contemporary Republican Turkish identity.

3

The Selçuks were a Turkic empire who ruled Anatolia in the eleventh century. They are credited with the spread of Sunni Islam and Turkicization of Anatolia.

4

Buhurizade Mustafa Itrî (1640–1712) was an Ottoman-Turkish musician, composer, singer, and poet who is regarded as one of the masters of classical Ottoman music; Nailî-i Kadim (1606–66) was a divan poet.

5

MODERNISM IN TURKEY

207

and that of the people from the end of the seventeenth century, that period of absolute growth and stability, were certainly very different from one another. But, at the same time, there was continuity between them. In Vanî Efendi there is Zembilli Ali Efendi, in Zembilli Ali Efendi there is the first judge of Istanbul, Hızır Bey. In İsmail Hakkı from Bursa there is Aziz Mahmud Hüdaî. In Hüdaî there is Üftâde, in Üftâde there is Hacı Bayram, and in him there is Yunus Emre. In Yunus, Rumi continues with a fire from the same hearth.6 All of these people questioned neither themselves nor those who came before; they entrusted life, thought, and the values which directed them as if to holy custody. Naturally, between them generational differences exist. They did not live in a fragmented time. Circumstance and the past were bound to one another in their mindset. In order for each to complete one another within time, they envisioned the future as an indeterminate downward flow from their own thought and life. Insomuch that it could be argued that Kul Hasan Dede, who lived in the eighteenth century and Eşrefoğlu, who lived in the fifteenth, seem to be in the same city and in the same tekke7; Nedim, who is otherwise different from the point of view of feeling and life, explains his own sensuality with a line from Fuzuli’s poetry8; the generations which came one after the other bring suit against Hallaj’s blood which was spilled unjustly.9 Life, one and whole, persisted together within each person. As the continual placement of stone over two or three generations eventually creates a building, so was it like this; people adopted an identity that was won over time. This is the thing we have lost in the years following the Tanzimat: the idea of this continuity and wholeness. While stating this fact, I do not want to say that we have done nothing since the Tanzimat, that we were left half finished. On the contrary, despite the fact that there was a great loss of time, generally many things were accomplished. Our society’s inner and outer outlook changed from generation to generation. Our women entered life. Our society got used to Western thought and art, our people were introduced to machines, the state became European. But we cannot deny that part of this is a result of the collapse of the old rather than enthusiasm surrounding the new; that a part of the phenomenon exists beyond our control; that even that which is bound to our essential volition and consciousness was

In the first half of the list Tanpınar is listing famous Turkish statesmen: Vanî Efendi (d. 1592) was a lawmaker; Zembilli Ali Efendi (1445–1526) held the position of şeyülislam, the highest religious authority in the Ottoman empire; Hızır Çelebi (1407–58) was the first judge (kadı) appointed after Istanbul was conquered by the Ottomans. The second half of the list includes famous Sufi mystic poets who composed verses in Turkish: Bursalı İsmail Hakkı (1652–1725) was a poet and musician who wrote over sixty books in Turkish; Aziz Mahmud Hüdaî (1541–1628) was a poet, musician, and scholar who legendarily read the first Friday prayer in the Blue Mosque; Hacı Bayram-ı Veli (1352–1430) was a poet and founder of the Bayrami Sufi order; Yunus Emre (1238–1320) is one of the first known poets to compose in Turkish; and finally Rumi (1207–73), known primarily in Turkish as Mevlana, also occasionally wrote in Turkish in addition to his more famous works in Persian. 6

Both Kul Hasan Dede and Eşrefoğlu were Sufi poets; a tekke is a monastery of Sufi dervishes, typically where rituals of worship and teaching occur.

7

Both Nedim (1681?–1730) and Fuzûlî (1494–1556) are considered to be two of the three most significant poets of the Ottoman divan tradition. Nedim is perhaps best known for his gazels, while Fuzûlî is best known for his Azeri Turkish version of Leyla and Mejnun.

8

Mansur Al-Hallaj (858–922) was a mystic poet in the Sufi tradition who was executed in Baghdad for his teachings.

9

208

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

perhaps neglected. What one generation begins is completed not by generations which come after them, but maybe by the historical conditions that generation is exposed to. But most significantly, we were not able to bring about the forms of life which affirm that our internal state in the face of these new institutions was neither fundamentally from Western culture and art, nor something else altogether. Always we lived divided in two internally. In a word, we did not completely believe in much of what we did. Because for us something else, something different always was and is present. This is the state of mind that separates us from Westerners and from our Muslim grandfathers of old. Even today, our lives have entered such a state that we are prepared for this altercation and we even dispute what is new. At last, to acknowledge the consequences of what we have done … we have not acceded this. In fact, the theological scholarship explained by Heine comes to mind when thinking of the debates of the past twenty-five years in which we considered ourselves to be living so rationally. This poor man devoted his life to writing a book in order to prove God’s existence. Truly it was a great work of scholarship, in order to take that sharp weapon of discussion inherited from scholastic traditions he piled evidence upon evidence, gathered testimony, and organized these to prove his case. But, in a sense the book was never able to be written. Because when the end drew near, his mind began to work in the opposite direction, the evidence and testimony which he had ardently, methodologically, and persistently gathered for years began to work against his case. Because he was an honorable man, he burned his book and this time began to write another book in order to prove that God did not exist. But when it would be completely finished, the true path again spoke and the miserable and dark instruments of denial suddenly began to shine with the light of faith. This continued like that through the entire period in which Heine lived. Is it possible to not see the escapades of the generations which we raised since the Tanzimat in this story? Maybe too Heine’s ruling mentality, this mental balance, was forged within Germany’s psychological state which resembles ours. From this point of view, it is beneficial to consider how the circumstance of literary generations changes in relation to life. But why only generations? We see the same fact when we consider individuals. Because the reaction of one generation to another generation, especially in art, is a very natural thing. But the division of an individual inside themselves is not a natural thing at all. Indeed, in the majority of those who have been raised since the Tanzimat almost every movement ends with a thundering and silent resignation, a sort of penitence, or a denial of themselves. Or else their character consumes themselves in a complete resentment or a barren doubt. The consequence of Fikret and Cenap!10 The doctrines of self-abnegation which in some way resemble the abolishment of the sultanate are beyond counting. It seems that the two kinds of tables, which Cevdet Pasha11 describes as a new expense while speaking about the changes that occurred in the course of the Crimean war, the

Tevfik Fikret (1867–1915) and Cenap Şahabettin (1870–1934) were both Ottoman poets affiliated with the Edebiyat-i Cedide (New Literature) movement in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Fikret also edited the Servet-i Fünun journal in which much of the movement’s work was published. 10

Ahmet Cevdet Paşa (1822–95) was an Ottoman statesman and bureaucrat who was influential in the Tanzimat era for his reform of Islamic law. He is also the father of Fatima Aliye (1862–1936) who is one of the first female Ottoman novelists.

11

MODERNISM IN TURKEY

209

alafranga and the alaturca12 table expanded, grew, and broke our lives into pieces. Furthermore, in time this state of mind has ceased to be dynamic; it has become static. It is as if unchangeable limits have been formed within us. The process is only a process. Firstly, this rhythm is present in our lives as individuals. We are adherents and crusaders for the new, but we are tied to the old. If the process extended only this far, it would be good. But it does not, it gets involved in more. We sense the compulsion of the old as men of the new in certain periods of our lives; we live under the influence of the new as men of the old in others. The changing of these poles has ruled our life. Sometimes events are caused by historical conditions. Sometimes they have psychological factors. For example, we don’t consider ourselves pure; we don’t live our own life; we don’t speak with our own mouths; we are deluded. To this it is necessary to add a hidden and merciless feeling of guilt that is wrought against that self that needs to know of the smallest failure experienced by the first reforming generation in the face of whatever failure in communal life or against a towering opulence. If I were brave, I would say that we are living through a type of Oedipus complex, the complex of a man who kills his father unknowingly. If there is an aspect that is certain, the old is right beside us, sometimes enduring like an oppressed, lost paradise, or like a treasure which hides our spiritual wholeness; the old opens in front of us with the glitter of a mirage in the smallest tremor; calls us to ourselves; causes us to be suspicious of our life. Hesitation and a kind of regret … (A fear of making mistakes) These are no doubt the starting points. But like every starting point, it influences our life in thousands of ways; through generations it hinders our reorganization as it requires people and our society. Civilizational change is that which transfers issues that could be solved in one generation from one generation to the next; which turns the simplest problems into thresholds which somehow cannot be crossed; which presents the consequences of our own actions as a kind of foreignness; which, in the place of a life unique to us, prolongs a probationary period which lasts ten, fifteen, twenty years, sometimes longer. Is this a vicious cycle, that which we will not be able to draw out from inside? Certainly not. But it will be necessary to scrutinize how and why it has settled inside us in order to be able to find the liberating cures for it.

In the Turkish context these terms designate a distinction between Western or European and Turkish cultural style that respectively denoted modernity and traditionalism. The term ferengî in Ottoman Turkish referred to a European or someone from Western, typically Christian culture. The styles of table Tanpınar is referring to are a Western-style meal table, raised off the floor and surrounded by chairs, versus a Turkish folding table, which would have been closer to the floor, surrounded by cushions, and easily removed once the meal is over.

12

210

CHAPTER SIX

Persian Modernism EDITED BY BAHAREH AZAD

The first flashes of modernism in Iran began with the introduction of the printing press by Iranian students sent to Europe for education in 1815 during the Qajar era.1 This technology led to an unprecedented rise in journals, periodicals, and mass reading through which European culture, philosophy, political thought, and literature were widely disseminated among contemporary writers, readers, and (so-called Westernized) intellectuals. European-educated students also contributed to the rise of modernism in Iran through their readings and translations of European works of art and humanities upon their return to the country, which later influenced the conception of modernism among Iranian writers as an imported phenomenon. After the reforms precipitated by the Constitutional Revolution in 1906,2 Iranian society and culture still had to wait for Reza Shah’s (1878–1944) autocratic monarchy (1925–41) to begin to modernize through changes such as urbanization and the rise of an industrial working class. Shah discarded the Constitutional Revolution and its democratic aspirations, however, and founded a monarchy that thwarted intellectuals’ hopes for a republic. Soon, the British and Tsarist Russian occupation of the country from August 25 to September 17, 1941, together with the oppressive system of feudalism, provoked Iranian intellectuals to raise national awareness amongst the masses to object more forcefully, if not iconoclastically at first, to the political and social constraints, and the progressive Reza Shah was dethroned without public resistance. The politically tense and unstable atmosphere which Iranian society experienced in the late nineteenth century and throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, as represented in the political division between royalists and republicans, had its counterpart in the clashes between literary classicists and modernists, who challenged each other’s authenticity and authority. Although modernism in Iran accompanied a passing period of infatuation with Western culture, it rendered an unprecedented resistance to that culture later on, which made its claim to novelty even more challenging for modernists to promote. This was so much the case that by the mid-twentieth century, in terms of poetry, for instance, classicists denounced She’r-e Nimaei or She’r-e No (Nimaic or New Poetry) and more harshly She’r-e Moj-e No (New Wave Poetry) as heretical (this was partly due to a historical distrust of the West and anything imported from it). This literary conflict continued until modernists finally took over by the 1970s and survived even after 1979, when they fell from prestige. The Qajar royal dynasty ruled Persia from 1796 to 1925.

1

The Constitutional Revolution lasted from 1905 to 1911 and led to the establishment of an elected parliament in Iran.

2

212

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Persian poetry, the dominant literary form in Iran for centuries, was the primary literary form in Iranian literature that was forced to respond to the introduction of modernism, a phenomenon which turned out to be quite new and disturbingly anomalous in its first encounter with a concrete body of tradition. The traditionalist masses did not smoothly come to terms with modernist trends, given the fact that the common understanding of poetry (if not its aesthetic and technical sensibilities) emerged from the ubiquity of poetry in daily life (rich in proverbs, sayings, and Quranic verses which incorporated elements of poetry) and was founded on the priceless poetic heritage of classics such as Ferdowsi (c. 935–c. 1020), Saadi (c. 1213–c. 1291), Rumi (1207–73), and Hafez (c. 1310–c. 1390). Consequently, the conflicts deteriorated between traditionalists who favored classical conventions and modernists who had sensed the dire need to shake centuries of dust off the classical canon. Activists and poets such as Abolghasem Lahouti (1887–1957), Shams Kasmaei (1883– 1961), and Mirzadeh Eshghi (1894–1924) saw breaking away from abstract sophistry, scholasticism, verbosity, and rhetorical acrobatics, which had plagued Persian poetic tradition and language after its medieval breakthrough, as the only way to salvage the essence of poetry. Later, Iranian modernists from Nima Yushij (1897–1960) and Mehdi Akhavan-Sales (1929–90) to Khosro Golsorkhi (1944–74), Ahmadreza Ahmadi (1940–), and Bijan Elahi (1945–2010) transformed the worn-out mystic, laudatory, and melancholy quality of classical literature into succinct, harsh images of modernity and daily urban life, materialistic doom, human conflicts, socio-political struggles, and popular culture. Thus, what generally distinguished modernist poetry from some classical examples—more than its auditory and visual break from the rigid formal conventions and the regularity of rhyme, meter, and line length—was the firm bond it forged with modern Iran’s sociopolitical reality. Rather than hovering in the classical ether, poetry came to dwell in and reflect the contemporary world. Having lingered before it could gain appreciation for decades, She’r-e No was forged through constant dialogue with both She’r-e Sonnati (Classical Persian Poetry) and European literature. No poet was more responsible for inaugurating Persian modernist poetry and poetics than Nima Yushij. For this section, we have chosen the “Preface” to his 1922 collection, Afsaneh (The Myth), as the paradigm of his revolutionary project. We have also included the poem-manifesto “She’r-i Ke Zendegist” (“A Poetry That Is Life”) by Ahmad Shamlu (1925–2000) and an interview with the poet Forough Farrokhzad (1935–67). BA

FURTHER READING Akhavan-Sales, Mehdi. Nima Yushij’s Innovations and Aesthetics and Nima Yushij’s Bequest. Tehran: Bozorgmehr, 1990. Aryanpour, Yahya. From Nima to Our Day. Tehran: Zavvar, 1995. Atashi, Manouchehr. Ahmad Shamlu: A Critical Analysis. Tehran: Amitis, 2004. Dastgheib, Abdolali. The Messenger of Hope and Liberty: Critical Review of Poems by Nima Yooshij. Tehran: Amitis, 2006. Hillmann, Michael C. A Lonely Woman: Forough Farrokhzad and Her Poetry. Washington: Mage Publishers, 1987. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran. Salt Lake City, UT: Oneworld Publications, 1995. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad and K. Talattof, eds. Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry. Boston, MA: Brill Press, 2004. Parsinejad, Iraj. Nima Yushij and Literary Criticism. Tehran: Sokhan, 2009.

I. PREFACE TO THE MYTH Nima Yushij Originally published in Persian as the preface to Afsaneh (The Myth), 1922. Translated by Bahareh Azad. Nima Yushij (pen name of Ali Esfandiari, 1896–1960) is the father of Persian She’r-e No (New Poetry). His first collection of She’r-e-No, Afsaneh (The Myth), appeared in 1922. Its preface, reproduced here, is considered the manifesto of modernist Persian poetry. As a manifesto in the form of a ghazal (a tradition Persian poetic form), it displays both European and classical Persian influence. Afsaneh is a dramatic and dialogic love story between the poet and Myth,1 who compels the poet to admit his need for her. The poem exhibits modernist formal and thematic tendencies such as irregular line length, rhyming and lexical freedom, and imagery that verges on the surreal. For the first time in Persian literature, nature is dramatized in a romantic lyric as an individualistic and subjective entity, which Nima achieves through his performative method. Another Nimaic characteristic in the poem is the use of compounds and adjectives as nouns. But what makes the poetry especially modernist and distinct from classical poetry is the harmonization of thought and feeling. Sound and sense in Nima’s poetry are not chained by metrical conventions but flow in a free and dynamic form. This preface explicates and defends this poetic practice, and as such provides a framework for subsequent experiments in modernist Persian poetry. BA

O young poet! The structure that my work, Afsaneh, accommodates, representing an unrestrained and natural conversation, may not appeal to you at first, and you might not be as pleased with it as I am. You may also wonder why it is such a long ghazal, with such incongruous words as compared to classical ghazal. Yet this is exactly what I have meant to accomplish, namely freedom of expression and expansion of discourse, in addition to opting for a more appropriate manner of conversation which Molana Mohtasham Kashani2 and others, too, had approached earlier. Eventually, by doing so, I wished to gain more poetic benefit. I believe that my work’s structure is the most convenient for unfolding drama, and, as each type of poetry has a particular description, I would call mine dramatic. Certainly, no other name can characterize Afsaneh’s structure more appropriately, since it can be best adapted to stage its drama and bring the story’s characters into a free conversation with one another. If, due to their open scope in form and description of a theme or life story, structures such as masnavi (couplet) grant the poet’s mind and heart the liberty to move freely with every beat, the same structural intensity is doubly present in Afsaneh: its structure is sufficiently capacious to accommodate whatever you put in it (description, novel, requiem, farce, etc.). The Farsi equivalent for myth is also used as a female name. Persian poet (1500–88), well-known for his tarkib-band (ghazals bound together through a varied linking verse).

1 2

214

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

This structure hosts the story’s characters as you please and provides them with sufficient space to maneuver through either a couple of words or hemistichs, as much as nature and will demand. The characters can speak where they please and end their conversation when they wish, without being constrained by insufficient poetic space to speak. Nor does the poet have to put words in their mouths in order to make them speak more. In fact, it is the characters themselves who speak on their own, not the traditional poetic conventions which have them do so, nor all those “he/she asked or replied” which elongated a poem. My belief in this structure comes from the fact that the particular meaning and nature of the subject are best respected in it, and there would be no greater asset for the poet and poetry than to define nature and meaning more simply and appropriately and to apply his/her gift and power as such. Staging my drama, I will show how and what I meant to say, and you will also know what the basic step has been to promote our [Iran’s new] poetry. However, for now, with some limited imagination, you may not quite understand my quest or distinguish my poem’s structure from that of the classical ones. Afsaneh is only an example, and my ideas will appear in the preface of my next dramatic piece.

II. A POETRY THAT IS LIFE Ahmad Shamlu Originally published in Persian “She’r-i Ke Zendegist” in Hava-ye Tazeh (Fresh Air). Tehran: Nil Publication, 1958: 153–61. Translated by Samad Alavi. A poet, political activist, journalist, translator, lexicographer, and filmmaker, Ahmad Shamlu (1925–2000, pen name A. Bamdad) is considered one of the greatest modernist voices in Persian literature. Keen in his defiance of the metaphysical assumptions of classical literature and the constraints of tradition in culture, he persisted in an intellectual modernist lifestyle, working in radio, television, and newspaper. Adhering to a humanist ethics verging on atheism—a concern with humanity generally figures in the foreground of his poems—Shamlu practiced an individualistic experimentalism while gravitating to the leftist party (Tudeh). Not geographically limited to Iran, his universal outlook granted him an understanding of modern global trends and wide-ranging worldviews. He wrote on a broad spectrum of issues such as politics, religion, literature, and love, approaching them in their worldly forms or contexts. For Shamlu, poetry should be “popular” and start from the masses in the streets. He is the inaugurator of She’r-e Sepid (Sepid Poetry), literally “white poetry,” which is close to Western free verse. Although his early poetry was composed in the tradition of Nima, he later became more radical in his formal experiments, detaching Persian poetry from rhyme and metrical patterns, even those elements which were typical of the Nimaic poetry. As such, he was dubbed the illegitimate offspring of Nima’s generation. Shamlu’s meta-poem, “A Poetry That Is Life,” from the collection Hava-ye Tazeh (Fresh Air, 1957), relishes the prospect of change in both politics and poetics, and is regarded as the poet’s manifesto of modernist poetry. He aspires to expand the horizons of imagination in poetry to encompass a wide range of worldly themes and asserts that poetry has its roots in the lives of the masses. To achieve this goal, Shamlu writes, poetry should avoid the loftiness of classical language and adopt common people’s ordinary speech. Shamlu envisions and writes a poetry which is considered modernist not only in form but also in its thematic concern with the here and now of the human life. BA

“A Poetry That Is Life” The matter of poetry for the bygone poet was not life. In the barren expanses of his fancy he was in dialogue only with wine and the beloved. Morning and night he was lost in whim, seized in the ludicrous snare of his

216

beloved’s locks, while others, one hand on the wine cup the other on beloved’s tresses, raised a drunken howl from God’s earth. Since the poet’s concerns were nothing but this the effect of his poetry    was nothing but this: it couldn’t be used in place of an auger; in times of battle the handiwork of poetry couldn’t move aside any stone demon   from before the masses. Meaning its existence left no trace being or not being made no difference it never stood in place of a gallows. While I   personally    at one time with my poetry fought shoulder to shoulder with the Korean Shen Chu. Once several years ago, I also hung “The Poet Hamidi”   from the gallows of my poetry … The subject of poetry     today   is a different matter … Today   poetry is the weapon of the masses because poets themselves are one branch from the forest of the masses not jasmines and hyacinths   in the

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

PERSIAN MODERNISM

hothouse of so-and-so. The poet of today    is no stranger to the collective toils of the masses: He smiles   with the people’s lips. He grafts the people’s hopes and pains upon his bones. Today   the poet must wear nice clothes, lace up his clean and well-waxed shoes, then from the busiest points in the city, with a precision particular to him, he must extract his subject, meter, and rhyme one by one from the passersby. “—Come with me, dear fellow citizen! For three whole days    I’ve looked for you      and knocked on every door!” “For me? How strange! Surely, sir, you must mistake1 me for someone else.” “—Not at all, dear sir, impossible: I can spot the meter of my new poem from afar.” “—What’s that you say?    Meter of a poem?” “—Consider it, comrade … I have always sought    meter, idiom and rhyme in alleys. My poetic units are all individual

More precisely: “you must have mistaken me for someone else.”

1

217

218

people. I seek everything from “life” (which forms most of the “content”) to “diction,” “meter,” and “rhyme scheme” among the people.   This way gives poetry life and soul. Now the time has come for the poet to persuade the passerby (with a logic particular to poems) so that he may resume his work with relish, if not, all his efforts go to waste … Well, now that meter has fallen in place, time to seek a diction: Any lexeme, as its Arabic name displays, is feminine in form,    a lovely and jovial maiden … The poet must seek a fitting Diction for the meter he has found. This business is difficult and draining but    not     optional: If Sir Meter and his wife Lady Diction are not matching and harmonious then their lives will not be pleasing. Like my wife and me: I was meter, she the words [hatchets on the meter] the subject of poetry, too, was the eternal vow on love’s lips … Our children’s smiles (these joyous beats) lay happily in this poetry, but to what avail when the cold, black words

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

PERSIAN MODERNISM

gave an ominous, elegiac sense? They broke both the meter and the joyous beats. The poetry grew both fruitless and senseless until pointlessness wore out the master! In short, this discourse has dragged on and this painful wound opened to shed its pallid blood … The pattern for poetry today we said   is life! It is from life that the poet, with poetry’s water and dye, renders an image   upon the designs of another. He writes poetry   meaning he lays a hand on the wounds of the old city. meaning he weaves a tale at night     of the sweet morning to come. He writes poetry meaning he cries out the pains of his city and its surrounds. meaning with his songs he restores the worn out souls. He writes poetry meaning he fills the cold and almost-empty hearts    with passion meaning with a face to the rising morning

219

220

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

he awakens     the slumbering eyes. He writes poetry   meaning he delivers an exegesis on the encomium for the human of the epoch. Meaning he recites the victory speeches of his age. This dry debate on the significance of particular utterances also does not serve poetry …    if poetry is life then in each of its darkest verses we sense the sunny warmth of love and hope: Kayvan has sung his life’s anthem in blood Vartan his life’s bellow in the framework of silence, but even if life rhymes     in there with nothing else but death’s protracted beat in both poems each death     means

life!

III. HASAN HONARMANDI’S INTERVIEW WITH FOROUGH FARROKHZAD Forough Farrokhzad and Hasan Honarmandi Originally published in Persian in Arash 13 (1967). Reprinted in Javdaneh Zistan dar Ouj Mandan (Living for Eternity, Dying at the Peak). Tehran: Morvarid, 1998: 180–4. Translated by Bahareh Azad. A poet and film maker, Forough Farrokhzad (1935–67) transformed the tradition of classical poetics and the moods and the vocabulary common in Persian poetry. Neither steeped in Persian classical literature nor merely attracted to its European counterpart, her poetry reflected the mood and music of her time. Simple yet volatile, Forough’s imagistic style adds an articulately feminine quality to Nima’s pioneering modernism. Drawing upon such taboo subjects in a patriarchal society as female lust, desire, and sensuality, Forough offered a graphic description of the female body and the feminine perspective. Though her career only lasted fifteen years, her defiant body of work arguably stands as the greatest poetic achievement of the generation that succeeded Nima. Avant-garde both in terms of women’s rights and poetic style, her poetry was the finest example of écriture féminine in Persian history. Socially conscious, willfully sensual, and unprecedentedly outspoken in diction and subject matter, Forough’s confessional poetry undermined and challenged the idiom and thinking of the patriarchal canon. Her acquaintance with English, German, and Italian, along with her travels in Europe, had a huge impact on her poetics and film-making practice. Introduced to modern artistic and literary movements in the West, Forough’s poetry openly addressed the concerns of secularism, individualism, feminism, and nihilism. The following interview is a pivotal text on modernist Persian poetry because it shows how Forough approaches contemporary poetry from a totally “modern” point of view, detached from its classical heritage. She redefines Persian poetry by insisting that it be situated in contemporary life: there should be a symbiotic relationship between poetry and its contemporary context, so that its “liveliness” can be brought out. While some classical works of art were less concerned with reflecting social reality, modernist poetry, in Forough's conception of it, could not be composed in an abstract metaphysical vacuum. At the same time, modernist Persian poetry should resist mere imitation of Western models in order to be both formally and thematically in tune with modernized Iran in the first decades of the twentieth century. BA

HH. A definition of “style,” please? FF. Generally speaking, “style” in poetry or any other work of art may refer to the manner of utterance and communication of thought or poetic impression. This, obviously, has had a private and individual aspect to it since its emergence.

222

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Similarly, on a more general level, the fact that the works with certain similarities are grouped together and are then followed by their admirers, gives these works a collective aspect. HH. Yes. Thanks. Now, would you please elaborate on your poetic method, the manner in which you write, and the characteristics of your poetry? FF. Of course, speaking in this regard is a bit difficult for me since one cannot have a sound judgement about their own work that has to be judged by others. I can, however, discuss my ideas about poetry. In my poetry I focus on the “language,” since a lack of lexical variety has afflicted our poetic expression. Our poetry is intermingled with the tradition of highly frequent words, which, though not meaningless, have lost their effectiveness in our ears. Additionally, words associated with our poetic tradition are not compatible with the contemporary poetic sensibility as our lives have changed. The contemporary world is replete with new issues that require new words that have never existed in our poetry to convey novel senses, and this is no easy task. I try to introduce these words into poetry and I believe that it is the right thing to do since, if contemporary poetry is supposed to be animated and lively, it should draw on these words and make use of them. In terms of meter, I do not favor the popular meters which have been used so far in Persian poetry, since there is no correspondence between these metrical patterns and my own impressions as a modern individual. Their mild rhythm, even in war poems, is of a gentle quality which cannot match modern sensibilities. I think, if we wish to and can draw our impressions on a piece of paper, they would make a zigzag line which cannot be contained in those too gentle rhythms which rather resemble, excuse my description of them, “nursery rhymes.” HH. You mean a louder cry? FF. Yes, I think we need to strive for novel meters, because these impressions are stronger than traditional meters, and the current issues in our lives are totally disharmonious with these meters. I am trying to work in this regard. I cannot say it has been a success, but I am trying to succeed as I need my poetry to improve. HH. What do you think of poetry and its relation to life? Even though this has been already hinted at in your talk. FF. Poetry is basically part of life and can never be detached from it or from the domain of life's effects on the individual. We can see the spiritual and even the material life from a poetic perspective. In fact, if poetry remains indifferent to the condition it grows in, it cannot be called poetry. Unfortunately, while pretending otherwise, Today’s Poetry in Iran or the so-called New Poetry has remained detached from real life and from its own real spatiotemporal coordinates, which of course has its reasons. One of the reasons is classical literature, a major obstacle before or behind us, a burden we have always been carrying. Another is the fear and anxiety of finding novel routes and applying new materials, one of which being meter. If these issues are resolved, poetry will thrive. HH. What view do you take on the transformation of Persian poetry? FF. It is a really hard thing to do. If you pay enough attention, you may observe that definitions and measures are falling apart and are becoming meaningless, if not worthless. Life cannot remain unaffected by, say, the Earth’s rotation, that is, scientific improvements are constantly changing the concepts in our lives, and, therefore, we cannot decide how Persian poetry will be transformed.

PERSIAN MODERNISM

223

The modality of this transformation is undecidable and spontaneous. This change is brought about by taking into account the conditions of life and the environment. This transformation is deterministic and cannot be planned or predicted. It is spontaneous. HH. With such trust in contemporary poetry, do you see this transformation as probable? Can it have a promising prospect? FF. I hope to see this come true soon, even if not now. The way the world is proceeding, I wonder if people will take any interest in poetry later on, and even if poetry will have a place in their lives at all. HH. What is your take on form and theme? FF. To my mind, it is the theme which generates form, i.e. imposes form. Theme is not created by the form, but the other way around. Form does not matter much to me. I believe poetry is the expression of some idea or sensation, not a frivolous one, but some deeply experienced impression to be expressed by a poet or any other artist, depending on her/his art. And if there is no impression, sensation, or idea to convey, one had better keep silent and never pursue poetry or the like. Unfortunately, the poet’s aimlessness is one of the serious defects in our contemporary poetry as you see. This resembles an artist’s scrawling to paint scenery, just to have painted something, whereas another artist paints the same image and expresses an idea in its every line, that is to say, he or she gives a purpose to those lines and that scenery. I prefer the second case and believe in it as a must. Purposelessness cannot go with art. More often than not, our poetry today is aimless; appealing forms and images are put to use to no avail, and they serve no particular purpose. They [contemporary poets] just make and hand out a sketch. But good poetry like Nima’s—I do not see myself worthy enough to talk about him in the first place—has a personal space in it, a mental and emotional space for which he sacrificed his life. There are also good poets even today and I respect them, those who are real poets and follow a purpose in life and poetry.

224

CHAPTER SEVEN

Modernism in the Caucasus EDITED BY HARSHA RAM

Georgia’s most celebrated twentieth-century painter, Niko Pirosmani (full name Niko Pirosmanashvili; 1862–1918)1 experienced a belated and largely posthumous rise to fame. Pirosmani’s canonization is a paradigmatic instance of a vernacular practice recuperated in the service of a global and élite discourse on art. The recovery of Pirosmani’s legacy is a story of two distinct models competing but also colluding in the artist’s canonization: the cosmopolitan discourse of modernist primitivism, and a nationalizing discourse of local particularity. Both discourses, in their distinctness and in their mutual complicity, find exemplary expression in the two articles found below. A partially literate autodidact, Pirosmani lived much of his life on the margins of urban society, eking out a living by commission, painting works which served to adorn as well as advertise the stores, cellars, and taverns owned and frequented by the popular classes of the Georgian capital Tiflis (Tbilisi). A functioning part of a lived environment of commerce and consumption, Pirosmani’s work circulated outside the realm of high art and aesthetic appreciation until it was “discovered” in the summer of 1912 by several (still teenage!) representatives of the Russian—or better still Russophone—avant-garde, who scoured the commercial spaces of Tiflis in search of his work, which they interpreted through the lens of the broadly modernist fascination with the “primitive.” It was largely in response to the Russian primitivist recuperation of Pirosmani that Georgian intellectuals were moved to transform him into a national icon. The discovery and canonization of Pirosmani thus allow us to contemplate the complex dialogue between competing vectors of modernist cultural production, be it in Georgia or worldwide. At the same time, the story of Pirosmani differs in one essential respect from the broader history of European primitivism: Gauguin’s Polynesian adventure and Picasso’s fascination for African sculpture presupposed a transcontinental voyage of recovery, arguably facilitated by European imperialism. By contrast, the Russophone and Georgian artists who “discovered” Pirosmani were mostly native to the city in which he lived, even as they took their cues from Paris and St. Petersburg. An important element of what we might call Eurasian modernism is the persistence of local and regional scales of cultural encounter and exchange, in striking contrast to the more familiar transcontinental and transregional Over the course of the twentieth century, two spellings of the long form of the artist’s name, as well as the short form Pirosmani, were used. This introduction refers to the artist by the popular abbreviated form of his name. Where the long form is used by the authors of the articles published below, I have consistently adopted the now established spelling Pirosmanashvili, although the book from which the articles are taken is entitled Niko Pirosmanishvili. The authors also frequently refer to the artist by variants of his first name: Niko, Nikala, and the Russian form Nikolai.

1

226

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

scale of European modernism. (An analogy closer both in scale and in aesthetic sensibility to Pirosmani would be the work of the “naïve” French painter Henri Rousseau: Picasso’s banquet of 1908 given in Rousseau’s honor would have served as a model and precedent for the modernist artists who interacted with Pirosmani on the eve of the First World War). What follows are two articles, translated from the Russian, which first appeared in the trilingual (Georgian, Russian, and French) volume Niko Pirosmanishvili (1926), the first monograph on Pirosmani to have appeared anywhere in the world. An initiative of the Georgian modernist poet Titsian Tabidze and his allies, the volume was itself a significant cultural achievement, appearing at a time when Georgia had only recently been absorbed into the Soviet Union. These were years of acute material limitations—the local publishing industry was only slowly being revived—but relative intellectual freedom. Both articles are strikingly sophisticated, largely free of the ideological constraints which would later fetter Soviet cultural discourse, and moving readily between a global arthistorical erudition and a deep rootedness in local practices. “Niko Pirosmanashvili” is by Kirill Zdanevich (1892–1969), one of a group of three artists, broadly representative of the Russian avant-garde, who “discovered” Pirosmani— the man and his work—in prerevolutionary Tiflis. Zdanevich’s argument is grounded in the idiom of modernist primitivism, which found its Russian-Eurasian inflection in Aleksandr Shevchenko’s “neoprimitivist” manifesto of 1913 and the related “Target” exhibition held in Moscow during the same year—a landmark event in the history of the Russian avant-garde which saw the first gallery display of Pirosmani’s works. It also quotes extensively from the diary of his celebrated brother Ilia (1894–1975, also known as Iliazd): an invaluable biographical source written by a precocious eighteen-year-old, these diary entries also read as a sui generis auto-ethnography of high modernism’s encounter with vernacular culture. Kirill Zdanevich was destined to remain in the Soviet Union his entire life, unlike Iliazd, who emigrated to Paris in 1921, thereby bringing Russian futurism into direct contact with western European currents such as dada and surrealism. “Niko Pirosmani” is by Grigol Robakidze (1880–1962), the single most influential intellectual in Georgian modernism: his article seeks to marry primitivism to the project of Georgian cultural emancipation, a goal both fostered and imperilled by Soviet rule. Robakidze’s worldview, which came into being well before the Russian revolution, was a heady cocktail of Nietzschean vitalism and biological nationalism, whose protofascist tendencies became more explicit after his defection to Germany in 1931. Robakidze’s undoubted achievement was to have introduced some of the most significant elements of European fin de siècle culture into Georgia. Taken together, the articles by Zdanevich and Robakidze offer a powerful articulation of aesthetic modernism on the periphery of Western Europe, emerging at the point of convergence of apparently irreconcilable polarities: the elite and the vernacular, the cosmopolitan and the national. HR

FURTHER READING Clifford, James. “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern.” In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. 1st ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 189–215. Kuznetsov, Erast, ed. Niko Pirosmani 1862–1918. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1983. Trans. Arthur Shkharovsky-Raffe.

MODERNISM IN THE CAUCASUS

227

Ram, Harsha. “Introducing Georgian Modernism” and “Decadent Nationalism, ‘Peripheral’ Modernism: The Literary Manifesto between Symbolism and the Avant-garde.” Special Cluster on Georgian modernism including two manifestos by Paolo Iashvili and Titsian T’abidze, translated by Shota Papava and Harsha Ram, annotated by Harsha Ram. Modernism/Modernity 21/1 (January 2014): 283–359. Rubin, William, ed. Primitivism in 20th-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. 2 vols. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984. Shevchenko, Aleksandr. “Neoprimitivism: Its Theory, Its Potentials, Its Achievements,” (1913). In Russian Art of the Avant-garde. Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, edited and translated by John E. Bowlt. New York: The Viking Press, 1976. 41–54. Tabidze, Titsian, Grigol Robakidze, Geronti Kikodze, Kirill Zdanevich, and Kolau Cherniavskii. Niko Pirosmanishvili (in Russian). Tiflis: Gosudarstvennoe Izdaltel’stvo Gruzii, 1926. Tsitsishvili, Maia and Nino Tchogoshvili, eds. Georgian Modernism 1910–1930 (in English and Georgian). Tbilisi: Goethe Institut Tbilissi, 2003. Iliazd (Zdanevich, Ilia) and Pablo Picasso. Pirosmanachvili 1914 (in French). Paris: Le Degré 41, 1972. Zdanevich, K. M. Niko Pirosmanashvili (in Russian). Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964.

I. NIKO PIROSMANASHVILI Kirill Zdanevich Originally published in Russian in Tabidze, Titsian, Grigol Robakidze, Geronti Kikodze, Kirill Zdanevich, and Kolau Cherniavskii, Niko Pirosmanishvili (Tiflis: Gosudarstvennoe Izdaltel’stvo Gruzii, 1926). Translated by Harsha Ram. See section introduction for a discussion of this text and its context.

The visual arts in Georgia came into being under the influence of the national cultures of its neighbors, the peoples of Assyria and Babylonia, Byzantium and Persia. Traces of the ancient culture of the Assyrians and Babylonians are still visible in bas reliefs, the ornamental façades of ancient churches, the folk-sculptural forms found on tombstones, and the architecture of watchtowers. The Byzantine influence can be discerned in church frescoes. Persia left its mark on Georgian miniature and book ornamentation. Yet the creative spirit of the Georgian people was able to transmute these ancient cultures, which, even as they enriched the nation, did not obscure its distinct contours. Тhe easel painter Niko Pirosmani (Nikolai Aslanovich Pirosmanashvili), an artist of inexplicable and miraculous power, reproduced in his work the full gamut of diverse cultures which contributed to Georgia’s artistic image even as he gave lucid and original expression to the creative particularities of the Georgian people. Pirosmanashvili’s success can be attributed to the fact that he gave voice to an inherited culture that was at once primitive and highly developed, while at the same time generating an idiom which convincingly reflected his own era. Pirosmanashvili’s work is a classic of its own era: this is its local as well as its eternal significance. There exists no other or better way to convey prerevolutionary Georgia, to grasp its life in all its fullness and force. Pirosmanashvili’s stylistic choices seem the only possible solutions—as well as the best—to the artistic challenge posed by his epoch. The cultures of the past found due reflection in Niko’s paintings. The Assyrian bas relief is resurrected in his Black Lion and Giraffe; the Last Supper of Byzantium comes to life again in his Feast of Kintos Accompanied by the Organ Grinder Datiko Zemel,1 while the Persian passion for the graphic spot is evident in any number of Pirosmani’s works. Even as he delved deeply into the artistic roots of the people, Pirosmanashvili also rose to the level of the art of our own time, including innovations recently achieved in the West. The Fisherman, with its spiral composition, straight lines and coloristic resolution, on an oilcloth barely painted over with still visible patches of primer, recalls the achievements of André Derain and Henri Matisse. Even as he employed a unified mode of artistic expression, Pirosmanashvili did on some occasions resolve the complex compositional challenges he faced in different

Grigol Robakidze defines the kinto as a member of “an utterly singular breed of déclassé street peddlers whose sole goal in life was a kind of singular artistic merriment” (see essay 7.ii).

1

MODERNISM IN THE CAUCASUS

229

ways. On that basis we can divide the painter’s artistic evolution into three periods. The painter’s earliest works (1888–1906) are dominated by light green, yellow and grey, and on occasion by black and dark blue. Portrait Dinner and Hunting Scene with a View of the Black Sea are distinguished by a fascination with the complexities of landscape, into which numerous human figures are inscribed, separated somewhat demonstratively from the background, their independent status deriving from the minute and variegated detail with which they are depicted. The painter’s second period (up to 1910) is marked by an increasing simplicity of composition: the painter depicts distinct human types against a reduced background, mostly on oilcloth. These are large monumental figures, drawn in broad generalizing strokes. Among them we might note Familial Company, The Actress Margarita, Childless Millionaire and a Poor Woman with Children, and others. These paintings, marked by their predilection for bright colors (intense yellow, black, deep blue, green and white), constituting a kind of still life dominated by a narrow palette, are among the greatest masterpieces Pirosmanashvili would ever produce. The paintings Pirosmanashvili produced in his final period display a further simplification of compositional structure and color range, depicting a range of near-white figures against a black background, with a few rare exceptions. Among the most significant works painted on cardboard during this time are such splendid works as Bears as well as Cows. In other works, such as Donkey Carrying a Load of Firewood, the artist elevates his use of black oilcloth (or more rarely tin or canvas) to a virtuoso level. We see the uneven use of a grey undercoat and subsequent formal elaboration through the use of a slightly tinted whitewash, around which the oilcloth has been left bare. Typical of this period is a sense of laconic or compressed expression, a new precision in the delineation of forms, a lightness of brush stroke and a more direct correspondence between individual details and the canvas as a whole. All of this makes for an exceptional level of refinement, all the more astonishing in the case of an autodidact like Pirosmanashvili. The painterly techniques used in this period are varied. The paint applied is of varying density and consistency: faces are rendered smoothly and thickly; fabric—calico or velvet—in broad strokes while cliffs are rendered in short, jagged ones. The sky, the air, the body, wool, trees, bones: each object has its own means of expression. Pirosmanashvili deploys all manner of devices: perspective is dictated by the needs of composition: a colored silhouette looms suddenly in the middle of a field, while human and animal figures serve to animate tree stumps, stones, and large standing pitchers. Pirosmanashvili painted on tin as well, the material from which shop signs were made. The refractory rigidity of tin lends a dry but sonorous quality to the small number of landscapes and still lifes found painted on this medium: their innate expressiveness becomes the very basis and condition of signage as an art form. In his final years (1914– 18) Pirosmanashvili worked chiefly on cardboard, a material which lends a certain woodenness to the texture of his works. His paintings were commissioned for specific sites and served as decorative panels. This explains why some of his works have a symmetrical or rhyming correspondence to one another (for example his diptych Musha or Porter). The very same reasons also drew Pirosmanashvili to themes whose innumerable variants go back to the festive culture of the Italian Renaissance, specifically Veronese’s scenes of ceremonial festivity depicted against the variegated backdrop of everyday life. We witness banquet scenes, familial or official, involving peasants or princes, seated on the grass or at a table filled with a traditional repast of boiled chicken, fish, salad greens and wine; outdoor scenes of revelry set in fields or gardens (Princes Seated in a Meadow, Feast

230

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

During a Grape Harvest) involving kintos or members of the sect of Molokans, which often contain background vignettes of brigands pillaging, pilgrims riding on bullock-carts, peasants harvesting grapes, or people celebrating church holidays. A sense of merriment, of a happy and fruitful life, pervades these works. Historical themes (Saakadze Saves Georgia from its Foes, Shamil and his Bodyguard and others), diverse theatrical spectacles, scenes of travel, ritual, and peasant labor embrace and supplement the works of festive revelry, thereby delineating the full gamut of Georgian life before the revolution, from half-forgotten customs to contemporary types. In every painting Pirosmanashvili shows himself to be an artist of the people, entirely devoid of any sense of seclusion or interiority. In his constant concern for the needs of the viewing public, in his desire to make his work pleasant and accessible to the people, Pirosmanashvili everywhere remains an artist bound to tradition, one whose painterly devices can be readily understood. His intuitive links to the commercial shop-sign, to the Georgian fresco, to the Georgian artisanal crafts of toy making, embroidery and ornamentation are clearly evident. Largely devoid of mystical intimations, his work more commonly displays a concern, Cézannesque and essentially realist, to bring to light whatever appears readily comprehensible to the artist as artist. Sunshine, glare or shade are almost entirely absent in Pirosmanashvili, who prefers an even spread of light which seems to emanate from somewhere within his paintings. Shadow serves to express form rather than as a way of conveying light. Pirosmanashvili painted quickly. Each one of his paintings was completed in two or three sittings, within a few hours. Take the painting Little Kinto, completed by Pirosmanashvili in half an hour in the presence of a large group of people clamorously expressing their appreciation both of the painting’s resemblance to its subject and of the speed with which Pirosmani executed the work. I have already mentioned the fact that Pirosmanashvili’s themes varied greatly. In his work we find representations of folk customs, battle scenes, typological portraits, genre paintings, still lifes, landscape and innumerable animal figures. The dimensions of Pirosmanashvili’s paintings range from five meters in length to fifteen centimeters. Their composition is largely determined by the dimensions of the canvas. They are painted on oilcloth, more rarely on canvas or on tin, and finally on cardboard. Pirosmanashvili authored a colossal number of paintings: more than a thousand. Regrettably not many survived. For this we can blame careless owners, the poor conditions—such as cellars—in which they were kept, and more generally the conditions of a transitional era. Pirosmanashvili lived an ordinary life, yet his creative accomplishments are remarkable. Working in taverns and storefronts to earn a meager meal and glass of vodka, suffering from extreme privation and need, the artist became a martyr to his craft. The artist Mikhail Le Dentu (1891–1917) and the Zdanevich brothers Il’ia and Kirill first discovered Niko’s paintings in the spring of 1912. This joyful discovery prompted them to seek out other paintings by Niko, as well as the artist himself. The search for paintings and painter proved successful: we tracked down the artist. We came to a building on Molokan Street where Niko was pointed out to us. He was standing on the pavement with a brush in his hand, busy painting the word “Dairy” on the wall. He turned to us, gave a dignified bow and continued working, sustaining the conversation we had initiated with infrequent replies. The visual details of this meeting remain etched in my mind to this day: the artist standing by a white wall, dressed in a torn black jacket and a soft felt hat, tall in stature, carrying himself with an air of calm independence,

MODERNISM IN THE CAUCASUS

231

his responses nonetheless betraying a sense of hidden bitterness. (Acquaintances would jokingly address him as “count”). Pirosmanashvili’s father, a peasant fruit-grower, lived in the eastern Georgian province of Kakheti, where Niko himself was born in 1863 in the village of Mirzaani. Upon his father’s death, between the ages of six and eight, Niko was sent to Tiflis, where he lived at the home of a certain soldier named Kalantar. It was here that Niko first attempted to paint in watercolors. On reaching maturity Niko was asked by his guardian what he would like to be. He replied: “An artist.” The answer didn’t go down well, and the young man was sent to work as a railway conductor, a profession he pursued for eight years until he fell ill. Niko then ran a dairy business for a time, decorating his store with pictures of cows. His store was first located on Olginskaia Street, then in Soldiers’ Bazaar. He gradually attained a level of prosperity. People who knew Niko from that time recall him as successful, kindly, a lively dinner companion with plenty of money to spare, irascible but quick to forgive. He would paint and readily give his paintings away to friends and acquaintances. One episode from this period reflects the painter’s growing popularity. In 1902–3 the Persian consul in Tiflis wrote a letter to a local newspaper about Niko’s paintings. The painter responded in kind, generating a polemic that awoke the interest of the townsfolk (I regret to say I have been unable to ascertain any details regarding this). Тhis cycle ended in a catastrophe precipitated by Niko’s tragic love for the “French” vaudeville performer, the actress Margarita. In the space of one year Niko, now bankrupt, was cast onto the street. Thus began his vagabond existence as a professional artist who now lacked even a room to call his own. The half-starved artist lived year after year among the taverns and stores of the city. Pirosmanashvili’s work arose in precisely these conditions, his talent in no way diminished by the daily struggle he experienced. In time Niko changed, losing the easy laughter of his youth. He withdrew into himself, projecting an air of severity and calm. He would wander the city in search of work, moving from one cellar to another with a suitcase containing his work tools and meager wardrobe. The cover of his suitcase contained a drawing of a man in a top hat. The circle of Niko’s friends and admirers gradually expanded and, with it, interest in the artist’s life and work grew. Below I provide lengthy extracts from notes taken by eye-witnesses. Having commissioned a portrait of himself from Pirosmanashvili, Ilia Zdanevich2 kept an account of his daily visits: Sunday January 27, 1913. I went this morning to Meskhiev (on 70 Cherezovskaia St.), from whom I purchased the portrait of the boy. From there I went to see Nikolai [Pirosmani]. Nikolai remained seated during my visit while he painted my portrait. He asked about the painting I had purchased. A preliminary outline of my portrait now exists, while the deer (which I also commissioned) is largely complete: it is magnificently executed, apart from the background which is not fully done. First Nikolai took me aside and said, “As for the exhibition, if someone gave me a room to work in and canvas

Ilia Zdanevich (1895–1975), along with his brother Kirill (1892–1969) and their mutual friend, art student Mikhail Le Dentu (1891–1917), “discovered” Pirosmani in the summer of 1912. Ilia subsequently returned during his winter holidays to Tiflis, during which time he sat for a portrait he had commissioned from Pirosmani. The diary entries which follow, written by an eighteen-year old gifted enough to lecture in Moscow on Marinetti’s futurist manifestos that very year, describe Ilia’s daily encounters with Pirosmani during January and February 1913.

2

232

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

to paint on, I would be able to paint ten to fifteen paintings in a month, better than those I have done until now, even better than Sheremetev Gardens.” He then added: “People keep spoiling my paintings. Take a look at this painting, for example. There’s a hare in it. Why? Who needs a hare? But they asked for it: ‘Please,’ they said, ‘do it for our sake.’ I draw these things so as not to get into a quarrel. People spoil all my paintings this way.” In response to my question as to whether he painted icons, he said: “An icon, a painting or a house: each one is different. I have never painted an icon. Just once I painted Saint George. Painters are like calligraphers. They can’t draw.” He then began to lament his terrible poverty, his shabby clothes, as well as the ignorance of his customers, while asking for my help. He begged me not to tell any of the tavern keepers about the fact that he needed a room. “The room should be bright,” he said. “Here it’s dark.” When he paints, he places his left hand underneath his right to stop it from shaking. He said he had taught himself Russian: “I bought a Georgian book translated into Russian.” And then: “I can’t work here. They keep making me drink.” He told me he had done a self-portrait once—“in a nice suit, not like this one”—but he had sold it to somebody. Yesterday he said: “There are different kinds of paintings. You can paint for a whole month, or even a whole year, and still have material left over.” Then he added: “I must confess I am not wild about the paintings at Beradze’s. I can do better.” January 28. I was with Nikolai this morning. He had been drinking. My portrait now has a tree, and he has added some grass to the deer painting. He told me has was upset with me for coming late. He had just received a new commission for which he would be paid 60 kopecks: this was going to keep him busy. I asked, “What kind of commission?” He then showed me a house lantern on which he had to paint the words “Molokan Street, Number so and so.” That was the entire order. “So what?” he said. “If we can’t fulfill ordinary requests, how can we do more elevated subjects?” I had to agree with him. Then Nikolai said that he had worked as a delivery man for the railways and that he had never completed his military service. Before dinner I dropped by to see Nikolai again, but didn’t speak to him. He was asleep. I then went to Bego Iaskiev’s tavern on 40 Peskovskaia Street, where I bought a still life for one ruble fifty, after which I went back to Nikolai. The owner of the establishment, Sandro Kochelashvili by name, told me that he wouldn’t have paid even five kopecks for such a thing. Then we began to discuss Nikolai in general. Among other things Sandro said, “He wanted to draw a tree stump and place your hand on it as well as a pile of books. But I told him to draw a table. As for the deer, that’s what you need a tree for, so that the deer can be seen leaning against it.” I said that Nikolai can paint whatever he wants and that I couldn’t make him do anything. Then we started discussing the painting they wanted to present to me as a gift. Sandro began praising it fulsomely, saying: “This is going to be the best piece in your exhibition.3 It shows a prince capable of drinking three buckets of wine at the dinner table.” Thanks to the efforts of Le Dentu and the Zdanevich brothers, four of Pirosmani’s works found their way that same year to Moscow, where they were displayed as part of “The Target” (Mishen’), a major exhibition of March– April 1913 organized by Mikhail Larionov to reflect the culmination of the neoprimitivist phase of the Russian avant-garde. Displayed alongside works by Larionov, Natal’ia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, Aleksandr Shevchenko, Mikhail Le Dentu, and Kirill Zdanevich, as well as children’s art, old lubok prints, and shop-signs, these paintings—which included the portrait discussed above, as well as Woman with a Mug of Beer, Still Life and Deer—would be the first public showing of Pirosmani’s works during his life. Pirosmani thus entered the art world framed by the aesthetic and ideological presuppositions of the Russian avant-garde.

3

MODERNISM IN THE CAUCASUS

233

We then woke Nikolai up. He came out and said: “My talent tired itself out waiting for you. I waited for you in the morning. You were late.” He asked me for two rubles. He looked over the still life and said: “I remember it. Why not: it was one of my best works. I painted it for myself. So what if it’s small. It’s bound to be worth a hundred rubles.” January 29. I was at Nikolai’s in the morning posing for my picture. The deer is done. Nikolai has done fifteen paintings for Bego Iaskiev for no remuneration other than meals. He has works hanging in the White Tavern on the highway to Manglisi, as well as in the city’s outer neighbourhoods. Sandro Kochelashvili keeps interfering and asking Nikolai to paint trees, leaves and such. It’s hard to make him see reason. In general it would appear that Nikolai is unable to complete a single piece on his own without being goaded on by someone else. “If I had a hundred rubles,” he tells me, “I would get some decent clothes, rent a room, and then start painting.” I told him I was going to write an article about him in the papers. As I took my leave he said: “Drop by later. I am going to paint some flowers.” Then he added: “My best commission was for Qipiani, a stationmaster on the Baku railway line. He paid me 30 rubles. Sometimes the mechanics who work in small shops also pay me. Generally, though, I work for food.” January 30. I was with Zyga Waliszewski4 this morning. They brought in Three Princes on a Meadow. We almost got into a fight with Sandro’s acquaintances, who didn’t want to sell the painting. Nikolai said the following about the frame: “If the wall is brightly coloured, then a black frame is best. If the wall is painted dark, then a bright frame is better. Otherwise the painting doesn’t stand out. It took me nine days to paint Three Princes. That’s Prince Gulbatov and his cousins, the Chavchavadze princes. He was upset he hadn’t shaved: that’s why his face doesn’t bear a strong likeness to him.” Then some other fellow came along and asked: “How much do you charge for a portrait?” Nikolai replied: “30 rubles.” He sat down and posed: the likeness was striking. He will finish the painting tomorrow. I said: “In Moscow any cafeteria owner will buy your work. Just be careful not to ask for too little. If you need something, write to me. I will send you whatever you need.” Then Ziga and I began visiting various taverns in search of Nikolai’s paintings. At the Varangian we were offered Queen Tamara for 3 rubles. In the evening I went back to see Nikolai for the second time, this time with my brother [Kirill]. When we arrived, Nikolai was sitting at the back of the tavern on a bench, warming his hands by some smoldering coal embers. When he heard that Kirill was an artist, he began to ask: were his paintings any good? The owner Sandro then inserted himself into the conversation, commenting on the quality of my portrait as well the deer and insisting that a moon was required. Nikolai declared that it didn’t need any moon and began to get angry. He asked for his brushes. Then he asked us to show him at least one work by my brother. We invited him to come visit us.

Zygmunt (Zyga) Walizsewski (1897–1936), an artist of Polish origin active in Tiflis’ cosmopolitan modernist milieu during the 1910s and 1920s. Alongside Le Dentu and the Zdanevich brothers, Walizsewski participated in the “discovery” of Pirosmani in 1912–13; after the revolution he was involved in the upsurge of futurist avant-garde creativity unfolding in the cafés and cabarets of the Georgian capital. He moved to Poland in 1920, pursuing a career in the visual arts between Poland and France until his death.

4

234

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

January 31. I visited Nikolai this morning and posed for him. The portrait is almost ready. He has also added a sky to the painting of the deer. I then went to the editorial office of Zakavkazskaia rech’,5 where I asked if my letter regarding the artist Pirosmani had been accepted for publication. They told me it would be published tomorrow. From there I went to see Nikolai again. He started telling me about his life, his professional career in the railways and then as a merchant, up to his financial ruin. In 1904 he had rented a room in Prickly Ravine, but for the past nine years he had not even had that, and was living exclusively off his painting. “I used to be rich,” he said, “but now I don’t even own any decent clothes.” His father had left him land in Kakheti, but he didn’t want to live there since he wasn’t, as he said, an “agriculturalist.” As I was leaving some other people showed up and began to criticize my portrait. Nikolai said: “Don’t listen to them. They’re fools. They don’t understanding anything.” February 1. I was with Nikolai this morning. The portrait is done. For the Gulbatov portrait I will have to pay Sandro two rubles which he claims to have given to his friends to calm them down. Nikolai discretely reminded me of his request (the Moscow commission). In the evening I was with the artist T. and the Journalist A. We looked over Niko’s paintings. The artist said: “He reminds me of the Persians, but he is cruder and lacks any sense of color. In general I don’t see anything remarkable about him.” Overall their response was indefinite and indifferent. I might add that in this they are a rare exception: those intellectuals who have actually seen his work have been uniformly disdainful. February 2. I went to fetch my portrait and the deer. Nikolai began to protest: “Don’t give me anything for the deer, that’s fine. If there are any commissions in Moscow, write to me.” When I informed him that his paintings were going to be displayed in an exhibition, his hopes were rekindled and he brightened up. I take leave of everyone and go to the railway station. The train departs, but there, in the depths of the vast city, by a pile of smoldering coal embers sits a man with an anguished expression on his face, a solitary wanderer and a major artist, who has made a deep impression on me. After making Nikolai’s acquaintance I now know what life is. (Here the extracts from Ilia Zdanevich’s journal end) During the war years those who had known Niko left Tiflis and lost touch with him. Others took up his cause.6 They sought him out in 1916 and invited him to a gathering

Zakavkazskaia rech’ (The Transcaucasian Voice), a Russian-language daily financed by progressive members of the Georgian elite, published in Tiflis between 1910 and 1917.

5

А reference to the Georgian artists Davit Shevardnadze, Davit Kakabadze, Lado Gudiashvili, and Mikhail Chiaureli who together founded the Society of Georgian Artists on March 31, 1916. Pirosmani’s brief association with the Society might be considered emblematic of the third stage in his circulation history. If the first stage involved Pirosmani’s prolonged immersion in the popular urban milieu in which he lived and worked, and the second saw his “discovery” by the neoprimitivist avant-garde, the third stage—following shortly after the second—involved Pirosmani’s embrace by the most enlightened members of the new generation of the Georgian national intelligentsia. A one-day exhibition of over fifty works by Pirosmani at the Zdanevich family home in Tiflis on May 5, 1916—the second and last exhibition of Pirosmani’s works to take place in his lifetime—unleashed a vigorous discussion of the artist and his work at two meetings of the Society of Georgian Artists that same month.

6

MODERNISM IN THE CAUCASUS

235

of the Georgian Artists’ Association, where he declared: “This is what we need, brothers. In the middle of the city, for easy access to all, we need to build a large wooden house where we can gather. We will buy a large table, a large samovar, drink tea, drink a lot, talk of painting and art. You don’t want this. You keep talking about other things.” He ended on a quiet and wistful note. That was the last time Niko attended a session of the Association.7 Then the painter Lado Gudiashvili8 tracked him down to a Didube courtyard,9 living in a shoebox of a room below the staircase of a small building. “Have you come as friend or as foe?” Niko asked him, examining him with a “haunted” look in his eyes. After striking up a conversation, Niko asked him: “Will we build a house? Did you know that all the cellars in Tiflis were painted by me?” Niko appeared sad and tired. His health had been shattered. Soziashvili (the owner of the wine cellar Niko frequented) describes the painter’s final years as follows: “He would come to me every day and seat himself at a table. He was never seen in company, and he never accepted food or drink from anyone. He knew Georgian literature, had a great fondness for Vazha Pshavela,10 wrote verse himself and was a poet. His notebook of verse has been lost. He loved Georgians, but disliked those in power, policemen and the like. He would complain, albeit seldom, that he had been forgotten.” So the years passed. Archil Maisuradze11 relates the following: “In the spring of 1918, as evening approached, Pirosmanashvili entered the cellar of No. 29 Molokan Street and lay down to sleep on the floor. He was already ill. Three days later, I happened to go down there and found Niko lying in the cold dark room. Initially I didn’t recognize him and called out: “Who’s there?” “It’s me,” Nikolai answered, and I knew him at once from his voice. He didn’t recognize me, however, saying: “I’m unwell. I’ve been lying here for three days and can’t leave.” I immediately brought along a horse-drawn cab. Ilia Mgalobashvili (now deceased) took him—if I’m not mistaken—to the Aramiants hospital where he passed away after a day and a half. He left no property behind. I believe he is buried in Peter and Paul Cemetery.” More years passed. Soviet Georgia, having realized the value of a singular artist of the people and overcome considerable difficulties is now publishing this monograph, a worthy monument to Niko Pirosmanashvili. The study of his work is a fruitful exercise for contemporary Georgian art. His legacy can enrich and give new strength to young artists. The memory of this man, gifted from birth, has survived, along with so many of his works. So Niko Pirosmanashvili’s labour lives on, for the sake of the future. The meeting, which took place on May 25, 1916, led to a wider awareness of Pirosmani’s work among the Georgian population. Nevertheless, Pirosmani’s status in Georgian circles remained sharply contested. This is evident from a widely circulated cartoon published on June 10 in Sakhalkho purtseli (The People’s Leaflet) which showed a critic bearing a striking resemblance to Grigol Robakidze addressing Pirosmani thus: “You need to study, brother! A man your age can still create something … Orphic. In around twenty years you could become a decent artist. Then we will send you to an exhibition of young artists.” The cartoon, which appears to have precipitated Pirosmani’s withdrawal from public life, throws a curious light on Robakidze’s subsequent article, published below. The article reads as a disavowal of the sentiments ascribed to him in the cartoon.

7

Lado Gudiashvili (1896–1980): twentieth-century Georgian painter, a native of Tbilisi, who sought to reconcile the vernacular and regional cultural idioms of the Caucasus with modernist currents emanating from Paris. His final meeting with Pirosmani took place in the summer of 1917.

8

A neighbourhood on the outskirts of Tbilisi.

9

Vazha Pshavela (1861–1915), arguably the most original Georgian poet of the late tsarist era, wove visual and ethnographic elements drawn from his native alpine region of Pshavi into a distinctly modern—at once tragic and neoromantic—sensibility.

10

A shoemaker, Pirosmani’s neighbour during his final months.

11

II. NIKO PIROSMANI Grigol Robakidze Originally published in Russian in Tabidze, Titsian, Grigol Robakidze, Geronti Kikodze, Kirill Zdanevich, and Kolau Cherniavskii, Niko Pirosmanishvili (Tiflis: Gosudarstvennoe Izdaltel’stvo Gruzii, 1926). Translated by Harsha Ram. See section introduction for a discussion of this text and its context.

Modern European culture is best expressed by Hamlet’s impulse to break free of his roots and in Faust’s anguished desire to reach for his origins. Europe has witnessed the ravaging, or in any case the enfeebling, of the earth’s very womb. “Son” is adrift from “father,” leaving the fruit barren. The only response to the moribund earth has been a supreme solitude: the European character is in essence melancholic. It is hardly surprising, then, that Europe has seen the rise of a fierce longing for a pristine or primordial experience of the land. Rousseau propagates a “return to nature,” while Tolstoi calls for “simplification,” the former with a whiff of sentimentalism, the latter with a tinge of rationalism. Both are speaking in essence of the same thing—the healing properties of the “primordial land” (pervozemli). It is worth recalling two significant facts from the recent past. By going off to China, Paul Claudel was able to fructify his poetic vision with the rhythms of the East. Paul Gauguin made his way to Tahiti, communing while among the savages with the untouched bosom of the earth. The creative impulse of both poet and painter was thereby diverted into new and different channels. Europe has already grasped the fact that the concept of “savage” does not signify some ethnic monstrosity. The savage is above all a child, and it is with the child that the truth always abides. Everything the child makes is marked by something archetypal, an unmediated sense of what is right. The “first word” speaks through the child, whose heart is wide open. It is for this reason that the creations of the savage are so expressive, like a massive boulder, or a spring which gushes unbendingly forth, or the branching antlers of a deer. Like the immortal Homer, eternally a child and eternally a wizard. A doe or а woolly mammoth carved by a savage on a fishbone: this was the first explosion of human creativity. We can well understand the fierce longing of Europe’s artists to seize upon this ground as its source. There is no reason to view this longing as a kind of regression. The “savage” here is more symbol than reality. There is still less reason to view it as the consequence of aesthetic surfeit: a hankering after rye bread after gorging on white. We are in fact dealing here with an entirely different phenomenon: the soul’s longing to open itself up, a filial desire to melt into the universe: ultimately, a longing to possess the last remaining virgin lands. Such are the lineaments of primitivism, whose consolidation was also facilitated by the discoveries of archeology, especially on the island of Crete. In the wake of Sir Arthur

MODERNISM IN THE CAUCASUS

237

Evans’ excavations, Minoan culture has become an abundant wellspring of inspiration for the artists of Europe. What unutterable bliss: to glimpse a patterned bracelet that once adorned the elegant wrist of a pagan goddess! The fragmentary remains of Cretan art can of course hardly be compared to the perfection, say, of a Hermes by the sculptor Praxiteles. Nevertheless they reveal the handiwork of a child, carefree yet propelled by nothing less than some inhuman or superhuman force. A surge of creative energy went into the fashioning of a Cretan vase: ancient Egypt and the vanished culture of the Chaldeans are palpable in its contours. Crete itself now appears to be one of the surviving colonies of Atlantis, said to have perished in a deluge. This only heightens its allure. * Niko Pirosmani was a primitivist. It goes without saying that he was not a primitivist in the manner of Gauguin. Pirosmani was himself a primitive (primitiv). He did not pursue any formal schooling. He did not study the techniques of drawing and painting. He was a simple man who received illumination from within. Let us listen to the words of one tavern keeper: “Nikala was an exceedingly honourable man, poor, sickly and homeless. On many an occasion I had to give the poor fellow something to eat. He was a kindly man who walked about in rags. He was very fond of poetry, in particular the verse of Ilia Chavchavadze and Vazha Pshavela (so says another eye-witness).1 Where he came from I cannot say. He was about fifty years of age. Just yesterday I thought: if Nikala were alive now, he would do something to brighten up this crumbling wall, and I would get off cheap. The poor fellow drank enormous amounts of vodka. He would say: ‘Buy me some paints and I will do a painting.’ And then he really would knock off a painting and bring it over.” It is hardly necessary to add anything to this simple account, which reveals Pirosmani in full: a genuine visionary looking to capture a “waking dream” (zriachee snovidenie) with a glass of arrack in his hand. Pirosmani appears all the more remarkable for that very reason. Only if we view his work alongside an anonymous fresco from Egypt, an African idol, or a Cretan vase will we truly be able to develop a feeling for it. The principal motif of Pirosmani’s art is the Georgian “land” (zemlia). I can think of no other artist other than the poet Vazha Pshavela who felt this land so deeply to be his own “mother.” A church holiday, a feast day, the grape harvest, chickens, animals, children, the barnyard: this is what Pirosmani the artist is drawn to depict. It is here that we find the authentic Georgian temperament, one shimmering in sunlight. No melancholy whatsoever. The only thing to be found here is life itself: joyous, open and festive. Pirosmani is the epic gaze emanating from within Georgian being. This gaze gave us vast and remarkable canvases such as The Grape Harvest—a work fully saturated with the fragrance of the winepress. It is all there: the gathering and the pressing of grapes, and the accompanying mirth. And the painting seems to be completed by the presence of a child with a bear cub. This final touch only serves to heighten the painting’s primordial sense of the earth and its energy unleashed in the form of child’s play. Pirosmani’s Wedding in Kakheti belongs to the same cluster of works. More significant still is Pirosmani’s Holiday in Bolnis-Khachini. The compositional force of this painting makes it the most complex and powerful of Pirosmani’s creations. People arriving by bullock-cart, a tower, a small

Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) was a major poet, publicist, and liberal reformist who strove to revive and reform Georgian traditions in the context of Russian colonial rule and European modernization. For Vazha Pshavela, see note 10 to Zdanevich’s essay (7.i).

1

238

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

church, a gathering of merrymakers, all framed by a single circle. I should also like to mention The Lenten Fast. The painter notably has transferred the act of prayer to the very bosom of nature. To pray under the open sky is Pirosmani’s act of fidelity to nature. One detail is worth recalling here: two children, one of whom is raising his little arms skyward, the other kneeling face downward. In those praying we sense an ecstasy sharply expressed. The painting is an undeniable masterpiece. But Pirosmani was a city dweller as well, in the general sense of the word, as well as in the sense proper to the city of Tiflis.2 A drunkard, loner and visionary, Pirosmani loved to frequent popular eateries. In the revelry of the kinto (an utterly singular breed of déclassé street peddlers whose sole goal in life was a kind of singular artistic merriment) Pirosmani discerned the bohemia of Tiflis. Many different racial elements came to constitute this colourful type.3 In all likelihood this was the very source of his “torment”: the kinto’s apparent nonchalance conceals a heightened pain. The kintos as a caste are typified by the cult of leisure, which they manifest as a kind of artistry. Pirosmani’s kintos, with their strange profiles, have an unforgettable kind of expressiveness. Here one can discern Pirosmani’s powerful impact on the painter Lado Gudiashvili.4 I would single out one Pirosmani painting from this series, in which five or six kintos are making merry on an open field. Some musicians are playing the zurna,5 others the davul,6 a boy is carrying fruit, a girl is bringing flowers, an old man proffers wine in a flagon, the kintos brandish horned goblets in their hands, while the grass is laden with edibles: salad greens, cheese and fish. All of these elements are held together by a strong sense of composition. Pirosmani’s White Tavern is even more sweeping. (One of Gudiashvili’s paintings would appear to be a variation on this work). I must note here the presence of a specifically Tiflis kind of boy. In this sketch all the racial elements of the qarachokheli7 (a figure identical to the kinto) have been seared as it were onto the canvas. The city also knows ladies of the night. In depicting a pair of harlots frequenting the gardens of Ortachala, Pirosmani resorted to a characteristically luminous touch: the young sinners are represented lying on a chaste bed of flowers, with two doves perched innocently on their shoulders. Another urban type is found in The Janitor, his face displaying a barely visible anger mixed with a whiff of spleen. A simple yet immensely expressive work. The kinto’s feast consists above all of salad greens and fruit. It was perhaps this fact which gave rise to Pirosmani’s still life paintings. Rows of objects automatically arise: a flagon, a wine skin, a horned goblet, skewers of barbecued meat, cucumbers, a bottle, cheese, herbs, glasses, fish and fruit. Pirosmani’s mastery of technique is most evident in these still lifes. One of these paintings (currently in the possession of Kirill Zdanevich) can be compared for its visual power to any of the still lifes painted by Cézanne himself. For Robakidze, urban habitation has two dimensions: (I) universal, designated by the Russian gorozhanin, and (II) particular, designated by the Georgian mokalake. A gorozhanin is a denizen of any city, while a mokalake refers to the long-standing inhabitants—chiefly merchants and artisans—of the city of Tiflis (Tbilisi) whose status, duties, and privileges were determined prior to Russian annexation by the ruling Georgian king. Pirosmani embraces both the universal and the particular dimensions of urbanity.

2

Robakidze is here referencing the fact that many of the urban professions and socio-economic niches in the city of Tiflis were dominated by other ethnic groups, most notably Armenians. Robakidze here moves between a typology of urban professions whose origins lie in the French physiologie and newer strains of racialized biology.

3

Lado Gudiashvili: see note 8 of Zdanevich’s essay (7.i).

4

Zurna: a woodwind instrument found throughout the Middle East and the Balkans.

5

Davul: a double-headed drum played with mallets.

6

Qarachokheli: a guild craftsman generally identified by a high-necked black woollen cloak.

7

MODERNISM IN THE CAUCASUS

239

Interestingly, Pirosmani is able to render nature not only as dead but as having been slaughtered. Let me clarify: while the genre of still life is generally characterized by the whiff of death, Pirosmani offers something new. Pirosmani’s still life is a table laden with food awaiting its festive participants. I should clarify that even here a certain sorrow is evident, the kind which hovers gently over every feast. In Pirosmani’s “slaughtered nature” one intuits an extraordinary feeling of pity. Phenomenal in this regard is his Easter Lamb, of which several versions exist. Pity here gives rise to a higher sense of love. This painting elicits universal compassion, a love for all creatures. Pirosmani’s Easter Lamb will be an indelible part of my life as a poet for all time. Pirosmani had a great love of animals. His Giraffe is a strange beast: proud, its eyes filled with another kind of reasoning faculty, fearsome to the point of dread. His She-Bear with Bear Cubs is an exploration of snowy whiteness. Bear on a Moonlit Night offers a matchless landscape, with a bear perched stilly on a fallen tree trunk like a sleepwalker who has been accidentally woken, his muscles all atremble. His Deer has two versions: the first, depicting the animal by a tree stump, is particularly noteworthy. Characteristic here is the deer’s rump, which seems oddly truncated. More striking still is the fact that the deer itself seems to have been carved out of wood, even as it has been fused by some extraordinary effort of compression into a living creature. This sense of “compression” is so palpably great that the deer itself appears to be caught in a kind of interrupted “leap.” Pirosmani has yet a third painting of a – spotted – deer whose remarkable eyes seem full of an unusual sorrow. His Donkey Carrying a Load of Firewood is memorable for its powerful technique, particularly evident in its arrangement of the logs. The donkey’s gaze, and the responsive glance of his youthful owner, feel like pieces of some vast epic poem. The Camel, led by an Iranian herdsman, is filled with the grandeur of faded colour. In Pirosmani’s Brood Hen with Chickens we are struck by the vividness of the newly hatched offspring. Pirosmani was also familiar with landscapes. One landscape is particularly noteworthy here. Two rows of trees framed by grape vines, in the middle a wine-bearing jug, in the background a house, situated beyond a streaming jet of light, a radiance which typifies the luminous Pirosmani to the full. * This then is Pirosmani, the “savage,” the child. His primitivism betrays an almost absolute sense of “immediacy.” This is not an empty phrase. His immediacy seems to me an ontological fact. Pirosmani’s works are shards of nature, cast as if of pure inspiration. Embodied inspiration. Pirosmani’s talent is such that there appears no distance between inspiration and its embodied form. Pirosmani’s foreignness to the realm of culture (akul’turnost’), his clumsy technique fall away entirely, giving way to a higher truth. All of Pirosmani’s objects, whether а deer’s eye or a hoof or a mountain stream, are facts of nature. He is truly a barbarian genius with the unspoilt soul of a child. A final word regarding Pirosmani’s palette. He painted chiefly on oilcloth. From this derives Pirosmani’s unique sense of colour (as the artist Dmitri Shevardnadze has so accurately observed). Perhaps it is this that explains Pirosmani’s predilection for the colours of marshland. Pirosmani’s destiny was no less strange: it was as if he did not die but merely vanished. Was it not fate’s intention, in the manner of the great nameless primitives of the past, to leave his creations unnamed? To see Pirosmani is to believe in Georgia.

240

CHAPTER EIGHT

Modernism in South Asia EDITED BY RUDRANI GANGOPADHYAY

Modernism in South Asia is a modernism of decolonization. As Supriya Chaudhuri points out, “In India … modernism can never be experienced simply as a formalist alternative; it is tied in with the terror and violence that in Europe is claimed by the avant-garde, but is here made the property of the modern itself.”1 The same could be said for the sub-continent as a whole. This decolonial backdrop, however, is complicated by the events of 1947, when the nation’s independence brought with it the tragic partition of the subcontinent. The north-western and eastern parts of India, heavily populated by Muslims, cleaved away from India as West and East Pakistan, with Urdu as the language of the newly formed republic of Pakistan. As in other decolonizing parts of the world, the politics of modernism on the subcontinent reflects these pressures, and modernism in South Asia, while at times in conversation with and influenced by European modernisms, is also always necessarily rooted to the “manifestly social and historical” contexts from which it emerges.2 Against this tumultuous backdrop, it becomes particularly difficult to specify the “when” and “where” of modernism in South Asia. Any attempt to understand it must first take into account the immense linguistic diversity of the region: there are around 120 major languages and over 1500 other languages, spread across what today stands as four separate nations. In addition to language, the complex dynamics of class and caste hierarchy in India and across the region impact the way in which modernist literatures are manifested. Because of the plurality inscribed within the region and, in India, even within the nation itself, any attempt to identify a modernist moment is necessarily pluralized as well. In literature, these modernist modes developed substantially from the nineteenth century onwards in around twenty distinct languages, embroiled in the socio-historical particularities of the areas from which they emerged. Each of these modernisms follows its own timeline and has its own history of breaking with tradition. Occasionally, multiple modernisms develop in tandem with one another thanks to prolific translator figures like Ashok Shahane or Agyeya (pen name of Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan) or K. Satchidanandan, who served as bridges between multiple vernacular modernisms

Supriya Chaudhuri, “Modernisms in India,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 955.

1

Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000): 298.

2

242

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

within India; such modernisms were therefore informed not only by Western modernist traditions, but also by parallel developments elsewhere in India or South Asia. Because of the number of languages in which there was a substantial presence of South Asian literature in the twentieth century, the selections in this volume as well as this discussion are only limited to a select few. But these selections have been made with multiple considerations. While they constitute only a fraction of the languages spoken in the subcontinent, they each represent one of its quadrants—Bengali from the east, Hindi and Urdu from the north, Marathi from the west, and Tamil from the south. Moreover, we have made an effort to look beyond what is traditionally canonized by way of global circulation of South Asian modernism in the hope that in doing so the understanding of what is modernist within the unique context of the subcontinent can be further revised. Given the fact that this understanding is split even further by divisions of caste and class, Dalit modernism has also been represented. Within the few pieces selected in the volume, two are originally in English, therein making a claim on a South Asian Anglophone modernism as well. Some of these pieces also reflect the internationalism that was at times strongly linked with certain modernisms in the country, as in many other parts of the world. And finally, the selections also represent the impact of the history of nation formation in South Asia, which came hand in hand with fragmentation, by way of tracing a lineage of Urdu modernism that emerges in pre-independence India and continues to thrive in what is now Pakistan. There are, however, some important omissions in this section. For reasons of space, we have been unable to include representations from Sri Lanka; for reasons of both space and periodization, we have also been forced to omit Bangladesh from this volume. Readers who would like to pursue these modernism further, however, might turn to Garrett Field’s Modernizing Composition for more on Sinhala poetry and song, or might explore the work of Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore or Kazi Nazrul Islam, whose work became important to Bangladeshi literature after Bangladesh’s establishment as an independent state in 1971. Pre-partition writing in British India played an important role in the development of transnational Anglophone modernism in the first half of the twentieth century, through writers such as Tagore and Mulk Raj Anand. Tagore’s work, championed by writers such as Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, became some of the most influential writing from India on the global stage; Anand, who spent time as part of London’s Bloomsbury group, became an important mediating figure in British modernism. Anand also went on to become one of the central members of the Communist Party of India’s cultural wing, which gravitated around the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and the Indian People’s Theater Association, both inaugurated in a pair of meetings in 1935 in London and 1936 in Lucknow. Anti-imperialistic and strongly leftist in its politics, the PWA attacked social injustice and advocated for equal rights in their writing, in the context of a pan-Indian vision of political and cultural unity. While Tagore’s relation to British and American modernism sometimes leads him to be located as an early Indian modernist, within Bengali literary history, modernism is usually understood as a reaction against Tagore. On this reading, modernism in Bengali arrives with the foundation of the literary journal, Kallol (The Surge) in 1923.3 The writers associated with this journal and its successors were deeply influenced by European modernism and translated European works extensively. In the 1960s, avant-garde poets

Chaudhuri, “Modernisms in India.”

3

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

243

such as the Hungryalist generation revived and radicalized the modernist impulses of the Kallol group, shifting the target of their dissidence from the colonial masters, against whom pre-partition literature was directed, to the people and the government of the now independent nation. This volume’s choice of Bengali modernists—Tagore (8.i) and the Hungryalists (8.iv and 8.v)—provides a sense of this development, by showcasing writers who bookend literary modernism in Bengali. Hindi modernism’s inception takes place with the 1943 publication of the poetry collection Tar Saptak (Upper Octave), edited by Agyeya, whose preface heralded the beginning of a prayogvadi (experimental) poetics in Hindi literature, which simultaneously developed from as well as broke away from the earlier pragativadi (progressive) writing. This movement prepared the ground for a number of others: the Nayi Kavita (New Poetry) movement, which focused on formalist experimentation; and later, between 1954 and 1963, the Nayi Kahaani (New Story) movement which was more involved with contemporary social and historical concerns and fiercely committed to realism.4 This latter group of writers, represented in this volume (8.vi), believed that their art could never exist in alienation from the material world around it. While pre-partition Urdu literature played a central role in the development of the PWA, after partition this literary community was divided between India and Pakistan. As the language of the national literature of Pakistan and a minority literature in India, Urdu had a complicated status. In this context, the socialist realist progressive literature of the 1940s and 1950s gave way to a newer modernism, typified by Pakistani writers such as N. M. Rashed (8.iii) and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. In western India, Marathi modernism centered partly on the unique bilingual (Marathi and English) modernist scene of Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1950s. Bilingual poets like Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre, who wrote in Marathi and English, were joined by nonMarathi Bombay poets like Adil Jussawala, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Gieve Patel, and Nissim Ezekiel, all of whom came from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds and wrote in Indian English. Together, they reshaped the contemporary literary sensibility with their use of profanity, descriptions of the body and sexuality, and vivid depictions of a sense of alienation pervading the urban landscape of Bombay (now Mumbai). At around the same time, in the late 1950s, Marathi literary culture was also deeply impacted by the rise of a radical Dalit Sahitya (Dalit literature), led by writers such as Raja Dhale (8.vii) and others. The term “Dalit Sahitya” was first used at the first conference of Maharashtra Dalit Sahitya Sangha (Maharashtra Dalit Literature Society), which was held in Bombay in 1958. The radical avant-garde aesthetic of Dalit modernism sought to reject formal literary style by way of experimentations with genre as well as linguistic expression in an attempt to record the tragic experiences of Dalits. In southern India, the poet Subramaniya Bharati, who arrived in the Tamil literary scene in the first quarter of the twentieth century, is considered to be the harbinger of modern Tamil literature. Contrary to many of his contemporaries in other vernacular traditions, but much like many modernist writers in Africa and other decolonizing regions, he was a nationalist who resisted Western influence. His poetry often reflected anger at the lethargy of the Tamil people which, he believed, had led to their downfall. However, while the Bengali, Hindi, or Marathi literatures demonstrated modernist tendencies up

Chaudhuri, “Modernisms in India.”

4

244

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

to the 1950s, the Tamil modernist New Poetry flourished later, in the 1970s.5 Like their Hindi counterparts, the new Tamil poets experimented with prose poetry, free verse, and prosody. As for the Nayi Kahaani writers, realism was for the Tamil writers a response to contemporary socio-historical conditions, and, in this sense, very much an expression of the modern. RG

FURTHER READING Chaudhuri, Supriya. “Modernisms in India.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Jalil, Rakhshanda. Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kapur, Geeta. When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000. Manjapra, Kris. “From Imperial to International Horizons: A Hermeneutic Study of Bengali Modernism.” Modern Intellectual History 8.2 (2011): 327–59. Mitter, Partha. The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. Nerlekar, Anjali. Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Pue, A. Sean. I Too Have Some Dreams: N. M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014. Rosenstein, Lucy, ed. New Poetry in Hindi: An Anthology. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Satchidanandan, K., ed. Indian Poetry: Modernism and After. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1998. Zecchini, Laetitia. Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

S. Carlos (Tamilavan), “The Politics of Modernism: The Case of Tamil,” in Indian Poetry: Modernism and After, ed. K. Satchidanandan (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1998): 46.

5

I. FROM JAPAN: A LECTURE Rabindranath Tagore Originally published in English in Japan: A Lecture. Macmillan Company: New York, 1916. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, music composer, and painter. He imbued new life into Bengali literature by deviating from the older classical language and structure and opting instead for a more colloquial language and new prose and verse forms. Tagore’s role in transforming Bengali culture extends to the realms of music, visual art, and theater as well. He was an anti-nationalist and famously called nationalism a “great menace.”1 Although he was also vehemently opposed to the British Empire’s hold on India, renouncing his knighthood in the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in 1919, Tagore was highly influential in fostering relationships between the (proverbial) West and Indian cultures and literatures. His work received attention from contemporary English, Irish, American, and European modernists. During his 1912 visit to England, his translated works particularly interested writers including Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, the latter of whom provided an introduction for the first edition of Tagore’s English translation of the collection Gitanjali (Song Offering). He was the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali, and used the earnings from the award to partially fund his school and university Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, India. Tagore traveled widely around the world, and visited Japan in 1916, 1924, and 1929. His visits were milestones in the timeline of Japan–India relations. He arrived in Japan for the first time on May 25, 1916, and delivered popular lectures in Osaka and Tokyo. The lectures were called “India and Japan” (June 1, 1916), “Ideals of Art” (June 10), “The Message of India to Japan” (June 11), “Address in Bengali” (June 13), “Paradise” (June 14), and “The Spirit of Japan” (July 2). Most lectures were delivered in English, except “Address in Bengali” which was delivered in Bengali and translated by Rikhang Kimura into Japanese. He found much to admire in Japan, particularly in its cultural and literary traditions as well as its traditional values, but he also sensed the seeds of divergence between those values and the more strident nationalism of the new Japan. In this excerpt from his last lecture delivered in Japan during the 1916 visit, Tagore addresses the notion of what it means to be modernized. In his discussion of Japan’s modernity, he reflects a sense, common throughout the colonized world in the 1910s and 1920s, that Japan might provide a model for a non-Westernized modernity (see also the essay in this volume by Haitian Normil G. Sylvain [2.i]). He advocates for what he calls “the true modern spirit” which prefers “independence of thought” to the imitation of Europe—a position that can be compared to the one he adopts in his famous lecture, “Vishva-Sahitya” (“World Literature”).2 Although one must wonder if the essay is speaking more about modernity than modernism, Tagore’s choice of terms is clear, and therefore makes for an interesting and quite novel idea of modernism envisioned by one of the most important literary figures in India. RG

Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (San Francisco, CA: The Book Club of California, 1917): 133.

1

Rabindranath Tagore, “Visva-Sahitya,” trans. Rijula Das and Makarand Paranjape, Journal of Contemporary Thought 34 (Winter 2011): 213–25.

2

246

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

All particular civilization is the interpretation of particular human experience. Europe seems to have felt emphatically the conflict of things in the universe, which can only be brought under control by conquest. Therefore she is ever ready for fight, and the best portion of her attention is occupied in organizing forces. But Japan has felt, in her world, the touch of some presence, which has evoked in her soul a feeling of reverent adoration. She does not boast of her mastery of nature, but to her she brings, with infinite care and joy, her offerings of love. Her relationship with the world is the deeper relationship of heart. This spiritual bond of love she has established with the hills of her country, with the sea and the streams, with the forests in all their flowery moods and varied physiognomy of branches; she has taken into her heart all the rustling whispers and sighing of the woodlands and sobbing of the waves; the sun and the moon she has studied in all the modulations of their lights and shades, and she is glad to close her shops to greet the seasons in her orchards and gardens and corn-fields. This opening of the heart to the soul of the world is not confined to a section of your privileged classes, it is not the forced product of exotic culture, but it belongs to all your men and women of all conditions. This experience of your soul, in meeting a personality in the heart of the world, has been embodied in your civilization. It is a civilization of human relationship. Your duty towards your state has naturally assumed the character of filial duty, your nation becoming one family with your Emperor as its head. Your national unity has not been evolved from the comradeship of arms for defensive and offensive purposes, or from the partnership in raiding adventures, dividing among each member the danger and spoils of robbery. It is not an outcome of the necessity of organization for some ulterior purposes, but it is an extension of the family and the obligations of the heart. The ideal of “Maitri” is at the bottom of your culture—“maitri” with men and “maitri” with nature.3 And the true expression of this love is in the language of beauty, which is so abundantly universal in this land. This is the reason why a stranger, like myself, instead of feeling envy, or humiliation, before these manifestations of beauty, these creations of love, feels his readiness to participate in the joy and glory of such revealment of the human heart. And this has made me all the more apprehensive of the change which threatens Japanese civilization as something like a menace to one’s own person. For the huge heterogeneity of the modern age, whose only common bond is usefulness, is nowhere so pitifully exposed against the dignity and the hidden power of reticent beauty as in Japan. But the danger is that this organized ugliness storms the mind and carries the day by its mass, by its aggressive persistence, by its power of mockery directed against the deeper sentiments of heart. Its harsh obtrusiveness makes it forcibly visible to us, overcoming our senses,—and we bring to its altar sacrifices, as does a savage to his fetish, which appears powerful because of its hideousness. Therefore its rivalry to things that are modest and profound and have the subtle delicacy of life is to be dreaded. I am quite sure that there are men in your nation, who are not in sympathy with your national ideals; whose object is to gain, and not to grow. They are loud in their boast that they have modernized Japan. While I agree with them so far as to say that the spirit of the race should harmonize with the spirit of the time, I must warn them that modernizing is a mere affectation of modernism, just as affectation of poesy is poetizing. It is nothing but mimicry. Only affectation is louder than the original, and it is too literal. One must bear in mind, that those who have the true modern spirit need not modernize, just as those “Maitri” is a Bengali word of Sanskrit origin that could mean friendship, union, amity, or good will. In this case, the usage is most likely to indicate union.

3

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

247

who are truly brave are not braggarts. Modernism is not in the dress of the Europeans; or in the hideous structures, where their children are interned, when they take their lessons; or in the square houses with flat straight wall-surfaces, pierced with parallel lines of windows, where these people are caged in their life-time; certainly modernism is not in their ladies’ bonnets, carrying on them loads of incongruities. These are not modern, but merely European. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage to European schoolmasters. It is science, but not its wrong application in life,—a mere imitation of our science teachers who reduce it into a superstition absurdly invoking its aid for all impossible purposes. Science, when it oversteps its limits and occupies the whole region of life, has its fascination. It looks so powerful because of its superficiality—does as hippopotamus who is very little else but physical. Science speaks of the struggle for existence, but forgets that man’s existence is not merely of the surface. Man truly exists in the ideal of perfection, whose depth and height are not yet measured. Life based upon science is attractive to some men, because it has all the characteristics of sports; it feigns seriousness, but is not profound. When you go a-hunting, the less pity you have the better; for your one object is to chase the game and kill it, to feel that you are the greater animal, that your method of destruction is thorough and scientific. Because a sportsman is only a superficial man—his fulness of humanity not being there to hamper him—he is successful in killing innocent life and is happy. And the life of science is that superficial life. It pursues success with skill and thoroughness, and takes no account of the higher nature of man. But even science cannot tow humanity against truth and be successful; and those whose minds are crude enough to plan their lives upon the supposition that man is merely a hunter and his paradise of sportsmen, will be rudely awakened in the midst of their trophies of skeletons and skulls. For man’s struggle for existence is to exist in the fulness of his nature—not be curtailing all that is best in him and dwarfing his existence itself, but by accepting all the responsibilities of his spiritual life, even through death and defeat.

II. MANIFESTO OF THE INDIAN PROGRESSIVE WRITERS’ ASSOCIATION Mulk Raj Anand Originally published in English in Left Review (February 1936). The Indian Progressive Writers’ Association was a progressive literary movement established in London in 1935 by a group of Indian writers and intellectuals, although its roots can be dated back to the publication of Angaaray (‘Burning Coals’), a collection of short stories by some of the authors of the Association, in 1932.1 The group was famously formed at Nanking Restaurant in Bloomsbury in autumn 1934. During this meeting, Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004) was elected president and asked to draft its manifesto, which was subsequently published in 1936 in the UK journal, Left Review.2 Thereafter, the group met fortnightly where essays, stories, and poems were read out. In the same year, the All-India Progressive Writers’ Conference was organized in Lucknow, India, under the leadership of Munshi Premchand (1880–1936), the famous Hindi-Urdu writer. The Progressive Writers’ Association, known for their revolutionary ideology and socialist practices, received the support of the then Communist Party of India, as well as the blessings of key figures of the Indian literary world, like Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Munshi Premchand, and Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949). The manifesto demanded that Indian literature be freed from the romanticization with which it was traditionally associated, and that it instead focus on the realities of life in pre-independence India. The PWA attempted to rescue Indian literature by eschewing the dominant standards of literary criticism, which were necessarily born out of a more elitist background. Instead, they wished to approach literature in a more analytical and rational manner. Premchand, in his presidential address at the Lucknow conference where the manifesto was adopted, said that “literature should become the medium to send strong messages across and use it as a tool to initiate action, it is not bothered about language; with the loftiness of the ideal and breadth of vision, language itself strives towards simplicity; the beauty of meaning can be retained without employing ostentatious and verbose expression.”3 In addition to redefining the way in which language was used, the Association was also concerned with representing honestly the realities of a nation that was subject to both colonial exploitation and problems relating to caste and religion. RG

Radical changes are taking place in Indian society. Fixed ideas and old beliefs, social and political institutions are being challenged. Out of the present turmoil and conflict a new society is emerging. The spirit of reaction however, though moribund and doomed to ultimate decay, is still operative and is making desperate efforts to prolong itself.

Snehal Shinghavi, “Introduction” to Angaaray, by Sajjad Zaheer et al., ed. and trans. Snehal Shinghavi (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2014).

1

Rehana Ahmed, “South Asians Writing Resistance in Wartime London,” Wasafiri 27.2: 20.

2

Quoted in Javed Akhtar and Humayun Zafar Zaidi, “Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu Literature,” Indian Literature 50.4 (July–August2006): 149.

3

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

249

It is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist in the spirit of progress in the country. Indian literature, since the breakdown of classical literature, has had the fatal tendency to escape from the actualities of life. It has tried to find a refuge from reality in spiritualism and idealism. The result has been that it has produced a rigid formalism and a banal and perverse ideology. Witness the mystical devotional obsession of our literature, its furtive and sentimental attitude towards sex, its emotional exhibitionism and its almost total lack of rationality. Such literature was produced particularly during the past two centuries, one of the most unfortunate periods of our history, a period of disintegrating feudalism and of acute misery and degradation for the Indian people as a whole. It is the object of our association to rescue literature and other arts from the priestly, academic and decadent classes in whose hands they have degenerated so long; to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people; and to make them the vital organs which will register the actualities of life, as well as lead us to the future. While claiming to be the inheritors of the best traditions of Indian civilisation, we shall criticise ruthlessly, in its political, economic and cultural aspects, the spirit of reaction in our country and we shall foster through interpretive and creative work (with both native and foreign resources) everything that will lead our country to the new life for which it is striving. We believe that the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our existence today—the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjugation, so that it may help us to understand these problems and through such understanding help us to act. With the above aims in view, the following resolutions have been adopted: (1) The establishment of organizations of writers to correspond to the various linguistic zones of India; the co-ordinations of these organizations by holding conferences, publishing of magazines, pamphlets, etc. (2) To cooperate with those literary organizations whose aims do not conflict with the basic aims of the association. (3) To produce and translate literature of a progressive nature and of a high technical standard; to fight cultural reaction; and in this way, to further the cause of Indian freedom and social regeneration. (4) To strive for the acceptance of a common language (Hindustani) and a common script (Indo-Roman) for India.4 (5) To protect the interests of authors; to help authors who require and deserve assistance for the publication of their works. (6) To fight for the right of free expression of thought and opinion. (This manifesto has been signed by Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, Dr. K.S. Bhat, Dr. J.C. Ghose, Dr. S.Sinha, M.D. Taseer, S.S. Zaheer.) All communications to be addressed to: Dr. M.R. Anand, 32 Russell Square, London, W.C.I. London, 1935.

This demand was later dropped in appreciation of India’s multilingualism.

4

III. INTRODUCTION TO A STRANGER IN IRAN N.M. Rashed Originally published as the introduction to Iran Mein Ajnabi [A Stranger in Iran] in 1957. Translated from the Urdu by A. Sean Pue. N(un) M(im) Rashed (1910–75) is a central figure in poetic modernism in Urdu, remembered for developing and successfully promoting free verse (azad nazm) in evolving styles throughout his oeuvre. Born in the Punjab, in what is now Pakistan, he spent much of his life outside of South Asia, first in the British Indian Army and later as an information officer in the United Nations. The selection below is the introduction to his second volume of poems, Iran men ajnabi (A Stranger in Iran, 1957), published ten years after the Partition of British India. A pivotal volume, it transitions from his initial break with Urdu poetic convention and rebuke of late colonial India to an emergent critique of identity and political ideology. The title work of the volume refers to the poet’s experiences in Iran, where he was stationed during the Second World War. Iran was the birthplace of Persian, a language that saturates Urdu and was the de facto lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent until the early nineteenth century. Urdu poetry grew out of the matrix of Persian poetry, and Urdu’s most esteemed genres, especially the ghazal, came from Persian. Yet instead of finding his cultural heritage in Iran, Rashed found different configurations of imperialism, as Iran had been jointly invaded by British, Allied, and Soviet armies in 1941. The introduction—something of a manifesto, as in all of his volumes—discusses literary modernism in terms of both form and content. First, it addresses the break with form, most notably with the ghazal, a genre that traditionally addresses an ambiguous beloved—perhaps male or female, human or divine—using a rigorous metaphorical vocabulary. The ghazal consists of a set of rhymed couplets that are united by theme, addressing the lover’s state as he anguishes outside the beloved’s door or wanders in the desert, using a rigorous metaphorical system. Its centrality to poetic traditions from South Asia to the Middle East can be traced through texts by the Turkish Garip group (5.ii) and the Persian poet Nima Yushij (6.i). Traditionally, a poet would have to cite earlier Urdu or Persian poetic tradition as precedent for new metaphorical usages. Much of the pleasure of listening to the ghazal that Rashed refers to in his introduction comes in the familiarity of its references, including the strong connection between the lines of the couplets that should be established, most often by the second giving proof to the assertion of the first. In his free verse, Rashed abandoned the fixed meters and rhymes of the ghazal, as well as its metaphorical references and logical structure. His justification for this break in form was the need to address new content, or themes related to experiences of the modern world. Rashed had established his approach to form in his first book of poetry, so this introduction first responds to critics of that verse, chastizing them as stuck in the past and not yet open to contemporary knowledge. But Rashed also advances his critique of conventional poetry by focusing his definition of modern experience. For Rashed, experience is a personal and individual category, so he distances himself from those more committed to exploring collective experience through poetry. He critiques such writers as ideological, clubbing together those who devalue individual experience in favor of historical memories of lost grandeur with those who favor utopian imaginations of

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

251

political futures. He takes aim not only at nationalists but also “progressive” writers, both realist and romantic, whom he decries both for devaluing the individual and for pledging their allegiance to a revolutionary ideology that he has witnessed in Iran to be nothing more than a new form of imperialism. ASP

Thirteen years have passed since the publication of Mavara (The Beyond, 1941). In this time, there have been many productive conversations about the relationship between form and content. Yet still, some readers do not find modern poetry, in general, and free verse, in particular, to be an object of enjoyment; or, they find it to be a lesser one in comparison to the ghazal. Some critics, too, do not deem it right to break with some such universally accepted truth. Despite this, an important class of young poets have successfully appropriated experiments with rejecting form and, in doing so, have worked to make current the expression of modern ideas and dramatic poetry in Urdu. It is perhaps too early to say whether or not the experiment of free verse has introduced into Urdu any exemplary examples of poetry as found in some languages of the West. Or whether, from this experiment, poetry of such rank has come into existence as one often finds in the ghazal and masnavi genres in Persian or Urdu.1 Nevertheless, in this there is no doubt: rejecting established principles has helped to break the stagnation of Urdu poetry, and shown poets new roads to message and meaning of which our old poets were unaware. Modern poetry and free verse, in particular, express a new melody, one granted to the contemporary poet by his times. This new melody cannot be made manifest according to the principles prescribed by the ancient prosodists. The modern poet has confronted such experiences and visions in his time that were never easy to express in bound verse. If the modern poet had not evaded the old genres of poetry then there would be no way for him to connect together new experiences, new feeling, and new melody. Those readers of modern poetry who cannot find pleasure in it are in no way deserving of criticism. For among them often are those who, despite living in contemporary times, still dwell in the world of the ghazal and masnavi. They have kept on in the ghazal milieu for centuries. They know well the love of the ghazal, its politics, and its philosophy. Their connection with the love, politics, and philosophy of modern poetry is still fresh. The doors the modern poet opened to experiences and visions can only be entered by those who have themselves harmonized with those visions and experiences. The new poet also uses a new lexicon that is not the lexicon of Farhang-e Asafiyah.2 How would they know the meaning of his words? Even if those meanings are inside the poem itself, who would have the courage to look for them? The truth is this: whether as a reader or as a critic, one cannot understand a poet’s language or temperament until one is ready to travel alongside him, even past a certain limit. Those critics whose knowledge and taste have been formed through the path of Bahr-ul-fasahat3 or Chahar Maqalah4 will not be able to interpret

On the ghazal genre, see headnote. “Masnavi” is a type of poem, written in rhymed couplets, popular in Urdu, Persian, Turkish, and Arabic literature.

1

Sayyid Ahmad Dihlavi’s Farhang-e Asafiyah, published between 1888 and 1901, is one of the most widely used dictionaries of the Urdu language.

2

An influential work on Urdu prosody by Najmul Ghani (1859–1932).

3

Translated in English as The Four Discourses, Chahar Maqalah is a series of addresses to kings and rulers by twelfth-century Persian writer, Nizami Aruzi. The second discourse deals with the art of poetry.

4

252

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

modern poetry properly until they are willing to deceive their knowledge just a little or to acknowledge, to some extent, its defeat. The objection to modern poetry that it is not poetry for everyone is correct. Without a doubt, it is not poetry for everyone. For it is the poetry only of those whose consciousness is new, whose experiences and visions are new, and who are composed of this new knowledge, taste, and feeling. I remember one occasion when one of our harshest critics took a few unrhymed poems by our modern poets and made their lines “measured” and rhymed. He heartily congratulated himself on his experiment. It is difficult to say whether every free-verse poem ever written in Urdu is justified in its rejection of form, but it is also clear that a person who tries to make a free-verse poem measured and rhyming does not fully partake in the creative work of poetry. Nothing can be established through this improper behavior towards a free-verse poem; it certainly does not prove the superiority of rhymed verse. Though the superiority of one genre over another is not established, some people have experimented in this manner by turning a novel into a short story or a short story into a novel. These experiments are of interest in themselves, but to use them to declare that the novel is better than the short story or the short story is better than the novel would be pointless. There is a difference in their expanse and approach—they pluck different strings in the mind. Rhymed verse and free verse are similarly different in their expanse and approach, and the impressions left by both are also different. A critic who conducts this sort of experiment does not aim to evaluate a poem or a literary piece. He aims to prove the superiority of his own knowledge. But changing the clothes of a literary piece does not increase its beauty, impressions, or rank at all. Modern poetry is not merely about craftsmanship or the enchantment of turning away from old craftsmanship, however. For modern poetry, whether rhymed or free verse, answers the demands of the age. The modern poet has opened his eyes to an age in which not only have the clothes changed but the construction of homes, etiquette, the ways and manners of family life, the economic framework of society are all different from previous times. Take the new construction of homes. It has made the love of the ghazal and masnavi impossible. Take also the case of woman. She used to be always either a wife or a courtesan and, with her support, verse used to be composed by means of special similes and metaphors. Today, she has become a fellow worker to men and a person who does more than fulfill just one of the mental and emotional necessities of men. The old poet was a part of his society in the way that the members of an organization are parts of it, or the way the links of a chain are part of the chain. Now however, the modern poet is truly an individual. To lessen the solitude of the old poet, listeners used to come to his poetic gatherings (musha’irah). The modern poet does not have this support, because the language in which he is compelled to converse is not the language of his listeners. They are not ready, mentally or emotionally, to hear or to take pleasure in the thoughts that he wants to convey. Yet the result of the bare loneliness of the modern poet has been that he has begun to examine and evaluate himself more shrewdly. As a consequence, the boundaries of his psychological deep diving have increased in both breadth and depth. The modern poet, like his worthy predecessor, does not merely express thoughts and emotions. His every thought and feeling are mixed with the shadows that appear to him. He wants to illuminate those shadows, too, because they are important creatures of his mental world. Whether the contemporary poet is happy or not at the destruction of his relationship with his elders, he is compelled to admit to it. Whereas the old poet’s education consisted of mythology, logic, Sufism, and Islamic law, the modern poet’s training entails science, economics, psychology, politics, and aesthetics. All these new

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

253

subjects are stealthily assailing him, sniping at him, and he is compelled to make them a part of the texture of his thoughts. For this reason, his language, too, is not the hallowed tongue that was his predecessors. Finally, his verses are cut off from the logical proof found in ghazal poetry. For the modern poet, the only proof is emotional proof. This excited him in his search for new genres and compelled him to save himself from the stagnation of the genres of the past. * * * As far as the poems in this volume, the author publishes them with profuse apology. This is the second collection after Mavara, but it lacks the freshness and the youthful bloom of those poems. Most of the poems in this collection were written overseas—some in Iran, some in Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and now some in America. The poem from which this volume received its name bears the impressions of Iran. My hope was that this poem would contain at least thirty qit’ah,5 but it has remained an incomplete poem of only a few. The sections of this long poem are merely scattered impressions, lacking the connection or harmony of a story. In the author’s two-year tour in Iran, he encountered not only Iranians but people from several other nations that the past world war brought together. These are the impressions of an Indian soldier who mentally is the resident of the subcontinent and physically an individual in a foreign army. Iran left a permanent impression on the author’s mind, and created an unwaning love and affection for the country. “A Stranger in Iran” is an attempt to analyze the conflict of emotions that the particular political circumstances of the times had produced. These scattered impressions were made on the curtain of the politics onto which individual emotions were merely embroidered. Numerous characters come into this poem, but on all the shadow of the hunter falls. One is terrified of this shadow; another, understanding it to be shadow, seeks coolness within it; while to another still, its light darkness grants the courage for highway robbery. The desirous hand of the hunter extends to all. Every person, through their lack of courage, seeks the aid of vague memories of history. The present, becoming a wall, blocks the path of the future, and life becomes and remains meaningless. Some of the qit’ah in “A Stranger in Iran” are merely versified short stories in which more emphasis is given to the depiction of one character, or an event is described so that those same impressions can be made that had reached the poet’s heart. Some poems are more like sketches. Some are nothing more than internal monologue. The qit’ah do share a fundamental thought, which will likely be easy to find for a clever reader like you. And even though these poems are connected to the times of the war in Iran, still, as you yourself will see, these events could occur anywhere in any part of the world. The manner in which the war upset Iran’s social life could happen anywhere. The rest of this collection’s poems are merely poems (nazm). Many of them are connected to my vicinity, but in none of them is there the persuasion of “ideology,” especially such an ideology that would lessen the poet’s own thought and enhance the intellectual policies of some political group. The author, by chance, has not maintained connection with those non-literary groups or ways of thinking that have become the only fountain of revelation for some poets.

Cantos, literally fragment or section.

5

254

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

In this volume, there are some ghazals, too. I have written very few ghazals. The craftsmanship of the ghazal is different from that of free verse, and I have not yet found it a suitable form of expression. Whenever I compose a ghazal I have mostly done so in imitation, and the traditional ways of expression have remained relatively prominent in it. It is difficult to say whether these few ghazals will satisfy your taste. N. M. Rashed New York

IV. THE PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A NOTUN SAMALOCHAK Malay Roy Choudhury Originally published in English in Intrepid 10 (Spring 1968). Translated from the Bengali by Malay Roy Choudhury. Malay Roy Choudhury (1939–) is a Bengali poet and the founder of Kolkata’s Hungry Generation or Hungryalist movement. The leading movement of the Bengali avant-garde during the 1960s, the Hungryalists reflected the youthful dissidence that characterized the 1960s globally. Their taboo-breaking poems experimented with new language and forms, as well as subject matter that openly embraced sex, obscenity, and the body. Roy Choudhury is most famous for his poem “Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar” (Stark Electric Jesus), which led to his arrest and imprisonment on obscenity charges in 1965. Although he was exonerated in 1967, the event contributed to the dissolution of the Hungryalists as a group (which was already underway, with the departure of key players in 1963 and 1964), as well as to their growing renown among the Beat generation in the United States. A number of Beat periodicals carried letters from Roy Choudhury seeking the financial and moral support of his US counterparts, and his case became something of a cause célèbre for US poets worried about censorship and obscenity laws in their own country. These texts are drawn from issue 10 of the US periodical Intrepid, published by Allen de Loach and guest edited by Carl Weissner. Intrepid, associated with the Beat generation, regularly published works by writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. This issue, however, was devoted to showcasing new Indian poetry, reflecting the Beats’ fascination with India and the Hungry Generation’s renown in the United States. The first essay calls for a new criticism, commensurate to the new poetry they sought to produce, echoing modernism’s influence on critical practices globally. The “Notun Samalochak” of this essay's title is a Bengali term, meaning “new critic.” The second is one of a number of manifestos the group produced, many of which circulated widely in both US and Bengali publications. Together, these texts capture the Hungry poets’ vivacious experiments with language, and the youthful impulse toward novelty and revolt. They appeared in this order on successive pages in the original publication. AM

Criticism should now assume a new form. It must proceed on other principles and propose to itself a sublime aim. The question should no longer be one concerning the dead lumber of diction, the conspicuity of witty metaphors, the craftiness of sentiments, the matter-of-fact reality in a work of art, as it was some decades ago among most of our critics, neither should it be a question mainly of a psychological sort to be answered by postmorteming and bum-boating the complex of attitudes of the artist from his creation, as it is usual with the best of our own critics at present,—but it should be, ultimately, a question of the essence of the art itself.

256

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

The problem is not now to determine by what mechanism Kalidasa1 composed sentences and struck out similes, but by what far finer and more mysterious hunger Sandipan organized his work and gave life and individuality to his Bijan, and Shakti to his Nirupam.2 Wherein lies that life, how have they attained that shape and individuality? Whence comes that divine madness, that violent and somnambulistic flash of jazzing which excites a man to jump out of the shadow into the sun and become an artist? Not only who was the poet and how did he create, but what and how was the poem, and why was it poetry and not rhymed prose, creation and not calculated passion. Those are the questions of the notun samalochak, the aesthetic rebel, the kshudharta.3 Criticism now, as an art, must stand like an interpreter between the inspired and the uninspired, the prophet and those who feel the structural and textual melody of his creation and catch some glimpse of its total meaning, but do not understand its deeper import. (From an early Hungry Generation Pamphlet. “Editors: Malay Roy Choudhury, Shatki Chattopadhyay, Debi Rai. Published by Haradhon Dhara from 269, Netaji Subhash Road, Howrah. 25th December 1962.”)

Kalidasa was a Sanskrit poet who probably lived in the fourth or fifth century. Given the title “Kavikulaguru,” or master of all poets, he is widely regarded as the greatest poet in the Sanskrit language.

1

Sandipan Chattopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay were writers and members of the Hungry Generation. Shakti is listed at the end of this essay as one of the editors of the pamphlet in which it was printed. Sandipan is one of the signatories of “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry” (8.v).

2

Hungry (Hindi).

3

V. THE HUNGRYALIST MANIFESTO ON POETRY Malay Roy Choudhury Originally published in English in Intrepid 10 (Spring 1968). Translated from Bengali by Malay Roy Choudhury.

Poetry is no longer a civilizing manoeuvre, a replanting of the bamboozled gardens: it is a holocaust, a violent and somnambulistic jazzing of the hymning five, a sowing of the tempestual hunger. Poetry is an activity of the narcissistic spirit. Naturally, we have discarded the blankety-blank school of modern poetry, the darling of the Press, where poetry does not resurrect itself in an orgasmic flow, but words come up bubbling in an artificial muddle. In the prosed-rhymes of those born-old half-literates, you must fail to find that scream of desperation of a thing wanting to be man, the man wanting to be spirit. Poetry of the younger generation too has died in the dressing room, as most of the younger prosed-rhyme writers, afraid of the satanism, the vomitous horror, the selfelected crucifixion of the artist that makes a man a poet, fled away to hide in the hairs. Poetry around us, these days, has been cryptic, short hand, cautiously glamorous, flattered by own sensitivity like a public-school prodigy. Saturated with self-consciousness, poems have begun to appear from the tomb of logic or the bier of unsexed rhetoric. Poetry is not the caging of belches within form. It should convey the brutal sound of breaking values and startling tremors of the rebellious soul of the artist himself, with words stripped of their usual meanings and used contrapuntally. It must invent a new language which would incorporate everything at once, speak to all senses in one. Poetry should be able to follow music in the power it possesses of evoking a state of mind, and to present images not as wrappers but as ravishograms. (Written and translated from Bengali by Malay Roy Choudhury. Published as Hungry Generation Pamphlet by H. Dhara. “Signatories: Utpal Kumar Basu, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Benoy Mazumdar, Sayyed Mustafa Siraj, Samir Roy Choudhury, Shaileshwar Ghose, Arupratan Basu, Basudeva Das Gupta, Satindra Bhaumik, Haranath Ghose, Nihar Guha, Ashok Chattopadhyay, Amritatanay Gupta, Tridib Mitra, Pobitra Ballav, Sunil Mitra, Bhanu Chattopadhyay, Shankar Sen, Pradip Chowdhury, Jogesh Panda, Debi Rai, Subimal Basak, Subhash Ghosh, Monohar Das, Sandipan Chattopadhyay.”)

VI. INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW STORY Kamleshwar Originally published as “Nayi Kahaani ki Bhumika” (Introduction to the New Story) in Nayi Kahaani ki Bhumika. Akshara Prakashan: New Delhi, 1969. Translated from Hindi by Arshdeep Singh Brar and Rudrani Gangopadhyay. Kamleshwar (1932–2007) was one of the most important short-story writers of the twentieth century. Along with writers like Mohan Rakesh (1925–72), Nirmal Verma (1929–2005), Rajendra Yadav (1929–2013), Mannu Bhandari (1931–), and Bhisham Sahni (1915–2003), he paved the way for a new literary movement called Nayi Kahaani (Nayi afsaane in Urdu, New Story in English) that was marked by the need for art to be connected with the material world and the conditions of a newly independent India.1 The movement was at its peak in the years between 1954 and 1963. Aside from being focused on the urban turn of the new nation, their narratives often focused on problems of unemployment, corruption plaguing the rapidly growing middle class, and changing relationships between the sexes, especially in the aftermath of the emergence of the working woman. Disintegration of families, erosion of values, loneliness, and anxiety became major tropes of the work produced by the Nayi Kahaani writers. In his essay “Nayi Kahaani ki Bhumika” (Introduction to the New Story) from the volume by the same name, Kamleshwar reflects on the context of the emergence of the New Story movement, as it arrived following the trail blazed by the Nayi Kavita (New Poetry) movement. Part of the rationale behind the selection of this essay is the fact that Nayi Kavita has had more visibility in its translated afterlife.2 Nayi Kahaani’s desire to capture authentic and realistic expression for the contemporary moment emerges clearly in this piece by Kamleshwar. He lists the various tropes that are trademark of the short fiction of this movement: its middle-class protagonist, the troubled relationship between men and women, the immense loneliness experienced by the characters, and a certain psychological verisimilitude with the crisis in contemporary society. Kamleshwar uses examples from other writers liberally, constructing a defense of the movement which, he believes, is an experiment with narrative and not with craft. RG

The attainment of the country’s independence brought an intellectual rebirth as well. Freedom was not merely political but a renaissance of ideas was also associated with it. When Democracy provided adult franchise to every individual, individual (and not personal) entities experienced a sense of dignity and started questioning outdated traditions, thought processes, and the ways in which society and standards of moral judgment are created. All that was false, deformed, frustrated and archaic was discarded and the Indian Constitution laid the intellectual foundation of a new society. In an essay,3

Raghuvir Sinha, “Modern Hindi Short Story,” Indian Literature 18.3 (1975): 20–1.

1

An invaluable source for readers interested in Nayi Kavita and its key texts in English is New Poetry in Hindi: An Anthology, edited, translated, and introduced by Lucy Rosenstein (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003).

2

“Adhunikta aur Bharat Dharma” (Modernity and Indianness) by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar.

3

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

259

Dinkar-ji4 analyzes the contemporary moment and its ideas and rightly states that instead of adapting the varnashram dharma 5of Manu,6 Shankaracharya,7 and Tulsi Das,8 India chose to manufacture its spirit through the philosophy and thoughts of Buddha, Kabir,9 and Raja Rammohan Roy,10 and the country’s Constitution underlines and inaugurates these ideas. This is applicable to both the creation of society as well as literature. As Independence approached, a reassessment of our thought process had been initiated and in this intense churning, Tulsi’s deism, despite all its social indicators and idealization of relations became irrelevant … More authentic than that was the musical voice’s aestheticism, but what rang loudest was the faithful and rebellious voice of Kabir. This did not occur overnight. A reassessment of Indian cultural legacy had been happening for some time and there was a change in what was being emphasized. The majoritarian Hindu society in its collective social conduct was seen as a nourisher of the tradition of Tulsi but its soul was turning kabirpanthi. There was perhaps no better evidence of the rootedness of traditions that the majority of India was bound to tradition by flesh but against it in spirit. This internal revolt was producing nothing. Deism and faith can be seen as part of our legacy and both have been part of the Indian personality. The blind sacrifice that deism demands is unacceptable to the developed Indian consciousness while the intellectual preference that faith needs was not unacceptable to them. Perhaps that is why we have been reading Bharatendu11 with belief and Hari Oudh12 with tradition. We accept Maithili Sharan Gupt13 as subservient to tradition but receive Nirala14 as part of our belief.

Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (1908–74) was a significant nationalist poet and scholar who wrote in Hindi. Ji is an honorific suffix in Hindi.

4

Varnashram Dharma is the Vedic system according to which society is divided into four hierarchical varnas (social groups or caste).

5

“Manu” is the Sanskrit term for “human.” Key texts of Hinduism like Manava Grihyasutra, Manava Sulbasutra, and Manava Dharmashastra are ascribed to Swayambhuva Manu, the first Manu, who is considered to be the spiritual son of the Hindu god Brahma.

6

Shankaracharya is one of the earliest theologians of Hinduism. The present form of the religion is said to have been largely formalized due to his efforts in the early eighth century.

7

Tulsi Das (1511–1623) was a Hindu saint remembered for writing Ramacharitmanas, an Awadhi version of the Ramayana, which is one of the two major Sanskrit epics in Indian culture.

8

Kabir was a fifteenth-century Indian mystic. He was not in favor of either of the two main organized religions in India—Hinduism and Islam—and instead preached, through his poetry, for a way of life in which one finds god within themselves. His followers were called Kabirpanthi.

9

Raja Rammohan Roy (1774–1833) was an Indian social and religious reformer. He was also the founder of the Brahmo Sabha, which was the beginning of a movement that wanted to free Hinduism from its ritualistic practices, and ultimately led to the formation of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious faction that still practices this version of the religion.

10

Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–85), better known by his pen name Rasa, was one of the most important writers, poets, and playwrights in Hindi literature. Because of his significant contributions to the development of modern Hindi language, literature, and drama, he is commonly known as the “Father of Modern Hindi Literature and Hindi Theater.”

11

Ayodhya Singh Upadhyay (1865–1947) was a Hindi poet and writer who used the pen name “Hari Oudh.”

12

Maithili Sharan Gupt (1866–1964) was an important modern Hindi poet. He notably used the plain dialect of Hindi—Khari Boli—in his writing, which was a departure from the contemporary custom.

13

Nirala is the pen name of the Hindi writer and poet Suryakant Tripathi (1899–1961). He is primarily associated with the romanticist chhayavadi (shadowist) movement, which was followed by the pragativadi (progressive) and prayogvadi (experimental) moments in Hindi literature.

14

260

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

When modern prose turned towards Kabir, we discovered Premchand,15 and when Nirala broke the boundaries of chhayavad (shadowism)16 and opened his arms to life itself, it seemed as if the form of Kabir had manifested itself. It is not by accident that we have been investing our belief into Bharatendu, Premchand, and Nirala’s voices. This is not to say that literature hasn’t seen other talents. It is however directly related to the fact that our consciousness, even from the past, has always outlined those who are alive and throbbing in contemporary contexts. It is true that a river keeps on flowing uninterruptedly, but the significance of this water is contingent upon the seasons. All of it is not useful to us at all times. When the crops are ready, they are exposed to the continuous flow of the river. Its destiny is to maintain continuity. This is also an important step, but it is cursed by futility. The intellectual rebirth is accompanied by the curse of Partition and when our consciousness was energized by a luminescent future, bands of refugees came and went … and in the middle of this fearful bloodshed was a dissolution which made refugees of our hearts and minds. The moment man was independent, he became a refugee in himself. Even then, one is reassured about the creation of a new society … Justice, freedom, equality and friendship—these weren’t terms of Western thought but in fact, it was our history that coined them. Kabir espoused social justice and friendship, and in doing so, unchained man from organized religion, and became valuable for us. The voice of rebellion that Bharatendu articulated and the demand for Indian-ness that he raised, was also about voicing our own expectations. Even a seeker of happiness like Prasad had adapted a humanist point of view in his fictional prose, and Premchand had transformed ideas of social justice, freedom, parity and friendship into expectations from life itself. Because slavery was the biggest obstacle in our lives, questions of justice, equality, and friendship had been adjourned till we attained independence. New relationships with these notions were only to be determined after independence. Despite all obstacles and taboos, up till Premchand, the expression of real expectations held primacy. Post World War I, the dissolution of the Indian middle-classes began and not just its echoes but clear voices can be heard in Premchand’s stories. The romantic stupor of its idealism also hangs heavy but he shrugs it off in his later stories and in “Poos Ki Raat” (Night of Poos17), “Kafan” (Shroud), “Shatranj ke Khiladi” (The Chess Players), his vision seeks a third phase of realism. This third phase was to inhabit humans within their environment (and not merely along with, which had hitherto been the case). Hence those stories by Premchand where man has been explored in his environment are ones of deep suffering, and become a platform for representing social history (in turn giving birth to the present). Kabir’s rebellion, social justice and call for friendship; Bharatendu’s Indian-ness and claim to freedom; Prasad’s humanist values and the desire for their reestablishment; and subsequently Premchand’s adoption of realism and the delineation of human suffering—

Munshi Premchand (1880–1936), one of the most famous Indian writers, wrote novels, short stories, and plays in Hindi and Urdu. After the First World War, Premchand’s writing changed significantly. He dropped idealism in favor of realism, and began to look toward the internal journeys of characters. Both of these traits of his later writing influenced the Nayi Kahaani writers particularly.

15

Chhayavad (shadowism) is the Hindi equivalent of romanticism in Hindi literature. Roughly spanning the years between 1918 and 1936, the major exponents of this movement include Jayashankar Prasad, Nirala, Sumitranandan Pant, and Mahadevi Verma.

16

Poos is the peak winter month in the Indian calender.

17

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

261

these were products of new ideas. However, it was when Premchand’s newly etched individual emerged out of the reality of the sequence of history with all his weight and personality, that a storm suddenly erupted. The third phase of Premchand, which was connected to the order of history, became a provision for the internal journey for some authors because they were not involved in their time and reality. And this is where the deeply personal voice in Hindi story emerges and a reetikal (new custom) begins. Suddenly the women characters who were centers of carrying life in Premchand, transformed into wily lovers, the men become rootless and impotent like Srikant.18 The author is crushed by his repressed lust and frailties and dependent characters are formed. Originating from the order of history, the individual breathing in his own space with social roots comes to a halt, and relationships involving sisters and sisters-in-law are suffused with eroticism. The era of sisters and sisters-inlaw lapsed not too long ago. The entire landscape began to change; language became “personal” and stories “personal diaries” that revolve around dream-lovers. There was perhaps never in the history of the Hindi Kahaani (story) such copious amount of tears, bursts of sighs, and loud sniffles echoing throughout, because all the sisters and sisters-inlaw (abandoning their soulmates) ran for their lovers, and for each assignation, specific “locales” were assigned. Lakesides were designated for the first meeting, quiet valleys for proposals, the setting sun stood for “hours of submission” and “hours of suffering” were meant for the rest of life. Some rebels emerged entranced by their false sense of sacrifice and began to demand representation of women’s conditions. The middle-class woman was condemned to suffering from their mental atrocities and physical impotence but it was never known where those rebels had managed to attain revolution? Where did their social roots lie, where were their revolutionary parties active and what role did they perform in them? The illustrious history of the Indian revolutionaries and the romantic shadows of their personalities seeking to fulfill their lustful appetites came into literature. But no unfazed revolutionary of flesh and bone could enter the world of literature. Instead of characters who could face life came characters who were hollow, cut off from contexts, driven by frustration and dependence; who wanted to enjoy their wealth and mental peace; and who began to pretend to glorify self-abnegation, anguish and a tragic outlook. It was not as if Hindi Kahaani did not have isolated voices in this reetikal,—Ashk’s19 lower middle-class characters and some of the premises in Bhagwati babu’s20 stories (“Mughalon ne Sultanat Baksh di” [The Mughals Gave Up the Sultanate] and “Do Baankein” [Two Banks]) and Yashpal’s21 “Vicharon ke Aagrahi” (Insistence of Ideas). Opportunistic characters came to light around this time and nobody really knew when a wandering, struggling aunt would suddenly appear, never to be seen again. The individual who had emerged out of the sequence of history came to a halt … this individual was at the center of the production of ideas and the tradition of life, but literary prose had drawn a curtain over him. It was not as if time had come to a standstill; the individual was passing through a litmus test. The lower middle and middle classes were performing a crucial role in the revolution of ’42. Relations between the peasant and landowner were formed. Character from Premchand’s short story “Anandi.”

18

Upendranath Ashk (1910–96) was a Hindi-Urdu writer, who wrote novels, short stories, and plays.

19

Bhagwati Charan Verma (1903–81) is a famous Hindi novelist.

20

Yashpal (1903–76) is one of the most significant writers in Hindi literature in the post-Premchand era. A prolific writer, he wrote novels, short stories, plays, travel books, essays, as well as an autobiography.

21

262

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Worker-owner relations demanded a new balance. Disintegrating families looked for their emotional sources and in the shadow of the Great War, tremendous disharmony, indecision and extinction abounded. The power of the independence movement and its intense fury could also be seen everywhere … But the protagonist of this reetikal through his crude nature, denied all social contexts and seemed to be lecturing on emotions and sorrow, accompanied by his lover who created a sphere of radiance all around him. With his personal absurdities, he was establishing an isolated aesthetic. And during this reetikal, some authors who are unable to adapt to this manufactured mentality began an intellectual and political crusade. Since this was a political crusade, like politics, a certain collectivization began to seep into it … In the beginning, this movement made life-sustaining values its foundation and outlined the ambitions of individuals cultivated through life experiences. It examined humanism from a scientific perspective and set the point of origin of the next journey of civilization. This progressive ideology attacked customs, taboos, wrong beliefs, and conservative mindsets and made man aware of his milieu. Since this intellectual movement was initiated by politics, the establishment of literary values and exemplars were also by political personalities themselves, and history can testify to the resultant “chaos.” Most of the characters in literary prose were Indian, their situations familiar, but their voices were that of an outsider and their future was alien and not aligned with the end expected from our historical conclusion. Some of the authors (like Yashpal, Nagarjun, Chandrakiran Sonraksia, Amritlal Nagar, Rangey Raghav etc) chose the correct point of view, adopted the right politics, protested against the opportunism and oppression through their craft. They rejected the weak characters and autocratic politicians declaring red dawns and hoisting red flags and undid the political specter over literature but by then the hold of such political figures was all over the country. After attaining Independence, politicians and workers had become the most respected figures in the social milieu. Hence certain groups came to dominate the literary sphere, and so the model of the individual formed by history, with all his qualities, could only be completed up to shoulders which could not support his Indian head. This person began functioning like a robot which was controlled by heads operating under political influence who, apart from deciding the party’s activities, also began to determine the problems of literature, like what characters and facets should be represented. This is when darkness engulfed our national horizons. The dream of building the society that the Constitution had laid in front of all was eroding away because the politicians responsible for laying the foundation of the future had gone corrupt. The freedom fair did not take long to wrap up and its debris were scattered around and disorder was everywhere in the same way in which there are flags, ropes, bamboos, and other decorations strewn around after a carnival is over. Politicians went to inhabit glass-palaces like religious gurus and local leaders began to wreak havoc like vagrants. It is astounding that the leaders involved in Satyagraha22 prior to freedom threw their lot behind corruption, malpractice and oppression. One encountered an enslaved generation at departments and offices. This lot was all over busy offices across the country, a slave by existence. This generation still worshipped the British and its fruits continue to be borne by the country. Satyagraha literally means “holding onto truth.” It was a term coined by Mahatma Gandhi to describe the strategy of non-violent civil resistance as a way to counter colonial oppression in India.

22

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

263

The boils of corruption, selfishness, nepotism, casteism, provincialism burst upon the body of the nation and the stench of its puss, rotting flesh and bad blood was all around. This was a state of disillusionment. On one end of the spectrum, in literature, reetikal and collectivization were bent upon their ways, personal vices were disabling the truth of life and propaganda was firming its grasp upon individuality. On the other end of the spectrum, at the administrative level, the rot, disaffection, factiousness and the slavegeneration was dominant. The middle and lower middle classes were paying a price for all of this while their own beliefs were lying broken, half-formed, or scattered and uprooted … they were committed to carrying the burden of life and were condemned to tolerate all its cruelties because their own leaders had become corrupt. The individual living during the Partition, disillusionment, mechanization, discrepancies, dissolution of families, political corruption and deep dissatisfaction was shirking accountability, or was unable to express himself in the middle of internal and external conflict. He stood amidst his milieu, entranced and astonished, on a path that was blocked. It is then that the Nayi Kavita revolution arrived, to release the blocked sources of the individual’s consciousness and orient itself towards the people tolerating life. Emerging from reality, the individual once again becomes the center of the story and the era of dependent characters comes to a close. A quest of Indian-ness was initiated and people began to look towards a verified and authentic reality. “Malbe ka Malik” (Owner of Debris), “Gulki Banno,” “Zindagi aur Jonk” (Life and Leech), “Bhagyarekha” (Fateline), “Badbu” (Bad Odour), “Karmnasha ki Haar,” “Teesari Kasam” (The Third Promise), “Saat Bachchon ki Ma” (Mother of Seven Children), “Jahan Lakshmi Qaid Hai” (Where Lakshmi is Imprisoned), “Bhains ka Katya” (Buffalo Breeds), “Chaudah Kosi Panchayat” (Fourteen Kosi Panchayat),23 “Shuturmurg” (Ostrich), “Babool ki Chhaon” (Shade of the Father’s Home), “Dhibri” (Wing Nut), “Kaalsundari,” “Samay” (Time), “Reva,” etc. and other stories break the obstacle that was created in literature. Harishankar Parsai,24 Sharad Joshi,25 Keshabchandra Varma,26 etc. voice the absurdities of their times through their satire. Plot, period, characterization, premise and craftsmanship emerge and a crisis of defining the Nayi Kahaani is created. The author abandons the pretense of being the creator, omniscient and invested in the future, because he has faced human troubles directly, and now seeks realism to express it. He refuses any sort of imposition and situates the Indian citizen within his time and circumstances. He demolishes the condemned, false and hollow traditions and morality, and instead opts for a morality which discards the religious belief of black and white traditions and gives way to new values. Isolated from religious morality, he accepts humanist values based on justice and equality. And the new storyteller does not accept the influence of religion, philosophy, network or ideology but rather subordinates himself to man’s ambitions and expectations. Nayi Kos is an Indian standard unit of distance. 1 Kos is 1.91 miles or 3.07 kms. Panchayat is a form of government within the South Asian political system. It dates back over two thousand years, and continues to be an important method of governance in the rural sectors of India.

23

Harishankar Parsai (1924–95) was a Hindi writer and humorist.

24

Sharad Joshi (1931–91) was a Hindi humorist and poet. He also wrote screenplays for some Hindi films and TV shows.

25

Keshavchandra Varma (1925–2007) was a Hindi poet and writer.

26

264

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Kahaani outlines emerging, forming or disintegrating relations of humans because it emerges out of an authentic expression relating to “me” and “[s]he” or “his/her” and the moment it comes out of “me” and relates to the other, the author is committed to it. The Nayi Kahaani author’s commitment is to life itself and not to opinions, fashions or promises. The main concerns that emerge in the context of the Nayi Kahaani are those about authenticity and narrative. Authenticity is to keep chiseling out lies and inconsistencies at the level of the craft of story and narrative is a search for simplicity. This simplicity is not synonymous with “equivocating” but is rather about expressing a reality by seeking it out from all of life’s phases without any tension or excessive romantic attachment. Authenticity is the condition for the truth of experience on one hand and on the other end is to handle truth with maturity and bring it to meaningfulness. Hence Nayi Kahaani is not merely a communication of life-chapters or condensed hours, but is the story of the meanings or values of various stages. In its analytical form, it is the faithful depiction of a situation, life-chapter or condensed time, and in a suggestive form, it takes human relations, incidents and moments to new meanings. These meanings emerge out of realities which the author chooses for the story. Today, the selection of narrative is important and hence the understanding of the meaning has increased. Nayi Kahaani is an authentic expression emerging out of this milieu, rather than being just a verbose rendition of events. Nayi Kahaani is dated because it does not contain a violation of its time. An expression of the central situations of its time and changing panoramas … there is an expectation to keep changing and “making it new” … there is no fixed form or model. Hence, it is fated to remain undefined. For any author, his creation is not a model but the platform for a new beginning. This process for creating this platform exists behind the creation of stories in Nayi Kahaani. Hence, a story is new if it seeks a new reality, and not if it looks anew at something that has happened. It is not an experiment in craft but in narrative. The importance of the narrative is all-pervasive. It is associated with everyone, more or less. The participation in narrative … emotion or entertainment or psychological verisimilitude are not bridges to communication. The magic of language, shadow of idioms or uniqueness of style are no longer ornaments of story-telling—style is no longer a roopvadi (aestheticist) tradition. Every story’s narrative is to determine its own style. The challenge to present reality by releasing oneself from artificial forms such as the epistolary, diary, memoirs has become important. And if seen at the level of realism then on one end contemporary stories have characters who are disappearing from life due to their strong Indian values—like the father and other elders—the mother from “Aadra,”27 the father from “Gulra ke Baba” (Gulra’s Father),28 the mother from “Chief ki Daavat” (Chief’s Feast), the father from “Biradari Baahar” (Out of the Community),29 the father from “Vaapsi” (Return)30 or “Pitaah” (Father) and mother from “Raktpat” (Bloodloss).31

Short story by Mohan Rakesh.

27

Short story by Markandey.

28

Short story by Rajendra Yadav.

29

Short story by Usha Priyamvada.

30

Short story by Dudhnath Singh.

31

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

265

The modern woman has now emerged with full dignity, ownership and respect. “Yehi Sach Hai” (This is the truth),32 “Mitro Marjani” (To Hell with you, Mitro),33 “Lal Paranda” (Red Bird),34 “Zindagi aur Gulab ke Phool” (Life and Rose Flowers)35 and many other stories have women posited in authentic contexts and affairs of life. These women are not merely satisfied to seek out values and meanings through their man, but rather independently participate in their own lives and are responsible for themselves. Sex is no longer understood as a sin, but as an acceptable and compulsive need. It is not a savoring of the author’s frustration, but a simple desire of the character’s physical needs. Women are now women, they are not merely belles or courtesans. Hence Nayi Kahaani lacks vamps, who used to be required at every step. Now there are two poles—woman and man—who are face to face with their expectations and all their consistencies and inconsistencies. No more swamps of doubt-riddled relations. A woman’s body is now her own. Fraud, rape and the illicit liaisons with sisters-in-law are no longer an issue for the author’s empathy. It is not a literary achievement to consider loneliness as a “posture” or as romantic pretense. This is not a truthful depiction. In reality, is man not really lonely only amidst the storm of circumstances, taboos, dissolution and corruption? There is a tendency for the common masses to be surplus in destiny. This is a tendency among our youth or those who remain idle, appearing to be useless misfits, that is those who can’t grab hold of life or those whose grip has now turned infirm, to remain excluded from contemporary society. But this is not a curse of intimidation, death or some overruling force but a blessing of contemporary dissolutions, where a bored or worrisome individual is also present. Due to mechanization and fissures in domesticity, the troubled individual, despite the evident futility, has not become fatalistic or too invested in the future—he is extracting a positive impression from the negative elements of repulsion, rage and rejection. The protagonist of the contemporary story is the middle-class individual, who is within his milieu, saturated from deriving nourishment for his existence from his social roots. He isn’t opportunistic or egotistical—he bears the actions and repercussions of his life, his victories and defeats; he accepts the declining lowly human condition; he savors or splurges his powers of decision, believing in the world and his existence; he bears joy and sorrows, seeking unknown horizons and a new balance in life. The author today is trying to visualize this totality of life—he is a participant in this literature … Hence he does not guarantee anything. He simply exercises his freedom to think and makes a humble attempt to represent with immediacy the individual emerging from this milieu. He is consequently confronted not with his own achievements, but with the question arising from this challenge. These points have only been raised in relation to authors faithful to the creation and craft, and not in the context of the mass-produced writing published in the hundreds of thousands. There is no point unless one distinguishes between responsible writing and fluff.

Short story by Mannu Bhandari, published in the volume of the same name.

32

Famous novel by Krishna Sobti that shot her to overnight fame. It is known for the strong and explicit sexual voice of Mitro, the protagonist.

33

Short story by Anita Rakesh, published in the volume Ek Doosra Alaska (A Second Alaska).

34

Novel by Usha Priyamvada.

35

VII. FROM THE TRUE STORY OF SATYAKATHA Raja Dhale Originally published in Marathi as “Satyakathechi Satyakatha” in Yeru (1969). Translated by Sadhana Bhagwat. Raja Dhale (1940–) is a Marathi poet, artist, editor, Dalit activist, and a co-founder of the Dalit Panthers, an organization modeled after the Black Panthers that was formed by a group of young Dalits in Bombay in 1972.1 As one of the few but significant Dalit voices of the sathottari (post-1960s) moment in Marathi literary culture, Dhale's voice is a particularly significant one.2 In Marathi literary criticism, the term sathottari is used to speak of a “radically experimental phase of Marathi writing … [which is] mired in simultaneous attributions of both nativism and the avant-garde.”3 It emerged as a reaction against the literature of the early period of modernism in the 1940s and 1950s which was associated with a more Westernized, upper-class, upper-caste sphere. Magazines like Satyakatha (The True Story), which ran from 1933 to 1982, became representative of this elitist faction of modernist writing, such that, “by the 1960s, [it] had become a onestop publishing location for writers to gain literary acceptance and respect in the Marathi world.”4 Sathottari little magazines constantly attacked Satyakatha (there was a bonfire of the latter publication in Bombay in 1969), one of the most famous critiques being Dhale’s “Satyakathechi Satyakatha” (The True Story of Satyakatha). This essay appeared as an entire issue of Dhale's little magazine, Yeru, in 1969. It garnered much positive and negative attention, and led to Dhale being briefly imprisoned. RG

An unknown person, many centuries ago, had described Marathi native language speakers as “people who take pride in and enjoy being argumentative.” I cannot be an exception to this rule as a native speaker. Every person who claims to be Marathi has these qualities. And he takes pride in being argumentative. A fully-fledged argument is incomplete without a few abuses and cuss words. If the ancient stone inscriptions are to be believed, they say the same thing. The inhabitants of this Maratha land dislike being instructed about right and wrong and those who tell them dos and don’ts run the risk of being abused. Following this adage I reserve all my right to call names and hurl abuses, so that they hit the intended target. Maybe being a Maharashtrian is in itself an abuse. When we were children, we parroted the daily pledge:    Marathi is my mother tongue,    Though it has lost its glory today    But a day will come, and bestow its glory.

Nico Slate, “The Dalit Panthers: Race, Caste, and Black Power in India,” in Black Power Beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement, ed. Nico Slate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

1

Anjali Nerlekar, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016): 37.

2

Nerlekar, Bombay Modern, 8.

3

Nerlekar, Bombay Modern, 49.

4

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

267

We yelled these lines, dreaming of the Marathi language as a goddess reclining on a gilded throne. Today there is no reason to dream—the Marathi tongue has been bestowed all the honor of Rajyabhasha or The State Language in the state of Maharashtra. But has it really? What I am witnessing about the state of our mother tongue is shocking enough. To save the great language, a complete shut down of the magazines that are churned out every month is needed. Readers must have surmised that the topic for today is the Marathi popular magazines and newspapers. It would be easy to enhance the richness of a language just by a crown. But that does not work. The richness of any language is gauged by its equally diverse and rich literary traditions. This keeps the language alive and progressive. High quality literature cannot just be spat out accidentally. Good literature can only be created in an environment that is nurtured for this purpose. Leave alone what we have today—mostly titillation in the guise of literature—but far worse are the commercial compulsions that beckon one like a street walker. It will be wrong to expect purity of character in the marketplace. The socalled classy literature with all its pretensions is rotten to the core. Is there a publication willing to promote literature of value? The honest answer will be no. Then most of us are free to attend every Marathi Literature Convention and keep blowing our own trumpets that great literature is being published. Without fail every chairman of these conventions is an old gaga who goes into raptures over the famous monthlies of his time. In reality the publications are hard at work not in serving the cause of good literature but rather that of personal agendas and of the politics of one-upmanship. These are empty pots which make most noise and we will expose them for what they stand for. If you need glasses just to see clearly, we also need to hold a mirror to your face. Now and again anyone stands up to sing praises of the so-called glorious past of great publications and great literature that is supposed to have appeared in them. Those were the golden days of magazines like Satyakatha. Yes maybe but that was in past! Some of the monthlies are still around, but are hardly alive. Satyakatha is a monthly that has added 35 years to its tally, but it has done so without gaining anything. It kept on reliving the fortyyear-old notion of literature, and serving the same to its readers. Who would be willing to spend one and a half rupee on such a trash? My esteemed friend Ashok Shahane5 used to tease every person reading any of these magazines by feigning astonishment and saying “This gets published even now?” In those days I was entertained by it, but today I am in agreement. There is no publication that can honestly claim to be accepted by the discerning readers. I feel sorry when it is claimed that Satyakatha is the only publication that is dedicated to great Marathi literature. It can be tested by the following excerpt from a piece published in the magazine: Navbharat is a monthly magazine dedicated to the intelligent reader—this is a very unfortunate claim made by the publisher. It is very clear that both the magazines have been declining due to the restrictive mindset of the people who run it. The situation is rather bleak, and to hope for the future is foolhardy. Therefore we do not wish to pin blame at any doorstep. But it is quite amusing that the very same people who run Satyakatha as it is now, come out and speak very seriously about serving good literature! And we are further amused when the same people delude themselves into Ashok Shahane is a prolific little magazine maker, editor, translator, and publisher, who was at the heart of the sathottari scene in Marathi literature. A polyglot, he translated contemporary world literature and Indian literatures from other languages into Marathi. He also edited little magazines such as Atharva Aso.

5

268

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

thinking that their magazine is doing well, and then they also crib about the falling standard of the writers in Navbharat. Before we go into the analysis of lines above, we must look at the Marathi newspapers. A folk poet has said that newspapers are the vehicles of democracy, which I am in agreement with. But he also claims that the editors are very unwilling to print critical appreciation of poetry. This is so because the critic’s piece is not important, but rather what is important is how much space can be allotted. The editors only want to fill some space. Once that is achieved, the write up is hacked and some part of it is used. So the content is never important; what counts is only how much space needs to be occupied. No one wants to read lengthy critical pieces on poetry. I had a similar experience at the Navshakti.6 They had edited out the important central part of the article. When I asked Bhau Padhye7 about it, he had a counter question about who reads such pieces nowadays. And if I do publish it, I have to face the boss, Mr Behere.8 This skirmish though had the desired effect and another article I wrote was published without any mindless editing. I had written the critical piece on “Majhe Vidyapeeth” (My University) as per the demand of Bhau, who wanted to publish it in Navshakti. It never appeared in the publication. Strangely it appeared in another publication Timba the next year.9 I was told that Mr Behere reportedly said that the criticism seemed so much bigger than the original article it was critiquing. They hardly understand that a collection of poems and critical appreciation are entirely different things. Once while discussing “Camus and Us,” Ashok had asked someone from Manohar10 pointedly that if it is indeed greatness if Camus had the ability to speak an entire book in one or two paragraphs. No one can reduce a book into a short summary. The original literary work and the critical commentary on it are entirely distinct from each other. If some references in both touch upon each other that is fine. If the original work is much smaller in content than the criticism, it should not matter in my view. But some policies have been established and everyone has to conform to those in this business. Every Sunday the newspapers are full of some literary piece or commentary. It is now mandatory for sub-editors to fill the pages with poetry written by themselves. Someone else fills some other pages and so on it goes. Regarding the critical comments that appear—the less said the better. What is passed off as criticism is limited to summary or a line or a word of the literature that is discussed to the point of boredom. This is the real sob story of the literature appearing in newspapers. The newspapers then make the natural progression to magazines. If I have to comment on the magazines, I must do this with the advice and input of others. The libraries that are run on government grants are not private property. But the managers sit in their respective positions as if they are there to guard their ancestral family Navshakti is a Marathi newspaper based in Mumbai.

6

Prabhakar Narayan Padhye (1926–96), popularly known as Bhau Padhye (Brother Padhye), was a Marathi journalist, novelist, playwright, and screenplay writer. His columns were regularly published in many notable Marathi magazines. He was also an editor of Navshakti, although Dhale appears to be describing a time when P. R. Behere was still the editor.

7

P. R. Behere was the first editor of Navshakti.

8

Timba (The Dot) was a Marathi avant-garde little magazine.

9

Manohar was a Marathi literary journal which was very popular in the literary circles. Ashok Shahane’s landmark essay “Ajakalachya Marathi vangmayavar kshkiran” (An X-Ray of Today’s Marathi Literature), considered a foundational document of the post-60s Marathi modernism in Bombay, was published in Manohar in 1963.

10

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

269

treasury. They are convinced that only they are entitled to reap the benefits. I have myself donated scores of rare old magazine issues to many such libraries. They might account for 70% of the books on the shelves. Many rare books are printed in new editions, but it has never occurred to them that rare magazines can also be printed in this way. It has become a routine for them to misplace whatever I have donated. The same goes for reference books which have become extremely sought after as they are not available in libraries in Mumbai or anywhere else. But the concerned officials just say not available and forget about it. It is not their concern as they never bother to step into the reference book section; neither have they bothered to know about the severe shortage of some titles. While I was going through some reputed magazines of their times, I noticed that most of the pages in ninety percent of magazines were missing! And I am sure that this must happen mostly in our country. I do understand that tens of thousands of people visit public libraries each with varied objectives. Some just to pass time, some to snooze, many just to get friendly with girls, and some like myself come to decorate and mark pages with ink. Who can find the culprit if the pages have been vandalized by doodles or scandalous remarks. Scores of books are eaten by termites and there are no appeals against that. In the heat of the moment I once made a mistake of writing a few lines on the margins of a new book. Realizing my mistake, I offered to buy the book with an apology, but the boorish manager just shut the door in my face. My dear fellows, you and your books hardly matter to me. All those shelves are just trash, with no knowledge. Most of the books written by scholars are nothing but a bit taken from here and some taken from other sources. They have no idea about real talent or originality. Some of the literary figures just acquire a degree to become professors and then they are free to churn out mediocre books by thousands. Does anyone care for that literature? There are a few magazines which are self-professed cheap tabloids. They are at least honest with themselves and their readers. But I can’t really comment on those owing to a lack of knowledge. I do have a problem with those who have put on airs of being upper class and take pride in their superior culture which is far from the truth. If there are hundreds of good-for-nothing magazines, at least one of them should be of some quality? Magazines which patronize good literature command a certain price. But those who bring out such publications do not really think about the real value of quality. This is why meritocracy is driving this market where each other’s interests and camps are looked after. Every publication worth its salt collects all sorts of sycophants and yes men. I wish to draw your attention to a few letters regarding Abhiruchi.11 The controversy about the comments between P. L. Deshpande12 and Umakanth Thomre who had published of his works in Abhiruchi on the poetic style of G. D. Madgulkar.13 It is surprising that Thomre spotted the talent in G. D. Madgulkar so early on in his career. Anyway P. L. Deshpande was always there to make the necessary recommendations. But a bloated ego does not take anyone to greatness. The time comes when the back slapping buddies fall

Abhiruchi was an important Marathi literary magazine launched by Atmaram Chitre, the father of Dilip Chitre.

11

Purushottam Lakshman Deshpande (1919–2000), popularly known as “Pu La” Deshpande, was one of the most well-loved Marathi humorists. Aside from being a writer, he was also involved with the Marathi film industry in various capacities.

12

Gajanan Digambar Madgulkar (1919–77) was a Marathi writer and poet. He had also worked as a part of the Marathi film industry.

13

270

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

out. I am reminded of the comments made by G. D. Madgulkar about the Nav Kavya (New Wave) in Marathi poetry. He had called it a foreign concept which would never be accepted in the established poet saint traditions of the Marathi language. For all these tall claims his own poems cannot be termed as representing the Indian culture. For example his work “Jogiya”—and I quote—“Sitar is sleeping quietly in the corner.” One of my lawyer friends from Kolhapur pointed out that this line has destroyed the entire poem. A courtesan has nothing to do with a string instrument like sitar. The word should have been sarangi instead. This person uses sitar instead of sarangi and we expect him to carry forward Indian culture!14 In the name of Indian culture we get cuss words in a foreign tongue which he uses for others. And people at large look up to such persons to carry forward the great poet saint traditions! No one really knows about these traditions as they claim. The writers have their own groups and coteries and this is why when P. L. Deshpande, the wellknown writer, trashed Thomre, others watched without a murmur. Take the example of the 1964 Diwali edition of reputed magazine Manohar. It is obvious that articles are edited randomly or some parts are deleted before printing. My friend Bhalchandra Nemade15 had referred to P. L. Deshpande as the “so-called esteemed writer” without naming him. And the higher ups in the monthly are busy running after the esteemed writer. They just make lofty claims to further the cause of great literature in the field of entertainment. But those claims are laughable. Every monthly worth its salt has to pay glowing tributes to P. L. Deshpande or be dammed. There is no possibility that such a great writer would put up his popular play Batatyachi Chawl for the financial aid of the monthly. Yet the magazines are more than willing to bend for him. The strategy of the well-established writer is to lavish praise on the young upcoming talent. The lavish praise does the trick and the poor new talent immediately falls prey to this trick. As a result P. L. becomes the literary idol to be worshipped. Whatever literature they create is influenced by the anticipation of P. L.’s reaction to it. It is frightening to think what demands are made on the poor writers by the editors of popular monthlies, when a famous writer like P. L. Deshpande, who is not even an editor, has everyone at his beck and call. The other magazine that is looked upon as the savior of the new breed of idealistic poets is Satyakatha. Though the image held by the dreamy new poets is far removed from the truth. A poor fellow sends his verses but it is repeatedly refused, and the poet is convinced that the monthly is only for those who are far superior than him. But he is unable to understand the low and dirty politics behind it. There is a girl in my office who is enamored of Satyakatha and waits with bated breath for the next issue each month. Who can snap her out of her misplaced love. But the question that begs an answer is the identity of the editor of this monthly. The name which appears as the editor should have an infinite number of indebted and grateful followers who have dedicated their latest literary piece to him. But the name that is mentioned in most book dedications is that of Prof. S. P. Bhagwat16 instead. My

Sitar and sarangi are both Indian string instruments. Traditionally, sarangi is the instrument that plays when a courtesan performs. Madgulkar’s poem mistakenly refers to the sitar and not the sarangi while referring to a courtesan’s room.

14

Bhalchandra Nemade (1938–) is a Marathi poet, novelist, and essayist who was deeply involved with the little magazine movement.

15

Shri Pu Bhagwat (1923–2007) was an editor and publisher who wielded a great deal of power within the Marathi literary and publishing industry. He was the director of Mauj Prakashan, and the editor of the periodicals Mauj and Satyakatha. He also presided over the 3rd Marathi Publisher Sammelan in 1987.

16

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

271

old friend C. T. Khanolkar,17 who is better known by his pen name Aarti Prabhu, has expressed his gratitude and dedicated his literary works to S. P. Bhagwat, and so has Gangadhar Gadgil.18 I am unable to reproduce the exact words of gratitude, as I do not have the books, but those who are interested enough should get a library membership, and go through the stack of Mauj. You will come across ten or twelve gushing dedications in honor of S. P. Bhagwat, penned by many writers. Look into any literary collection of B. B. Borkar,19 there are glowing tributes to the same person. At any literary meet or discussions about books, it is a known fact that the editor of Satyakatha is S. P. Bhagwat. It is not a surprise that he has also edited many stories and books written by Gadgil. This is how the interest and favors are distributed, and how various circles or coteries complement each other. All the great personalities that are engaged in the pursuit of all-round knowledge show this ugly side too. As Bhagwat is also a respected professor in our college, the following notes in my diary will give a fair idea about how said person conducts his class. 15/1/69 Today S. P. Bhagwat was in our class and it was amusing. He was saying that whatever was written ages ago should be thrown away and everything modern should be considered best is a mistake and vice versa. In other words works of saint Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram should be accepted and anything that came later should be discarded is a kind of headstand. We must consider the times and era when these works were written before passing any judgments he said. I think he was hinting at Ashok. Then why was he silent when “ … Kshkiran”20 was written? He should have answered questions put by the students then. Ashok had the guts, but this person does not. He later proceeded to take Mahimbhat to task over the sections pertaining to Chakradhar. Lila Charitra21 fulfills all the parameters of classic literature. The literature that came later does not come even close. Every word in Lila Charitra is measured and used with perfection. The literary work has done away with object, subject and punctuation in the sentences, which may have been thought as grammatical constraints. At times just a verb or an adjective has been used to form very meaningful sentences. While reading the sections of the literature in class the professor kept commenting on the frequent use of colons in the literature. Mahimbhat was a great genius in literature as he proved through his work, and definitely not like the educated fools who fail to see greatness under their noses. A person who displays absolute command over words, no doubt has equal understanding of punctuation marks. So the great Mahimbhat is a moron but the anglicized professor is genius. The grammar in the older work is much better and it

Chintamani Tyambak Khanolkar (1930–76), popularly known by his pen name “Aarti Prabhu,” was a Marathi poet, novelist, and playwright.

17

Gangadhar Gopal Gadgil (1923–2008) was a prolific Marathi writer who wrote novels, plays, essays, travelogues, and literary criticism, as well as children’s literature.

18

Balakrishna Bhagwat Borkar (1910–84) was a poet from Goa, India, who wrote in Marathi and Konkani.

19

Refers to Shahane’s essay “Ajakalachya Marathi vangmayavar kshkiran” (An X-Ray of Today’s Marathi Literature).

20

Lila Charitra by Mahimbhat is a thirteenth-century Marathi literary text which was part of the university curriculum. Considered to be one of the first Marathi literary works, it is a biography of Sri Chakradhar Swami, who propagated a social movement in the thirteenth century that rejected ritualistic religion and accepted people irrespective of their castes.

21

272

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

does away with unnecessary commas and question marks. These learned people think the British were the know-alls and our writers are fools. What is passed off today as Marathi is actually language devised by a Major Candy.22 This sahib introduced the commas and full stops into our language. Actually: is Bhagwat coming today: that this sentence is a question is very clear due to the “is.” What rubbish did you teach today: here too “what” signifies a question. Where is the need to use the question mark when the question shows itself clearly in the sentence: But we are forced to use this punctuation because English wants us to—that is the reasoning of these foolish English-educated scholars. Every sentence speaks for itself. When we say where are you going do we speak the question mark. If we don’t speak punctuation why write it: the sentence in itself is spoken with punctuation. When Lila Charitra was written (:) and (.) were the only punctuation marks used and that was a correct method and practice. What is seen today has been forced on us by the British. What Mahimbhat used then was just (:) which seems incorrect and what British introduced (?!;,) all that is very convenient. Full stop denotes that the sentence has ended. We speak without punctuation and that is how it should be. Mahimbhat was absolutely right and what we do today is foolish. For example they would say “gone”: how is one to know if this word is intended as a question. Every word comes after many words which have meaningful context which gives sense to the following word. In that case there should not be any need for various punctuation marks. As dialogue progresses the meaning becomes apparent: If anyone of the learned few goes ahead in pursuit of a doctorate degree and writes a thesis on spoken language of the seventeenth century the other scholars will immediately make fun of the subject. The reason being there is no way to really know how a given word was pronounced in that era and therefore according to the scholars it is a useless exercise. But they forget what such study can tell us about words and what it can tell us about grammar. Today though it’s possible to record sounds there are limitations to how many voices and sounds can be recorded. If a person pronounces a certain word in a certain way this in fact will be very difficult to establish five, ten, or a hundred years later. There no doubt will be many people around then who will also make fun of such studies. Those who consider bookish heavy language and spoken language as different from each other just exhibit their narrow minds. The printed word also talks to its reader so it is also a spoken language. We all are engaged in studying spoken language including that of S. P. Bhagwat our professor. Who is making fun of whom does matter a lot. We make fun of a certain set of people who think they have a right to laugh at some other set of people. These few people are our esteemed teachers who predictably mark our answer sheets with zeros whenever we choose to have our own view. In the BA we are judged third class pass. MA, flunked. To cut the story short the professors make fun of the study of spoken language of the seventeenth century which actually is a great achievement. By cracking jokes at others’ expense the professors just try to become popular among the students. They are the real students. I pray to God: please save me from such teachers who always want me to become just like them. With that the diary entry for 15/1/69 has ended. So Bhagwat should refrain from forcing his views in his lessons. The chairman of the respected drama production company Rangayan has failed in his own drama. I say why should S. P. Bhagwat hide his multi-talented personality. Just as his name as the real editor of Satyakatha has been kept hidden. Or there is some motive involved. We need to understand the inside story. Major Thomas Candy (1804–77) was a member of the British army, a Christian missionary, and an important Marathi lexicographer.

22

VIII. MODERN LITERATURE Ka. Naa. Subramanyam Originally published in Tamil as “Naveena Ilakkiyam” c. 1986–87. Translated by Darun Subramaniam from Ilakiya Vimarsanangal: Ka. Naa. Su Katturaigal, II (Literary Criticism: Ka. Na. Su’s Essays, II), edited by Kaavya Shanmugasundaram (Kaavya: Chennai, 2005). Ka. Naa. Subramanyam (Ka. Naa. Su) (1912–88) was a Tamil writer, translator, and literary critic. He is considered to be the most influential literary critic in modern Tamil literature. In this essay, Ka. Naa. Su investigates the relationship between tradition and the modern, and sees criticism as a historically necessary undertaking that animates the modern: “[The] modern sensibility,” he says, “is realized through criticism.” His method of criticism emphasizes the primacy of “literary taste” and regards the experience literature produces in a reader as the chief arbiter of literary merit. His penchant for prescription of literature is evident in this essay, and the works and writers he celebrates in it form the modern Tamil literary canon today. Ka. Naa. Su fought all his life against the proliferation of second-rate literature through the commercially driven periodicals of his time, and he, along with his literary nemesis, C. S. Chellappa, started numerous tabloids that were instrumental in the flourishing of modern Tamil poetry. Ka. Naa. Su identified the lack of a rigorous and continuous body of literary criticism in Tamil as a major reason for this capitulation to substandard, vulgar literary trends. His intervention in the critical scene consolidated the critical framework in Tamil literature, and promoted “serious” literature. Apart from criticism, Ka. Naa. Su’s great contribution to modern Tamil literature was through his translations. He translated Swedish, Norwegian, French, and English novels into Tamil. His translation of Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas (Aṉpu Vaḻi in Tamil) along with his novel Oru nāḷ created a modernist wave that deeply influenced the course of the modern Tamil novel. He was also the first to introduce a conception of “World Literature” to the Tamil reader. This essay serves as an excellent overview of modern Tamil literature—its fiction, poetry, criticism, and commercial writings; its exponents and their major works— and how they problematize the terms “modern” and “literature.” DS

The appellation “Modern Literature” is a conjunction of two words. It is necessary that we understand fully, and in the fullest capacity, what these words mean. In fact, this is absolutely necessary. Firstly, let us turn to “Modern.” The adjective “Modern” refers to time. A time that is associated closely with our present-day lives, and the distinctive writings of this time. Some literature tends to remain modern at all times, though this is very rare. In Tiruvaḷḷuvar,1 we come across non-human entities that remain very much like human

Tiruvaḷḷuvar (believed to have been born in 31 BCE) was a Tamil poet and philosopher. He wrote Tirukkuṟaḷ (composed sometime around 1 CE), a classical philosophical treatise on ethics. It is written in verse and contains 1330 couplets.

1

274

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

beings, and this, at the level of ideas, one wonders, would remain “modern” for all times. In Cilappatikāram,2 some passages highlighting city life, despite having been written a thousand years ago, seem distinctly “modern.” Likewise, when we read Rāmāyaṇam (The Rāmāyaṇa), Mahāpāratam (The Mahābhārata),3 or Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacaritham,4 we experience them not only as old but also, simultaneously, as “modern.” This modern sensibility is realized through criticism. In modern approaches to literature, literary creation and literary criticism appear to share a close proximity in terms of their shared “literary vision,” though they do not exactly coincide. There was a time when literary genius and literary criticism were two different things. In Indian literary tradition, the writer and the critic were two different people. “The writer should not be a literary critic,” was a widely-held sentiment. But modern literary perspectives have spawned the idea that it is not possible for literary creation to happen without the aid of a critical vision. The notion that criticism itself is a creative act is also popular. If some say that, “Carasvati5 rests in my mouth and directs my speech” or “Parācakti6 stands behind me and directs my pen,” we need to understand that they do not mean it in a literal sense. They are rather finding metaphors from tradition to express their inability to locate their creative genius. It looks like we have come to know our language and our literary tradition, and other languages and their traditions, through criticism. Even if we don’t recognize this knowledge as capacious and subtle, we need to recognize in it a certain depth. Modern literature acts like criticism in its very approach to understanding tradition. At the level of criticism, it becomes clear that language and literature rely on a shared tradition and a shared set of conventions. The modern literary perspective has recently informed us that those who create modern literature, do so by interacting with tradition both in affirmation and in contestation. Modern aspects of literature comprise critical engagement with tradition, the selfcritical nature of creativity, the nature of world literature, and one needs to add to this list, the scientific knowledge that stands as the foundation of modern times. One does not find a full development of these four aspects of modern Tamil literature. This is largely the case with Indian literature as well. Despite having a long and glorious literary tradition,7 we have failed to critically establish it in the global arena. It also strikes me that we are insensitive to carrying out this task. One finds modern Indian literature to be not as fully developed, or not even close to attaining this maturity, but only at the nascent, “developmental” stage.

Cilappatikāram (c. 5th CE) is one of the five great Tamil Epics. It is attributed to the Jain poet Iḷaṅkōvaṭikaḷ, and is a poem telling the “tragic” story of Kōvalaṉ (a merchant who squanders his wealth on the temple dancer, Mātavi), and his faithful wife Kaṇṇaki, who eventually becomes a goddess.

2

The Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata are the two great Hindu epics.

3

Buddhacaritham is an epic poem in Sanskrit on the life of Gautama Buddha by Aśvaghoṣa, composed in the early second century CE.

4

Hindu goddess of wisdom, music and art.

5

Supreme Mother goddess in Hindu mythology; source of power and creativity.

6

Tamil boasts a literary tradition spanning at least 2500 years. The oldest extant text is Tolkāppiyam (5 BCE– 2BCE?), a treatise on Tamil grammar. The earliest Tamil poems belong to the Caṅkam period (3 BCE–2CE).

7

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

275

Popular writers like Sujatha write science fiction novels and short stories in popular periodicals and attract a wide readership.8 But these writings do not spring forth from our own systems of knowledge. Jayakanthan’s writings are at once popular and possess considerable literary merit.9 Yet the intellectual component of his writings and their emotional content seem to be separate. T. Janakiraman’s Mōkamuḷ had an intellectual plot while his more recent novels like Am’mā vantāḷ and Marappacu have not attained this fullness.10 There were also writings of some authors published in magazines that were not popular, that were not later published as books, but were modern and contained intellectual experimentation. After Subramania Bharati,11 Pudumaippithan12 and Mowni13 should be considered as important modern writers in Tamil. Their best short stories carry the imprint of modern intellectual tradition, which is a major trait of modern literature. Likewise, in Sundara Ramaswamy’s Oru puḷiyamarattiṉ katai (Tamarind History) one finds the same intellectual impact.14 This impact is most fully felt in the novel he wrote after twenty years, and published only recently, called J.J. Cila kuṟippukkaḷ.15 How well this novel will be received, read, and recognized, we will have to wait and see. But this is a major attempt. Nakulan’s four to five novels are the outcomes of a completely modern intellectual influence, and more importantly, literary intellectual influence.16 But these books have largely gone unread. Sadly, this is the state of modern Tamil literature. I think the above examples would suffice. We can add to this Sa. Kandasamy’s recent Avaṉ Āṉatu.17 The short story and new poetry, in response to the modern intellectual

Sujatha Rangarajan (1935–2008) was a popular Tamil writer and screenwriter, known for his science fiction and popular science writing.

8

D. Jayakanthan (1934–2015) was a writer, critic, journalist, and activist. He wrote for popular periodicals like Āfor popular, while also writing critically acclaimed novels and short stories.

9

T. Janakiraman (1921–82) wrote novels and short stories, including Mōkamuḷ (The Thorn of Passion, 1956), Am’mā vantāḷ (Mother Came, 1965), and Marappacu (1975), the latter of which has been translated into English by Lakshmi Kannan as Wooden Cow (Madras: Sangam Books, 1979).

10

Chinnaswamy Subramania Bharati (1882–1921) is considered to be the first modern writer in Tamil. He brought free verse to Tamil, inaugurating the “New Poetry,” movement, which was an attempt to democratize poetry by writing in the “real language of men.” He experimented with prose forms like the short story and the essay which set the template for modern Tamil prose. His pioneering efforts in journalism helped establish the field in Tamil. He was the sub-editor of the Tamil nationalist daily, Swadeshamitran, and edited the daily Vijaya and the weekly India. He was a freedom fighter and a social reformer. He was the first poet whose works were nationalized in 1949, and he remains the most influential literary and cultural figure in Tamil.

11

Pudumaipitthan, the pseudonym of C. Viruthachalam, (1906–48), was a Tamil modernist writer, considered to be the greatest modern short story writer. His highly satirical stories made extensive use of social critique.

12

Mowni, the pseduonym of S. Mani Iyer (1907–85), wrote highly symbolic works, devoid of extensive characterization and plot.

13

Sundara Ramaswamy (1931–2005) was one of the most important modernist writers and literary critics in Tamil, who experimented with the form of the short story and the novel. His first novel Oru puḷiyamarattiṉ katai (1966) is centered on a tamarind tree that witnesses the social transformations of post-independence India. It has been published in Blake Wentworth’s English translation as Tamarind History (New Delhi: Penguin, 2013).

14

J.J. Cila kuṟippukkaḷ (1986) is a novel in the form of a collage of diary entries. It explored the possibilities of the novel form, eschewing character development and plot. It has been translated into English by A. R. Venkatachalapathy as J. J.: Some Jottings (New Delhi: Katha, 2003).

15

Nakulan (T.K. Doraiswamy) (1921–2007) was a major modern Tamil poet and novelist.

16

Sa. Kandasamy (1940–) is a writer, critic, scholar, and film maker.

17

276

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

influence, have produced numerous writers with a modern intellectual sensibility. The stories of Ashokamitran18 and Na. Muthuswamy19 and the new poetry of Gnanakoothan,20 Nakulan, Mayan are worthy of mention. After all, it is not surprising for modern literature to give rise to new domains of thought and new forms of writing. One such literary form that emerged in the first part of this century in world literature is the short story. Beginning with the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the short story form traveled to France and Sweden. Most importantly, in the later years of the nineteenth century, it flourished in Russia, and then permeated Ireland, Germany, South America and Italy, and ripened. Even in India, there are critics who believe that the growth of the short story is greater than that of the novel. Historically it is correct to say that, in modern Tamil literature, in the period post-Subramania Bharati, in the 1930s, a literary renaissance occurred with the onset of the first wave of modernism in the realm of the short story. Starting with Pudumaippithan, Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan,21 Mowni, Na. Pichamurti,22 and then progressing to T. Janakiraman, La. Sa. Ramamirtham,23 Ku. Alagirisami.24 Following a brief period of dormancy, it picked up again in the 1950s after Jayakanthan and Sundara Ramaswamy started writing. The short story scene after 1965 has greatly matured. One can easily name ten to twelve good short story writers, at the least. There are pointed, modern differences, effected through time, in terms of form, content, and style between the short stories written earlier and in the present. In general, the early short stories—even the ones that exhibited pessimism and hopelessness as themes—acknowledged idealism. They embodied a universally accepted human psychology and contained a principle of harmony. Human sentiments, ambition, and belief were considered important. The short stories of recent times eschew idealism; there is a dearth of ambition in them. Human psychology is not sufficiently and satisfactorily dealt with, like in the old days. Not the man, but his circumstances, and the events that shape those circumstances have now become the subjects of literature. In modern literature, the novel too is treated as an important form, like the short story. It seems to me that the novel has flourished more than the short story. I have already mentioned a couple of novels and a few names but if we add to the list of Sundara Ramaswamy, Jayakanthan, T. Janakiraman, Sa. Kandasamy, Nakulan, the works of Neela

Ashokamitran (Jagadisa Thyagarajan) (1931–2017) was an important Tamil writer. His works explore the lives of the powerless and the meek in middle-class society, and employ a distinctive, deceptively simple, disinterested style.

18

Na. Muthuswamy (1936–) is the art director of Tamil folk theater group, “Koothu-P-Pattarai.” His play Kālam kālamāka is considered the first modern play in Tamil.

19

Gnanakoothan (R. Ranganathan) (1938–2016) was a modernist poet, whose poems contain unresolved paradoxes, digressions, and prose, alongside tropes from traditional poetry. His first collection Aṉṟu vēṟu kiḻamai was a very significant publication in modernist writing.

20

Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan (1902–44) was a short story writer, known for his careful, chiseled use of language and for writings that explored male-female relationships and psychology, with a clear Freudian influence.

21

Na. Pichamurti (1900–76) was considered Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan’s literary “twin.” He was a major modernist poet and a pioneer of philosophical fiction.

22

La. Sa. Ramamirtham (La. Sa. Ra) (1916–2007) was a short story writer, known for his highly experimental works.

23

Ku. Alagirisamy or G. Alagirisamy (1923–70) was a short story writer.

24

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

277

Padmanabhan,25 Ki. Rajanarayanan,26 Vannanilavan,27 Nanjil Nadan,28 Ashokamitran, and Aa. Madhavan,29 we get a glimpse of the pinnacle of achievements in modern Tamil literature. One of the major components of modern literature is the serialized long stories published in the periodicals. Till the 1980s there were only three popular magazines. Today there are around ten or twelve. This number is sure to increase in the coming years. It is indeed a matter of pride that among all the weeklies published in India, only the Tamil weeklies sell in lakhs.30 But seen from a different angle, the literary service they provide does not go beyond a certain standard. Whatever the standards may be, these periodicals greatly influence modern writing. One aspect of this influence is the acceptance of long serials as novels. The magazines also offer the readers humbug in the name of “new poetry.” Although there is much to write on these issues, while pertaining to modern literature, they are best left unsaid. Literary criticism in Tamil, as an institution, developed after the 1960s but did not grow to attain maturity and has remained stagnant. The contribution of criticism to modern Tamil literature should have been substantial, but it was not so. There are many reasons for this and they are not exclusive to Tamil literature. They are common to the literatures of many Indian languages. In our literary tradition, criticism did not develop as a historically continuous body. Schools and colleges did not provide the grounds for a critical engagement with the literatures of the past. We did not conceive of ancient literature as a living thread. There are many such reasons. There are few critics in Tamil who can recognize, assess and prescribe modern literature as it is being published. Like in the West, criticism about critics, and complaints about them have started to come. This is a major limitation of modern Tamil literature. The influence of cinema on modern literature and criticism, although little, should be welcomed. Without the knowledge of the foundational texts, or literary history, some critics have tried developing critical attitudes in Tamil just by watching European and American cinema. This has provided different viewpoints to criticism. Significant among modern Tamil literature is the “New Poetry.”31 The father of modern Tamil literature, Subramania Bharati sought to put an end to “thought quantified and measured on the tips of the fingers to be able to render itself to poetry.” But the prose poems of Bharati did not capture the imagination of his readers. But this lack of attention to his prose poems might be rectified through Gnanakoothan’s recently released Bharathiyin Puthukavithai. Following Bharati, in the 1930s, Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan and Neela Padmanabhan (1938–) is known for his realist novels.

25

Ki. Rajanarayanan (1922–) is known for his elaborately descriptive stories set in rural villages, which make use of spoken language and folklore. His novels espouse Marxist philosophy.

26

Vannanilavan (U. N. Ramachandran) (1949–) is a novelist.

27

Nanjil Nadan (G. Subramaniam) (1947–) is a prolific writer of fiction, short stories, and essays. His fiction incorporates references from classical Tamil literary tradition.

28

Aa. Madhavan (1934–) writes novels and stories set around Chalai Bazaar, exploring the lives and activities of merchants, scoundrels, and beggars.

29

A lakh is an Indian measure for 100,000.

30

The term “New Poetry” (or “Putu kavitai”) was coined by Ka. Naa. Su, to describe poetic innovations by Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan, Na. Pichamurti, and Gnanakoothan, who built on Subramania Bharati’s experiments with prose poems. This new poetry was influenced by Ezra Pound’s “A Retrospect” (1918) and valued economy of words, precise diction, and limited description. The anthology, Putu kuralkaḷ (New Voices, 1958) is a landmark publication in the history of New Poetry.

31

278

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Na. Pichamurti tried their hands at prose poems. But only after 1960, when Pichamurti started writing and publishing under the tag of Putu kavitaikaḷ (New Poetry) did this take shape into a movement and a convention. I have made my own contribution to this movement. New poetry has been attempted in every period in history, and in all languages of the world. More than a hundred names along the lines of Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot can be named. This new poetry has been shaped by and to some extent encompasses the complexities of modern life and the impact of modern science. Modern Tamil poetry is no exception to this. In about twenty years, around twenty to thirty noteworthy names have emerged in the modern Tamil poetry scene. Shanmuga Subbaiah,32 Gnanakoothan, Nakulan, Pasuvaiah33 are some important figures. In a sense, it will have to be said that the two supreme forms of modern Tamil literature are the novel and New Poetry. Dialect literatures corresponding to different zones of Tamilnadu are major components of modern Tamil literature, predominantly written in the form of a novel or a short story. This was inaugurated by R. Shanmugasundaram.34 Novels of the Kōvai35 region like Nākam’māḷ, Caṭṭi cuṭṭatu, Aṟuvaṭai are some of the best novels in the Tamil language.36 The novels and short stories of T. Janakiraman employ the linguistic registers of the Thanjavur region. Very recently, Ki. Rajanarayanan, Vanna Nilavan, Vanna Dasan,37 Nanjil Nadan are some important names that have emerged. Over the century, periodicals have become the most flourishing part of modern Tamil literature. I have already mentioned this. In Tamil, there are some ten popular magazines that sell around one lakh, two lakh or five lakh copies. The effect of journalistic prose is seen in all other forms of modern literature and across all languages. The writings of Subramania Bharati are considered to be the beginnings of modern Tamil literature because, in addition to being a Mahākavi (Great Poet), he was also a journalist. With the influence and dominance of periodicals, we see literature being put through some complications, and this is true with regard to modern literature. The period that we call “Modern” gave rise to periodicals which affect the second word in the appellation—“Modern Literature”—because they affect the standard of literature.38 The writers who feature every week without fail in these magazines are the only names that stay in the minds of the readers. The readers who read these stories and serials written for pure entertainment, in addition to remembering their authors, Shanmuga Subbaiah (1924–) wrote poems that are known for the poet’s unobtrusive voice, their simplicity of language, and the strong presence of the oral register.

32

Sundara Ramaswamy wrote 108 poems under the pseudonym Pasuvaiah.

33

R. Shanmugasundaram (1918–77) is a novelist who belonged to the Manikkodi group of writers. His first novel Nākam’māḷ (1941) is regarded as the first serious realist novel in Tamil. The novel was also the harbinger of the so-called Vaara Ilakkiam (Dialect Literature) genre in the Tamil novel.

34

Kovai or Coimbatore is the name of an important city in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu where Shanmugasundaram’s novels are based.

35

Nākam’māḷ, Caṭṭi cuṭṭatu, and Aṟuvaṭai are all novels by Shanmugasundaram, depicting the regional specificity of the Kovai region.

36

Vannadasan (1946–) writes poetry under the pen name Kalyanji. He is known for his eye for detail.

37

While commercial writing flourished in popular periodicals and weeklies, modern literature in Tamil emerged in the avant-garde magazines that operated alongside these popular publications. Weeklies like Manikkodi, C.S Chellappa’s Ezhthu, Ka. Naa. Su’s Suraavazhi, and many others carried experimental poetry and short stories, translations, and literary debates that consolidated a set of values which we now recognize as “modern.” These magazines were responsible for the creation of modern Tamil literary criticism, largely through the contributions of the writers themselves.

38

SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISM

279

also start experiencing periodical stories as short stories and serials as novels. This is a general trend in modern literature, seen across all languages. This is true to some extent for some world languages. But there, in the Western countries—in France, America, England—a great critical tradition spanning 400 to 500 years is in place. In India, this literary awareness came about only recently. That is, the ability to read by oneself and to understand is a phenomenon that occurred only after the advent of English education. Before this, although Indian peoples were cultured and literate, and intelligent, they were not “well read” or “learned.” They achieved knowledge only through oral traditions. Despite having a 3000-year-old literary tradition, the lack of a developed tradition of literary criticism has provided room for magazines to thrive and establish a commonsense notion that whatever is written is worthy of being called Literature. We have reached a state where, instead of functioning as an aid and source of modern literature, the periodicals, in order to be commercially successful, stand in opposition to Literature, and promote and celebrate pseudo-literature. This is an unfortunate but fairly common aspect of modern literature. Modern Literature and its development, like in other Indian languages, has been imbricated in various artistic and intellectual fields, and through various publishing outlets. This has imbued Indian writing with great possibilities and given it great encouragement. Modern Literature today serves as a fine bridge—a conduit to accessing tradition—giving us every reason to be hopeful of a future, just as great as the past.

280

CHAPTER NINE

Chinese Modernism EDITED BY STEPHEN J. ROSS

China’s fraught relation to modernity and modernization makes the task of defining Chinese modernism a difficult one. Scholars continue to debate precisely when China became modern and what modernity means in this context. While some would argue that China did not start to become modern until well into the twentieth century, others would situate the onset of modernity in China in the nineteenth century, or even earlier (according to one prominent modernist scholar, China became modern long before Japan and the West).1 Certainly in the early decades of the twentieth century China was still marked by millennia of hierarchical Confucian traditionalism and dynastic rule and had not modernized on the order of colonizers such as Britain and Japan. Yet the imperial incursions of Western powers and Japan into China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also inevitably dragged it into the capitalist world-system. Whatever the case may be, China cannot really be said to have had a textbook modernist moment like the one that occurred, for instance, in post-Meiji Japan in the 1920s and 1930s; though if there was such a moment, it happened in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s. Nor was there a Chinese modernism that straightforwardly served as an apparatus of anticolonial struggle, as is the case with many other modernisms anthologized in this book. If China’s struggle to modernize was exacerbated by Japanese and Western imperialism, the obstinacy of Confucian traditionalism, and civil war, it was also a product of resistance to importing—and being situated within the framework of—Western values and concepts, one of them being modernism itself. Yet, while scholars of modern Chinese literature and culture have been reticent to posit something so monolithic (and, in many ways, incongruous and anachronistic) as “Chinese modernism,” modernism in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and among Chinese-speaking expatriates has proven to be a rich and various field of study that registers a century of wrenching political, aesthetic, and identitarian turmoil. This modernism has been an asynchronous, decentralized, and plural affair, spanning the New Culture Movement’s efforts to vernacularize classical Chinese literature and the singular flourishing of urbane Shanghainese modernism in the 1930s and 1940s to the revival of high modernist aesthetics in Taiwan in the 1950s and the avant-gardist refusal of social realism in the reform period following Mao’s death in 1976. If “Chinese modernism” is not really conceivable—being the expressive dimension of a modernity that never materially existed—it might be possible to conceive of modernism operating in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and abroad

In Planetary Modernism: Provocations on Modernity across Time, Susan Stanford Friedman posits a Tang dynasty (618–907) modernism.

1

282

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

as a state of mind, an orientation toward freighted topics like aesthetic form, imperialism, nation, the individual, the unconscious, the foreign, and the spiritual. Historians tend to date the emergence of modern China—or perhaps, the impingement of modernity on China—to the Opium Wars, which forcibly opened Chinese ports to Western trade under the auspices of asymmetrical treaties. These conflicts precipitated the more general decay of the Qing dynasty (1636–1912), which was further eroded by the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), the Hundred Days’ Reform (1898), and the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901). The eventual fall of the dynasty in 1912 in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution (1911) brought an end to four millennia of dynastic rule in China and inaugurated the Republic of China (mainland rule, 1912–49). While the founding of this constitutional republic seemed to portend reforms, the Republic of China did not stabilize under Kuomintang (National Peoples’ Party) rule until 1928 and was then successively riven by civil war, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, and the Communist takeover in 1949. The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by conflicting nationalist and globalist impulses. On the one hand, the anti-imperialist, anti-Christian, and anti-foreign sentiments unleashed so powerfully during the Boxer Rebellion signaled the emergence of a Chinese proto-nationalism. On the other hand, the recalcitrant, hierarchical conservatism of the decaying Qing dynasty spurred efforts to modernize China by exposing it to Western values and culture (mediated in part by Japan), a path that other declining imperial powers such as Turkey and Persia would follow. Holding these impulses in tension was the New Culture Movement (1915–19), which began with efforts to reform Chinese culture by eradicating the dynastic system, vernacularizing Chinese literature, and opening the country to foreign culture and technologies, a path that has parallels in other empires newly anxious about their status in a Western-dominated world, from Japan in the late nineteenth century to Turkey under Atatürk. New Culture Movement intellectuals initially blamed the suffocating persistence of Confucian traditionalism for China’s failure to modernize and achieve self-determination; Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), a leader of the movement and later a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), suggested “Mr. Confucius” be exchanged for “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.” In 1917 Hu Shih (1891–1962), a Western-educated leader of the movement, published an essay calling for a new Chinese literature written not in the classical language but in the vernacular. Hu’s call was answered famously by Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936), whose experimental frame narrative, “Diary of a Madman” (1918), introduced the vernacular into modern Chinese literature. Like many innovators of the New Culture Movement, Lu Xun had received a classical education but was also deeply immersed in foreign intellectual currents and committed to harnessing Western technologies and disseminating foreign literature in translation. He was therefore keenly aware of what stood to be lost and gained in the movement’s anti-isolationist “call to arms” (the title of his 1923 short-story collection). The New Culture Movement culminated in the May 4, 1919, student protests in Beijing against the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, which ceded German-occupied Chinese territory to Japan. The May Fourth Movement’s sense of betrayal by the Allies marked a souring of youthful idealization of the West and activated leftist political consciousness. In the wake of this sentiment, the CCP was founded in 1921. Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s was the indisputable center of modernism in China; indeed, some would argue that Shanghai modernism of this period is the only cultural formation we can meaningfully describe as Chinese modernism. The vividly

CHINESE MODERNISM

283

metropolitan Shanghai style of art and literature that crystallized during these years emerged from the city’s uniquely international character, dating back to the construction of the International Settlement in the nineteenth century. If the material conditions of Western-style modernity did not obtain throughout China, here at least they could be glimpsed. Writers associated with the Shanghai style (haipai) inaugurated cosmopolitan, hybrid modes of art-making keyed to the historical Western avant-gardes and to Japanese New Sensationism (shinkankakuha). The Francophile poet and editor Dai Wangshu (1905–50), for instance, began publishing free verse “new poetry” showcasing a French Symbolist sensibility transplanted to the urban theater of Shanghai. Dai and collaborators such as Mu Shiying (1912–40) and Shi Zhecun (1905–2003) published their fiction, poetry, and translations of foreign work in influential Shanghai-based modernist little magazines such as Xiandai (1932–5, also known as Les Contemporains). Perhaps the most influential chronicler of Chinese urban life during this period was Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920–95), a cosmopolitan novelist, essayist, and short story writer who drew on her experiences in Hong Kong and Shanghai in her wildly popular early novels and short stories. Chang, who was fluent in English, moved back to British-controlled Hong Kong in 1952, where she wrote her first novel in English, The Rice-Sprout Song (1955), a critique of the Communist land reform movement. She moved to the United States in 1955 and never returned to mainland China. Social realism would all but monopolize the field of literary production in China from 1949 until the late 1970s. At the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (1942), Mao Zedong had established two principles that would enshrine social realism as official CCP policy: (1) art must take the working class as its subject matter and audience, and (2) art must serve the advancement of politics, specifically socialism. While modernism had been routinely denounced by Communists and Nationalists alike as bourgeois, decadent, derivative, colonialist, and pathologically individualistic well before 1949, it became officially anathema in mainland China after the Communists came to power. Chinese-language modernism as such was not completely suppressed but did reassert itself in Taiwan after the Kuomintang retreat. In 1956, Ji Xian (1913–2013), a former practitioner of the “new poetry” and contributor to Xiandai in the 1930s, founded the popular “modernist school” in his journal, Xiandaishi jikan (Modern Poetry Quarterly). His six-part manifesto of the school famously defined the “new poetry” as “a horizontal transplantation, not a vertical inheritance” (i.e., in dialogue with the West and against traditional hierarchy) and aligned the “modernist school” with democracy, patriotism, and anti-communism. During the liberal reform period of the late 1970s and 1980s that followed Mao’s death, China experienced a striking resurgence of modernist practices. The “residual modernism” of the period, as the scholar Xiaobing Tang has dubbed it,2 violated social realist norms by courting difficulty over dogmatic plainness, valorizing individualism over collectivism, and reckoning with the trauma of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). “Scar Literature” aptly names an important realist genre that emerged in the late 1970s, as does “Misty Poetry,” an originally derogatory title for the experimental imagecentered free verse of poets who endured the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and were also skeptical of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. The late-breaking modernism of the “era of reforms” culminated in the so-called “Cultural Fever” of the mid-late 1980s,

Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

2

284

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

which marked the arrival of major avant-garde voices such as Gao Xingjian (1940–), Yu Hua (1960–), and Can Xue (Deng Xiaohua, 1953–) and which abruptly ended with the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. SJR

FURTHER READING Denton, Kirk, ed. Modernist Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. FitzGerald, Carolyn. Fragmenting Modernisms: Chinese Wartime Literature, Art and Film, 1937–49. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013. Hayot, Eric. “Modernism’s Chinas: Introduction.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18.1 (2006): 1–7. Hsia, C. T. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. 3rd edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930– 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Ning, Wang. “Rethinking Modern Chinese Literature in a Global Context.” Modern Language Quarterly 69.1 (2008): 1–11. Schaeffer, William. Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925–37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Shih, Shu-mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Tang, Xiaobing. Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Tang, Xiaobing. “Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman and a Chinese Modernism.” PMLA 7.5 (1992): 1222–34. Zhang, Xudong. Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

I. SOME THOUGHTS ON OUR NEW LITERATURE Lu Xun First published in Chinese in Weiming 2.8 (May 25, 1929). Translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang.

An icon of the “new literature” and widely considered one of the most important modern Chinese writers and thinkers, Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) lived through, and had a significant hand in guiding, the tumultuous emergence of modern China in the first decades of the twentieth century. Born to a family of fading distinction, Lu Xun received a classical Chinese education and endured the first Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Rebellion as a youth; these events coupled with his wide reading in foreign literature, his struggles as a student in Japan, and his abortive training as a doctor convinced him of China’s desperate need to modernize itself (and colored his acerbic skepticism about its prospects of doing so). His opposition to Confucian traditionalism and increasing commitment to leftist struggle (though eventually a fellow traveler of the CCP he was never officially a member) placed him at the fore of the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s. Although he stopped producing literature in the last decade of his life, he is perhaps most famous for his short fiction, especially “Diary of a Madman” (1918), a modernist frame narrative that inaugurated the use of the vernacular in modern Chinese literature and, with its terrifying governing conceit of tradition’s cannibalism, emblematized the ideals and anxieties of the May Fourth Movement. “Some Thoughts on our New Literature” was delivered as a lecture on May 22, 1929, at the National Literature Studies Association of Yenching University in Beijing. With characteristic satiric verve, Lu Xun criticizes a large swath of modern Chinese literature for being insular and falsely revolutionary. “Politics comes first, and art follows accordingly,” he avers, adding that properly revolutionary art does not precede and prompt political revolution but follows in its wake and registers the new revolutionary dispensation. In keeping with his lifelong commitment to translating and disseminating foreign works, Lu Xun traces the failures of so-called revolutionary literature of the time to its refusal to look abroad. SJR

For more than a year now I have spoken very seldom to young people, because since the revolution there has been very little scope for talking. You are either provocative or reactionary, neither of which does anyone any good. After my return to Beijing this time, however, some old friends asked me to come here and say a few words and, not being able to refuse them, here I am. But owing to one thing and another, I never decided what to say—not even what subject to speak on. I meant to fix on a subject in the bus on the way here, but the road is so bad that the bus kept bouncing a foot off the ground, making it impossible to concentrate. That is when it struck me that it is no use just adopting one thing from abroad. If you have buses, you need good roads too. Everything is bound to be influenced by its surroundings, and this applies to literature as well—to what in China is called the new literature, or revolutionary literature.

286

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

However patriotic we are, we probably have to admit that our civilization is rather backward. Everything new has come to us from abroad, and most of us are quite bewildered by new powers. Beijing has not yet been reduced to this, but in the International Settlement in Shanghai, for example, you have foreigners in the center, surrounded by a cordon of interpreters, detectives, police, “boys,” and so on, who understand their languages and know the rules of foreign concessions. Outside this cordon are the common people. When the common people come into contact with foreigners, they never know quite what is happening. If a foreigner says “Yes,” his interpreter says, “He told me to box your ears.” If the foreigners says “No,” this is translated as “Have the fellow shot.” To avoid such meaningless trouble you need more knowledge, for then you can break through this cordon. It is the same in the world of letters. We know too little, and have too few materials to help us to learn. Liang Shiqiu has his Babbitt, Xu Zhimo has his Tagore, Hu Shih has his Dewey—oh yes, Xu Zhimo has Katherine Mansfield too, for he wept at her grave1—and the Creation school2 has revolutionary literature, the literature now in vogue. But though a good deal of writing goes with this, there is not much studying done. Right up to today, there are still some subjects which are the private preserve of the few men who set the questions. All literature is shaped by its surroundings and, though devotees of art like to claim that literature can sway the course of world affairs, the truth is that politics comes first, and art changes accordingly. If you fancy art can change your environment, you are talking like an idealist. Events are seldom what men of letters expect. That is why the so-called revolutionary writers before a great revolution are doomed. Only when the revolution is beginning to achieve results, and men have time to breathe freely again, will new revolutionary writers be produced. This is because when the old society is on the verge of collapse you will very often find writing which seems rather revolutionary, but is not actually true revolutionary literature. For example, a man may hate the old society, but all he has is hate—no vision of the future. He may clamor for social reforms, but if you ask what sort of society he wants, it is some unrealizable Utopia. Or he may be tired of living, and long for some big change to stimulate his senses, just as someone gorged with food and wine eats hot pepper to whet his appetite. Then there are the old campaigners who have been spurned by the people, but who hang out a new signboard and rely on some new power to win a better status for themselves. There have been cases in China of writers who look forward to revolution but fall silent once the revolution comes. The members of the South Club3 at the end of the Qing Dynasty are an example. That literary coterie agitated for revolution, lamented the sufferings of the Hans, raged at the tyranny of the Manchus and longed for a return to the “good old days.” But after the establishment of the Republic they lapsed into utter silence. I fancy this was because their dream had been for “a restoration of ancient splendor”

Lu Xun disparages prominent members of the Crescent Moon Society (1923–31), a “conservative” society influenced by Anglo-American humanism. Liang Shiqiu (1903–87) was a writer, literary critic, educator, and translator influenced by the “New Humanism” of Harvard literary critic Irving Babbitt. Xu Zhimo (1897–1931) was a poet and translator (including a major interlocutor with the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore) who opened Chinese poetry to Western forms and to the Chinese vernacular. Hu Shih (1891–1962) was a Chinese Nationalist and scholar who helped establish Chinese vernacular as the official written language.

1

The Creation Society began in the early 1920s as a promoter of romantic individualistic expressivism but had shifted toward a radical revolutionary platform by the late 1920s (at least nominally).

2

The South Society, founded in 1909, was a major literary organization of the late Qing Dynasty.

3

CHINESE MODERNISM

287

after the revolution—the high hats and broad belts of the old officials. As things turned out differently and they found the reality unpalatable, they felt no urge to write. Even clearer examples can be found in Russia. At the start of the October Revolution many revolutionary writers were overjoyed and welcomed the hurricane, eager to be tested by the storm. But later the poet Yesenin4 and the novelist Sopoly5 committed suicide, and recently they say the famous writer Ehrenburg6 is becoming rather reactionary. What is the reason for this? It is because what is sweeping down on them is not a hurricane, and what is testing them is not a storm, but a real, honest-to-goodness revolution. Their dreams have been shattered, so they cannot live on. This is not so good as the old belief that when you die your spirit goes to heaven and sits beside God eating cakes.7 For they died before attaining their ideal. Of course China, they say, has already had a revolution. This may be so in the realm of politics, but not in the realm of art. Some say, “The literature of the petty-bourgeois is now raising its head.” As a matter of fact, there is no such literature; this literature has not even a head to raise. Judging by what I said earlier—little as the revolutionaries like it—there has been no change or renaissance in literature, and it reflects neither revolution nor progress. As for the more radical revolutionary literature advocated by the Creation Society— the literature of the proletariat—that is simply empty talk. Wang Duqing’s8 poem, which has been banned here, there and everywhere, was written in the International Settlement in Shanghai whence he looked out towards revolutionary Guangzhou. But his PONG, PONG, PONG!9 in ever larger type merely shows the impression made on him by Shanghai film posters and advertisements for soya sauce. He is imitating Blok’s The Twelve,10 but without Blok’s force and talent. Quite a number of people recommend Guo Moruo’s Hand11 as an excellent work. This tells how a revolutionary lost a hand after the revolution, but with that remaining to him could still hold his sweetheart’s hand—a most convenient loss, surely! If you have to lose one of your four limbs, the most expendable certainly is a hand. A leg would be inconvenient, a head even more so. And if all you expect to lose is one hand, you do not need so much courage for the fray. It seems to me, though, a revolutionary should be prepared to sacrifice a great deal more than this. The Hand is the old, old tale about the trials of a poor scholar who ends, as usual, by passing the palace examination and marrying a beautiful girl. But actually this is one reflection of conditions in China today. The cover of a work of revolutionary literature recently published in Shanghai shows a trident, taken from the

Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925): popular Russian lyric poet.

4

A misspelling of the surname of the Jewish Russian writer, Andrei Sobol (1888–1926).

5

Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967): Jewish Soviet writer, Bolshevik revolutionary, historian, and journalist.

6

A reference to Heinrich Heine’s poem, “Mir träumt’: ich bin der liebe Gott” (I dream I was the Lord Himself) in Die Heimkehr (1823).

7

Wang Duqing (1898–1940), poet and member of the Creation Society whose work was influenced by French Symbolism and who later became a Trotskyist.

8

In English in the original.

9

Alexander Blok (1880–1921), Russian lyric poet. The Twelve, composed a few months after the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, is a masterpiece of modernist poetic montage.

10

Guo Moruo (1892–1978), poet and co-founder of the Creation Society. Guo’s story, “Only One Hand,” was serialized in 1928.

11

288

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

cover of Symbols of Misery,12 with the hammer from the Soviet flag stuck on its middle prong. This juxtaposition means you can neither thrust with the trident nor strike with the hammer, and merely shows the artist’s stupidity—it could well serve as a badge for all these writers. Of course, it is possible to transfer from one class to another. But the best thing is to say frankly what your views are, so that people will know whether you are friend or foe. Don’t try to conceal the fact that your head is filled with old dregs by pointing dramatically at your nose and claiming, “I am the only true proletarian!” Folk are so hypersensitive today that the word “Russia” almost makes them give up the ghost, and soon they will not even allow lips to be red. They are scared of all sorts of publications. And our revolutionary writers, unwilling to introduce more theories or books from abroad, just point dramatically at themselves, till in the end they give us something like the “reprimands by imperial decree” of the late Qing Dynasty—no one has the least idea what they are about. I shall probably have to explain the expression “reprimands by imperial decree” to you. This belonged to the days of the empire when, if an official committed a mistake, he was ordered to kneel outside some gate or other while the emperor sent a eunuch to give him a dressing-down. If you greased the eunuch’s palm, he would stop very soon. If not, he would curse your whole family from your earliest ancestors down to your descendants. This was supposed to be the emperor speaking, but who could go and ask the emperor if he really meant all that? Last year, according to a Japanese magazine, Cheng Fangwu13 was elected by the peasants and workers of China to go and study drama in Germany. And we have no means of finding out if he really was elected that way or not. That is why, as I always say, if we want to increase our understanding we must read more foreign books, to break through the cordon around us. This is not too hard for you. Though there are not many books in English on the new literature and not many English translations of it, the few that we have are reliable. After reading more foreign theoretical works and literature, you will feel much clearer when you come to judge our new Chinese literature. Better still, you can introduce such works to China. It is no easier to translate than to turn out sloppy writing, but it makes a greater contribution to the development of our new literature, and is more useful to our people.

A book of literary criticism by Hakuson Kuriyagawa, translated by Lu Xun from the Japanese.

12

Cheng Fangwu (1897–1984), member of the Creation Society in the 1920s, later an important figure in the CCP.

13

II. DAI WANGSHU’S POETIC THEORY Dai Wangshu Originally published in Chinese as Wangshu shilun in Xiandai 2.1 (November 1932): 92–94. Translated by Kirk A. Denton.

Dai Wangshu (pen name of Dai Mengou, 1905–50) was one of the leading lights of the neo-Symbolist “new poetry” of the late 1920s and 1930s. In addition to his contributions to Chinese poetry in the modernist vein, he was a prolific and influential translator of foreign literature, especially French and Spanish. He was also an important advocate of early Soviet literature. Like other modernist contemporaries, he was a Francophile and sojourned in France from 1932 to 1935. By his mid-twenties he had established a strong reputation as a poet, critic, and fellow traveler of Western and Russian avantgardes. “Rainy Alley,” perhaps his most famous poem, epitomizes his melancholy, urbane free verse style. Written when he was just 21, the poem narrates a soft-focus wistful encounter with a young woman in a lonely street and appears in his debut collection, My Memory (1929). A second collection Rough Drafts of Wangshu (Wangshu cao) appeared in 1933, after which Dai Wangshu’s poetic output dropped off as his translation and editorial activities increased. In 1932, he helped found the Shanghai-based modernist little magazine, Xiandai, also called Les contemporains, which ran for three years. Xiandai convened many of the influential Chinese avant-garde voices of the time and published translations of European and American modernists. In 1936, Dai Wangshu helped launch another little magazine, Xinshi, another important venue for Chinese avant-garde writing and foreign translation. Xinshi was forced to fold in the summer of 1937 with the Japanese invasion of Shanghai. Dai Wangshu fled to Hong Kong in 1938 and was later imprisoned by the Japanese. He died in 1950 from the effects of his imprisonment. “Dai Wanghu’s Poetic Theory” (Wangshu shilun) appeared in the first issue of Xiandai in November 1932. By that time, Dai Wangshu had already left Shanghai for Paris. In fact, the “poetic theory” seems to have been compiled by Dai Wangshu’s friend, Shi Zhecun (editor of Xiandai), from the former’s notes. The seventeen principles enumerated here call for a modernist “new poetry” that jettisons all non-poetic trappings such as musicality, painterliness, and rhyme, in favor of new techniques for capturing “poetic mood,” a position that comes intriguingly close to US critic Clement Greenberg’s influential account of modernism in the visual arts later the same decade. Notably, the statement is not against “old poetic objects” or classical diction, so long as the poet, in keeping with modernist piety, makes them new. SJR

290

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Poetry cannot rely on musicality and should discard its musical qualities. Poetry cannot rely on the strengths of painting. The mere composition of beautiful words is not a characteristic of poetry. Those of the Symbolist school say: “Nature is a prostitute who has been debauched a thousand times.”1 But who knows if a new prostitute will not be debauched ten thousand times. The number of times doesn’t matter, what we need are new instruments and techniques for debauchery. Poetic meter lies not in the melodiousness of the characters, but in the melodiousness of the poem’s emotion, the degree of the poetic mood. What is most important for new poetry is the “nuance” of poetic mood and not the “nuance” of characters and phrases. Rhyme and regularity of lines may obstruct poetic mood, or deform poetic mood. If the emotion behind a poem is made to conform to stagnant and superficial old rules, it is like placing your own feet in the shoes of another. A fool will trim the foot to fit the shoe, whereas a rather more intelligent man will choose for himself a better fitting shoe. A wise man, however, will make for himself a pair that fits his own feet. Poetry is not a pleasure felt by a single sense alone, but something felt by all the senses, or which transcends the senses altogether. New poetry should have new emotions and new forms for expressing these emotions. And this so-called form is most certainly not the superficial arrangement of characters, nor the mere compilation of new words. There is no need to necessarily have new objects as thematic material (although I am not opposed to this), for new poetic moods may be found in old poetic objects. Diction of the old classics cannot be opposed when it bestows on us a new poetic mood. One should not simply indulge one’s fancy for resplendent adornment, for this will never be eternal. Poetry should have its own orginalité, but you must also give it a cosmopolité [sic] quality; neither is dispensable. Poetry is born from reality passing through the imagination; it is neither only reality nor only imagination. When poetry expresses its own emotions and causes people to feel something, it seems to take on a life of its own and is not a lifeless thing. Emotion is not captured as with a camera, it should be brought out through description in an ingenious style. This style must be alive and ever-changing. If one uses a certain language to write poems and the people of a country feel them to be good poems, they are not really good poems but at the most the magic of language. What is good in a real poem is not just the strengths of language.

Source unknown.

1

III. DREAM OF GENIUS Eileen Chang First published in Chinese as Tiancai meng in Xi Feng (The West Wind Monthly), 48 (August 1940), 542–3. Translated by Karen Kingsbury.

Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, born Zhang Ying, 1920–95), one of modern China’s most influential writers and chroniclers of Chinese urban modernity, came from a prominent but troubled Shanghai family. Privately educated, she gained fluency in English and later translated her own work from Chinese to English, as well as writing novels directly in English. Chang’s plans to attend university in the UK were interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War, and she enrolled instead at the University of Hong Kong in 1939. The Japanese occupation compelled her to move back to mainland China in 1942, before completing her degree. In the early-mid 1940s, she began to establish herself as a fiction writer and essayist with early masterpieces like “Love in a Fallen City” (1943) and “The Golden Cangue” (1943). This work, influenced by the Japanese New Sensationists and her experiences of Westernized urban modernity in Hong Kong and Shanghai, offers detailed chronicles of city life in the 1940s and focuses on the vexed relationships between men and women. The work notably refuses to channel the revolutionary zeitgeist of its time but instead uses it as a backdrop for its studies of private experience. Chang left Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1952 and then the United States in 1955. She was never to return to mainland China. Chang wrote “Dream of Genius” (Tiancai meng) in 1939 and published it the following year in an essay competition. This self-mocking essay—calculatedly gossipy, edged with pathos—narrates the precocious writer’s struggle to square her sense of writerly vocation with the demands of everyday practicality and common sense, a hackneyed tale, perhaps, made vivid by the return of a malignant absentee mother from France. References to early literary efforts about “domestic tragedy” and utopianism uncannily foreshadow core themes of Chang’s mature work, which she would begin to publish to great acclaim within just a few years. SJR

I am a very peculiar girl, regarded as a genius since I was small, the sole aim of my life the development of that genius. But once the fantasies of childhood had slowly faded, I realized that all I had was the dream of being a genius—the eccentricity of genius and nothing more. The world forgives Wagner his excesses, but I do not think it will forgive me. With the help of some American-style fanfare, I might have been called a child prodigy. I could recite Tang poetry when I was three years old. I still remember standing before an old Manchu official’s wicker chair, swaying as I chanted, “The singing-girl knows no

292

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

lost kingdom’s sadness/Still sings across the river ‘Jade Flowers in Rear Court,’”1 and watching his tears fall. When I was seven I wrote my first story, a domestic tragedy. When I came to a complicated word, I’d run to ask the cook how to write it. My second story was about a young lady who committed suicide due to an unhappy love affair. My mother criticized it, pointing out that if the girl really wanted to kill herself, she wouldn’t take a train from Shanghai all the way to West Lake just so she could drown herself. But because West Lake was such a poetic setting, I insisted on keeping this part. Outside the classroom, the only books I had were Journey to the West2 and a few children’s stories, but my ideas were not in the least bit limited by these books. When I was eight, I tried writing a kind of utopian story called “Happiness Village.” The people of Happiness Village were hard-fighting highlanders, and because they had subdued the Miao tribes, they received a special dispensation from the Chinese emperor: they were exempted from taxes, and were granted the right of self-governance. So Happiness Village was one big family, cut off from the rest of the world. They grew their own food, made their own clothes, and retained a joyous tribal way of life. I stitched together half a dozen exercise pads, intending to make it a really enormous work, but after a while I lost interest in this grand topic. I still have several of the illustrations, which shows this ideal community’s social services, its architecture, and its style of interior design; included were a library, a martial arts stadium, a chocolate shop, and roof gardens. The communal dining room was a pavilion in the middle of a lotus pond. I don’t remember if they had movie theaters and socialism, but even without these two signs of civilization, they seem to have managed quite well. When I was nine I was in a grand quandary whether to choose a career in music or in art. After seeing a movie that featured a poverty-stricken painter, I was terribly upset. So I decided to be a pianist, and perform in opulent, imposing concert halls. Colors, words, and musical tones evoke strong responses in me. When playing the piano, I used to imagine that the eight notes each had distinct personalities, and that they danced hand in hand wearing splendid costumes. When I learned to write compositions, I loved to use fancy words, like “zhuhui” (pearl-grey), “huanghun” (twilight), “wanmiao” (gracefulness), “splendour,” and “melancholy.”3 As a result, my writing was often overblown. But even today, I still love to read Strange Tales from the Leisure Studio4 and the gaudy Parisian fashion advertisements, simply because the phrases have this kind of appeal. In school I had freedom to develop. My confidence grew stronger every day, until I turned sixteen, when my mother came back from France, and surveyed the daughter whom she had not seen for many years. “I regret having nursed you so carefully when you had typhoid,” she said to me. “I’d rather see you die than watch you cause yourself so much suffering.” This translation of the last two lines of Du Mu’s “Bo Qinhuai” [Mooring at River Qinhuai] is based on the translations of Wai-lim Yip in his Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1976): 331, and Stephen Owen in his Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985): 181. This poem is a classic meditation on dynastic decline, memory, and insouciance. [trans.]

1

Journey to the West: one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Published in the sixteenth century, it chronicles the pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang to Central and South Asia.

2

The last two words appear in English in the original. [trans.]

3

An apparent reference to Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi, 1740), a collection of stories of Pu Songling (1640–1715).

4

CHINESE MODERNISM

293

I discovered that I didn’t know how to peel an apple. After tremendous effort I finally learned to darn socks. I’m afraid to go to the hairdresser, afraid to meet people, afraid to try on clothes for the tailor. Many people have tried to teach me to knit, but not one of them has succeeded. After having lived in the same place for two years, I’m still thrown into confusion when someone asks me where the doorbell is. After three months of going to the hospital every day, by rickshaw, to get an injection, I still don’t know which road to take. In sum, when it comes to practical, everyday matters, I am utterly useless. My mother gave me two years to learn how to cope. She taught me to cook; wash clothes with powdered soap; practice good posture when walking; take my cue from other people; draw the blinds after turning on the lights; study my expressions in the mirror; and never, if lacking a gift for comedy, try to tell jokes. In terms of the common sense needed for ordinary social interaction, I clearly am an astonishingly stupid person. My two-year plan was a failed experiment. Other than disrupting my mental composure, my mother’s heartfelt warnings had absolutely no effect on me. But there are some parts of the art of living that I do understand. I know how to read “the clouds of early autumn”; listen to Scottish troops play their bagpipes; sit in a wicker chair enjoying a light breeze; eat salted peanuts; watch neon lights on a rainy night; and reach up from a double-decker bus to pluck green leaves from the top of a tree. When I don’t have to meet and deal with people, I am full of the pleasure of living. But I can’t, not even for a single day, conquer all those little, teeth-gnashing frustrations. Life is a gorgeous gown, swarming with lice.

IV. EXPLICATING THE TENETS OF THE MODERNIST SCHOOL Ji Xian Originally published in Chinese in Modern Poetry Quarterly 13 (February 1, 1956): 4. Translated by Paul Manfredi.

Ji Xian (pen name of Lu Yu, 1913–2013) was an important free verse (xinshi, “new poetry”) innovator in the 1930s and later brought modernism to Taiwan in the 1950s. Trained as a painter and influenced by surrealism, Ji Xian moved toward poetry in his early twenties and cut his teeth among the writers clustered around the journal Xiandai (also known as Les contemporains, 1932–5). A staunch individualist and self-conscious devotee of French Symbolism and its legacies, he promoted the Westernization of Chinese poetry through the 1940s and resisted the political “call to arms” of the time that privileged politics over art. Given his commitment to an elite modernist practice widely denounced as bourgeois, decadent, colonial, and unpatriotic, he was compelled to move to Taiwan in 1949, where he set himself up as the doyen of Taiwanese modernism (a movement that boasted as many as one hundred members). He founded Modern Poetry Quarterly (MPQ) in Taipei on February 1, 1953, and was its driving force until it folded after forty-five issues in 1964. He immigrated to California in 1972. Published in February 1956, the thirteenth issue of MPQ announced the six “tenets of the modernist school” on its cover. Ji Xian’s explication of these tenets offers a pithy resume of the modernist “New Poetry” in Taiwan in the early years of the Republic of China’s martial law regime. Taken together, these tenets propound a modernist practice steeped in aesthetic principles reaching back to nineteenth-century France, including Baudelairean Symbolism and Mallarméan poésie pure. These principles get their political orientation from the association between modernism and anti-communism—in contrast to communism’s link to social realism—a connection that was common by the 1950s and played a significant role in mid-century cultural geopolitics. But it is the second tenet—“We believe that New Poetry is a horizontal transplantation, not a vertical inheritance”—that has been most enduringly relevant and controversial for its assertion of a non-derivative egalitarian Chinese-language modernism engrafted from the West. SJR

PREFACE We are neither a political party nor a religious sect; we have neither strict organization nor abiding form. We base our affiliation on similar views of New Poetry and consistent literary tendencies. We are bound together by a spirit of common purpose, and the natural inclination is thus to form the Modernist School. This is the first point we wish to make clear. The Modernist School is a poetry group and not a social organization. Other than adherence to the tenets of the Modernist School, members of this group are completely free to join, or not join, any literary organization they choose (for instance, the Chinese

CHINESE MODERNISM

295

Literary Arts Association). The Chinese Literary Arts Association is a social organization, and we are just a poetry group. Freedom of association is the second point we wish to make clear. Moreover, the Modern Poetry Association is a journal-based association and is not equivalent to the Modernist School. But the Modernist Poetry Quarterly is edited and published by the Modern Poetry Association for all poets of the Modernist School. Therefore, it is obviously our flagship journal. This is the third point we wish to make clear.

EXPLANATION There are six tenets of the Modernist School. They are simple and clear. In order to accomplish the modernization of poetry and bring about a second revolution in New Poetry,1 we must broaden the understanding and sympathy among those engaged in literature and art, as well as general readers, so as to win their moral support. Thus, it is necessary to clarify our tenets. Number 1: We are a group of modernists who selectively promote and reject the spirit and constituents of all new schools of poetry from Baudelaire to the present. Just as new painting originated with Paul Cézanne, new poetry was inaugurated by the Frenchman Baudelaire. Symbolist poetry came from Mr. B., and all the new poetry schools since are either directly or indirectly influenced by symbolism. Those new schools include the symbolists in the nineteenth century, the postsymbolists, the cubists, the Dadaists, the surrealists, the new perceptionists, the American imagists, and the various pure poetry movements in Europe and America in the twentieth century. Collectively, they may be called modernism. What we reject are the sickly, fin-de-siècle tendencies; what we try to develop are those that are healthy, progressive, and uplifting. Number 2: We believe that New Poetry is a horizontal transplantation, not a vertical inheritance. This is a general view, a starting point for both theoretical development and creative practice. Generally speaking, New Poetry in China and Japan is a transplanted flower. Our New Poetry is clearly not the national essence of Tang dynasty verse or Song dynasty lyrics. Similarly, Japanese New Poetry is not the national essence of haiku or waka. Logically speaking, in terms of what they have accomplished, the Japanese and Chinese poetry of today should both be seen as part of world literature. To promoters of national essence, we say this: When in the realm of science we are eager to catch up with the world, why are we content to remain closed-minded and complacent in the realm of literature and art? We should realize that, like science, literature and art know no national boundaries. If someday our New Poetry achieves international acclaim, I guess even stubborn traditionalists will praise us for bringing glory to our country. Number 3: We advocate explorations of the new continent and cultivation of the virgin territory of poetry: expression of new content, creation of new poetic forms, discovery of new tools, and invention of new techniques. We believe that New Poetry must be true to its name and renew itself each and every day. If a poem is not new, it has no business being called New Poetry, hence our emphasis on worldview. At the same time, we do not advocate novelty for novelty’s sake. Those who do not really understand us should not malign us blindly.

The first one having occurred in the 1920s and 1930s (see Dai Wangshu’s essay, 9.ii).

1

296

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Number 4: We emphasize rationality. This is of critical importance. One major characteristic of modernism is its opposition to romanticism, which is to say an emphasis on reason and rejection of the direct expression of emotion. What’s the use of giving free rein to passionate feelings? When you reach the second poem, you are bored already. Thus, as soon as the Parnassians emerged, Hugo lost his authority. Cool-headed, objective, and deep, we exercise a high degree of rationality and use subtle expression. A new poem should be a solid, perfect structure; a new poet should be an outstanding engineer. Here lies the essence of the tenet. Number 5: We pursue the purity of poetry. International movements of Pure Poetry have yet to create a ripple on our poetry scene. But we believe it is important to reject all the impure ingredients that are not poetic and to purify and distill poetry through refinement and more refinement, processing and more processing, like using an entire cow to produce a small jar of beef concentrate. Although the world is small, it is very dense. Every line, even every word, must be pure poetry and not prose. Number 6: We promote patriotism and anti-Communism. We support freedom and democracy. These need no explanation.

V. THE NEW POETRY—A TURNING POINT? (A MISTY MANIFESTO) Hong Huang Originally published in Chinese in the third pamphlet published by Jintian (Today)’s Literary Society, 1980. Translated and adapted by Zhu Zhiyu with John Minford.

“Misty poetry” (menglong shi) was originally a disapproving label given to poetry that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s reform period after Mao’s death. The imagedominated experimental poetry of this movement marked a neo-symbolist break from the dominant social realism of Mao’s regime and had its origins in the “underground” street poetry of the 1960s and 1970s written by urban youth who had been sent to rural areas during the Cultural Revolution. The poetry’s delirious imagism resonated with readers after decades of state-mandated social realism and garnered official criticism for its putatively elitist refusal of realism, incongruous modeling of Western modernism, and critical skepticism of government reform. The cachet of “Misty poetry” had declined by the mid-1980s, and it is now seen as a transitional formation leading to the Third Generation or Newborn Generation of poets who were born in the late-1950s and early 1960s, whose educations were not entirely disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and who came of age in a more open society. “The New Poetry—A Turning Point? (A Misty Manifesto)” announces a break from the “poetic disease of the past two decades” of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and theorizes the liberatory implications of a formally innovative second-wave “new poetry.” The manifesto appeared in 1980 in the third pamphlet published by the “Literary Society” of Today (Jintian). Today ran for two years as the Misty poets’ main literary organ but had recently been shut down by the authorities after nine issues and four books. Published pseudonymously by “Hong Huang,” the manifesto’s real author is allegedly Xiao Chi, who was then a graduate student in the Program of Classical Chinese Literature and Theory at the People’s University of Beijing. This text evinces a learned familiarity with both the history of Chinese literary scholarship and modern avant-gardes, marshaling precedents from across the centuries to demonstrate Misty poetry’s continuity with the Chinese classical tradition and with the Western poetic practices, such as Imagism, which they influenced. SJR

298

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

I. Birth of the New Poetry A new kind of poetry has been born. It is flowing in the winds and waters of our land, in the blood and breath of a new generation. Some call it revolution; others an invasion of the world of Chinese poetry by Western monsters. But its birth is an incontrovertible fact. It has been given a variety of names: symbolist, surrealist, “misty 朦朧”, even impressionist. In fact, it is none of these. We should rather call it a new embodiment of the national spirit, the voice and pulse of the thinking generation, a reaction to the poetic disease of the past two decades. Or just simply the New Poetry. Its birth is no secret. Since the fall of the Gang of Four,1 China has seen the dawn of a Renaissance. Prose (fiction, reportage, etc.) is moving towards reality.2 So too is poetry. The prose reality is objective; the poetic reality subjective, knowledge of the true self, a passionate rejection of alienation. This breakthrough in content has led to a breakthrough in form. Now that the poet’s own wealth of authentic feeling has replaced an abstract, false and prejudiced set of “intents” as poetic material; now that a truly vital self, one endowed with dignity, intellect and a complex inner life, has appeared in poetry; now that poetry is no longer hack literature, no longer the mouth-piece of politics; now that we are standing face to face with this land imbued with suffering and yet full of hope, musing on the sorrowful but radiant dawn; we need our own stance, our own voice. We have substituted irregular lines for ornate parallelism. Rhythm has been given a new meaning. It is conceived of as the vibration of the poet’s feelings, which he projects directly into his poems, no longer through some static system of poetic conventions. Form has become simply an extension of content. Like Debussy, we substitute coloration for functional organization, rich visual imagery for auditory pleasure. Rhyme is neglected, even abandoned altogether. In terms of art psychology, we do not seek to achieve the fleeting pleasure of the reader at the moment of perception, but rather endeavor to imprint images in his mind and thereby to arouse him to imagining and thinking. Here we have reversed the famous dictum of the poet: “Music above all else.”3 The traditional, simple, harmonious beauty we replace with a rich, uncomfortable tension. We are seeking not serenity, but impulse. …… The most severe accusation levelled against the New Poetry is that it is too Westernized, a betrayal of our national heritage. This question must be answered.

Gang of Four refers to Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Yao Wenyuan, and Zhang Chungqiao. They were arrested after Mao’s death and charged with treason and other crimes against the Chinese people.

1

As opposed, presumably, to state-sanctioned social realism that dominated PRC literary production for decades. This could also be a reference to “scar literature”.

2

Quoting Paul Verlaine’s poem, “De la musique avant toute chose” (Art Poétique, 1884).

3

CHINESE MODERNISM

299

II. What can we learn from Chinese classical poetry? At the end of the 1950s, a debate was conducted criticizing the “formlessness” of the “new poetry” of the time. The conclusion was reached that poetry should develop on the dual basis of folk song and the prosodic rules of classical poetic composition. This was a victory for classicism, and virtually determined the poetic orientation of the following two decades. To defend the new poetic revolution, a re-appraisal of this debate is imperative. Is it necessary to prescribe a form for New Poetry? Is it evil to refrain from so doing? Surely not. Surely no such necessity exists. To prescribe a form is to prescribe an evolution according to formula. True, our classical poetry (shi, ci, and qu) is thus formalized, and classical opera, even literati painting, tends towards formalization, tends to be formulaic. Their rich repertoire of artistic devices (prosody, lyric meter) achieves an abstract formal beauty. The advocates of “formalization” usually emphasize musical beauty as an artistic effect. A talented poet should indeed possess a sensitive ear and a sense of musical beauty; he should convert emotional rhythm accurately into poetic rhythm. The musical beauty of poetry, therefore, is a creative artistic means, not a pure technique. The unlimited creative potential of art should not be confined within the limitations of a technical formula. It is true that it requires less effort to create a rhythm according to a ready-made formula than it does to create one in free verse; but this very ease limits the creativity of the poet. Great lyric poets of the past, of course, chose differing lyric meters to suit their subjects; and out of the strict prosody of new style Regulated Verse, the great master Du Fu4 created musical beauty. But surely, in today’s uniquely complex emotional world, when the emotional rhythm and coloring of every line of poetry are absolutely “individualized,” it is hard to imagine how the poetic rhythm should not be equally “individualized.” Even the “technical” 格調 school of the Ming dynasty, the strongest advocates of imitation and musical effect in poetry, did not identify “technique” with prosodic rules, and preferred the less rigid Old-style Verse 古體詩 to the strict Regulated Verse 今體詩, as it gave freer rein to the musical creativity of the poet. Li Dongyang5 李東陽 wrote that a slavish imitation of prosodic rules actually “bridled the expression of personal feelings 無發 人之性情”. (See his Huailutang shihua 懷麓堂詩話). Why then should we emphasize a “formalization” based on traditional classical prosody? It was the most worthless imitators of the classics, the “early and late Seven Masters” of the Ming dynasty, who lost the brilliant spirit of Tang poetry. Prosodic rules do not merely reflect the rhythm of life. Both Whitman and the Victorian poets used the English language. But Whitman, when confronted with the vast rugged landscape of the New Continent, with the mighty labors of the pioneers, created a tone and a style totally different from those of the English poetic tradition. In the same way the two-stress four-character line found in The Book of Songs6 詩經 can only reflect the rhythm of the primitive productive labor of the pre-Qin period. In a thinking era, in a society that is embarking on modernization, it is unimaginable that we should continue to use a poetic rhythm evolved under the agricultural mode of production. We do not

Du Fu (712–70): major poet of the Tang Dynasty. Interestingly, Susan Stanford Friedman nominates Du Fu as a (very) early modernist in Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015): 184–214.

4

Li Dongyang (1441–1516): Ming Dynasty poet, prose writer, and literary critic.

5

Shih Ching: Ancient collection of over 300 poems, supposedly compiled by Confucius.

6

300

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

deny the existence of some good new works in folk-song style, especially narrative poems like Wang Gui and Li Xiang-xiang7王貴與李香香 and Zhanghe Shui 漳河水. But they are almost all without exception about country life. Agricultural production had, after all, not changed greatly since ancient times. We can predict with confidence that with the agricultural modernization of our country, a new rhythm will appear in folk poetry! What, then, should we learn from classical poetry? The lesson is precisely what some friends dismiss as insignificant, precisely what they regard as a defect of our New Poetry. We should revive the rich visual-imagist tradition of Chinese poetry, what Hulme called a “visual, concrete language,”8 and oppose external logic and syntax as the sole source of poetic creation. The American imagist poet Ezra Pound wrote: “It is … because certain Chinese poets have been content to set forth their matter without moralizing and without comment that one labors to make a translation.”9 This is not worshipping and fawning upon things foreign. Ouyang Xiu10 歐陽修 said long ago, “the poet’s task is to present an elusive scene so that it seems to appear before the (reader’s) very eyes, and to contain therein the endless meaning beyond words”; or, as Wang Fuzhi 王夫之11 put it, “true profundity is attained when the poet implants feeling in the scene, in such a way that no sign of the intent is visible.” We should revive the many levels of meaning, the ambiguity that is part of the tradition of the Chinese classical poetic language. This is a quality that has been singled out for comment by many Western sinologists. And yet this is not worshipping and fawning upon things foreign either. Sikong Tu 司空圖,12 after all, sought the “flavor beyond flavor 味 外之味”, the “resonance beyond harmony 韻外之致”, the “image beyond imagery 象外 之象”, the “meaning beyond words 言外之意.” Yan Yu 嚴羽13 urged “the use of living language 須參活句”, advised the poet “not to be trammeled by words 不落言筌”. We must revive the suggestive quality traditionally associated with Chinese poetic conception. This may coincide with contemporary Western poetics. But it is certainly not worshipping and fawning upon things foreign. The Tang poet Dai Shulun 戴叔倫14 said of the ideal poetic conception: “it is like Lantian in the warmth of the sun, the aura of fine jade wavering in the heat, to be viewed from afar, not scrutinized.” And Sikong Tu: “to describe it from a distance is to be there; to approach it is to negate it.” Wang Shizhen 王 士稹15 borrowed the terminology of art-criticism in his description of poetic imagery: “In the distance, the mountains have no folds, the water no ripples, the faces no eyes.” Are we to criticize these ideas as too “obscure”, or “misty 朦朧”? We must revive the four-dimensional perspective of the Chinese poetic tradition. We must apply the artistic technique of multiple development of ideas. This is not a poetic A long narrative poem composed by Li Ji (1922–80) that tells the story of lovers set against the backdrop of the Chinese Communist Revolution.

7

A close paraphrase of T.E. Hulme’s (1883–1917) remarks about poetry in his essay, “Romanticism and Classicism” (1911–12).

8

Quoting Ezra Pound’s (1885–1972) essay, “Chinese Poetry” (1918).

9

Ouyang Xiu (1007–72) was a scholar, writer, and historian of the Northern Song dynasty.

10

Wang Fuzhi (1619–92) was an early Qing dynasty Chinese nationalist, historian, and poet.

11

Sikong Tu (837–908), Tang dynasty critic and poet.

12

Yan Yu (c. 1192–c. 1245), Song dynasty poet and theorist of poetics.

13

Dai Shulun (732–89), Tang dynasty poet.

14

Wang Shizhen (1634–1710), famous poet of the early Qing dynasty.

15

CHINESE MODERNISM

301

extension of Picasso’s aesthetics; to understand it, just read the magnificent poetry of the Tang dynasty. We believe this to be the essence of the classical tradition in Chinese poetry. We live in an era of world cultural interfusion. The magnificent heritage of Eastern classical painting, drama and poetry has influenced the modern Western arts. Similarly, in drawing on the modern arts of the Western world, we can come to understand more deeply the true value of our own artistic tradition; we can combine this tradition more harmoniously with the content of modern life in order to develop our own new literature and art. Perhaps this is the secret of the New Poetry of the new Chinese generation, a secret which our poets and critics refuse to take seriously. This Rose on the tomb of Homer remains unconcerned and indifferent to the Nightingale singing fresh songs before her, would rather see youth wither in the parchment pages of the Iliad. But the Nightingale will continue to sing, to conjure an oasis of moisture and fragrance out of this wilderness ravaged by wind and sand.

VI. WITHOUT ISMS Gao Xingjian Originally presented in Chinese as a paper at the Past Forty Years of Chinese Literature conference organized by the Taiwanese daily Lianhe Bao, November 15, 1993. Translated by Mabel Lee.

The writings of Nobel laureate and French émigré Gao Xingjian (1940–) evade the prescriptive claims of language, nationality, and tradition. Born in 1940, Gao attended university during the “Great Leap Forward” and self-censored large quantities of writings throughout the “Cultural Revolution.” He came to prominence with the publication of his Preliminary Explorations into the Art of Modern Fiction (1981) and his first two plays Alarm Signal (1982) and the Beckettian Bus Stop (1983) at the People’s Art Theater in Beijing. Increasingly hounded by the government and “Anti-Spiritual Pollution” campaigners as the 1980s progressed, he eventually fled China for France in 1987 just before the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, which he chronicles in his play Fleeing (1989). His novel Soul Mountain (1990) fictionalizes his journey in China’s rural interior while evading the authorities and was singled out for praise by the Nobel Committee, which awarded him the 2000 literature prize for “an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama.” Gao’s commitment to an artistic practice “without isms” steers a third way between Western and Chinese literary modes and traditions. In the essay below, Gao advocates a measured, practical receptivity to Western literature that treats it as a useful writerly toolkit rather than a totalizing set of cultural norms. At the same time, he resists pressures to conform to social realism, asserting the independent writer’s primary duty to language rather than national, political, or cultural exigencies. In this insistence on the primacy of language itself—perhaps more so than in his adaptation of high modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness (what he calls “flow of language”)—lies the essential modernist thrust of his work. Gao discusses his intensive study of the Chinese language and his efforts to restore its natural written and spoken character after its standardization according to distorting Western linguistic norms. SJR

I have just read Ya Xian’s “On the Formation of Annual Rings.”1 He maintains in the essay that it is pointless nowadays to argue about whether literature is Westernized, traditional or indigenous. I absolutely agree. Previous to that, there was an essay by Liu Zaifu called “Goodbye All Gods,” in which he makes the statement that this century’s disputes in Chinese literature have all been fought over foreign issues and have never jumped out of other people’s shadows.2 Ya Xian (or Ya Hsien, “mute strings”), pen name of Wang Qinglin (1932–), a Chinese-born poet who moved to Taiwan in 1949 and composed a small but influential oeuvre of modernist poems in the 1950s and 1960s.

1

Liu Zaifu (1941–) is a Chinese literary and cultural critic. “Goodbye All Gods” was first published in 1991.

2

CHINESE MODERNISM

303

Realism, romanticism, modernism and isms with labels such as new or old, critical or revolutionary, social or national or classist were applied to literature, and this heavy burden made it hard for China’s fledgling modern literature to breathe. Worse still were the numerous isms and definitions of literary criticism that had insinuated themselves into literature, so that while banners aplenty could be seen, it was hard to see any of the works themselves. Western isms have their own native soils and long histories, and Lu Xun of course was not wrong to have advocated importing them; nonetheless his “bring-it-in-ism” was somewhat excessive. Moreover, is it possible to import everything? I do not think it is necessary to repeat the road taken by Western literature. Some isms inevitably will be imported, but once writers transform these into things of their own, the original isms will have been considerably distorted, so it is futile to proceed to verify them and even more futile to insist on carrying other people’s banners. Literary creation has always amounted to the surging of blood in the writer’s own heart, and has nothing to do with any ism. If a work sets out to expound some ism it will certainly die prematurely. Naturally, different writers will have their own literary concepts and artistic methods, but if a writer cannot infuse his works with a life force, then no matter how new the concepts and methods used, his works will sooner or later become passé. I have my own ideas about literature, but I do value artistic form and technique. Western literature—especially many of the concepts and methods of Western modernist literature—has provided me with many insights. However, I do not believe that simply using these concepts and methods will lead to good writing. It is for this reason that I place greater value on the actual works and refuse to stick the label of any ism onto myself. In 1981 I published that slim booklet of mine, Preliminary Explorations into the Art of Modern Fiction, hoping it would open a path for my fiction, which did not conform with China’s guidelines at the time. At this point Wang Meng3 and some other writers published letters that stirred up the “realism versus modernism” debate and resulted in my becoming a modernist. Then in 1983, when a ban was placed on the performance of my play Bus Stop, I became an absurdist. In 1985, my play Wild Man had a strong flavor of searching for roots because I had discovered a Han folk epic called Record of Darkness.4 Fortunately, Hu Yaobang5 was in power, so the cultural situation was reasonably liberal and I was not given a label. In 1990, when my play Fleeing was published, I was designated a reactionary. The disaster for Chinese literature is that there must always be judgments to enable the formulation of policies, directions, guidelines, principles, patterns and models, and to determine what is right or wrong, mainstream or non-mainstream. By failing to conform, one is consigned to the ranks of those to be criticized, banned, exterminated, purged, killed or destroyed. I should say that in both politics and literature I belong to no group, nor am I bound to any ism, including nationalism and patriotism. I certainly have my own views on politics as well as on literature and the arts, but I see no need to nail myself into a certain political or artistic framework. In the present era of ideological collapse and disintegration, if Wang Meng (1934–), a Chinese fiction writer.

3

A collection of ancient legends and folktales gathered and preserved in the Shennongjia region. A manuscript was discovered in the early 1980s.

4

Hu Yaobang (1915–89), a Chinese politician.

5

304

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

an individual wants to preserve his spiritual independence it would seem that the only attitude he can adopt is to question. I hold this same attitude towards fashions and trends. My experience of mass movements and mass tastes has taught me that these, like the socalled self, need not be worshipped and certainly cannot be superstitiously believed. As a writer living in exile I can achieve salvation only through literary and artistic creation. This is not at all to say that what I advocate is pure literature, that ivory tower totally divorced from society. Quite the contrary: I regard literary creation as the individual’s challenge to society for the right to exist, and although this challenge is insignificant, it is nevertheless a gesture. Once literature divorces itself from practical gain it achieves enormous freedom. Literature is a luxury that is only possible after issues of survival are resolved, and the fact that people need to enjoy this bit of luxury is something both the writer and the reader can take pride in as human beings. Because of this social aspect of literature, it will always to some extent seek to expose, criticize, challenge, overturn and transcend society. However, when this social aspect is narrowly confined within the parameters of political function or ethical rules, and literature is turned into political propaganda and moral teachings, or even into an instrument of war for political factions, it is a terrible misfortune for literature. China’s literature has not completely freed itself from this. Modern Chinese literature was worn out by political struggles lasting from the end of the previous century to the end of this century, but Chinese writers have now finally escaped from the lair of “literature as a vehicle for the Way,”6 and have the opportunity to speak out as individuals in their own voices. Literature is essentially an affair for the individual. It can be treated as an individual’s profession, but it can also simply express his feelings and dispel his emotions, or it can feign madness so that he can say whatever he wants to gratify his ego, and of course it can also intervene in current politics. What is important is that it is not forced upon others, and naturally it will not tolerate having restrictions imposed upon itself either, whether it be for the sake of the nation or the party, the race or the people. Endowing the will of these abstract collectives with authority can only strangle literature. For a frail individual, a writer, to confront society alone and utter words in his own voice is, in my view, the essential character of literature, which has changed little from ancient times to the present, whether it be in China or abroad, in the East or in the West. The narrative form used by the writer, his methods and techniques, are secondary. There is a need to say something before there is deliberation on how to say it, and that is the relationship between content and form. Literature requires the need to affirm the existence of the self before art can arise from it. In the West, a writer’s freedom of expression is universally recognized. Nonetheless, from time to time there are instances where writers are oppressed by political authorities. For example, under fascist rule in Germany and Spain, and under communist totalitarianism in the USSR, writers had no choice but to flee into exile. This served to escalate the globalization of trends in modern Western literary thinking. Released from nation-state consciousness, the writer confronted the world as an individual with responsibility only to the language he used for writing. In this way, the art of language assumed a position of primacy, and how something was said gradually became more important than what was said.

A Neo-Confucian dictum asserting the didactic and edifying function of literature.

6

CHINESE MODERNISM

305

It is for this reason that I have revisited language, although I do not by any means consider the art of language to be literature. It was only after obtaining freedom of expression that I turned my attention to language. Sometimes I even play games with language, but this is not the ultimate objective of my writing. And playing with language is often a trap for the writer. If some meaning that is normally difficult to express is not being conveyed behind the game, it is only an empty language form. I search for new modes of expression because normal language restricts me and does not allow me accurately to express the full extent of my feelings and perceptions. While striving to do so, I gained many insights from Proust and Joyce: their tracking of the conscious and subconscious, as well as constructs they used to achieve different narrative angles. I was also prompted to study differences between the Chinese language and Western languages, and in the process I discovered that syntax in Chinese is not fixed, that the subject and object can be freely transposed, that verbs have neither declension nor tense, that the subject can be dispensed with and that sentences without a pronoun are very common. This being so, all the Chinese grammar books written since Mr. Ma’s Comprehensive Grammar,7 which have mechanically adopted the rules of Western grammar, should be rewritten. Numerous mechanisms in the structure of the Chinese language can actually trigger off a freer narrative method, and my own method of writing, which I call “flow of language,” derives from these. Pronoun subjects and temporal states in Chinese have fewer restrictions than in Western languages, so there is enormous flexibility when describing the activities of the human consciousness. Chinese is so flexible that short circuits in thinking and semantic confusions often result. In my search for a Chinese language that would more precisely express modern man’s rich feelings and perceptions, I wrote novellas and short stories one after the other. It was not until I wrote the story “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather”8 that I began to understand that in Chinese reality, memory and imagination are manifested in the eternal present, which transcends grammatical concepts and hence constitutes a time-transcending flow of language. For thoughts and perceptions, consciousness and the subconscious, narration, dialogue and soliloquy, and even the alienated consciousness of the self, I turn to tranquil contemplation rather than adopting the psychological or semantic analysis of Western fiction, and unity is achieved through the linear flow of language. This sort of narrative language has directed the form and structure of my novel Soul Mountain. Incidentally, the research of a young Chinese linguist, Shen Xiaolong,9 deserves the attention of those who write in Chinese, because a large part of present literary theory is based on Western languages and overlooks the structural characteristics of the Chinese language. The Europeanization of the Chinese language is so rampant that at times it is unreadable. This problem has existed ever since the new literature movement of the May Fourth period.

A reference to the first modern systematized grammar of Classical Chinese, composed by the Chinese scholar Ma Jianzhong (1845–1900). Ma’s Grammar, first published in 1898, was based on the structure of Latin grammar and divided Classical Chinese words into nine categories. The grammar paved the way for the modernization of the Chinese language according to Western linguistics.

7

The title story from Gao’s 1989 short story collection.

8

Shen Xiaolong (1952–), a professor of linguistics and author of the landmark Interpreting Language (1992). Shen’s work critiques the project of applying Western linguistic theories to the Chinese language, beginning with Ma’s Grammar.

9

306

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

The absorption of Western languages into the Chinese language should be distinguished from the Europeanization of the language. I do not totally oppose the use of Western languages to enrich modern Chinese; I am talking about respecting the language. I try to accord with the linguistic structures that have always existed in the language and not write Chinese that is unintelligible when read aloud. Even when playing with the language to convey content that cannot be expressed in normal sentence structures, I demand of myself that it be pure modern Chinese. At the same time, I do not indulge in computerlike language; after all, I am not a language machine. Undoubtedly there are aspects of modern Chinese still to be developed, and various writers have made their different contributions. There are also writers who use the spoken language and dialect in their writings, and I think this has enriched modern Chinese. When changing sentence patterns in my search for new modes of expression, I pay attention to the spoken language and dialect. This is important, because if literature in the Chinese language is simply writing to be deciphered and lacks any feeling for the spoken language, it becomes a brain-teasing game for the intellect, or like a rigidly translated novel, and not worth reading. To infuse the spoken language and dialect into the language of literature is also a kind of creation. Roland Barthes and deconstructionism do not constitute the only direction for the language of modern literature. The French writer Céline, who rescued avant-garde literature through works that used lively spoken language and popular sayings, has provided me with another insight. Modernity in literature does not mean that the style must be burdened with complexities and the writing cannot be read aloud. Moreover, in my view, what constitutes modernity remains problematic. In my novel Soul Mountain, and some of my plays, such as The Other Shore and Between Life and Death, I have put great effort into broadening the expressive potential of the modern Chinese language.10 Inevitably, my quest in language at times leads me to doubt its capabilities. Is language in fact able to express people’s actual perceptions? My own experience has shown that the harder I try to expand the expressive potential of the language, the further I get from my actual perceptions. The various types of research in contemporary Western linguistics since Wittgenstein have certainly deepened human knowledge about language, but the real world, including man’s own existence, lies beyond language. Writing built on semantic analysis has turned literature into an appendage of language, and has nearly brought contemporary literature to a dead end. Hence at times I deliberately destroy language; this can be seen most clearly in my play Dialogue and Rebuttal.11 The language of Chan Buddhist gong’an defies logic and contains meanings beyond the words, which suggested to me that yet another attitude could be adopted towards language.12 So I vacillate between the two: while attaching a great deal of importance to language, I do not allow it to control me. It would seem that, being infatuated with language, contemporary literature has become lost within its demon walls, and sometimes needs to return to the real world that linguistic analysis has put into parentheses. Some knowledgeable French writers have recently begun to argue for a return to this sort of reality. For the past twenty years Western literature has been undergoing a crisis because it has become lost in linguistic form. Literature loses its life if nonstop changes in Soul Mountain (1990); The Other Shore (1986); Between Life and Death (1991).

10

Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992).

11

Gong’an (literally, “public case”) are brief enigmatic stories, usually in question-and-answer format, commonly used for instruction in Chan Buddhism. The word is cognate with the Japanese “kōan.”

12

CHINESE MODERNISM

307

form result in a loss of connection with the real world. I attach importance to form, but I attach more importance to reality. This is not limited to external reality, but exists even more vividly in the perceptions of humans living within that external reality. It is in order to articulate and convey this sort of reality that literature resorts to language, even if it is helped by imagination and fabrication. When writers living in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as those staying longterm or living in exile in the West, suddenly cast aside, escaped or liberated themselves from the restrictions imposed upon literature and confronted only the Chinese language in which they wrote, they ran into the same problems of linguistic art encountered by Western writers. After charging flamboyantly through the methodologies of modern Western literature, Chinese literature has entered the flow of contemporary world literature. The current predicament of Western literature also confronts Chinese literature—or to be more precise, Chinese-language literature. Old problems seem to have been resolved, but what are the new problems? The source of these new problems is to be found in Western literature. It is a fact that during the past century the development of modern Chinese literature has taken place in the shadow of the West, so if Chinese writers want to produce a voice that is different they must understand the path that others have travelled. My interest in modern Western literature has been sparked by a need to provide myself with a frame of reference, so that I would avoid taking a route that others have already followed. Literary creation is interesting precisely because it is the creation of an individual and not replication. It is easy to state this as a principle, but people often live in the shade of others, especially when they truly appreciate certain writers or writings. My aim has been to try to distance myself from others. Beckett moved from intellectual inquiry to the absurd, but I have repeatedly discovered that there is an element of the absurd in real life. I do not consider the absurd and reality to be in conflict. Beckett endowed the absurd with a sense of tragedy, whereas I prefer to return to comedy. Western avant-garde plays reject realism, whereas my experimental plays are based on real life. Western avant-garde plays resolutely claim to be anti-theater, but I have retraced Chinese traditional drama to its source and seek to restore what has generally been lost in contemporary drama: theater and theatricality. Moreover, I strive to find and realize new possibilities for theater and theatricality in both playwriting and performance methods. I must admit that modern Western literature has stimulated me more than modern Chinese literature has. Chinese literature from the May Fourth period onwards was constrained by the limitations of China’s political and social environment and endlessly embroiled in the various debates foisted upon it, so there was no time to address literary problems. But those debates, which were imposed on literature and had nothing to do with it, now seem to have ended. The fact that today Chinese writers, or to be more precise Chinese-language writers, are able to transcend political and ideological restrictions and meet with one another is to some extent a good sign. The present age is not a time for reading in isolation, because cultural communication between the East and the West, and indeed between all the various peoples of the world, is no longer too big a problem. A writer who is devoted to writing and has responsibility only for his own written language will strive to absorb and reproduce in his own creations all that interests him in the cultures of humankind, from ancient times to the present. I believe that there is little difference between Chinese and Western writers in their attitude towards creative writing. Of course, many writers bring with them the profound cultural achievements of their own people, and these will naturally be reflected in their

308

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

writings, but this is totally different from deliberately sticking on a cultural label to please others in order to promote sales. Living in exile, the Polish writer Gombrowicz13 was quite right in saying that Poland was there inside himself, and even though at times he uses gimmicks from American detective stories in his writing, the loneliness and cold of Eastern Europe can still be felt. Joyce’s Ulysses is set in his native land, but no one would read it simply as a novel that describes Irish life. Neither writer ever returned to his homeland. Living in exile has not been bad for me; instead, it has given me even more points of reference. By completing my novel Soul Mountain and my play Romance of “The Classic of Mountains and Seas,”14 I was able to cure my so-called homesickness. The former deals with feelings induced by the social realities of China, and the latter with reflections on the origins of Chinese culture; I spent many years of hard work writing both of these. When a person is suddenly divorced from his ancestral land, a distance is created that allows him to become more detached in writing about it. Chinese culture is already infused in my blood and there is no need for me to stick a label on myself. In my own way I have already sorted out what is positive and what is negative in traditional Chinese culture. It is important for a writer to be able to transcend cultural traditions, and not to depend on selling his ancestral heritage in his work in order to make a living. Writing has always relied on the individual, unlike other occupations, which must rely on the cooperation of various sectors of society, including the government. Conversely, any form of collective will that is imposed on writing can only be disastrous. The writer is neither the representative of his culture nor the spokesperson of his people, and if he has the misfortune to become such a representative or spokesperson he will inevitably no longer be recognizable as a writer. It might be said that my play Fleeing,15 which I wrote for an American theater, was inspired by the events in Tiananmen Square. I removed the setting from the historical reality and made it into a political philosophy play without any heroes. The Americans wanted me to make changes, so I withdrew the manuscript and paid for the translation myself. When I write I have my own things to say and I will not make compromises to please the tastes of others. The writer faces society alone and speaks and narrates in the voice of the individual; for me it is this voice that is closest to truth. There are reasons why literature over the past century has promoted the worship of the self to the extent that the self virtually attained the status of God. However, in retrospect, if one really thinks of oneself as God, even if one escapes going mad like Nietzsche, it will not be easy to escape the fate of idols—falling down and breaking into pieces. Nietzsche went mad and is dead, and Nietzsche-styled selves have now been deconstructed. In this postmodern age, which is concerned only with consumerism, the unchecked bloating of the individual is already a far-off myth that probably had its origins in the narcissism of people’s youth. Rather than the starting point of modern literature, Nietzsche’s Superman should more accurately be seen as the end point of romanticism. Kafka’s self is a more accurate depiction of modern man. After him, a brilliant analysis of

Witold Gombrowicz (1904–69): Polish émigré novelist, playwright, and diarist seen as an important precursor to the theater of the absurd.

13

Shanhaijing zhuan (1993), translated into English as: Of Mountains and Seas: A Tragicomedy of the Gods in Three Acts, trans. Gilbert C.F. Fong (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

14

Fleeing (1990).

15

CHINESE MODERNISM

309

the self is to be found in some hundred thousand lines of posthumously published poetry by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. The self is of no significance in the world, but it has boundless wealth because human feelings about the boundless universe are ultimately derived from the self. Modern literature is a return to the perceiving subject, and it is through the mirror of the self that the world is reflected. Literary truth is the truth of these perceptions, and the world external to these perceptions is beyond the concerns of literature. In modern literature, the affirmation of the perceiving subject and its replacement of the all-knowing and omnipotent narrator, who is normally the author, has cast aside unquestioning ethical judgments of right and wrong, but the search for self has led to schizophrenia. So, as I see it, the history of twentieth-century literature may be summarized as the replacement of disintegrating traditional values with this sort of modernity. After the discovery of the self at the end of the last century there inevitably came the doubting of the self. Now it is the end of another century. The fact that evil is not confined to others and one’s own self is an eternal hell has intensified the doubting of the self. If I were to sum up my recent play Nocturnal Wanderer,16 I would say that it is about the impossibility of winning the war against evil. There is no trace of anything Chinese in the setting, and its only discernible difference from a play by a Western author is its attitude of tranquil contemplation. This attitude, which I always adopt towards society and the self, can of course be said to derive from entrenched Chinese cultural traditions, and it is quite different from the psychological analysis and traditions of Western writers. Yet the non-action of Daoist philosophy and the renunciation of the world that is central to Buddhism are too negative for me, because I do in fact want to achieve something. I am neither Daoist nor Buddhist, and what I adopt is simply an attitude of observation and scrutiny. The narrative language of my fiction and my so-called tripartite theory of theater performance are derived from this sort of attitude.17 Can a Chinese intellectual living in the West preserve his spiritual independence as an individual without embracing an ism or seeking consolation in Chinese cultural traditions? I have only doubts, and even doubt all notions of value. It is only life that I do not doubt, because I myself am a being who is full of vitality. Life has a significance that is above ethics, and if I have any value it lies in my existence. It is hard for me to contemplate either suicide or the killing of my spirit prior to the arrival of natural death. For me, literary creation is a means to salvation; it could also be said that it is a means to life. It is for myself, not to please others, that I write. And I do not write to change the world or other people, because I cannot even manage to change myself. For me, what is important is simply the fact that I have spoken and the fact that I have written. It is now apparent that literature can transcend ideology, and Baudelaire and Dostoevsky have already shown that it transcends ethical judgments. What literature cannot be separated from is aesthetic judgments, and it is the writer who generates tragedy, comedy, poetry, absurdity, farce or humor. Some modern writers have expunged ethical judgments from their writings, but it is impossible to dispense with subjectivity

Nocturnal Wanderer (1993).

16

Gao’s “tripartite” theory of acting (sanzhongxing biaoyan) posits the “neutral actor” as a third figure that emerges in an actor’s effort to embody a role and involves an actor’s capacity to observe both the audience and the role they are playing at the same time.

17

310

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

in their aesthetic judgments. This is the last bastion of the writer’s authority and is why literature continues to exist. As a writer I strive to position myself between the East and the West, and as an individual I seek to live at the margins of society. In this era in which, to use Liu Xiaofeng’s18 words, the physical body ridicules the spirit, this is a better choice for me. Yet there is no way of knowing whether or not I will be able to continue doing this.

Liu Xiaofeng (1956–), an influential thinker within the field of Sino-Christian theology.

18

VII. A PARTICULAR SORT OF STORY Can Xue Originally published in Chinese in Dajia, 2003: 4. Translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping.

A prolific novelist, short story writer, and literary critic, Can Xue (pen name of Deng Xiaohua, born 1953) is the author of an eminent body of experimental fiction marked by its anti-realism, inward dream logic, and psychological grotesquerie. Her parents were persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, and she endured prolonged hardship throughout the Cultural Revolution (can xue can be interpreted as both “dirty snow that refuses to melt” and “pure snow on top of a mountain”). Although her formal education was truncated, she read deeply in Chinese and foreign literature and history and taught herself to read English. After establishing a successful tailoring business with her husband, she turned to fiction writing in the early 1980s; soon after, she came to prominence as the sole woman among an avant-garde formation of the mid to late 1980s that included figures such as Mo Yan and Yu Hua. Since then she has established a strong individual identity as a writer of what she calls “soul literature.” She has also written book-length studies of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kafka, Calvino, and Borges and several essay collections. “My works do belong to modernism,” Can Xue told an interviewer in 2002, “but I was also influenced by earlier writers, such Cervantes’s Don Quixote … Modernist ideas really began in ancient times, like in Dante’s works.”1 Can Xue’s bold recasting of “modernism” as a trans-historical phenomenon may be understood partly as an effort to valorize China’s nascent avant-garde tradition within a global theater of experimental writing. It is also, more simply, a statement of her intellectual affinities. In “A Particular Sort of Story,” Can Xue, a master fiction writer and gifted literary critic, begins by disavowing any knowledge of how her stories are made, only to then elucidate a writing practice “where the self is split apart” to attain “the greatest joy in the midst of an infinitude of keen feelings.” SJR

The particular characteristics of my stories have now been acknowledged. Nevertheless, when someone asks me directly, “What is really going on in your stories? How do you write them?,” I’m profoundly afraid of being misunderstood, so all I can say is, “I don’t know.” From any earthly perspective, in truth I do not know. When I write, I intentionally erase any knowledge from my mind. I believe in the grandness of the original power. The only thing I can do is to devoutly bring it into play in a manmade, blind atmosphere. Thus, I can break loose from the fetters of platitudes and conventions, and allow the mighty logos to melt into the omnipresent

Laura McCandlish, “Stubbornly Illuminating ‘the Dirty Snow that Refuses to Melt’: A Conversation with Can Xue,” MCLC Resource Center (December 11, 2002). Accessed July 16, 2018. http://u.osu.edu/mclc/onlineseries/mccandlish/.

1

312

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

suggestions that inspire and urge me to keep going ahead. I don’t know what I will write tomorrow, or even in the next few minutes. Nor do I know what is most related to the “inspiration” that has produced my works in an unending stream for more than two decades. But I know one thing with certainty: no matter what hardships I face, I must preserve the spiritual quality of my life. For if I were to lose it, I would lose my entire foundation. In this world, subsistence is like a huge rolling wheel crushing everything. If a person wants to preserve the integrity of his innermost being, he has to endlessly break his self apart, endlessly undergo “exercises” that set the opposed parts of one’s soul at war with one another. In my exercises, while my self is planted in the world, at the same time my gaze—from beginning to end—is unswervingly fixed on heaven; this is forcing a division between soul and flesh. By enduring the pain from this splitting of the soul, I gain a force of tension—conquering the libido and letting it erupt anew on the rebound. Through this writing, where the self is split apart, one achieves the greatest joy in the midst of an infinitude of keen feelings. As for the world, it constantly exhibits an unprecedented godly purity. It isn’t possible for people to live in pure spirit, because we are situated in a world that is highly filtered and conglutinated. The birthplace of pure spirit is situated in our dark flesh and blood. Perhaps my stories simply return to the old haunt: while pushing forward the dark abyss, they liberate the binding desires and crystallize them into pure spirit. The impetus for this kind of writing lies with the unending desires that make up ordinary life. While the conglutination decomposes wondrously and while the wide-awake imagination receives a clear message from profound restlessness, my pen achieves its own spiritual power. If one is in pursuit of the very purest language, one has to encounter grime, filth, violence, the smell of blood. While writing, you have to endure everything, you have to give up all worldly things. If you still care about being graceful, concerned with your posture and stance, you can’t write this kind of story. In this sense, I exist only after my stories exist. Stories with this kind of unusual language open another life for me. These stories and my ordinary life pervade each other, are interdependent. Because of their intervention, all commonplace vulgarities are imbued with secret significance; human feelings become the greatest enigma of them all. Therefore, daily anguish is no longer something that can’t be endured, because the unending source of inspiration lies precisely in this. Perhaps it’s from the boundary which is between melting and blending that artists are able to derive truth in a split second, the result being a coagulation into a work of art. I believe that art is instinctive in human beings. Artists are simply those who are able— via mighty restraints—to exert their instincts to the utmost. My realm is one shared with all artists. When I enter this realm, the first thing I do is to remove the stone foundation from under my feet, and suspend my body in a semi-free state. Not until then is there an acceleration of mystery. And that is only in spurts. Years of repeated practice have gradually made me aware that success benefits from the mighty logos, inside myself, that is like a murderous machine. The more rigorous the sanction of reason, the more ferocious the rebounding of flesh and blood. Only in this way can the stories have a powerful, unconstrained style and fantasy, yet also have a rigorous and profound level of logic. I certainly did not painstakingly set out to write this kind of story. From the beginning, as I practiced, I heard the faint drumbeats of fate. Afterwards, my life naturally evolved in pursuit of that summons. From my experience, one can see how great the power of art is to transform a person’s life. Whether or not a person is a writer, if he maintains the

CHINESE MODERNISM

313

sensitivity of art, his humanity can be greatly increased. So, art very much harmonizes with human nature and humanism. Art is the most universal pursuit of what it means to be human. Its essence is love. Some people say that my stories aren’t useful: they can’t change anything, nor do people understand them. As time goes by, I’ve become increasingly confident about this. First, the production of twenty years’ worth of stories has changed me to the core. I’ve spoken of this above. Next, from my reading experience, this kind of story, which indeed isn’t very “useful,” that not all people can read—for those few very sensitive readers, there is a decisive impact. Perhaps this wasn’t at all the writer’s original intent. I think what this kind of story must change is the soul instead of something superficial. There will always be some readers who will respond—those readers who are especially interested in the strengthening force of art and exploring the soul. With its unusual style, this kind of story will communicate with those readers, stimulating them and calling to them, spurring them on to join in the exploration of the soul. Self-reflection is the magic formula for creation, a particular self-reflection different from passive self-examination. This kind of self-reflection brings all one’s strength to bear on entering the profound world of the soul, and makes what one has seen there appear again through a special kind of language. Thus, it opposes the scenes of the spiritual world with the exterior world we’re accustomed to, so that we can deepen our understanding. So artistic self-reflection is virtually an active process: it is taking the initiative to go down into hell, to establish oppositions, to strengthen self-contradictions. And in the brutality of fighting closely with oneself, one achieves a unified, highly conscious creation. This dynamic process comes from the longing of the artist to deny his worldly, carnal existence. To satisfy this innermost desire, I put into effect this sort of drill every day. I bring into play my energy to seek out ancient memories that faded long ago. I feel instinctively that there’s no way to stop this kind of exercise. Beginning a long time ago and continuing until today, it is my purpose for living. When I face this world that is filled with material desire and immerse myself fully in the worldly roles, it is precisely what endows my worldly life with meaning. Without it, I would be ashamed to show my face. I would have no foothold. Now, every day, I put into effect artistic activity and restrict my daily life to serve my artistic calling. I feel that I am mightier than ever! In essence, there’s no way for modern art to consider its viewers. Modern art cannot “consider” who its observers are. It can only provide information and summon people, inducing them to stop in their busy lives to think and self-consciously make time for a certain kind of spiritual activity. And so we can say that modern art—approaching human instincts ever more closely—as a spiritual pursuit, can only be an adventurous activity filled with initiative. The relationship between a successful work and its readers is described by the priest in Kafka’s The Trial when he says to K, “It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go.” What I try hard to reach in my stories is this realm of freedom. I believe, when writers create their uncertain imaginary world, they are restless; their eyes are blurred, their hearts startled. But only when it receives affirmation from perceptive readers does this world exist. There must be this kind of reader. I deeply believe that humankind’s soul is a shared place: humans are those who can reason, who are good at self-criticism. In the process of deepening their understanding of the self, people, uninterruptedly, have developed a high level of reason, and have begun to construct a spiritual mechanism forever at odds with “jungle culture.”

314

CHAPTER TEN

Modernism in Japan EDITED BY ALYS MOODY

To scholars trained in European, British, and American literature, modernism in Japan looks immediately familiar: following a period of rapid industrialization and modernization in the nineteenth century, disillusionment and then unrest set in. This paved the way for the proliferation of avant-garde and aestheticist literary and artistic movements in the 1920s, which were sometimes tied to radical political movements and sometimes committed to pure or autonomous literature or art. By the mid-1930s, this period of foment and innovation was overtaken by an increasingly authoritarian government and a surge of nativist sentiment that spread through the literary and art worlds as it did the general population. At the outbreak of the Second World War, modernism had been almost entirely suppressed by a fascist government that linked literary innovation to communism and degeneracy and that was quick to target writers and artists suspected of disloyalty. The familiarity of this narrative reflects the synchrony of Japanese and Western modernism, a result of the history of Japanese modernity and the internationally oriented understanding of culture that characterized Japanese modernism itself. For many Japanese writers and artists in the first decades of the twentieth century, modernism and the avant-garde were part of a dramatic change that both produced and transformed world culture. They understood their experiments in literary and artistic form not as derivative of Western innovations, but as a mark of their position as active participants in an international cultural movement that was unconstrained by national borders. Negotiating a place for Japan at the world table was a project that Japanese modernists undertook on aesthetic grounds, constructing and writing out of a new synthetic tradition that absorbed Western and Japanese precursors into unified histories of the novel, the poem, and the artwork. For their detractors, however, this world culture was not international but Western, and their commitment to it a reflection of their unpatriotic and insufficiently Japanese aesthetic disposition. Caught in the tension between cosmopolitanism and cultural nationalism that animated contemporary and later modernist projects around the world, Japanese modernism became identified with the production of an internationalist or cosmopolitan world culture. These debates get much of their texture from Japan’s unusual place in world politics and its distinctive experience of modernity in this period. For much of the Edo period (1603–1868), Japan had practiced a policy of isolationism known as sakoku, which restricted trade and other forms of exchange, including travel, with the rest of the world. The policy was introduced in the 1630s, in part in response to Spanish and Portuguese colonial expansion, and was eventually dismantled in the wake of an 1853 expedition of American warships, which forced the opening of Japan to trade with the West through

316

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

a series of unequal treaties with the United States, Russia, Britain, and France. Anxious to protect themselves against the colonial aspirations of the West in the wake of this experience of forced trade, and acutely aware of the West’s technological advantages, the Japanese government of the Meiji period (1868–1912) embarked on a process of rapid and top-down modernization. In the space of a few decades, Japan transformed itself from a primarily agrarian, feudal society into an industrialized, urbanized one. This process of modernization was explicitly understood in Japan as a process of Westernization, entailing the importation not only of Western technologies, but also of Western thought, philosophy, and culture, which key members of the Meiji elite took to be a necessary conjunct to the West’s technological power. At the same time, this Meiji-era orientation toward the West was undertaken in a spirit of Japanese nationalism and defense of the nation, a concept captured by the term Wakon-yōsai (Japanese spirit, Western techniques), which was coined at the start of the Meiji period and became increasingly important into the twentieth century. In this context, Japan became increasingly militaristic and expansionist. Its victories in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 cemented the country’s position as a world power, while its annexation of Korea in 1910 made it a colonial power. In this sense, Japan’s attempt to modernize on Western models as part of their own colonial and nationalist aspirations is distinct from many other regions in this volume, for whom modernization was linked to the experience of being colonized or of decolonization. Japan in this sense perhaps most closely resembles the experience of Turkey, for whom modernization was also understood as a process of government-directed Westernization, aimed at maintaining the power of nation and empire in the face of Western competition and encroachment. By the early decades of the twentieth century, as essays elsewhere in this volume by Haitian Normil G. Sylvain (2.i), and Indian Rabindranath Tagore (8.i) show, Japan had become a powerful model of what modernity for non-Western nations might look like, and an exemplar to countries whose aspirations were more decolonial than colonizing. Ironically, this non-Western modernity was, at the same time, an explicit project of modernization through Westernization. It was made possible through the rapid growth of Japanese travel to Europe, as well as a flourishing translation culture, which brought literature, philosophy, science, and other texts from French, English, Russian, and other European languages into Japanese. Against this backdrop, Japanese literature and art of the Meiji period, like society as a whole, modernized along Western lines. From the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, Western-style painting, known as yōga, was taught and practiced in Japan, where it was prized for being more naturalistic, and therefore more “scientific,” than traditional Japanese forms. From the 1880s, translations of European poetry introduced the concept of “poetry” as a generic category into Japanese literature, alongside formal innovations, from line breaks and stanzas to modern forms such as free verse. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the “I-novel,” a confessional genre that was understood as a distinctively Japanese adaptation of Western techniques, emerged as one of the defining literary genres of the period. Modernism in Japan is usually understood to emerge in reaction to the initial optimism of this experience, as the Meiji period dissolved into the fraught Taishō period (1912–26). Taishō saw the expansion of Japanese military ambitions, rising domestic political unrest, growing leftist movements, and superficial democratic reforms. The Great Kantō Earthquake, which devastated Tokyo and surrounding areas in 1923, produced a shock sometimes likened to the impact of the First World War on Europe,

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

317

and spurred a darker turn in literary and artistic culture. At the same time, Japan’s now firmly established translation culture provided constant access to artistic developments in Europe, where avant-garde and modernist writing and art were flourishing out of a similar sense of discontent in the face of modernity’s disasters and disappointments. Japanese modernism, in this context, emerged as a constellation of competing ideas about how to imagine art’s new function under these conditions of disruptive modernity. The answers ranged from those, like Hirato Renkichi, who understood themselves to be participating in global avant-gardist movements such as Futurism, to those, such as the MAVO artists, who developed indigenous avant-gardes; and from the proletarian writers, for whom literature was reimagined as part of a broader, internationalist leftist movement, to aestheticist advocates for “pure literature.” This brief and energetic period of modernist foment continued into the early Shōwa period. In the 1930s, however, nationalism and militarism increasingly came to dominate Japanese society, and the space for the risky political and aesthetic experiments that emerged during the Taishō period rapidly narrowed. The proletarian literature movement gradually wound up in the face of growing repression and in the wake of the death of Kobayashi Takiji, one of the movement’s leaders, at the hands of the police. Less overtly leftist writers, such as Kobayashi Hideo, were able to continue to publish into the 1930s and through the Second World War by assimilating their projects to the demands of the government. As the Second World War approached, Japanese literary culture turned toward an increasingly nostalgic and nativist revival of Japanese tradition, and away from the Western influences and interlocutors that helped to animate Japanese modernism. By the outbreak of war, Japanese modernism, in its varied forms, had all but disappeared. This section, featuring texts from the 1920s and 1930s, showcases the breadth of projects that made up modernism in Taishō and early Shōwa Japan. AM

FURTHER READING Bowen-Struyk, Heather, and Norma Field, eds. For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Doak, Kevin Michael. Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gardner, William O. Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. Karatani Kōjin. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Lippit, Seiji M. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Sas, Miriam. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Solt, John. Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902–1978). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Tyler, William Jefferson, ed. Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–38. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. Weisenfeld, Gennifer. MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

I. MY FUTURISM IN ACTION Hirato Renkichi Originally published in Nihon Shijin, January 1922. Translated by Sho Sugita.

Hirato Renkichi (1893–1922) was an avant-garde poet and translator. At his death from a pulmonary disease in 1922, he was Japan’s leading Futurist poet, a writer who understood himself as a participant in a global avant-gardist movement. Futurism had been known in Japan almost since its inception in Europe. In 1909, only months after Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti published “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in French, Mori Ōgai, a Japanese writer, translated its key principles into Japanese. Over the subsequent decade, Japanese writers and artists were kept apprised of Futurist developments in Europe through translations of their works and reports on their exhibitions. This awareness crystallized in a Futurist movement in Japan in the first years of the 1920s, constellated around the painter Murayama Tomoyoshi and his Futurist Art Association. Hirato’s “Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement,” which he printed and distributed by hand in 1921, was a typographically and poetically experimental hymn to the “dynamo-electric” core of the modern, technologized city. This essay, written after the manifesto, seeks to articulate the relationship of Japanese Futurists like himself to the global movement in which they sought to participate. AM

My Futurism is by no means theoretical. It is the split-moment in motion encapsulated by life itself. It is Realization itself. Burliuk jested me and said, “you are the Marinetti of Japan,”1 and though I am influenced by Marinetti among other Futurists, I am in no means working under them. 1909—the Futurists dropped their first bomb above all of Europe, fretful and anemic, with their so-called steel hand;2 subsequently for ten years, I have seen the entire world completely enthralled by Futurism that lifted this Earth with feelings of restlessness and destruction.—Truth—Futurism does not merely problematize poetry, nor does it pose an issue with painting, sculpture and dance; that is to say, it does not pose a problem with merely an artistic form, but rather an ideological backdrop that we must be so cautious of, namely its significant dynamism towards society and life presented under our footsteps. The aforementioned social condition was not limited to the Adriatic region. Be it France, Germany, Bohemia, Serbia, Russia, England, or America, the world was in a state of diseased decadence uplifted by a Futurist insurrection. David Burliuk (1882–1967) was a Ukrainian Futurist, sometimes described as “the father of Russian Futurism.” He spent two years in Japan in 1920–2 and his presence had a galvanising effect on the Japanese Futurist Art Association.

1

F. T. Marinetti’s “Manifesto and Founding of Futurism,” was first published in French in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro in late February 1909. Within months, the Japanese writer and academic Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) had translated its statement of Futurism’s key tenets into Japanese, publishing them in his regular column about European cultural news in Subaru, a literary journal with Romantic tendencies.

2

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

319

Today, Futurism happened in Japan. In consequence, I am saddened that the manifesto declared from my own skinny arm was very cliché; however, is this something that shall not exist in Japan today?3 I hear words like, this isn’t exactly Futurist anymore, is it? Indeed, Futurism as an artistic form is nothing new. But to a shallow formalist, the partial sacrifice towards true Futurist exaltation is inevitable silence. As you’ve seen, there hasn’t been a time like today where the world wants to reorganize itself. Will this new anthology not eventually possess a kind of Renaissance? But the makeshift remedy sustained by past generations could not aid us, just like how Russia had started a drastic treatment for its rise and fall of an entire nation. At this time, what will become of our little Passéist4 Japan? The verbosity, disorder, cultural life of waste, and blindness of our everyday life—all together, nothing can catch us by surprise. There is nothing magical about how my directness was born this day in age. Directness is my mores. Directness is my action. Directness is my art. My direct Futurism is precisely the speedy steel machinery, set in motion to give us a fatal wound, and nothing must change this. Participate towards the shining light! Follow and realize the L’Esprit Nouveau5! Whatever happens, that is inside a Futurist container. Futurism shall not associate itself with any other new-isms, becoming the elite world-ideology to burn down all literary circles for the sake of our Future. Futurism is to become the single theory, and as a form, I am bound to give my cold-hearted glance along with the other Futurist jesters in this world. Some say that new wine can’t be put in old wineskins. New wine copiously wells up as L’Esprit Nouveau. In terms of an entirely new Futurist form, it cannot be explained without an old but eternally new metaphor: the relationship between the internal and external are neither 2 independent entities nor a + of each entity, but rather a total 1. The first contribution given by Futurism must be, above all, music. The state of music gives power, dynamism, and movement to all life through an externally internal voice. The Futurist music will go further, becoming an absolute symphony of spirit and cloud, a great orchestra tied together by the coordination of all things funneled into freedom. With this great instrumental movement in full effect, we will live as we will, constructing our own environment, and soak ourselves in the ceaseless flow of life.

Hirato printed his “Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement” as a flyer and distributed it in the streets of Tokyo in 1921. It is available in Sho Sugita’s English translation in Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Books, 2017): 186–9.

3

Rendered in Roman script in the original.

4

Written as 新精神 (“new spirit”) in kanji with furigana (a reading aid, whereby small characters are printed alongside the word in kanji to indicate pronunciation) that is a transliteration of l’espirit nouveau (エスピリ ヌ ウボウ).

5

II. RED AND BLACK MANIFESTO Originally printed on the cover of Aka to kuro [Red and Black], issue 1, 1923. Translated by Tom Baudinette.

Aka to kuro (Red and Black) was a short-lived anarchist literary journal, founded by poets Hagiwara Kyojiro (1899–1938), Tsuboi Shigeji (1897–1975), and Ono Tosaburo (1903–96). Inspired by anarchist politics and radical avant-garde literary aesthetics, it was published from 1923 until 1924, when it was forced to close in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake. This manifesto is typical of many Japanese avant-garde manifestos of the period, and appeared on the cover of its first issue. AM

DECLARATION What is this thing called poetry? And who are those called poets? Within this bold affirmation, we completely renounce all concepts from the past! “Poetry is a bomb! Poets are black criminals who hurl their bombs at the doors and walls of prisons!”

III. AN ARTISTIC INQUIRY INTO THE BARRACK TOWNS Hagiwara Kyojiro Originally serialized in Chūō shinbun, 12–19 April 1924. Translated by Sho Sugita. Sections 1 and 3–6 taken from the Hagiwara Kyojiro zenshū [Hagiwara Kyojiro’s Collected Works]. Section 2, which was not included in the zenshū edition, taken directly from Chūō shinbun.

Hagiwara Kyojiro (1899–1938) was an important figure in the Japanese avant-garde. A self-proclaimed anarchist, he was one of the figures behind Aka to kuro (Red and Black), whose manifesto is printed above (10.ii), as well as an important participant in MAVO, a radical avant-garde art group. His poetry collection Shikei senkoku (Death sentence) was published in 1925 and remains one of the central texts of the Japanese avantgarde, combining experimental poetry with experiments in printmaking, photography, typography, and book design. “An Artistic Inquiry into the Barrack Towns” is one of many responses by the Japanese avant-gardes to the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, which devastated Tokyo and killed around 140,000 people. The earthquake caused fires throughout the city, destroying swathes of the wooden buildings that were common in the city at the time. As a result, many of the city’s poorer inhabitants were left homeless, forced to build makeshift barrack towns on the edges of the city. This essay, serialized over six issues of the Tokyo daily newspaper, Chūō shinbun in April 1924, offers an aesthetic appraisal of these towns, explicitly linking them to the project of the avant-gardes. Hagiwara’s response was common among his peers, for whom the earthquake offered a shock that is sometimes compared to the effect of the First World War on the European avantgardes. Many took the city’s destruction as an opportunity to rebuild anew, or to imagine new forms of architecture, urban design, and ways of living, and Hagiwara mentions some of these experiments in the text. For those who, like Hagiwara, were interested in the connections between radical politics and radical art practices, the earthquake and its effects on Tokyo provided a unique opportunity to develop new ways of imagining the relationship between art, politics, and daily life. AM

1. How hundreds of thousands of the world’s laborers’ clean hands have handled their bluecovered books with their pale faces! Like attempting to discover a poem that resembles a rare pearl or Columbus trying to discover the American continent. Claiming that art is beauty, many ignorant people have been astonished by such research, questioning what colors or shapes are, as though they’re computing geometry equations. Those melancholiacs dealing with beauty, wearing their pince-nez while uttering their “ahem,”

322

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

have apparently felt some kind of heavenly beauty that transcends reality from their bluecovered books on aesthetics.1 Some of my dear friends, during an afternoon after a satiating meal, inside a gloomy room, must have heard a tremendous lecture from a pretentious scholar of aesthetics. When listening to these talks, our faces turn yellow, whether it’s inside a classroom or library or out in the streets. From reading newspapers or magazines, we must have thought about the foolishness of our own questions to the point of laughter, while making our faces frown, listening as though something useful will come out of it. It is precisely when we are tormented by our excess energy of fiery ideals that even the dullest aesthetic theory could work as a soul-tranquilizer for a while, fulfilling a role equal to that of a Jintan cake (since Westerners call Jintan “cakes”).2 However, when my dear friends have completely matured, realizing their individuality, they must have used the bulldog-like toes of their shoes3 and furiously kicked the person they once called a teacher, who now looks like a ghost in the sun, a skeleton wrapped in a frock coat. Throwing away the blue-covered books, fiercely setting foot in the once-forgotten soil, my dear friends’ hearts must have boiled over with creative energy like raging billows in the sea, as though it is the flowering season or the first time Adam saw Eve. Yet to this day, as we enter the great joy of this bright twentieth century with our lives of worldly processions, there are things that are incessantly talking and consuming, like novels and poetry and criticism, so-called plays, questions about life and ideology, theory of the novels, poetics—how bitter those idealists are, blocking their eyes, cramming in their own obnoxious words. We must have patience with each other, layering chatter over chatter, with the advent of literature and the future of our lives getting spat on.

2. How filthy that plaque-filled spit is! The baselessness of those maggots’ arguments! Now is the time we give them our blow with a rebuttal. How they fail to fulfill our desires for pursuit, how intemperate they are, how they burden us to clench on some lead in our hands when we are only trying to live a sincere life—why don’t we take this opportunity to refute the organization of life and problems in art that they are so fond of enumerating in print? It is very much inevitable that our art must begin from the foundations of our lives. Beyond how life and art should be closely connected, the boundary between art and life renders itself into something indistinguishable from each other as they mix and melt. If there’s anyone who feels that life and art can always be something that can be categorized,

The blue coverings of these books suggest their province in the Edo period (1603–1868). The content of these books is somewhat ambiguous: “blue-covered books” would usually indicate Confucian books or copies of The Tale of Genji to a Japanese readership, but “books on aesthetics” suggests Western books with dark blue leather covers.

1

Jintan was a Japanese medicine, developed after the Russo-Japanese War and marketed in Japan and elsewhere as a cure-all that would promote general health and cure a range of minor complaints. It became a symbol of Japanese modernity in Asia. Today it is sold as a breath mint, and its candy-like appearance may be what Hagiwara is referring to in his observation that Westerners treat it as a cake, rather than a medicine.

2

A reference to jika-tabi, a kind of split-toe shoe developed in the early twentieth-century, based on traditional split-toe socks. These shoes were mostly worn by workers, and represent in this context a modernization of traditional Japanese fashions.

3

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

323

that person is an idiot who should be looked down upon with disdain. If we are said to be advocates of life for life’s sake, there is so little demarcation between life and art that no one would object to call us advocates of art for art’s sake. Art is life. I will keep my own theory of art for another occasion, but from the yellow, bacteria-infested dust; from the hopelessly small, crammed, fearless, rattling train; from our quivers after hearing the hysterical scream of the conductor as we step into the path of this capital we call Tokyo that is like a beloved bride who suffered from a miscarriage—there is much for us to learn. We learn from the terrifying conflict between the world of books and the real social condition that makes the sunlight tremble, as we flinch from its hilarity that borders on crying. However, my friends, from dimly lit districts like Koishikawa and Hongō, which unfortunately survived the fire and look like dwellings of slugs,4 to the barrack towns with foul air—imagine a helter-skelter canvas of all the innocent faces in the barrack towns that turn tense, all showered in dust, with packed trains and buses that look like the month of parturition, municipal cars that look like cargo trucks, battered cabs, Lumbercarrying wagons, motorcycles, bicycles, career women, traffic cops, all the crossroads that have lost their tree lines, and new recruits of the military police and privates first class bearing their terrifying fixed-bayonets in broad daylight. A new kind of art will at least emerge into this field, where it will perhaps need to inhabit this welter of confusion.

3. Although I can’t say this without reservation, the people of the barrack towns are largely propertyless compared to people in districts who were unaffected by fire. Even if they were not propertyless, they are people who were confronted with a terrifying reality. I believe their souls are greatly different than ours. When we are riding on our trains and passing through the barrack towns, what do we perceive through that rebellious energy, color, and shape in their uniquely agitated state? If we are to seek new colors and moods through a new form of art, the sensibilities we crave are probably things that project out of these barrack towns. Behind the fresh and jaunty lives that we lead, there are of course nests full of immorality and tremor and sickness and unbearable hunger with exposed teeth. However, we must understand these realities and how they may be on the last brink of an unstoppable dance. On the other hand, we are unlikely to be able to overlook the thoughts of people who encountered these hardships and their unifying spiritual passage. We cannot forget the powerful electricity that silently passes through us that we cannot parse with logic. At the same time, we will likely be able to see the freedom and emancipation contained within that delightfully bright light of our heliotropic spirit.

4. Whether considering a recent Japanese novel or play, I see that most of these either feel like translated novels or Naturalist styles of writing that have withered to death. These irritating works with no particular originality are never able to attain an individual

Koishikawa and Hongō were middle-class wards, home to intellectual and artistic families but more traditional than Ginza. They were relatively unscathed by the earthquake and ensuing fires, compared to the widespread destruction in the city’s east.

4

324

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

character, because they are indifferent towards aspects of color that sit apart from reality and are insensitive to the indwelling consciousness that shapes occupy. While the energy and originality of art are the first factors to consider when getting to know the sensitivity of an artist, these factors are revealed to us through what are called shapes and colors. In that sense, the color form in architectural styles must be something that is good for current artists to consider. I think we should overcome the inseparable traditional formalities and concepts that surround us, and ask ourselves what art is. Where art originates from, where it is born—unless these adhere to the domain that we currently live in, the philosophers or artists who overlook these problems that we face can neither be called new philosophers nor artists. Those people do not amount to more than the silverfish (name of insect) at libraries. However much they disseminate their flowers of melancholic theory in their war of words, the era will probably continue to move on in full fling as a box of rubbish quarrels. Acting as if they own this place, narcissistic artists will likely emerge on account of continuing to transition from the discussions of aesthetics and social issues while they mock the reality of living. Artists outside of this transition, at least for the art world from this point forward, will become a kind of unauthorized personnel.

5. Have you heard of that fruit shop Sembikiya in Ginza?5 Upon visiting their upper floor, I went home with a rather good feeling. I would like to take people who only know the front gates of libraries and place them in front of Sembikiya. I would like to inform the people of the old Koishikawa and Hongō districts how much energy is brought about by cheerfulness.6 Likewise, I would even like to refer to how those shapes bring out invisible and diverse tastes of life, especially for people who don’t wish to nurse themselves on melancholy. Apart from that, while I’m not a resident and unfamiliar with Ginza Street, the décor at Kirin Beer that was designed by the Action coterie7 is something curious and unusual, and the fact that an unembellished sign for Café Russia stands in a place where bricks are still difficult to transport have also brought unforgettable, episodic emotions in some way. In addition, it has been 12 days since the MAVO-style barracks near the Imagawa Bridge have been said to have built by MAVO.8 I can’t tell you how much freshness these sensations can give me compared to the works of authors that seem to have withered and died. I even want to worship the barrack towns. At least that fresh lifestyle may be more artistic than the old Tokyo to some extent, like the post-Impressionist paintings that rebelled against classical paintings. Bright and cheerful, considerably egalitarian without its horrors, can’t you see their lifestyle as they intimately flock together? And more than anything, see the vivid colors of those people and the fierce form of their houses. The people who can live and tightly link themselves to those

Ginza was a fashionable district in Tokyo, known as a favorite destination for students and avant-gardes in this period. Rebuilt in a Western style after a devastating fire in 1872, its European-style coffee shops were popular gathering places in the period. Sembikiya was, and still is, a famous fruit store, with a branch in Ginza.

5

See note 4, above.

6

Action was another avant-garde art group that became interested in post-earthquake urban regeneration projects.

7

In the aftermath of the earthquake, many avant-garde groups sought to adopt an active role in the rebuilding efforts, contributing architectural and design projects. Hagiwara refers to projects by Action and MAVO.

8

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

325

colors and forms cannot pass their time without a burning force greater than that of these colors and forms.

6. Are there new authors who can endure this intensity? New art ought to be made by sincere people with a strong determination and those who shine brightly. The works should not be emotional works that stimulate cheap tear glands like coal cinder, not hysterical works that are frivolous and lack criticality, but works organized by a brighter intellectual passion without an arrogant air of melancholy. The brightness of the barrack town is like the brightness of gunpowder. Also, the comfortable and unembellished aspect of the post office in front of the Asakusa Kaminarimon should be a point of reference.9 Also, I would like to recommend looking down the barrack towns that stretch from the mountains of Ueno and Asakusa Shitaya to Kanda Nihonbashi.10 Paintings and poetry, and above all the truth of light and heat will likely force themselves upon us. Aside from the barracks of Ueno and Hibiya, have my dear friends looked at the barracks near Senju and Fukagawa? My friends may have seen many barracks that have yet to show their forms as houses. They must have seen the primitive life conditions of people needing to live, needing to eat, fighting the cold and hunger. With colors and reverberations of shrill screams that stir up painful anxieties, there must be someone who has knocked on those doors of desperation. There must be an author who has portrayed the people tormented by poverty and hunger but are still painting a new world and charging on with their lives. There must be an author who has the colors and reverberations that are equivalent to what drifts through our world—colors and reverberations that are moving. It makes me think. My dear friends must be familiar with Expressionism, Futurism, DADA, and other new artistic styles in their entirety—good heavens, how they have so many things in common. As new life unfolds, a demand for new art is inevitable. Where does this new life and art originate, where is it developed, and where does it bear fruit? In other words, it is necessary to know how the whole view of barrack towns is suitable for the form of contemporary art. Born out of ignorance, what appears on the surface of our creation in the height of our impulsive desire for new art is something that is most stimulating as it continues to guide us. I believe that this is an important point to consider for new artists.

The Kaminarimon is an ornate entrance gate leading to the temple Sensoji, in the historical district of Asakusa. It dates originally to AD 942, although it has been destroyed and rebuilt many times over its history. Its historical nature and rich embellishment would offer a sharp contrast to the unassuming post office. The modern postal service in Japan was first established in 1871, as part of the Meiji period’s project of modernization and Westernization.

9

Hagiwara draws the readers attention to barrack towns that run through historical parts of Tokyo: Ueno Mountain has long been a favourite site for cherry-blossom viewing and in 1876 became home to Japan’s first park; Shitaya is an historic shrine in what was then the Asakusa distinct; Kanda Nihonbashi was the center of Edo, as Tokyo was known before the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868.

10

IV. NOVELS WITHOUT A “STORY-LIKE” STORY Akutagawa Ryūnosuke Originally published in Japanese in Kaizō in 1927, as part of the series “Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeiteki na” (Literary, All Too Literary). Translated by Sho Sugita from the Aozora Bunko edition.

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) is perhaps the most renowned Japanese modernist short story writer, best known in the West as the author whose texts inspired Kurosawa Akira’s internationally acclaimed film Rashomon (1950). Akutagawa’s early writing adapts traditional Japanese folk tales using modern forms to grotesque and often horrifying effect, while his later work is increasingly experimental and fragmentary. He committed suicide in 1927 at the age of 35—the year this essay was published—and his death has become part of his mythology as a tragic and tortured artist. This essay is part of an important and much-discussed debate between Akutagawa and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) over the role of plot in fiction, which took place in the pages of the general-interest magazine Kaizō in 1927. Responding to Tanizaki’s claim that, “The appeal of plot … is the method of construction, the appeal of structure— an architectural beauty,”1 Akutagawa retorted with an influential series of forty essays, collectively known as “Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeiteki na” (Literary, All Too Literary). This text is the first installment in this series, and lays out Akutagawa’s complex position on plot and narrative in fiction. Conventionally this essay, and Akutagawa’s late work in general, has been read as indicating a turn to the Japanese I-novel (shishōsetsu), a confessional genre that developed out of Naturalism in the first decade of the twentieth century and was extremely popular during the Taishō period (1912–26). More recently, scholars such as Seiji Lippit have argued that, to the contrary, “Akutagawa’s ‘plotless’ novel in fact reflected a loss of faith in narrative and especially in the possibilities of selfexpression and self-representation in literature.”2 However we read his aesthetics, this text stands as one of the most influential statements of “pure literature” in the period, as well as a fascinating case study of how Japan’s vibrant translation culture and its writers’ thoughtful mediation of Western and Japanese tradition produced highly distinctive forms of innovation in this period. AM

I don’t have the highest regard for novels without “story-like” stories. Accordingly, I won’t call on anyone to always write novels without “story-like” stories. For starters, my novels often have “stories.” A painting cannot be realized without dessin. Likewise, a novel is something that is built on a “story.” (What I mean as a “story” does not simply mean a “narrative.”) Strictly speaking, a novel would not be at all realized in the complete absence of a “story.” I’m undoubtedly someone who will also show respect for novels with “stories.” Ever since Daphnis and Chloe, with every novel and epic poem built on Quoted in Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): 44.

1

Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism.

2

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

327

“stories,” who could possibly not show respect for novels with “stories”? Madame Bovary holds a “story.” War and Peace holds a story. The Red and the Black holds a “story.” ….3 Nevertheless, what determines the value of a certain novel is never the strength or weakness of a “story.” Whether a story is conventional or unconventional should be, all the more so, outside the bounds of criticism. (As many know, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō is an author of many novels that are built on unconventional “stories.”4 Some of his novels that are built on unconventional “stories” will perhaps last a hundred generations. However, that does not necessarily mean that the life of the novel is entrusted on whether or not the “story” is unconventional.) Moreover, even the existence of a “story-like” story is independent of these kinds of problems. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have the highest regard for novels without “stories”—or novels without “story-like” stories. Still, I also think that these kinds of novels can have their place. Of course, a novel without a “story-like” story is not merely a novel that depicts one’s personal affairs.5 It is, of the many kinds of novels out there, a novel most similar to poetry. Furthermore, it is something much more similar to a novel than what people call prose poetry. For the third time, I don’t have the highest regard for novels without “stories.” But, if “purity” is the point of discussion—from the fact that it is not concerned with popular interest, it is the purest kind of novel. To give an analogy to painting again, a painting cannot be realized without dessin. (Several paintings by Kandinsky titled “Improvisation” are exceptions.6) However, paintings that entrust their lives in color rather than dessin can be realized. Several paintings by Cézanne that were fortunately brought over to Japan will clearly prove this fact.7 I am interested in novels that are similar to these kinds of paintings. Then, do these kinds of novels actually exist? Early German Naturalist writers had set their hands to these kinds of novels. Nevertheless, only Jules Renard comes to mind in terms of more recent work by a novelist. (As far as my observations are concerned) Renard’s Les Philippe (included in the Japanese translation of Le Vigneron dans sa vigne by Kishida Kunio8) seems almost unfinished at first glance. But, in reality it is a novel that

Akutagawa’s history of the novel is a Western one, running from Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (second century AD), to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867), and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830). Ellipses in original.

3

Tanizaki was known for novels that depicted Japanese modern life, including at times dealing with taboo sexual and erotic themes.

4

This is likely an allusion to the I-novel (shishōsetsu), which used the first-person confessional mode to depict personal affairs.

5

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)’s Improvisations is a large series of abstract and semi-figurative paintings, begun in the first decade of the twentieth century. In his important essay, On the Spiritual in Art (1910), he describes these paintings as “Intuitive, for the greater part spontaneous expressions of incidents of an inner character, or impressions of the ‘inner nature.’” See Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 1948): 98. Kandinsky’s paintings and writings found their way into Japanese artistic discourse by way of artists such as Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–77), the founder of MAVO, who was such an enthusiast that he was dubbed the “Kandinsky of Japan.”

6

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)’s Self-Portrait with a Hat (1894) and Landscape (1885–7), both of which were unfinished, were the first of his paintings to be exhibited in Japan when they were shown at the first Shirakaba Museum Exhibition in 1921. For a full account of Cézanne’s reception in Japan in the early twentieth century, see Inaga Shigemi, “Between Revolutionary and Oriental Sage: Paul Cézanne in Japan,” Japan Review 28 (2015): 133–72.

7

Kishida Kunio (1890–1954) was an important Japanese dramatist, as well as a translator of Jules Renard (1864–1910)’s Les Philippe (1907) and Le Vigneron dans sa vigne (1894).

8

328

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

can be simply described with its “keen eye” and “sensitive heart.” To give an analogy to Cézanne again, Cézanne left behind many unfinished paintings for our future generations. Just like how Michelangelo left behind unfinished sculptures—yet, even for Cézanne’s paintings, there are some doubts as to whether the work is unfinished. As a matter of fact, Rodin has described Michelangelo’s unfinished works as finished works! …..However, unlike Michelangelo’s sculptures or several of Cézanne’s paintings, Renard’s novels are not works of questionable completeness. Although I am unfortunately unaware of how the French regard Renard due to my limited resources, the originality of his works are apparently not fully acknowledged. Then, are these kinds of novels only written by Westerners? I would like to mention Shiga Naoya’s many short stories for my Japanese readers—his many short stories, including “Bonfire” (Takibi).9 I mentioned before that these kinds of novels are “not concerned with popular interest.” What I mean by popular interest is an interest towards its very own happenings. I was standing in traffic today, and I observed a fight between a rickshaw man and a driver. I also sensed a certain interest in this. What was this interest? No matter how I see this, I can’t imagine this interest is any different from seeing a fight in a play. If different, a fight in a play could never put me in danger, while I could never know when a fight in the streets could put me in danger. I am not trying to deny works of literature that deliver that kind of interest. Yet I believe that there are more sophisticated interests than that kind of interest. If I were to say what those interests are—and I would especially like to respond to Tanizaki Jun’ichirō with the following—that it is his introductory pages of “Kirin” that will immediately become a pertinent example of such interests.10 Novels without “story-like” stories lack popular interest. But, at their very best, they never lack popular interest. (That is simply an issue of how the word “popular” is interpreted.) Half the reason why Renard’s portrayal of Philippe gives us interest is that Philippe—who sees through a poet’s eyes and heart—is an ordinary man, much like ourselves. To likewise call that a popular interest should not be unreasonable. (Of course, I do not want to place my point of emphasis on “being an ordinary man.” I want to place emphasis on “being an ordinary man who sees through a poet’s eyes and heart.”) For instance, I know a lot of people who constantly familiarize themselves with literature for the sake of these kinds of interests. We are not unwilling to express our admiration for a giraffe at a zoo. But, we feel attached to our cats at home after all. If Cézanne is a destroyer of paintings like critics claim, Renard is also a destroyer of novels. In this sense, whether Gide is carrying a thurible or Philippe’s fragrance resembles that of his town, Renard is perhaps walking down a somewhat quiet path full of traps. I am interested in the works of these kinds of authors—the works of writers in the style of Anatole France or Barrès.11 What I mean by a so-called novel with a “story-like” story and why I’m interested in those kinds of novels—those subjects have probably been for the most part exhausted by the above-mentioned lines of writing.

Shiga Naoya (1886–1971) was one of Japan’s leading short story writers and novelists, known particularly for his contributions to the I-novel genre. A collection of his stories has been published as The Paper Door and Other Stories, trans. Lane Dunlop (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

9

Tanizaki’s story “Kirin” (1910) draws on classical Chinese subject matter and begins with a philosophical dialogue between Confucius and a Taoist sage. 11 Anatole France (1844–1924): an influential French writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. Maurice Barrès (1862–1923): French author known for his trilogy The Cult of the Self (1888). 10

V. ON WALL STORIES AND “SHORT” SHORT STORIES: A NEW APPROACH TO PROLETARIAN LITERATURE Kobayashi Takiji Originally published in Shinkō geijutsuha sōsho (Studies in the Newly Rising Arts), June 1931. Translated by Ann Sherif.

The Japanese proletarian literature movement was one of the most important movements in Japanese literature in the 1920s and 1930s. Driven by a tide of Marxist and broadly leftist sentiment that swept Japan in the wake of the country’s rapid industrialization and in the light of its growing imperial ambitions, this movement, like its counterparts internationally, imagined literature as a key driver of social change and a tool for moblizing the proletariat. Conventionally dated to the publication of the journal The Sower in 1921, its heyday began in 1928 with the formation of the Japanese Proletarian Arts Federation (known as the NAPF after its Esperanto name) and the launch of its journal Battle Flag. The movement was notable both for its attempt to engage the working classes of Japan, and for its incorporation of Korean writers, at a time when Japan was an occupying power in Korea. Kobayashi Takiji (1903–33) was one of the leading writers of the movement and a central figure in the NAPF. His death following police torture in 1933, at the age of 29, helped to herald the end of the proletarian literature movement in Japan, in the light of growing government repression as the country turned increasingly toward fascism and imperialism. This essay was initially published in the second of a series of three volumes, Studies in the Newly Rising Arts, mainly devoted to aestheticist writing—an unusual outlet for proletarian literature, which is often remembered as staunchly opposed to these less political modernists. It reflects on the formal innovations required to reach a proletarian audience, focusing particularly on “wall stories,” a genre of very short stories, pioneered by the proletarian literature movement and intended for display on the walls of factories (although whether such works were ever displayed in this fashion is unclear). Connecting formal innovation to the need to engage disenfranchized audiences, Kobayashi here presents a highly original—and distinctively politicized—version of modernism’s familiar interest in literary experiment. For more information about and texts from the Japanese proletarian literature movement, see For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature, edited by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), from which this essay is reproduced. AM

330

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

As writers, many of us have fully appreciated Lunacharsky’s observation that we need to create literary works “elementary and simple” in content that will gain currency among the millions of industrial and agricultural workers.1 We have not, however, succeeded in producing works that live up to this ideal. Early last year some among our ranks misunderstood the ideological implications of “elementary and simple” content. Even after this misinterpretation had been rectified (“Resolution on the Problem of Popularization,” Senki [Battle Flag], July 1930),2 no concrete example of this concept—in other words, no “literary work”—appeared. This results not so much from our sloth but rather reveals the practical difficulties of the task that we have been assigned. From the latter half of last year, however, Battle Flag proposed that we experiment with wall stories. As for why Battle Flag embarked on this experiment, it was first and foremost our way of responding to the wishes of the people right away; it was also a matter of the writers themselves wanting to dedicate energy to this project. Though they are far from perfect in form, we have succeeded in finding in wall stories the early manifestations of a new type of proletarian literature, one grounded in “elementary and simple” content. I can offer several reasons why wall stories will find favor among people of the industrial and agricultural working classes. First, they are only a page or two in length, so they can be read quickly at any time, any place, and moreover, they let the reader grasp something solid and coherent. Second, wall stories will be posted in places where workers and farmers congregate, and address topics of immediate concern to the masses. Given such a role, wall stories hold great potential if we put effort into them. We must be wary, however, of the risk of developing a certain bias. What sort of bias do we risk? It is the risk of understanding the role of wall stories one-dimensionally and formulaically. If such an understanding were to take hold, wall stories would turn into crappy old sermons ordering people to “do this and do that!” And in actual practice, all the wall stories to date seem to have succumbed to that tendency, despite the author’s good intentions and efforts. Nevertheless, to the extent that wall stories are wall stories as distinguished from “short” short stories—however much they may resemble them—I believe they have a limitation. The reason is the role with which they have been charged. In that respect, wall stories are bound to be a “one-dimensional” art form. What I wish to emphasize here is that the genre of wall stories will have a completely new and significant influence on the field of proletarian literature. This is because wall stories can inform our interest in the “short short story” in proletarian literature, yielding rich contributions on the question of form in short short fiction. There is an important reason for why I refer to “short” short stories here, rather than “short stories.” What would that reason be? Allow me to quote from my monthly literary review for the May issue of Central Review: A factory worker once said to me, “Can we get you to write lots of really short pieces that we could read in five or ten minutes?” The kind of story he had in mind was very simple, with a very specific theme, something that he could get the gist of immediately. Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933) was a Russian Marxist and revolutionary, who served as the first People’s Commissar of Education from 1917 until 1929. See “Theses on the Problems of Marxist Criticism” (1928), Section 9, in Lunacharsky, On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973).

1

Senki (Battle Flag) was the publication of the NAPF and one of the chief outlets for proletarian literature.

2

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

331

A story that makes you say the minute you finish reading it, yeah, that’s the way it is, or, is that right—the sort of work that hits you smack where it counts.3 In the case of proletarian literature, particularly in Japan, which is pre-revolutionary, and where the cultural level of workers is low, I believe this type of short story has a special significance. Many short stories familiar to us look like excerpts from novels with the beginnings and ends cuts off. You finish reading them, and you don’t really “get” it. (However excellent they may be as examples of a certain kind of narrative, they fail to stand on their own as short stories. We have had many “excellent” short stories of this kind in Japan.) The minute you finish reading the last line of a short story, the story should become crystal clear to you. Just as in the case of a bad joke, if the last sentence of a short story is vague and unclear, the reader feels unsatisfied and is likely to prefer an interesting, plot-driven novel. For workers who have little time or money, however, this is not an option.—For this reason as well, we must produce many, many short, convincing works. Proletarian writers have much to learn from the “theme stories” of Kikuchi Kan4 or the works of some of the excellent foreign short story writers who employ the conte form. It takes a special talent and technique to master the short story form. One reason that we have seen so few convincing short stories is that many writers regard them as something to be slapped together when taking a break from novel writing, rather than as a form requiring a specific skill. The important thing is that henceforth, when we “consciously” take up short stories in this sense, Lunacharsky’s dictum—that these stories must penetrate the stratum of workers of low cultural level by relying on “elementary” and “simple” content—will surely find concrete realization …. I have only been able to discuss these topics in a very general manner, but I believe that this is only one new direction that our Japanese proletarian literature must see in 1931.

Kobayashi Takiji, “Bungei jihyō: Tokidoki, kata o sobiyakashite,” [Literary review: Let’s hold our heads high from time to time]. Chūo Kōron [Central Review], May 1931, 359–68. In Kobayashi Takiji zenshū, 250–1.

3

Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948) wrote popular fiction and plays.

4

VI. WHEN PASSING BETWEEN TREES Sagawa Chika Original publication details are not available, but this essay would likely have been written in the early to mid-1930s. Translated by Sawako Nakayasu.

Sagawa Chika (1911–36) is the pen name of Kawasaki Ai, a Japanese avant-garde poet and translator. Born in Hokkaido, she moved to Tokyo at the age of 17, where she became active in the Japanese literary world, especially the group around Kitasono Katue (1902–78). Here, she adopted the pen name Sagawa, made from the Japanese characters for “left” and “river,” probably in reference to the Parisian Left Bank. She was involved in the avant-garde journal Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics), and published in Madame Blanche, the journal of the Arcueil Club, so named for the Parisian suburb in which Erik Satie lived. Her slim but dazzling body of poetry has recently been made available in Sawako Nakayasu’s English translations as The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books, 2015). In addition to her poetry writing, Sagawa also published a number of translations by English-language modernists, including Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. This essay, with its emphasis on the aesthetics of vision and the distorting effects of perspective, is typical of her poetics, and reflects the importance of experiments in art as well as poetry to her thought. Her concern with how to “harmonize” contemporary Japanese poetry with the “all-too-French air” speaks to an ongoing preoccupation of writers in this circle. The coterie structure of her poetic world is reflected in the second half of the essay, which develops her poetics through brief discussions of her peers, many of whom are no longer significant figures in Japanese literary history. AM

Wearing glasses was not for the purpose of seeing things more clearly. That is to say, if what I see is limited by the width of my face, I might misperceive only that which appears before me, the sparks of the phenomenon itself often distracting me before I learn just how the thing spreads out or permeates. To see is not the same as knowing the result; it is for the purpose of reaching the end of one part of the phenomenon. Such are my thoughts as I walk through the wheat field. The wheat grows vigorously like a victor, shining in white rows against the black earth. I wonder if the sun in May isn’t a little too bright for the Japanese poets of today. They speak only of dreams and illusions, failing to harmonize with this all-too-French air. What relationship could there be between their imagery and the row of trees on the other side? The negligence of having imported only the world of Leica1 into poetry only makes us a little dizzy—neither their pastry-like German camera manufacturer Leica's famous Leica A camera—the first commercially successful 35-mm camera—was produced from 1925 to 1936. It was popular enough in Japan to have a famous photography club (the Leica Club, or Raika Kurabu) and a high-end photography journal (Gekkan Raika, or Leica Monthly) devoted to it. Suzuki Hachirō’s 1937 book Knowledge of the Camera and How to Use One recommends the Leica as a camera best-suited to capturing, in Kerry Ross’s paraphrase, “motion and mechanistic beauty” (p. 17). For a detailed account of photography in early twentieth-century Japan, see Kerry Ross, Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

1

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

333

sweetness nor their enumerated language could be seen as having the freshness of the young leaves on the zelkova trees by the side of the path I walk. They lose themselves only when imitating others, and when that figure has been chipped away at, are quite tired. There is a clear beauty in the hazy scenery when I have removed my glasses, and there is also a hazy goodness in what I see clearly when my glasses are on. But to think that everyone must gaze into a single mirror and distinguish black from white is foolish. It is not so much about searching for boundaries, but rather the precise snapping together of the infinite allusions on either side of that single line, with the cross-sections of a leaping field of vision. And yet, the highs and lows of artistic rhythm are determined by whether that field of vision is near or far. I believe poetry is the study of language. Unlike spoken language, it is a language of the heart, not visible from the surface. It is the filling of the air with words selected out of deep contemplation. Not a gathering of the meanings of words spoken to be spoken, but an attempt to say something, or to reflect something. Very sparse and most strict, it is a skillfulness right on the brink of burning out like a flame. It can mean to say one real thing within a long conversation, or to go chasing after something from behind. I step on a still-lit cigarette butt. Someone has already gone ahead of me. His failure, and her error, lay in the finding of something man-made in the discontinuities of this endless nature. As I walk into the woods, I become aware of the roaring wind. I find it hard to believe that Kashiwagi Shunzo, many of whose poems were just like the sound of the wind, was in love with treetops—as well as inorganic substances like the air and the wind. Rather, I imagine it was quite the opposite. He must have written those useless things out of a desire to depict people at the moment the wind passes through their bodies, or the sight of himself staring at whinnying ponies in the woods. Am I the only one who feels something akin to suffering in the poetry of this man who wanted to portray the human, stripped bare, but simply could not depict a person shouting this, and so instead wrote only echoes, only the tracks left behind by earlier passages? This intensity is better felt in his poem called “Lightning” in the April issue of Shii no ki, rather than the one called “Early Spring,” published in the May issue.2 Master of the language of trees and quite enraged, he emerges before us by breaking through the scenery. On the other hand, “Life in the Countryside” by Ema Shoko,3 provides the usual inexplicable pleasure that is like listening to music that is out of focus. No matter what the situation, she never tries to put things in focus. We feel a bit lost. And then just at that moment, a vividly beautiful curve. I always expect great things from Hirano Jinkei,4 and he has never disappointed. “Divergence” is a deftly constructed poem. In “A moment with an old friend,” Uchida Tadashi depicts the fragility of emotions that are toppled like dominos before kind words. No real object is visible, but its projection casts blurry rings at our chests. Such are the things I feel from the poems of Uchiyama Yoshiro. In both “Daily life” and “Contemplation” from the March issue, he seems to express an interior symmetry using only straight lines. “Roof mechanic” by Abe Tamotsu is a sweet lyric

Shii no ki was a Tokyo-based literary journal, founded in 1926, and associated with the circles around Madame Blanche.

2

Ema Shōko (1913–2005) was a Japanese poet and librettist, and a close friend of Sagawa. Her first collection of poetry, Haru e no shōtai, was published in 1936, but she is best known for her post-Second World War works, Natsu no omide (1949) and Hana no machi (1951).

3

Hirano Jinkei (1914–). Although listed here as a poet, he is today best remembered for a book about samurai, Nihon no kamigami (1982).

4

334

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

poem. We always imagine the picture of a young girl with a bouquet of flowers, wonder if it isn’t a bit too distant in terms of music—and the thorns of those roses are shining like clear crystal needles. “Song of March” by Takamatsu Akira seems rather gentle. But the seasonal winds are no longer pastorals. Like those footsteps, they slap us on the cheek as they pass by. Walking through the woods, I discover a single tree with very smooth bark. It is unfamiliar to me, and so I wonder what it is. I read Odakane Jiro’s work for the first time.5 “Song of stone” is like looking at the jagged breaks in refracted light. Something akin to viscosity indicates a faint brightness. The trees stand silent. As if to conquer time, for the sake of a thousand years. Purity was not the difference between water and beer. I found being unable to see the sky from between the trees suffocating.

Odakane Jirō (1911–), also known as Miura Tokio, was a poet associated with the group around the journal Kogito (Cogito), founded in 1932. This group was one of the key players in the Japanese “cultural renaissance” which began around this time, which sought to engage with modernity through a return to tradition, in the light of the eclipse of both formalist and proletarian literature and the right-ward shift of Japanese political life at this time.

5

VII. LITERATURE OF THE LOST HOME Kobayashi Hideo Originally published in Japanese in Bungei Shunjŭ in May 1933. Translated by Paul Anderer, using both the Bungei Shunjū and Kobayashi Hideo zenshŭ editions.

Kobayashi Hideo (1902–83) is widely regarded as Japan’s first modern critic—that is, the first to raise criticism to the level of literature, through his development of a subtle, exploratory critical voice. A student of French literature at Tokyo University during the Taishō period, he wrote widely on French, Russian, and Japanese writers, as well as Japanese culture more widely. Unlike many of the Taishō and early Shōwa writers associated with modernism, he was not a leftist and never espoused Marxist politics or aesthetics. As the editor of the literary journal Bungakkai and one of the participants in the notorious 1942 symposium “Overcoming Modernity,” Kobayashi’s political positions during the Second World War remain the subject of debate. While some allege he collaborated in writing propaganda and providing intellectual cover for the fascist regime, others see him as a voice of liberalism in a hostile environment. Whatever his wartime sins, they did not have a lasting effect on his post-war career as a successful critic and lecturer. This essay is one of the key statements of the mood of the 1930s, and was first published in Bungei Shunjū, an influential monthly magazine edited by the writer Kikuchi Kan. Like Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s essay (10.iv), “Literature of the Lost Home” positions itself as a response to an essay by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (although Kobayashi was elsewhere highly critical of Akutagawa). By the early 1930s, Tanizaki, like many Japanese writers and intellectuals of this decade, was engaged in a nostalgic attempt to reclaim Japanese literary tradition (he produced numerous translations of The Tale of the Genji during this decade, for instance). Kobayashi’s response reflects on the tension between modernism and contemporary life, on the one hand, and a growing cultural nostalgia, on the other, in a political and cultural context that was rapidly turning toward an idealization of the Japanese past. AM

It might be said that in Japan today a literature read by adults or by old people scarcely exists. Our politicians are taken to task for their lack of literary sophistication, or for being oblivious to what is happening in the literary world, but does the blame not lie with the literati themselves? People are not necessarily cool or indifferent to literary matters….… Still, it is true that adult taste runs mostly toward the Chinese classics, or else toward certain Japanese classics, though certainly not toward modern writing. Modern Japanese literature, especially what is known as “pure literature,” is read by young people, that is, by a certain “literary youth” between the ages of eighteen and thirty, or to stretch the point, by writers only, or else aspiring writers. ….. Our so-called bundan1 is in fact a

This term dates from the late nineteenth century and is used to refer to both the literary world in general, and a literary élite focused on the production of pure literature in particular. This latter sense is operative here. In this sense, as a close-knit, exclusive group of writers, bundan was both a symptom and cause of the emergence of a modern, professionalized literary class.

1

336

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

special world populated almost entirely by like-minded youth, and this situation has not changed since the days of Naturalism.2 Although a proletarian writer might be expected to have an interest in political institutions or in social conditions, once he becomes a member of the literary world, and is absorbed in writing monthly review columns, his readership narrows to that limited sphere which is the focus of pure literature itself. Few can claim to have avid readers scattered widely throughout the population, among farmers and workers, for example. Of all our arts, literature alone is trapped inside this narrow and cramped universe. Of course it is well known that Japanese music and painting, not to mention the theater, have always maintained a broad-based and devoted patronage. Popular literature, too, as if in compensation for having been exiled from the monthly reviews of the literati, seems to attract a circle of readers drawn from every sector of society. Yet even here, the overwhelming majority of its fans are doubtless men and women under thirty. I am approaching fifty and can feel only sadness, knowing that the likely readers of my work will be youth. And putting myself in the position of the adult reader, who claims there is nothing he can bear to read beyond the classics, I must acknowledge that our modern literature is somehow defective. For only that writing which one has leisurely perused by the hearth, which has offered consolation and a lifetime of untiring companionship—only such writing can be called true literature. As I was reading Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s essay “On Art” (in the April issue of Kaizō),3 I encountered the above passage, and fell to brooding about it. I did not brood with any thought to refute Tanizaki, or with any sense that I could resolve the dilemma. Mine was the useless brooding of a man, in Tanizaki’s words, “trapped inside a narrow and cramped universe,” and my feelings turned heavy and gloomy. Reading over both parts of the “On Art” series, it occurred to me that although Tanizaki’s style was measured, his conviction was intense. If in formal terms the writing seemed obscure, what the author wanted to say was nevertheless unmistakably clear. Such intense conviction and unequivocal opinion, were we to look for a counterpart, might be found in an address given at Kudan Nōgaku Hall by George Bernard Shaw, whom Tanizaki himself has dubbed the “boyish-grandpa”: “Ladies and gentleman, humanity is hopeless! Many of those who are artists, however bad, declare that they cultivate art for the sake of humanity. This is not so. Let us leave to the philistines of the outside world the pretense that everything they do for us is for the good of humanity.”4 Shaw’s words in themselves are of no special interest. In our day it is not at all strange that a writer’s passion would assume a certain peevish, perverse expression. Yet in the power and integrity of the sentiments Tanizaki himself expresses, which are founded on that author’s lifelong experience, something else is at work, something hard to fathom, which provokes in us readers a heavy, gloomy feeling. Tanizaki concludes his essay by Naturalism was an important force in Japanese literature around the turn of the twentieth century.

2

Kaizō was a magazine that published articles on politics, society, culture, and the arts, often of a leftist disposition, for a middle-class, educated readership. “On Art” (in transliterated Japanese, Geizan; also translated as “Speaking of Art”) does not, to our knowledge, yet appear in English translation. In its original Japanese, it was published in two installments in the March and April issues of Kaizō, and is now collected in Tanizaki Jun’chirō zenshū, vol. 20, pp. 411–54.

3

George Bernard Shaw visited Japan while on a round-the-world cruise on the Empress of Britain. He was in Japan from approximately February 28 to March 9, 1933. Two speeches that he gave while there appear in the same volume of Kaizō as the second installment of Tanizaki’s essay: “Engels, Shaw, and Lenin,” and “The Speech of George Bernard Shaw on the Occasion of the Performance of ‘No’ on March 8, 1933,” Kaizō 14.4 (1933): 314–5. Both are reprinted in The Independent Shavian 3 (Spring 1965).

4

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

337

remarking that “young people who laugh at my perversity will perhaps come around to my way of thinking when they reach my age.” Although at my present age I have yet to “come around,” I wonder—Has Tanizaki said anything to invite my ridicule? Whenever someone refers to me as an Edokko,5 I grimace. This is because a rather considerable distance separates what others mean by this expression and what I take it to mean. Most people of my generation who were born in Tokyo know very well how bizarre it is to claim this city as a birthplace. Recourse to an expression like Edokko is wholly unsuitable. People like myself feel their situation will not be understood by outsiders. Even among those born in Tokyo, there is a sense of difficulty in expressing one’s feelings to anyone even slightly older. I have neither thought of myself as an Edokko, nor do I possess what are known as “Edo tastes,” although perhaps unconsciously I harbor traces of an Edokko temperament. This is fine with me. I have never lamented the situation. Still, I have never lived without even stranger feelings of incomprehension. “Born in Tokyo”—I cannot fathom what that really means. Mine is an unsettled feeling that I have no home. It should be recognized that this is not in the least a romantic feeling, although it may be harder to see that there is nothing realistic about it. Once I was traveling from Kyoto with Takii Kōsaku.6 As our train emerged from one tunnel, the mountain roads suddenly flashing into sight, he gazed up and heaved a deep sigh. I was struck by this. Listening to him then describe the fullness of his heart, how gazing upon such mountain roads a stream of childhood memories came welling up within him, I keenly felt that the “country” exists beyond my comprehension. It is not so much that I do not know the country as I do not understand the notion of a “birthplace,” or a “first home,” or a “second home”—indeed, what home of any kind in fact is. Where there is no memory, there is no home. If a person does not possess powerful memories, created from an accumulation of hard and fast images that a hard and fast environment provides, he will not know that sense of well-being which brims over in the word kokyō.7 No matter where I search within myself for such a feeling, I do not find it. Looking back, I see that from an early age my feelings were distorted by an endless series of changes occurring too fast. Never was there sufficient time to nurture the sources of a powerful and enduring memory, attached to the concrete and the particular. I had memories but they possessed no actuality, no substance. I even felt they were somehow unreal. Putting aside this rather exaggerated example, we all on occasion recall something our mother might have told us about her own childhood. Just a simple story, nothing special or inspiring, and yet for that very reason a strong and unwavering sentiment courses through it. A story of such commonplace memories contains the precondition for fiction. And so I am envious, because no matter how I try, this is something I cannot replicate. Without embellishment, or if that sounds too crass, without a device allowing a subjective response—a point of view or a critical perspective—I feel my memories would have no unifying structure, even as I realize that however necessary, the use of such devices is somehow unnatural.

A native of Tokyo, so called for the city’s historic name, Edo.

5

Takii Kōsaku (1894–1984) was a haiku poet, short story writer, and novelist.

6

Also rendered furusato. Usually translated as “homeland” or “native land,” this term is used only to refer to a place in the past and has connotations of nostalgia and a yearning to return. It has an important place in Japanese literature.

7

338

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Once it occurred to me that mine was a spirit without a home, I found evidence for it everywhere. It is especially instructive to record certain extreme experiences. I enjoy walking and often go off to the mountains, being someone who takes pleasure in remote, even dangerous places. Of late I have come to realize how odd such behavior is. To go off for inspiration to the beauty of Nature may seem to be a perfectly natural activity, but on reflection we must admit that it is just another manifestation of our quotidian intellectual unease. It is not at all a matter as straightforward and reasonable and innocent as “loving nature.” I have grown increasingly skeptical about the existence of anything concrete and actual behind my being moved by the beauty of Nature. Looking closer, I see much in common between intoxication by the beauty of a mountain, and intoxication by the beauty of an abstract idea. I feel as though I am looking upon two aspects of a spirit that has lost its home. Consequently, I am not heartened by the recent craze for mountain climbing. And I feel all the more uneasy as the number of afflicted climbers rises each year. On reflection, I know that my life has been lacking in concrete substance. I do not easily recognize within myself or in the world around me people whose feet are planted firmly on the ground, or who have the features of social beings. I can more easily recognize the face of that abstraction called the “city person,” who might have been born anywhere, than a Tokyoite born in the city of Tokyo. No doubt a meditation on the various components of this abstraction may produce a certain type of literature, although it will be deficient in real substance. The spirit in exhaustion takes flight from society and is moved by the curiously abstract longing to commingle with Nature. It may well be that a world of actual substance is to be found in the beauty of Nature isolated from society, yet there is no reason to believe any real writing will come of it. In his essay, Mr. Tanizaki referred to a “literature that will find a home for the spirit.” Of course for me this is not a mere literary issue, since it is not at all clear that I have any real and actual home. … The other day, rereading Dostoevsky’s Raw Youth in the Yonekawa Masao translation, I was struck by several things that had not occurred to me when I first read the book.8 In particular, I sensed the importance of the title chosen by the author. Illuminating the world seen by a single youth through the language of a single youth, the author revealed all the attributes of youth in general: its beauty and ugliness, hypersensitivity and insensibility, madness and passion and absurdity; in short, its authentic shape. I was left with an almost unbearably strong feeling that it is incorrect to call young people “youth.” They are rather a species of animal that must be called by some other name. It struck me too that Dostoevsky’s youth is no stranger—a youth whose mind is in turmoil because of Western ideas and who, in the midst of this intellectual agitation, has utterly lost his

Also translated into English as The Adolescent and An Accidental Family, this novel was first published in Russian in 1875. Russian literature in general, and Dostoevsky in particular, had been translated into Japanese since the final two decades of the nineteenth century and left a significant mark on modernist literary culture. At the time he published “Literature of the Lost Home,” Kobayashi was writing a serialized study, A Life of Dostoevsky, an excerpt of which is available in Anderer’s edition of Kobayashi’s writings: Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism 1924–39 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995): 152–8.

8

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

339

home. How very closely he resembles us. Indeed, I repeatedly ran into scenes that made me feel the author was describing me, that he had me firmly in his grasp. “Our so called bundan is in fact a special world populated almost entirely by likeminded literary youth,” Tanizaki writes, “and this situation has not changed since the days of Naturalism.” However, the role of youth in literature seems to me to have grown steadily more blatant. In the days of Naturalism, issues of social order or social chaos were not so clearly pressing as they are today. As a consequence, we are overwhelmed and prone to sacrifice our reflective spirit for the sake of dreams about the future, our ideas for the sake of action, our feelings for the sake of ideas, facts for the sake of theories, the ordinary for the sake of adventure. In short, we might say that as society has assumed a youthful character, it has cheapened the value of a mature spirit. It is then perfectly natural that the bundan too should become increasingly a special world of youth, although this is not reason enough to question the value of the literature it produces. Still, I believe that formally literature brought as many benefits to society as it induced any evil. Given our situation today, I can only feel that the evil, by degrees, is spreading. It cannot be claimed that mature adults necessarily have no interest in literature about youth. For example, The Sorrows of Young Werther is a type of “youth writing,” yet it has been able to attract great numbers of people.9 It is not, then, just a matter of recent Japanese literature being literature by and for youth. Rather, ours is a youth literature that has lost its youth. And whatever its intentions may have been, in practice is it not the distinctive trait of such literature to be fundamentally conceptual and abstract, and, at least since turn-of-the century Naturalism, to come more and more to lack a taste for reality? Of course we should not always overlook literary motives or intentions and regard only practice or results. But it is in the practice of such “youth writing” that we are able to discover not only these current, vigorously debated issues regarding society and economics, but also the peculiar context and inevitable fate of the literary youth of our nation, who feel the urgent sway of Western models and influence, and who have lost a sense of tradition. Popular writers have emerged recently to attack the narrowness of “artful” literary fiction, proclaiming its demise. However, these popular novels also exhibit a spectacle unique to our country. The readership of our literary fiction may be young, but it takes a certain literary sophistication to understand such work, and there are a number of very fine books that could not be fully appreciated were they to be read by adults, sophisticated only in worldly affairs. Of course I cannot imagine mature adults reading the alternative: modern popular fiction. Adults are not about to read a story, however interestingly written, about what they already know, and that reveals no further discoveries. And so they turn to historical romances, magemono.10 Surely it is not so elsewhere, but in our country conditions are such that most popular writing relies not on contemporary incidents but on historical tales for its contact with an audience of adult readers.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), often cited as one of the foundational eighteenth-century Bildungsromane, was first translated into Japanese in 1889 by Nakai Kinjo (although initially only in extracts). It became an important text for Japanese literary culture, and appeared in an additional twelve Japanese translations between 1889 and 1938. For an account (in German) of Goethe’s reception in Japan, see Hans Müller, “Goethe in Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 2.2 (1939): 466–78.

9

Stories or plays about samurai or, more broadly, popular literature set in feudal Japan. This genre had a particular heyday in the 1930s.

10

340

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

This becomes all the clearer if we turn to film. From the outset our film masterpieces were done in the old style, on historical themes. The fine actors and directors all tended in that direction. In comparison to literature, film is a far more immediate artistic medium, and so one need hardly argue the point that the average fan would likely wish his masterpieces to be based on contemporary events. In Japan a contrary situation exists, although we must admit that, if not for Japanese films, we would not recognize so clearly the true strangeness of our cultural condition. Historical romances and chambara movies11 exert a profound influence over the masses. Although this peculiar phenomenon may not be long-lived, it cannot be argued that it will easily pass away. Its roots are quite strong. Some suggest that in a period of social collapse, when no definite or stabilizing ideas are in force, people have a renewed desire for sensual stimulation or excitement. Still, I do not feel this alone can explain the popularity of such fare. If that were the only reason, these popular entertainments would have no hope of such success. Farfetched subjects and convoluted plots alone would not spark the interest of the masses, no matter how culturally naive they may be. I believe that the hearts of the masses are captured almost involuntarily along a slower but surer path. Their interest turns on the capacity of a film to make them unconsciously surrender to a stream of real emotions. This stream flows through our chambara movies, though not through our gendaimono—movies about modern life.12 I often go to the movies with my mother. Of course her preference is the period film, as she finds nothing of interest in gendaimono. Once I took her to see the Western film Morocco.13 It occurred to me that this was quite futile, but to my surprise she was greatly moved by it. She has since cultivated a taste for western movies. Even my old mother, then, has been overwhelmed by the complications and confusions of our modern Japanese art forms and has turned away. Morocco has been called a modern masterpiece, but its content is in fact quite shallow, and in this respect there are a number of our gendaimono that address more serious concerns. However, Morocco has a certain style that our films about modern life cannot match. It possesses a wholly captivating charm that leaves no room for discussion about its plot meaning this or that. And what is most lacking in our gendaimono, as well as in our current popular fiction, is just this inexplicable style. Were we to inquire why such entertainment, utterly lacking in such style, nevertheless has fans to see it or read it, we might find the reason is that the majority are satisfied simply with the plot. Being young, of an age when the world is seen through movies and life is known through fiction, this audience does not question whether a given work lets flow a stream of real emotions so compelling as to overpower a mere plot. Only when such youths reach maturity will the plot seem silly to them, and all but unconsciously will they begin to look for the kind of style that might conceal the silliness. In film, this demand is presently met by period pieces or by Western movies; in literature, by popular renditions of historical adventure. The manners and mores that appear in chambara movies and in magemono fiction already seem as distant and removed from us Also chanbara. A genre of films featuring swordfighting, usually between samurai, known in English as “samurai cinema.”

11

Gendaimono are films about contemporary life, often realistic in style, as opposed to jidaigeki films, which are set in the past and often contain supernatural elements.

12

Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) became the first subtitled film in Japan when it was released there in February 1931. Set in the late 1920s, it shares the contemporary focus of Japanese gendaimono.

13

MODERNISM IN JAPAN

341

as the manners and mores depicted in Western films. Still, the psychology and emotional temperament expressed in such works seem perfectly in harmony with the social scenery of that time. And the expression of such human feelings, free of contradiction, possesses an unimaginably powerful charm and fascination. This style elicits a sense of intimacy, so that we feel closer to the Moroccan desert we have never seen than to the landscape of Ginza before our eyes.14 Some speak of the modern world as one beset by a common, universal social crisis, although I can only feel that contemporary Japanese society is collapsing in a quite distinctive way. Obviously, our modern literature (for all practical purposes we might substitute “Western” for “modern”) would never have emerged without the influence of the West. But what is crucial is that we have grown so accustomed to this Western influence that we can no longer distinguish what is under the force of this influence from what is not. Can we possibly imagine the profound emotions and wonder that Futabatei’s Ukigumo (Floating cloud) or [Mori] Ogai’s Sokkyō shijin (Improvisation)15 aroused in the youth of their day, we who came of literary age when translations were so numerous that they could not all be read? Can we fear that anything remains to be taken away, we who have lost a feel for what is characteristic of the country of our birth, who have lost our cultural singularity? Is it any consolation to think that those writers of a preceding generation, for whom the struggle between East and West figured crucially in their artistic activity, failed to lose what we have succeeded in losing? It is a fact that ours is a literature of the lost home, that we are young people who have lost our youthful innocence. Yet we have something to redeem our loss. We have finally become able, without prejudice or distortion, to understand what is at the core of Western writing. With us Western literature has begun to be presented fairly and accurately. At this juncture, it is indeed pointless to call out for the “Japanese spirit” or the “Eastern spirit.” Look wherever we might, such things will not be found. Or what might be found would prove hardly worth the search. And so Mr. Tanizaki’s notion that we must “return to the classics” will not readily be embraced and passed on. It speaks simply to the fact that Tanizaki himself has chosen a certain path and matured in a certain direction. History seems always and inexorably to destroy tradition. And individuals, as they mature, seem always and inexorably to move toward its true discovery.16

Ginza was a fashionable and Westernized district in Tokyo.

14

Futabatei Shimei (1864–1904)’s Ukigumo (1887) is often described as the first modern Japanese novel because of its realism and sense of anomie. Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) was one of the key figures involved in the modernization of Japanese literature, through the translation and adaptation of Western forms. His Sokkyō shijin (1902) was a famous translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s autobiographical novel Improvisations (1835).

15

The zenshū text is identical to the original publication except for the last line, which was dropped. It read: “With the passing of time, history reveals in clearer outline to the writer certain objective facts, and presses on him a structure that he can in no way evade. And, as the writer matures, his character becomes more and more concrete and distinctive, and paradoxically becomes part of the content of the [historical] structure that presses upon him.” [trans.]

16

342

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Korean Modernism EDITED BY KEERAN MURPHY

For readers unacquainted with the social and political environment in Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it will be helpful to approach the idea of modernism on the peninsula by first noting the entanglement of Korean literary production at this time with both the global encroachment of Western modernity and Korea’s own mediated modernization as a colony of Japan. If Japanese writers faced the challenge of situating their work within the global literary landscape so that it might be acknowledged according to Western standards of civilization, this challenge was redoubled for Korean writers, who had to do so not only from their geographical and racialized position in East Asia, but also from Korea’s subalternized position within the Japanese empire. In the late nineteenth century, Korea’s Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) fell increasingly under Japanese influence and was officially annexed in 1910, after which it remained a Japanese colony until 1945. Both before and after annexation, many Korean nationalists promoted the abandonment of deeply rooted Confucian traditions in favor of Westernization, believing that the only hope for Korea’s survival in an age of global imperialism was in severing its cultural (and, until 1895, tributary) ties to what was perceived to be a “backward” China and, like Japan, accepting and entering into the “civilization” of capitalist modernity. One of the most prominent of these voices of social reform was writer Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950), who considered the existence of a written national literature to play an integral part in the modernization process because of its potential to reform individual behavior and cultivate a national spirit, and whose didactic Bildungsroman, The Heartless (1917), is often regarded as the first “modern” Korean novel. In 1925, proletarian writing came to the fore with the joining of several leftist organizations into the Korean Artistic Proletarian League, or KAPF (Esperanto: Korea Artista Proletaria Federacio), an organization that both predated and outlasted the NAPF, its Japanese counterpart. While adhering broadly to techniques of socialist realism, the KAPF was by no means monolithic, and writers such as Im Hwa and Kim Namch’ŏn actively debated the primacy of ideology and class struggle in the literary work. A consciously international organization that actively coordinated with proletarian movements in Japan and the Soviet Union, the KAPF was faced with persistent antagonism from Japanese authorities until it was ultimately forced to disband in 1935. Another prominent group active in the 1930s was the Kuinhoe, or “Group of Nine” (1933–6), which formed around the idea of “sunsu munhak,” or “pure literature,” and included such writers as Kim Kirim, Yi T’aejun, Yi Sang, and Pak T’aewŏn. While many (though not all) Kuinhoe writers’ works exhibit characteristics that would be identified in

344

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

literary studies as “modernist” (such as self-referentiality, fragmentation, and stream-ofconsciousness-like narration), they should by no means be considered merely derivative of European models. While these writers were very familiar with the work of Western authors, their formal experimentation and stylistic innovations can be read as creative responses to the specific crises in which they found themselves as Korean subjects living under Japanese imperialism in a time of rapid modernization and urbanization. While the increasingly fascist imperial government of the late 1930s began to suppress Japanese leftist and experimental writing, such suppression was compounded for Korean writers by assimilation policies that threatened to erase Korean identity and the Korean language itself. In 1940, the vernacular press was shut down entirely, and until 1945, writers were left with the choice of either publishing in Japanese or not publishing at all. Japanese-language works produced by Korean writers throughout the colonial period were long neglected in Korean literary studies, but in recent years scholars have been reengaging with this rich and fascinating body of texts. Another significant expansion in the study of modern Korean literature came in 1988 with the lifting of the ban on wŏlbuk writers (those who went to the Soviet-occupied north after 1945) in South Korea. This allowed for many of the most prominent writers of the colonial period to be read in South Korea for the first time. KM

I. MISCONSTRUED “DADA”: FOR KIM KIJIN Ko Dada Originally published in Korean in the Dong-A Ilbo (December 1, 1924). Translated by Nagi Yoshikawa, with Sho Sugita.

The following is a public letter by Ko Dada (né Ko Hanyong) that was addressed to Kim Kijin, one of the central figures of the Korean proletarian literary movement. Because of the deteriorated condition of the original newspaper in which this letter first appeared, an accurate reading was rendered difficult for a small portion of the writing. Illegible characters in this translation are denoted with dots inside brackets. Each dot corresponds to a missing hangŭl syllabic block. An initial Korean-Japanese translation of the letter was composed by Nagi Yoshikawa, a second Japanese-English translation was composed by Sho Sugita, and a final draft was collaboratively edited between the two translators. NY & SS

Forgive me for feeling like this towards you. Though this may yet be another Dadaist mindset that develops under the pathological sensation of the peripheral nerve, I spent the entire day in unreserved rage against you. From some time ago, I’ve felt a kind of—let’s say a kind of love, or trust—yes, I’ve trusted you to some extent. And as I sit here now, in one sense, I clearly do not harbor malice towards you. However, of what you said the other day in the literature column of the Daily News,1 there were some absolutely intolerable words that still dwell in my mind. What made you write such a thing? Since you, too, occupy a space we call subjectivity, I don’t have the right to say this or that, but if you’re to criticize Dada, I would like you to criticize its entirety. If you’re just going to insult Dada—whether Dadaists are madmen or rogues or so on and so forth—it would be best if you could express them with sincerity. If not, I would appreciate it if you first understood a little about what we call Dada. I admit that you outclass me both academically and intellectually in some ways, but in terms of DA.DA, I think one would have to experience to some extent a deep and intense anguish from that discipline to participate in any meaningful discourse. The inability to discuss with others the seething blood inside my mind, and from that eternal despair, thrusting my face into the bosom of a sympathizing [.] person, wanting to cry until the end of the century as the universe contracts—such is the extent of anguish you would need to talk about Dada. A statement like this may be absurd and meaningless, but recounting about some commonplace misery of life or problem of the era just won’t cut it. That’s what can be described as the Dadaist torment.

Kim Kijin, “On Essence,” Maeil Sinbo [Daily News], November 23, 1924.

1

346

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Since we both inscribe words on paper according to our moods, I don’t care how much you write—but once we pass a peak, your   becomes a very dangerous view for the Dadaist. Try drenching the torrid heat of the flame, burning despite its hoarded fury that has yet to destroy the entire living skull. No ashes will likely remain. That said, I’m not trying to harm you at this very moment; however, pointing your finger at Dada in a public letter like you did to Ms. Kim Myŏngsun,2 not to mention with the same kind of language, has no meaning whatsoever. Moreover, I’ve once seen you criticize some madam named Kim about her misuse of the word “idea,” but how are your recent comments any less frivolous than your past criticisms? This is particularly true for your remarks in “On Essence.” Since you’ve written that Dada’s rejection of everything shows strength and its affirmation of contradictions shows weakness, your means of expression in the section that illuminates the state of Dada is none other than beef on a horse bone.3 Objective criticism would be unfathomable without embracing Dada in the first place. Without a strong sensibility, you will never be able to know despite knowing. In other words, perception will yield zero results. Accordingly, however much one embodies Dada, and even if one is a Dadaist through-and-through, that person will never know what Dada is. Inside that fermenting milieu of Dada, one will only be able to take a whiff of its aroma and experience some of its traces. Though tagged with an “-ism,” unlike other movements, Dada can’t be explained with false doctrines. In your writing, are the remarks on Dada really words that could come from a person who understands Dada? If what you wrote was written as a joke, considering how one could discover an element of Dada in the world-view of an old woman from the countryside, you could be regarded as an exemplary Dadaist, but I think the tone in “I will provide you with details at a later date” shows an egregious attitude. Even though Woo Dada of Songdo4 is a self-proclaimed Dadaist who knows nothing about Dada, he’s still a Dadaist; you, on the other hand, are not worthy enough to be criticizing Dada. Although you may already be looking at me with hostility after what I’ve expressed, you are still dear to me. Personal relations in Dada are characterized by duplicity, because pleasures in life cannot be ascertained with mere rebellion. Dadaist emotions are uninhibited enough that on one hand, we rebel; on the other hand, we love. And finally, please understand that the reason I wrote these words, meant to be written as much as we please, was to spit out my occasional, spasmodic, and insufferable fervor.

Kim Myŏngsun (1896–1951) was a Korean feminist activist, novelist, and poet.

2

Something heterogeneous and inconsistent; hodgepodge.

3

Kaesong, a city in North Hwanghae Province in the southern part of present-day North Korea.

4

II. SOLILOQUIES OF “PIERROT”—FRAGMENTARY NOTIONS ON “POÉSIE” Kim Kirim Originally published in Korean as “‘P’iero’ ŭi tokpaek—‘P’oesi’ e taehan sasaek ŭi tanp’yŏn,” in Chosŏn ilbo (January 27, 1931). Translated by Walter K. Lew.

Kim Kirim (penname of Kim Inson, 1908–?) was a poet, a literary critic, and one of the founding members of the Kuinhoe, or “Group of Nine.” He attended university in Japan, graduating from the Department of Literature and Arts at Nihon University in 1930 and later earning a degree in English literature from Tōhoku Imperial University. Having studied the work of Anglophone poets such as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, Kim worked to introduce Western avant-garde and modernist techniques into Korean poetry. “Soliloquies of ‘Pierrot’: Fragmentary Notions On ‘Poésie’” (1931) is written in a playful, aphoristic style that Kim would depart from in his later critical writings. However, he would maintain many of the views presented here, such as the belief that the appropriate source for modernist poetry ought to be the natural, everyday language of the masses rather than, for instance, the subjective emotional state of the Romantic poet. In addition to being a founding member of the “Group of Nine” (which has often been reductively characterized as being committed exclusively to an apolitical “pure literature”), Kim was actively involved in leftist politics and became a dedicated socialist following Korea’s liberation from Japan. During the Korean War, he was kidnapped and taken to the North, after which, it is believed, he did not continue to publish. In spite of having been abducted, Kim was accused by the South Korean government of voluntarily going north, and his works, like those of all who went to the North after 1945, were banned in South Korea until 1988. Notes to this text are the work of the translator, unless otherwise noted. KM

The present translation of “‘P’iero’ ŭi tokpaek—‘P’oesi’ e taehan sasaek ŭi tanp’yŏn” is based on (1) its original newspaper publication in the Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn Daily) (January 27, 1931) (CI hereafter) and (2) the version printed in Kim Kirim chŏnjip 2: Siron, si-ŭi ihae, sisa-ron, sip’yŏng (Complete Works of Kim Kirim, Vol. 2: Poetics, Analysis of Poetry, Essays on the History of Poetry, Poetry Reviews) (Seoul: Simsŏltang, 1988): 299–303 (K hereafter). The K version often substitutes Korean hangŭl orthography for Chinese characters and uses standardized contemporary spellings of words. Although I have not recorded such minor differences in the following notes, I do describe more significant discrepancies. I thank Mickey Hong for her suggestions in regard to earlier drafts of the translation.

348

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

1. Reality and Sensation I have never looked to poetry for anything but the action of its lived sensing and critique of reality. 2. Secondary Meanings The secondary (hidden) meaning of a word and the secondary (hidden) relations between words, the new, previously unconceived-of relations between one word and another: Doesn’t the sacred realm awaiting the poet in that regard lie before one like a virgin forest? 3. Snake Spirit The all-consuming craft of poésie1 gives objective shape even to one’s passions. Poésie is cold-blooded like a snake. 4. Nonsense Outside of the world of children, where is it possible for impossible things to exist so lightly? 5. A World That Is All-Too-Small There is a poet who does nothing but run in circles like a squirrel2 around the center of a single theme. If I were forced to speak on the matter, is it not unnecessary for a poem to have anything like a subject? There is a poet who keeps writing a single poem his whole life, fixed upon the most likely meanings. 6. Poésie— What we call poésie: Is it not the igniting3 of a dream closing its eyes over sensations blazing up at every moment? 7. Composition Among our century’s most important discoveries was a great4 word. “Composition”— It indicates (1) a selected fundamental piece of reality’s (2) organic unity-based (3) creation of a new reality. It is the conscious reordering5 of reality. Thus, it is both negativism and surrealism. 8. Poésie Poésie is a certain adventure.

All non-Korean words that appear as such in the original are italicized in this translation.

1

CI has

2

(human rat) where K has

(squirrel); “human rat” in the original appears to be a misprint.

CI has 發 花 where K has 發 火; I have chosen the latter, translating it as “igniting.”

3

K omits the word hullyung han, restored here and translated as “great.”

4

K replaces CI’s 整 現 with 整 理, which I believe is correct and have translated as “reordering.”

5

KOREAN MODERNISM

349

9. Concepts I dislike it when that knowledge of yours only operates in your head. 10. Dreaming Senses Imagination— So-called illusions are our senses when they descend upon reality and dream a short while in its recesses. Unknown flowers that do not even recognize themselves. 11. Your Castle6 My interest flees from you when you speak only of yourself. 12. Blowing Alone on a P’iri Please stop blowing all alone on your p’iri.7 When you do that, you are as desolate as the nonsense of a poplar tree trembling by itself in the desert. 13. The Audience and You I want to read your spirit as it moves across the world of an audience. 14. Essence Don’t speak excessively on any point. Don’t dress up any essence that you’ve grasped in the garb of a lot of words. “Bare thought and emotion are bold like a naked woman.”— Bréton • Eluard8 15. Your Spirit I saw the ghost of a reader that said it was your spirit.9 So at last I see your spirit moving toward the world in multifaceted ways. Only at such times does your humanity shine forth. 16. Utopia A certain imagining and empty illusion— When your dreams build a house only in your mind (pitiful surrealist!), I see the ashes of your skull. Please show me a dream that soars up and out. 17. The Beauty of Work at Work In the past, artists always painted the idle hours of idle people. The discovery of people at work and the beauty of their labor are like literature’s own theory of earthly motion.

K gives 城 廓 where CI has 城 廓; both can be translated as “castle” or “citadel.”

6

The p’iri is a small Korean reed pipe.

7

This quotation appears in “Notes on Poetry,” which French surrealists André Breton (1896–1966) and Paul Éluard (1895–1952) co-wrote and published in the journal La Révolution surréaliste in 1929. The line was a modification of Paul Valéry’s “Completely naked thoughts and emotions are as feeble as naked men.” [ed.]

8

9 The CI version of this sentence would be translated as “I have never seen a reader’s ghost say that it was your spirit” or “I have never seen the ghost of a reader who says he/she was your spirit.” I have followed the K version, which substitutes the verb issŭmnida for ŏpsŭmnida in CI’s “Tangshin-ŭi 魂-irago hanŭn 獨 自-ŭi 幽 靈 ŭl pon iriŏpsŭmnida,” for the sake of consistency with the following sentence, although either version is plausible. K also replaces the three Chinese character words in this sentence with the hangŭl spellings for, respectively, hon, tokja, and yuryŏng. I surmise that 獨 自 is a misprint for 讀 自 and have translated it as “reader.”

350

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

18. Poetry and Women There is no pestilence like poets who make love to their topic. Goethe and Dante, too, how could they have been such debauchees? 19. The Multitude Magnificent expression has no fear of the multitude (taejung). 20. Peril Always bear in mind what you will write. But shield your poetry from writing even a single letter of anything that is useless. 21. Constraint Free verse is not a matter of abandoning old-fashioned poetry’s rhythm, melodiousness, or even its formal rules. It only excises what constrains it. The time has come again for us to throw everything away, even free verse. Natural language in its most liberated state: That is where we must discover poetry. 22. Classics and Corpses I call the poetry of our symbolist or neo-romanticist originators “classical.”10 Such poems of decline (though oddly current), I also call “corpses.” 23. Resistance Resistance, a desire arising from new radiance, is struggle. 24. The Poet He is a person of his times. At the same time, a person beyond his times. 25. Force “Equilibrium” is a situation in which several “forces” confront each other nicely in a compromise. Not a potent array, but a shriveling up. “Force” is disequilibration. 26. Nervous Emergency A “poem” is an emergency expressed in the poet’s nerves the very moment they become agitated by his internal or external senses.

In Korean literary history, the prolific poet and translator Kim Ŏk (1896–?) is credited with introducing symbolist and neo-romanticist currents, which Kim Kirim criticized for having supposedly led to excessively fervent, decadent, or narcissistic writing. In the present section, Kim Kirim makes his characteristic dismissal of both the romantic and classical (kojŏn), two traditions that are conventionally seen as being opposed to each other. Kim usually deplored the former for its emotionalism and the latter for its lack of relation to most people’s daily lives and the urgency and dynamism of modern, technologically advanced societies. In his essay “Poésie and Modernity,” for instance, Kim asserted that “the poetry of ‘romanticism’ investigated emotions. Symbolism caresses feelings and sentiments. However, emotion is not the fundamental essence of poetry. If emotion were the essence of poetry, then a weeping face or enraged voice would be the most poetic thing” (“P’oesi wa Modŏnit’i,” K, p. 82; originally published as “Si ŭi ‘modŏnit’i’” [Poetry’s Modernity], Sin tonga [New East Asia], [ July 1933]).

10

KOREAN MODERNISM

351

27. Understanding What we see is a passing phantasm. Only what attains understanding becomes art. This understanding, a rational embrace—that is, in love does it commence.11 28. Leaping Forward It is a heroism absolutely needed to save human history from normalcy. 29. The Folk Poet12 Long ago, the folk poet was a spokesman for the people. His magnificence13 arose from the practice of facing the masses and calling out to them in the form of a powerful declaimer. However, the modern (kŭndae) poet always presupposed individuals in isolation. As for today’s poet, isn’t it necessary to become an orator once again? 30. Artistic Activity Artistic activity first sets out from its selection of material. 31. The Death of Rhythm Rhythm died with the fatuous music of symbolism. The present age loves its transcendent leaps at a tempo too quick to be romantic. 32. The Surrealist Fallacy The surrealist tries to gaze through the “window of individual vision” at his own “individual metaphysical soul.” 33. Becoming Prose In the very beginning, poetry was the livelihood of government officials and prophets. Afterwards, it was retaken from the royal court and sold its body to the bourgeoisie. But with the growth of the people (minjung), poetry drew close to them as well. Comprising poetry’s nobility, rhythm is formalism. The beauty, resilience, and harmony one finds in the natural state of the people’s everyday language is the new art of prose.

K omits this entire sentence for no apparent reason.

11

K gives minyo siin where CI has only 謠 詩 人, translated here as “The Folk Poet.”

12

K has widae where CI has 雄 大; their meanings are similar, translated here as “magnificence.”

13

III. THE EXPANSION AND DEEPENING OF REALISM: ON SCENES BY A STREAM AND “WINGS,” I AND II Ch’oe Chaesŏ Originally published in Korean as “Rialijŭm ŭi hwaktae wa simhwa: Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng kwa ‘Nalgae’ e kwanhayŏ,” Chosŏn ilbo (October 31 and November 3, 1936). Translated by Christopher P. Hanscom.

Ch’oe Chaesŏ (1908–64) graduated from Keijō Imperial University (now Seoul National University) with a degree in English literature in 1931 and immediately became a highly active and influential literary critic, drawing on the work of Anglophone writers such as T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Herbert Read in order to develop a new approach to Korean literary criticism based on Western intellectual traditions. In 1940, Ch’oe’s writing shifted dramatically, as he began to view Korean literature not from a European intellectual perspective but rather as an aspect or component of Japanese literature, a critical move that adhered to Japan’s assimilationist colonial policies and their attendant slogan naisen ittai, or “Japan and Korea, one body.” Unsurprisingly, this ambivalent position, which worked to preserve a distinct Korean literature and culture while at the same time legitimizing Japanese colonialism, has greatly complicated his legacy for Korean literary historians. His article “The Expansion and Deepening of Realism: On Scenes by a Stream and ‘Wings’” (1936), the first two sections of which are reproduced here, provides a window into Ch’oe’s literary critical practice in the 1930s while also, through its direct engagement with the work of Pak T’aewŏn (1909–86) and Yi Sang (penname of Kim Haegyŏng, 1910– 37), introducing readers to two of the most highly regarded writers of Korean modernist fiction. Pak T’aewŏn’s Scenes by a Stream (Ch’ŏnbyŏn P’unggyŏng), which Ch’oe views as an extroverted “expansion” of realism, is composed of fifty intertwined sketches exploring the lives of those living around Ch’ŏnggye Stream, located in the center of Kyŏngsŏng (colonial Seoul), while Yi Sang’s short story “Wings” (“Nalgae”), which Ch’oe views as an introverted “deepening” of realism, is a striking and fragmentary first-person account of an unemployed intellectual in the colonial metropolis that bears similarities to works of the Japanese “I-novel” genre. In sections III–V (not included here), Ch’oe ultimately acknowledges the stylistic innovations of both writers but also critiques their work for what he perceives as the absence of a coherent critical perspective, suggesting that Pak’s expansive attempt to describe reality from as many different angles as possible in Scenes by a Stream lacks a unified consciousness that would link the scenes together in a meaningful way and that Yi Sang’s deep engagement with the fragmentations and

Translation taken from the original printing in Chosŏn ilbo, published in five installments on October 31, November 3, 5, 6, and 7, 1936; and from the version reprinted in Kwŏn Yŏngmin, ed., Hanguk ŭi munhak pip’yŏng (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1995), 1: 551–62. Installment numbers from the original printing have been added to the text by the translator. We reprint here only the first two. The full text can be found in Christopher P. Hanscom, Walter K. Lew, and Youngju Ryu, eds., Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era (University of Hawaii Press, 2013): 169–80.

KOREAN MODERNISM

353

contradictions of modernity in “Wings” is devoid of a moral element that would serve as the basis of a consistent worldview. All footnotes to this text are the work of the translator, unless otherwise noted. KM

I Pak T’aewŏn’s novel Scenes by a Stream was serialized in the August, September, and October issues of Morning Light,1 and Yi Sang’s short story “Wings” was published in the September issue of Morning Light. Unlike many of the works that we typically see today, these two were not extemporaneous creations. Both authors seem to have put pen to paper with a definite aim and exerted themselves for a lengthy period of time. We are pleased that to a significant extent the authors’ aims have been realized in these works. The material selected for these two works is quite different. Scenes by a Stream depicts the lives of people in the contemporary world,2 their activities in one corner of the city, while “Wings” describes the subjective world of a highly intellectualized Sophist. Yet these two works find their common characteristics in the manner of their observation and the technique of their description. That is, each author has attempted as much as possible to relinquish subjectivity in confronting the object, resulting in Pak’s viewing the object in an objective manner and Yi’s viewing the subject in an objective manner. Since to some extent these two approaches— the expansion and the deepening of realism3—are representative of two tendencies of the modern literary world, they raise issues in which we have a deep interest. The statement that Pak views the object objectively and Yi views the subject objectively may strike the reader as odd. Yet if we recognize that a psychologist who can observe scientifically (relatively speaking) his own mental processes and a second-rate poet who sees all natural phenomena in a sentimental way can exist side by side, we certainly know that it is by no means a bit of sophistry. Unless clearly intended for a particular purpose, the erasure of any distinction between the subjective world and the objective world is dangerous in literary criticism. Yet we must first of all do away with the naïve logic that an author taking the subjective world as his material is subjective and the author dealing with the objective world is objective. Moreover, when we consider that certain authors tend to be treated better nowadays simply because they work with objective rather than subjective material, we cannot but abhor this simplistic moral prejudice. Insofar as writers are artists, they do not value the subjective world over the objective world, and vice versa. It is inevitable, of course, that an author, swayed by heredity and culture, cannot approach these two worlds with the same degree of familiarity. Here we feel the need to

Chogwang, a Seoul-based literary journal published between November 1935 and December 1944.

1

Ch’oe uses the phrase “set’ae injŏng” here, meaning something like “the prevailing state of human society.” Set’ae, or set’ae sosŏl, (usually translated as “a fiction of manners”) was a term that subsequently came under contestation, used by leftist critics to negatively evaluate the fictional works of Pak and other authors as being purely descriptive and hence apolitical. See Im Hwa, “Set’ae sosŏl ron” (On the Fiction of Manners), Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily), April 1–6, 1938. 3 Non-Korean words that appeared in the original text as such have been italicized throughout. 2

354

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

apply the psychoanalyst’s “psychological type” to literary criticism. Human intellect can be divided into three types. Those whose motives for action always come from the outside are referred to as the “extroverted type.” The opposite is the “introverted type,” whose motivations come from within. These two types are, so to speak, extreme examples, and somewhere between the internal and the external rests a middle type. Though numerically a majority, their way of life is so ordinary that it does not draw our interest. The extroverted mind is always inclined toward the external world, and it seems alive only when immersed in the objective world. On the other hand, the introverted mind prefers to continually reflect on its own internal world and feels pleasure and security only inside this internal world. We cannot command any artist to choose between these two worlds because artists are innately inclined one way or the other and their art is formed out of this inclination. Yet we are entitled to require sincerity; whether of the external or internal world, it is something that one must observe truthfully and represent accurately. This is equivalent to requiring an attitude of objectivity and realism from the artist. Artistic reality is not confined to the external or the internal world only. Reality is formed through observation conducted in an objective manner. The problem is not one of subject matter but of perspective. Artistic character is determined by whether one sees with eyes clouded by the film of subjectivity or whether one sees with clear eyes, free of any such membrane. The focal point of this dispute might concern the phrase “clear eyes, not filmed over.” I feel, however, that the question of the presence of the camera in cinema casts a not inconsiderable light on our problem. No one will claim that the human eye can function as a camera does. Yet we can find examples in modern literature of the artist’s effort to take on a camera-like existence and cases in which this effort resulted in a degree of success.4

II A writer cannot match the photographic functions of the camera, but the writer can perform functions that the camera cannot. That is, the writer can be at the same time both the camera and the director who operates the camera. As a camera, the writer can almost entirely transcend individualistic deviations; while working as a director the author cannot separate himself from the customs of subjectivity, nor is there any need for him to do so. The scenes a camera captures and the system by which a camera moves are determined by individuality, and the dignity and value of art lie in the fact that this determination is based on individuality. The writer can, according to his or her psychological type, turn the camera toward the external world or toward his or her own interior world. In the former case, the situation is relatively uncomplicated. In the latter case it is extremely delicate, however, as the relationship between observer and observed is located within the same person. For autobiographical poets or authors who write stories about themselves, who candidly reveal their lives and emotions, this may not devolve into a serious problem. Yet while an analysis and observation of the human interior from one’s position as an artist—in the same way the author of “Wings” analyzes the observing artist and the observed character (as a person engaged in daily living) within himself, to some extent distinguishing between the two—might be pathological, I would say that Yi’s efforts reach a previously Compare this discussion of cameras, vision, and perspective with Sagawa Chika roughly contemporaneous essay, “When Passing between Trees” (10.vi). [ed.]

4

KOREAN MODERNISM

355

unattained height of human intellect. To be sure, this is not healthy, as the development of self-consciousness is premised on the fragmentation of consciousness. Yet if we can say that the status quo of modern man is just such a fragmentation of consciousness, then the task of an honest artist will be to express frankly that condition of disintegration. Just as an author of the extroverted type takes his camera and photographs the external world, the honest artist must turn his own camera upon himself and photograph his interior world. If at this point the camera is veiled by the screen of subjectivity, then the work has no value whatsoever. The feelings that stem from everyday life, taken as the raw material, and the sentiment of an artist who deals with those emotions as artistic subject matter are entirely different things. If an artist does not know how to deal with the emotions that stem from his own life with the stern attitude of a scientist, then it would be best to discard that material. Having such a camera-esque consciousness when depicting the external world is relatively simple, but working on one’s interior world using such a technique is not only difficult but may even be, in certain situations, cruel. We respect, then, Pak’s lucid description of a section of the bustling city but all the more admire Yi’s ability to systematically capture the fragments of a pulverized individuality within the frame of his camera. Our interest in Scenes by a Stream is not an interest in the flow of the story, or even in the colorful personality of the author himself. If we are conscious of the author in this work at all, it is only a consciousness of his absence. That is, when we read this work we are not conscious of an author, in the same way that when one watches cinema there is no consciousness of the existence of the camera. The position of the author is not inside this work but outside it. He does not willfully manipulate the characters in accordance with some made-up story; rather, he moves or rotates his camera according to the way the characters move. Of course, this “camera” is a literary camera—it is the eye of the author. Pak is always careful not to have a speck of the dust of subjectivity settle on the lens of that eye. The result, unusual in our literary world, appears before us as a vivid and multifaceted representation of the city. Readers of this work will to a significant extent acknowledge the author’s success in this method.

356

CHAPTER TWELVE

Modernism in Vietnam EDITED BY PHUONG NGOC NGUYEN

The Tự lực văn đoàn group (the Self-Reliant Literary Group) is today unanimously recognized for its decisive role in the evolution of Vietnamese literature, particularly in the areas of the novel and poetry. It produced irreversible changes in Vietnamese society of the 1930s, producing a freer prose style at the level of the sentence, and bringing about changes in Vietnamese life as well as art, including introducing new styles of dress for women. Its name expresses its revolutionary project: the authors stake a clear claim to the right to be governed by their own rules—to put it plainly, to liberate literature from politics, situating themselves in opposition to the project of their rival journal, Nam Phong. The name Tự lực văn đoàn is composed of two parts—tự lực (oneself, power) and văn đoàn (literature, organization)—which we can translate as “self-reliant literary group” or group “under our own power.” The name itself appears for the first time in 1934, in number 87 of Phong Hóa, published on Friday, March 2, 1934, although the journal had existed since 1932. However, we can consider the group to have been formed with the launch of the journal Phong Hóa, centered on Nhất Linh (1906–63), the editor, and Khái Hưng (1896–1947), the author of the group’s first novel, as well as Hoàng Đạo (1907–48), Thế Lữ (1907–89), Tú Mỡ (1900–76), and later Thạch Lam (1910–42) and Xuân Diệu (1916–85). While other authors were close to them, it is generally accepted that Tự lực văn đoàn had only seven members, “seven stars” of the new constellation. The presence of a project that had been well-defined since its beginning, as well as the stability of its members, justifies our speaking of Tự lực văn đoàn as a group formed in 1932. The group ran two journals, Phong Hóa (Mores, 1932–6) and Ngày nay (Today, 1935–40), as well as the publishing house Doi Nay (Current life), which was active between 1933 and 1945. The group officially introduced itself in the text reproduced here, which constitutes a sort of profession of faith in ten points. It appeared in the Spring of 1934 issue of Phong Hóa, under the heading “Tự lực văn đoàn,” all in capital letters. It indicates their intention to distinguish themselves from Nam Phong’s project of trying to achieve harmony between East and West. Instead, they resolutely choose the West, privileging literary creation and the freedom of the individual. In order to understand this vast project, which has significant repercussions for Vietnamese literature and society, we have since 2012 had access to the complete collection of Tự lực văn đoàn’s two journals, thanks to the efforts of a collective made up of descendants of the group’s authors. This text is translated from the statement’s appearance in its original Vietnamese. PNN (trans. & adapted from French: AM)

I. MANIFESTO OF THE SELF-RELIANT LITERARY GROUP Originally published in Vietnamese in Phong Hóa 87 (March 2, 1934): 2. Translated by Chi P. Pham.

Mission Statement The Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tự lực văn đoàn) brings together those who share the same goal in the literary world; members of the group communicate through intellectual connection, following the same principle, and practicing mutual aid and protection to attain the common objective in works of a literary nature. Members of the group have the right to seal Tự lực văn đoàn under their names as authors and all of their works are received and sealed by Tự lực văn đoàn. Regarding books by non-member authors, in either published or manuscript form, these are sent to the Group for consideration; if two-third group members in the Committee perceive the books as valuable and as in line with the group principles, the Group will stamp and help to promote them. Tự lực văn đoàn is not a book trade association. In the future, if the conditions are met, the Group will found a literary prize, called Tự lực văn đoàn Prize, to reward works that are valuable and in line with the group’s principles.

Principles 1.

Produce your own literary works of value, and do not just translate foreign works if they have only literary worth: this is to enrich the literary tradition of the nation (văn sản trong nước). 2. Compile or translate only works with social content for the purpose of contributing to the improvement of people and society. 3. Follow populism (chủ nghĩa bình dân), compile works that are close to the common people, and encourage people to love populism. 4. Follow simple writing style—easy to understand and with few words from Chinese—a writing style that truly embodies the Annamese nature (tinh cách Annam). 5. Always new, always young, and always loving life, with a mind striving for improvement and a belief in progress. 6. Praise the beauty and virtue of our country that are close to the common people, which will make other people love their country in a populist way. Get rid of any sense of elitism and aristocracy (trưởng giả quý phái). 7. Respect individual freedom (tự do cá nhân). 8. Make people understand that Confucianism is no longer appropriate to our time. 9. Bring scientific methods of the West (thái tây) into Annamese literature. 10. It is acceptable to follow one of the above nine principles as long as one does not violate any of the other principles.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Malay Modernism EDITED BY MUHAMAD NASRI MOHAMAD SHAH

As if the task of translating modernity to different regions and histories were not difficult enough, having to define “Malay modernity” for those of us who work in this field complicates this task further. Part of this difficulty stems from the diversity of the “Malay world” itself, which culturally and geographically encompasses archipelagic Indonesia, peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, Southern Thailand, and many more parts of island Southeast Asia. Moreover, the diversity of the Malay world is compounded by the diversity of the peninsula itself, which has grown especially since the nineteenth century to acquire a multi-ethnic character that includes the diasporic Chinese, Indian, and Eurasian communities, amongst several others. Malay modernity, as a concept then, is not nearly the same as the history of modernity in the Malay peninsula. How, then, can one describe Malay modernity or, rather, how useful is “Malay modernity” as a historical category in describing the communities it claims to represent? The problematic assumptions entailed by the use of this category “Malay,” whether retrospective or otherwise, are thankfully averted in part by the political demands that have historically been made by political communities in the past for a coherent, pan-Malay alliance. In other words, one might propose locating “Malay modernity” in the historical struggle for, rather than on the assumption of, a singular, pan-Malay identity, or what has been referred to as “tanah Melayu” (literally translated as Malay land, but referring to the states of the Malay peninsula). The role of the printed press and the broadening of the mass media in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries have been important in this regard: the medium of print democratized and consolidated discussions of a coherent Malay nation-state and identity, at the same time that advertisements, movie posters, and fashion spreads appeared to articulate lived Malay experiences which were diverse and far from traditional norms. In this way, print came to mirror the formation of a modern Malay subjectivity, in the sense that it was both consolidated internally and articulated vis-à-vis an external, foreign identity. The two texts provided below are articles published four years apart in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Second World War. Published in the literary and arts magazines Mastika and Seni, the articles go beyond literary and art criticism. Taking on the topic of recent Western artistic imports in the field of fine art and dance, the writers make their respective cases for the assimilation or rejection of the respective trends into the popular Malay cultural imagination. Encountering these articles for the first time can prove jarring to the non-Malay reader, because of the way the authors’ discussion of the arts cuts haphazardly across religion and civilization. This is only because of the role that the arts played in the arbitrage of Malay modernity, trading in various cultural

360

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

imports to articulate their own visions of modernity. The first article, “Seni Kita” (Our Art), is written by writer and artist Mohd Salehuddin who grapples with the role that oil painting can play in advancing Malay art. Unlike the anonymous writer of the second article, Salehuddin is sympathetic to potential cross-cultural exchanges when mobilized effectively by Malay art collectives and art associations. The second article, “Seni Yang Mana Untuk Kami?” (Which Art Is for Us?), offers a less generous view of Western cultural imports and insists on the self-sufficiency of the Malay arts by drawing on an insular cultural history. MNMS

I. OUR ART Mohd Salehuddin Originally published in Bahasa Melayu in Mastika Magazine 49 (November 1950). Translated by Muhamad Nasri Mohamad Shah.

See section introduction for a discussion of this text and its context.

The Malay community can be said to be a nation with an artistic soul—one which possesses an inclination towards the arts. This can be seen through the extent of the beauty of its handcrafted arts, from the patterning of embroidery, and silversmithing to the carving of keris hilts and so on, as well as the patterning of reputable cloths and textiles such as Terengganu textiles, Bugis textiles, Samarinda textiles and many more. As far as the application of this craft to the visual arts goes, not much has been done amongst Malay artists and craftsmen because that skill has not yet arrived upon our shores from the West. Painting by means of watercolour, oil paint, chalk, black ink and many more techniques, comes from the West along with the notion of Western culture itself. Whilst each and every community and nation has participated in this by promoting this new art, one can nevertheless be assured that the Malay nation has not been left behind in the advancement of this new art. Steps to establish Malay art associations and art classes in Singapore and in various places around the Malay world as can be observed now, are good steps that should be wholeheartedly supported by the Malay community whether it be directed towards the art of painting or otherwise. Even though our nation has only recently known of this world of the visual arts, the Malay painters today do not embarrass and in fact make us proud: it is only that our artists have not yet attained prominence. At the same time, it is only a matter of time before a handful amongst our artists will have created a name for themselves in the pages of the history of Malay art owing to the remarkable standard of their art and its compelling qualities, as can be seen in two Singaporean Malay art teachers who were featured in a recently concluded exhibition at the British Council Singapore a few days ago, and separately, the respective works created by Abdullah Ariff from Pulau Pinang and A. Mahat from Singapore which were displayed only recently. Art classes and Malay art associations are currently putting great effort towards advancing the art of our nation. The Malayan Association of Malay Artists (PPMM) which is based in Singapore and which has plans to establish branches all over the Malay World, have made efforts to advance this art, and the fruit of their labour can already been seen in the sheer quantity and quality of works that were recently shown in an exhibition in Kampung Kembangan in Singapore three weeks ago, to the extent that they received a charming silver trophy. I have earlier brought attention to the state of the visual arts today which is based on the art that comes from the West. It is therefore only appropriate that I elaborate more on matters that concern the visual art that can be found in the West. Whilst on my visit to England two years ago, I was able to visit the National Gallery, which is a museum

362

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

where various beautiful paintings and works by prominent English and European artists are kept. What I discovered was that the artworks there might be referred to as paintings made from oil paint, or ‘oil colour’. Works which have been made from pencil, black ink, chalk and watercolour are indeed there, but in small number. For this reason alone, there must be an explanation as to why this is so. It’s also not hard to understand why oil paintings are favoured here. We know paintings first and foremost by their beauty, and secondly by their longevity. Oil paint embodies both of these qualities. Oil paintings are beautiful: if they were to depict a sitter’s facial expression, they would be able to do so faithfully, or almost identical to reality itself— not only in terms of the sitter’s face, but also the colour of their skin or their disposition. The pure qualities of such colour can only be accomplished through oil, and cannot be achieved correctly with the use of pencil, charcoal, ink or chalk. Therefore this is one of many reasons why oil painting as a medium is coveted by prominent artists. The second reason is the longevity of the medium. Oil paintings can withstand several centuries without so much as a change in its colour, whereas watercolour paintings can, in a matter of a few decades, have its appearance drastically aged because of the ravages of time. Furthermore, watercolour paintings, and works done with chalk, pencil and ink are often produced on paper. When paper becomes worn or brittle, its image is lost along with it. Where this concerns oil painting, this loss of image does not happen because of the thickness of its medium, having been made on cloth or canvas. Oil painting can be transferred onto another piece of cloth or canvas by detaching it from its original cloth or canvas that may already be worn out.1 As such, aspiring Malay artists who wish to create an artistic legacy for the generation that is to come, should begin to pay attention to painting with oil. Although Malay artists today prioritise watercolour painting only—a type of art medium which does not last, though I do not wish to say that watercolour, pencil and chalk works are thus useless. This is because these media have long been used as a medium of education and instruction in art, which makes them special and affordable as opposed to oil painting which is expensive and will only be wasteful were it used for practice only.

This sentence has been translated from the original Malay, and suggests the ability of conservators and/or painters to transfer paintings from an old canvas to a new canvas. It is not clear if the author is referring to the conservatory practice of lining a painting, in which a painting’s canvas is reinforced and supported by a second canvas, or some other advanced and less common procedure which involves the replacement of the primary canvas altogether. Either way, the ambiguity in this process should be attributed to the foreignness of the medium to the author, and the difficulty of locating such a technique in the Malay lexicon.

1

II. WHICH ART IS FOR US? Anonymous Originally published in Bahasa Melayu in Seni Magazine 9 (May 1954). Translated from the Malay by Muhamad Nasri Mohamad Shah.

See section introduction for a discussion of this text and its context.

Our nation and our art has long existed since the time of autonomous Malay royalty and nobility, whilst the Malay people have progressed alongside their art, particularly in physical art forms such as the martial arts (pencak silat) and traditional dance, as well as the vocal arts (that is, in singing). These two art forms have since then become the flesh and blood of the Malay society. In fact, it was a long held belief that if the youth were not skilled in the martial art of pencak silat, they would be deemed incompetent, for this would mean a youth that was [socially and physically] unprepared. We also later discovered in our history, performers who were skilled in the art of singing and performing, and composing poetic ballads. Because Malay society recognized the value of such art forms, many of these performances and works were self-published. This sense of recognition was also shared by the royalty and nobility, who valued the art forms to the extent that they maintained a stable of their own performers and singers so that they could enjoy melodious songs and graceful dances. Therefore, this soulful appreciation of the arts has existed over several hundred years in the hearts of the Malays. These days, the question of the arts and dance has become of great concern to us ever since the “Western winds” have begun to blow upon us, bringing with it an art form called “dancing” or dancing in a manner where a male and female partners embraces, regardless of who they may be. Before the Western style of dancing arrives upon our shores, a beautiful dance, that is the dance of the East, has been copied by actors and actresses for this very reason—a dance which is full of manners and which does not clash with local etiquette. This cultural practice of our nation—this dance form—has since then been viewed by all layers of society, and the people who possess this craft of dancing, who might properly be called an original artist and performer, rather than someone who presented inauthentic or superficial dances. Hence, these “true” artists were housed in palaces and received the patronage of established families and houses, thus living out the rest of their lives practicing a craft that has now become their flesh and blood. Today, however, the art of dancing can be learned by anyone who can afford the slightest practice, and the dance form that is promoted the most today is a dance fuelled by temperament and passions: that is, the dance form from the West known as modern dance and “dancing.” If the youth of the past were expected to be proficient in the craft of “silat,” then the urban youth of today must be proficient in modern dance or “dancing.” Should this precarious habit be promoted? If the youth of the past were advised to be proficient in “silat” for the sake of their own safety, then what purpose might proficiency in Western dance serve?

364

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

We are anxious if this art form named “dancing” in English were advanced within the Malay society amongst the youth, whether deliberate or otherwise. We believe this art is a threat to the soul of our nation—one that is well-mannered, delicate and respectful of the religion of the “Eastern people.” At the same time, it is a people that tends to get amorous when in the company of the opposite gender, due to the heat of the tropics. As such, we perceive this art of pulsating dance as being detrimental to our society and should not be promoted to our youths, which stands in contrast to the Westerners who possess a culture different from ours.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Modernism in the South Pacific EDITED BY SHAYNAH JACKSON AND ALYS MOODY

Perhaps more than any of the other sections in this anthology, modernism in the South Pacific is heterogenous and dispersed, composed of the traditions of discrete nations and ethnic groups, which sometimes lack a coherent identity and whose literatures developed in this period in isolation from one another. Grouping essays from Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Island nations together under the banner of “Modernism in the South Pacific,” as we do here, is thus a polemical move. In doing so, we take our impetus from Albert Wendt’s call in the final essay of this section to forge a “new Oceania.” Although Wendt’s vision is focused primarily on the indigenous peoples of this region, we are interested in what we learn when we read the modernism of these countries—whose histories are intimately interconnected in this period and into the present—as part of a single, discontinuous formation, one which seeks to hold indigenous people and settler colonials in the same frame. Modernism in the South Pacific is best conceptualized as a colonial and decolonial modernism, marked by the dominance of settler colonial people and powers in this region. The South Pacific was colonized by European powers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first permanent British settlement was established at Sydney in New South Wales, in what is now Australia, in 1788. New Zealand, initially part of the colony of New South Wales, became an independent colony in 1841 when its government signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the indigenous Māori people (Australia has never signed a treaty with its indigenous peoples). Although British colonization dominates this region, Britain and France were both major colonial powers in the Pacific, annexing various islands throughout the nineteenth century, while the island of New Guinea, north of Australia, was divided between the British, the Dutch, and the Germans around the turn of the twentieth century. In 1901, the six colonies of Australia federated as the Commonwealth of Australia, an event that Australians usually identify as the beginning of their nation. New Zealand elected at the last minute not to join them, preferring to become an independent state, and secured its status as a Dominion of the British Empire in 1907. The independence of both Australia and New Zealand, such as it was, was clearly independence for its settler colonial populations and not its indigenous peoples, who remain colonized to this day. Independence for the Pacific Islands occurred much later, on roughly the same timescale as post-Second World War decolonization elsewhere in the world: Samoa attained

366

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

independence in 1962, Fiji and Tonga in 1970, and many of the others in the 1970s and 1980s. In the twentieth century, the newly independent Australia and New Zealand themselves emerged as hegemonic powers in the Pacific. In New Zealand in particular— thanks in part to the cultural ties between Māori and Pacific Islander people—a Pacific identity has been an increasing feature of national identity in recent decades, while Australia in the same period has oriented itself more broadly toward the “Asia-Pacific,” which also incorporates east and south-east Asia. This “combined and uneven” history means that modernism in the South Pacific unfolds unevenly across the region. The first wave comes in the early twentieth century, as settler colonial writers and artists in Australia and New Zealand sought to articulate a response to modernist developments unfolding in Europe. In both white Australian and pākēha New Zealander culture, as in white South African culture, the problem of modernism was often imagined as a problem of provincialism: how to articulate a culture distinct from that of the colonial powers whose own cultural crises seemed to set the tone for international artistic production. In Australia, the conventional narrative of interwar literary history pits cosmopolitan and internationally oriented modernists against more formally conservative nationalists. By including conservative poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart’s letter on the Ern Malley hoax alongside the more conventionally modernist narrative of artist Margaret Preston, we seek to contest this account. We suggest that the so-called divergence between “modernism” and “nationalism”—here as in, say, later debates in African literature—is best read as position-taking within a field. Put another way, we see these as divergent responses to the same problem, with modernism understood not as any particular response but as the problem itself—the problem of what social role art might play under the conditions of modernity. In the Australian context, this was brought to a head by international modernism’s contemporaneity with the attempt to develop a “serious” national literature in a country defined by its egalitarian anti-intellectualism. In New Zealand, the picture was somewhat different. While the internationalizing impulse in modernist literature persisted—exemplified, most famously, by the expatriation of Katherine Mansfield, still New Zealand’s most famous literary figure—the tension between international modernism and cultural nationalism was less marked. Indeed, New Zealand modernism in its heyday in the 1930s was a self-consciously nationalist affair, seeking new resources to respond to the landscape and to develop an authentically New Zealand literary and art tradition. Periodicals such as Phoenix (1932–3) and Tomorrow (1934–40) were central to this movement, challenging the separateness of art from society through literature that was politically engaged and socially aware—and commonly discussed as modernist. For some settler colonial artists and writers in this period—the Jindyworobak poets in Adelaide, Australia; several New Zealand painters—indigenous cultures offered a way of coming to grips with the new land in which they found themselves, usually in ways that we would now regard with great discomfort. For the indigenous peoples of this region themselves, however, modernism evolves on the pattern of other decolonizing literatures in the post-Second World War period, especially those in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. For these writers, the modernist problem, still centrally occupied with anxieties springing from a crisis in art’s social role, gravitates around how to imagine indigenous cultures in a modern world in which they have always been painted as unevolved and even anti-modern. The examples we include here from the indigenous peoples of this region reflect cultural nationalist and trans-indigenous or regional moments in this struggle

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

367

respectively, in the works of Māori educator Kāterina Mataira and Samoan writer Albert Wendt. Australian Aboriginal art deserves a special mention here. There is a strong case to be made for the modernism of the Western Desert Art Movement, popularly known as the movement that produced Aboriginal “dot paintings.” From about 1972, Aboriginal artists such as those associated with the Papunya Tula art collective began producing paintings that combined traditional techniques, motifs, and sometimes narratives with Western painting methods, using acrylic paints on hard surfaces. These paintings were increasingly produced for a white Australian and then international audience, and when they were exhibited in New York in the 1980s, they were initially read in dialogue with American modernist traditions of minimalism and abstraction. This is not the sense in which we think of these paintings as modernist, however. Rather, their modernism—like that of the other writers in this section—springs from these paintings’ testimony to their attempt to develop a new role for themselves as artists within the conditions of colonial modernity. That these artists are not represented in this volume is a reflection of the limitations of an anthology of this kind. Overwhelmingly, the influential early statements on this movement came not from artists themselves but from intermediaries such as Geoffrey Bardon, the schoolteacher who is credited with spurring these communities to use Western styles, and white art dealers, gallerists, and curators in urban centers in Australia and internationally. Such intermediaries, while influential, do not have the same claim to speaking on behalf of the artists themselves, and so reluctantly we leave this interesting episode of Australian modernism unrepresented here. Other omissions that readers might remark from this section include the most famous antipodean writers, such as Katherine Mansfield and Patrick White. These writers, already absorbed into the canons of European and international modernism, hardly require the kind of recovery work that constitutes the central goal of this anthology, although we encourage readers to read their critical essays and bodies of work in dialogue with those collected here. AM

FURTHER READING Dixon, Robert and Veronica Kelly, eds. Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia, 1870s–1960s. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008. Jones, Lawrence. Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture, 1932–1945. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2003. Long, Maebh, Sudesh Mishra, and Matthew Hayward. Oceania in Theory. Special issue of symploke 26.1 (2018). Pound, Francis. The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National Identity, 1930–1970. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009. Somerville, Alice Te Punga. Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Stephen, Ann, Andrea McNamara, and Philip Goad, eds. Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917–1967. Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, 2006. Vickery, Ann. Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry. Cambridge: Salt, 2007.

I. WHY I BECAME A CONVERT TO MODERN ART Margaret Preston Originally published in The Home (1 June, 1923): 20.

Margaret Preston (1875–1963) is one of Australia’s most celebrated artists, known particularly for her modernist woodblock prints. This essay recounts her “conversion” to modernist art as a result of her travels in Europe in 1904–7. In her account of modernism as something that happens abroad (and specifically in Europe), Preston follows a spatial imaginary common to the Australian arts of this period, which we see repeated less appreciatively in James McAuley and Harold Stewart’s account of Ern Malley (13.iii), for whom modernism is imagined as a foreign import. Preston’s travels exemplify the centrality of expatriatism to Australian modernism, as reflected not only in the visual arts but also in the literary careers of well-known modernist writers, such as Patrick White and Christina Stead. This essay appeared in The Home, a quarterly magazine aimed at upper-middleclass Australian housewives, published from 1920 to 1942. The Home was important in promoting modernist art and design to an elite Australian audience, selling modernism as part of a glamorous modern lifestyle. Preston’s breezy tone here reflects the popularizing impulse behind the magazine. AM

The character of an individual is not a fixed property t. s. eliot1

Once upon a time when I was twelve years of age I borrowed (?) my mother’s best dinner plates and brunswick blacked them all over.2 On to the blacking I painted flannel flowers.3 The result so impressed my mother that after the shock of the loss of the plates was over she determined to have me properly trained. Her justification was that as the flowers were the image of the natural ones I must have talent. From this on my imitativeness was well nurtured. Excellent tuition was found for me, and I was well taught to draw the outward show of dancing fauns, Donatello heads, etc. I was well surrounded by tradition, taught only through tradition. Would that I could have had the advantages offered by the Slade school in London, where the sculpture of the Greeks & Co. flourish in museums and not in a live school, and where all imitativeness is discouraged.4 I must have learnt to draw, for I

We have not succeeded in finding the source for this quotation; it seems possible it is not a genuine quotation.

1

Brunswick black: durable, quick-drying varnish made from a solution of bitumen in turpentine, typically used for coating metal.

2

A native Australian flower, particularly associated with Sydney.

3

The Slade School of Art, established in 1871 as part of University College London, trained many members of Britain’s avant-garde in the first years of the twentieth century. Despite Preston’s implication here, London’s museums were an important part of the art training at Slade, and students were expected to draw from busts before progressing to life drawing.

4

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

369

won so many prizes. After some years of this excellent training I was allowed to start on colour. Oranges, turnips, bald heads, hairy heads, bananas, etc., etc., all were imagined by me, and more prizes followed. At last I felt competent to face the future, let it be eggs, onions or portraits. I had been magnificently grounded, and all I had to do was go on doing more, as I had nature always before me, and how could anyone improve on Nature? What is a plate but a dish and an onion but a vegetable? Then full steam ahead in art. As long as the onion were of a recognised species, and plates as they are generally known, all was well. Trees and portraits with a little gentle selection were equally safe so long as you were careful to arrange the lights according to nature. This was the text-book of my early realism. Imitating the world, I decided to go abroad, and fixed on Munich. There were two very strong elements in Munich at that time, the dead realists and the lively moderns. These two sets of painters had their shows at the same time. Naturally I condemned as mad and vicious the moderns, and went willingly with the deads. I was well soaked in “nature above all” and “sanity first” and the boat fare afterwards. My first visit to the Secession Exhibition, as the modern show called itself, left me undefiled.5 To the pure all is pure, to the blank all is blank. My letters about this time written back to my native country could be compressed into a few sentences such as: Half German art is mad and vicious and a good deal of it is dull; I am glad to say my work stands with the best of them. Six months after another tabloid letter could have been received:— You were astonished when you read that I am starting to think that perhaps the mad and vicious show has something in it. And again:— I have found out one thing from them—that eggs don’t need to be peculiarly Wyandotte,6 etc., and they can still be eggs. This discovery gave me bad growing pains. I suffered all the discomforts of doubt and indecision and, much worried, resolved to leave Germany and go to Paris. When I arrived in Paris the old salon (française) was open.7 Here I found triumphant realism! Myriads of canvases! It seemed as if all the artists in the world must be showing there. But again, its very multitudinousness made me think that if painting is as easy as this, why is it regarded as an art? So again I paid my door money to a modern show and this time tried to think.

The Munich Secession were a group of progressive—although by no means uniformly avant-garde or modernist—artists who broke from the Munich Artists’ Association (the Munich Künstlergenossenschaft) in 1892. This latter group is likely Preston’s “dead realists,” who, it should be noted, were not literally dead at this time.

5

A breed of chicken.

6

The Salon was the official French art exhibition, and by the first years of the twentieth century already very much in decline. It faced competition from numerous other annual public exhibitions, such as the Salon des Indépendents, established in 1884, and the Salon d’automne, from 1903, as well as the rise of private galleries and dealers. Any of these may be the “modern show” Preston visits below.

7

370

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

I found at last that the eggs or onions as part of whole of a picture could appear different and suggest something more than being merely edible. I could not paint the smell so I needn’t paint the species. Realism had its first rebuff. But it is a hard thing to part with a faith. I went to the Galleries and studied Ingres and Renoir, etc., and so, muddled and worried, I moved on to Spain to worship at the shrine of Velasquez, that demi-god of realism. Velasquez occupied a large room but, alas, so did Goya. Like the Wandering Jew I fled from country to country hunting an ideal, and at last came back to Australia. I had learned to think—so the passage money was not wasted. Australia is a fine place in which to think. The galleries are so well fenced in. The theatres and cinemas are so well fenced in. The libraries are so well fenced in. The universities are so well fenced in. You do not get bothered with foolish new ideas. Tradition thinks for you, but Heavens! how dull! To keep myself from pouring out the selfsame pictures every year I started to think things out. Why is music so controlled and painting such a muddle?—Because music is a science and painting is uncontrolled. How can art be controlled?—By a scientific study of optics, etc. When does an onion cease to become a kitchen requisite and useful to art?—When the onion becomes merely an aesthetic object for the painter? What is the difference between an onion in art and one in commerce?—In art we must use nature as tradition only and originate another suggestion apart from food and fecundity. Why does the tobacco-juice art (Vandyck brown)8 flourish in Australia in preference to the light and colour sect?—Because the appreciation of colour was nearly killed in the Victorian era, and most of the art has not emerged from that period. When is a work modern?—When it represents the age it is painted in. These answers were my revised text-book. And so I started to try not to duplicate nature, but to endeavour to make my onions, etc., obey me, and not me them. To add my mind (aestheticism) to their contours and let my eyes be more controlled by my brain. And now I want to think and think and try and get those onions, etc., without any remembrance of the Greek, German, French brand, and portray them as a purely Australian product. It’s going to be difficult, but anything is better than turning a handle and finding myself doing brunswick blacked dinner plates only a little more fluently.

Van Dyke brown is a brown pigment, named for the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck.

8

II. SOME ASPECTS OF N.Z. ART AND LETTERS A. R. D. Fairburn Originally published in Art in New Zealand Quarterly 6.4 (June 1934): 213–8.

This is an excerpt from a Wellington-based periodical titled Art in New Zealand. Editor Charles Marris released four issues a year from 1928 to 1946. The content of this periodical was art of any kind, including reproductions of art work, poems, paintings, and articles regarding artistic endeavor in New Zealand. In this essay from June 1934, poet A. R. D. Fairburn (1904–57) laments the lack of a distinctly New Zealand culture, as society instead clings to English tradition. The disdain presented by Fairburn provides a fair representation of this group of New Zealand modernists generally, who were intent on establishing a new culture which testified to the New Zealand experience, rather than perpetuating the tradition of a culture far removed from their own. SJ

It is natural that we who were born in New Zealand should look to English (and to a lesser extent, Continental) models when we wish to express ourselves in the arts of writing and painting. We are of British seed, planted not so very long ago. We have, as we are never tired of pointing out, no tradition of our own. In a word, we are Englishmen, born in exile. Set down in this evergreen unchanging countryside, there is a constant pain in our hearts, a nostalgia for the vast movements of the English seasons, for the honey-coloured haze that shrouds the northern landscape on even the brightest summer day, for the intoxicating beauty of springtime in England, and for the endless melancholy of autumn. These motions of the earth and air are lacking, except as a pattern in the blood, which finds no correspondence in nature. A dynamic race in a static environment: stagnation will precede, and cloak, adaptation. The strictly human drama is not different. We open our “Hamlet” in a bush camp and are aware of no incongruity. But to read “A Midsummer Nights Dream” in the fastnesses of our hills is to open a gulf, and to become homesick for a home we have, perhaps, never seen. We enjoy a romantic melancholy at best. And at the worst we become prey to an intolerable sentimentality. This emotion, in its various shapes, has been our main literary stock-in-trade since the day we left off writing bush ballads.1 In spite of the falseness in which it is usually cloaked, it is a real emotion, and it has been expressed once with completeness and simplicity. Mr. Alan Mulgan has, I feel, allowed himself to be frustrated in some directions by too much contemplation of the distant English scene. But if it has led to frustration, it has permitted him to make the one simple and true statement of the genuine emotion. His book “Home” says what most of us have felt, at times strongly, without having the necessary singleness

A style of writing that depicted life in the bush, often rhyming, and often an adaptation of English songs that were re-written according to the New Zealand or Australian environment. They were central features of nineteenth-century colonial literature in New Zealand and Australia.

1

372

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

of mind to express it successfully.2 “Home” is a true and adequate statement. It is also a full-stop. The thing cannot, and will not, be said again. I have no doubt whatever that others will continue to paraphrase it. For one thing, it pays. Even the weakest variations on the theme find a ready market, propped up by those unhappy thousands who celebrate Easter in the autumn, and tie artificial red berries on holly sprigs, and send snow-scenes to wish their friends joy of a subtropical Christmas.3 But it won’t do much longer. “Home” foreshadows the end of an era in New Zealand. I have dilated on the climate and the scenery, important conditioning agents always, but more so since the Catholic, or Christian, religion faded in our hearts and, faced with the rigours of Calvanism and the dreadful cleavage of Manichee, the more sentient of us took to that vague nature worship popularised by Rosseau and the English Romantics. I should stress, too, the economic factor. The umbilical cord of butterfat has held us in strict dependence on the motherland, culturally no less than economically.4 We are, even today, far from dreaming of a latch-key. That cord, hardened into debt, will continue to hold us in subservience, and will exert a drag on any movements toward a culture of our own. The supplements of the daily papers, serving commerce, do their best with sentimentality to maintain the dependence. They are not interested in today, still less in tomorrow. Their subject matter is, for the most part, either Mother-worship, turned a little rancid, or the early history of this colony. Culture, not in the sense of ladies’ debating societies, but in the wider sense of a whole way of life, rough and smooth intermingled harmoniously and without snobbery, is the enemy rather than the protégé of our press magnates. We writers could ignore the newspapers were they not the main channel open for our expression. Even so, we must do our best to forget about them. That era of dependence is drawing to a close. With talk of butter quotas, and serious attempt on the part of England to feed herself, we shall be compelled before many years are past to begin to build up a balanced production. The effects on our pockets may be, for a time, unpleasant. But in the long run it will be for the good of our souls. New culture is the result of cross-fertilisation, so that any efforts toward selfconsciousness will continue to derive benefit from contact with English culture. The relationship has in the past been an incestuous one. We must in future allow ourselves to be influenced, but not enslaved and led by a string. The contact is, ineluctably, such a close one that there is no danger of our getting right out of touch. Rather must we hold ourselves aloof with what little strength we have. We are young, and weak. We need other influences than that which arıses from the natural bond with the homeland, if we are to escape mother-fixation. A young man who remains tied to his mother does not gain spiritual independence, does not become in any true sense a person. To balance the maternal influence he needs—what? Well, for example, a relationship with an elder brother and another with a grown man. Where are we to find these? Alan Mulgan (1881–1962) was a New Zealand journalist and writer. His 1927 novel Home is a nostalgic eulogy to England. He writes adoringly about his true “Home land,” and fondly admires all things English. Mulgan was a strong advocator for the English tradition in writing, and therefore produced work in the style of conservative Georgianism. He opposed the rise of a critical literature. 3 This refers to clinging to a tradition and a land (England) that is completely different to the New Zealand experience. As New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere, the seasons are opposite to England, yet people continue to follow practices such as celebrate a white Christmas, regardless that Christmas in New Zealand occurs in summer.

2

This refers to New Zealand’s dependence on England as its most significant trading partner. Butter was one of New Zealand’s chief exports to England.

4

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

373

Let us turn to painting. There is no golden mist in the air, no Merlin in our woods, no soft warm colour to breed a school of painters from the stock of Turner, Crome, Cotman and Wilson Steer.5 Hard, clear light reveals the bones, the sheer form, of hills, trees, stones and scrub. We must draw rather than paint, even if we are using a brush, or we shall not be perfectly truthful. The paintings of Christopher Perkins are a healthy influence, moving as they do toward a true and knowing expression of our landscape.6 Looking at a lithograph drawing of Perkins the other day I thought I noticed another tendency, one which I had been watching for for some time. There was an emphasis on design, and a deliberately formal treatment which I have not seen in other New Zealand work. The method impressed me, for I had come to think that impressionist technique, though it represented one permanent and fruitful line of march, failed to express the character and singularity of our natural landscape. It needed civilising by some other methods. Our most characteristic naturals forms—ferns for example, lakes, mountains, and many native leaves such as the kowhai7—are geometrical and sometimes rigid. And Perkins seemed to me to have exploited this, and to have given his drawing something of the formal and delicately selective treatment of a Hokusai or Hiroshige print.8 I am sure that our methods of painting could borrow with greater profit at the present time from the Japanese than from the traditional English and French schools. Though the natural bleakness of our manmade scenery—buildings, bridges, railway stations and cuttings, telegraph poles, and so on—does seem to need the burning honesty of a Van Gogh to extract what aesthetic truth may lie in it. To come to literature. It is of little use our trying to write novels of manners with Fielding and Dickens in the back of our minds. The core may be true enough for us, but the surface is not. And we are almost certain to fall into the error of imitating the surface. In any case, Dickens is too much of a soothing lotion for the Victorian bad conscience about social conditions to be a healthy or useful influence for us who hope to avoid those horrors. W. W. Jacobs is admirable—but no model for us. And a second-rate novelist such as Galsworthy would be something worse than fourth-rate in New Zealand surroundings. If it is the actual quality of life in this country which we are interested in portraying, honesty must compel us to look for other guidance besides that of the great English masters. By themselves they are too big for us, and would crush us. Here I venture to make the suggestion, hateful to many people no doubt, that American literature may have a better influence on us than English, especially when we are considering contemporary writers. I know of no living English writer whose work I can read as a New Zealander. On the other hand there are several Americans who make

J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) was a leading English Romantic painter. “Crome” may refer to either John Crome (1768–1821) or his son John Berney Crome (1794–1842). Both Cromes, as well as John Sell Cotman (1782–1842), were English landscape artists associated with the Norwich School, the first provincial art movement in Britain. Philip Wilson Steer (1860–1942) was an English landscape and seascape painter, initially associated with the Impressionists, who later turned to a more traditional style.

5

Chrisopher Perkins (1891–1968) was an English painter turned New Zealand teacher. Perkins’s arrival in 1929 influenced a shift in painting toward simplified forms and bursts of bright colour to aptly depict the harsh New Zealand sunlight. He proved extremely influential in the development of New Zealand art.

6

Trees native to New Zealand, best known for their bright yellow flowers.

7

Hokusai Katsushika (1760–1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) were influential Japanese ukiyo-e artists of the Edo period, famous for their landscape woodblocks. They were major influences on European impressionism. For other examples of Japan appearing as a counter-model to Western modernity, see Sylvain (2.i), and Tagore (8.i).

8

374

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

me feel that I should be quite at home in the society they deal with: I should hate it, but I should understand it. English life makes a more pleasant object for our contemplation than American; but however much we lay to our souls the flattering unction that we are more English than the English, we really understand, and get inside, certain aspects of American life more readily. And it is understanding, and not comfort, that we are seeking. America is our eldest brother. From some points of view our present state of mind is beginning to be not unlike that of the American people a century or so ago. Not yet is there a parallel to that sharp division between the old and the new, expressed in the cleavage between the colonial English writers (Hawthorne, Emerson and the Yankees generally) and the native American school of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. But we have produced something very like a Thoreau in Mr. Darcy Cresswell, in respect of his social attitude.9 Caught between an old order and a new anarchy, and unable to partake of either to the full, both retreat within the walls of a strongly fortified individualism. But not all writers are by temperament capable of finding a sort of provisional salvation in this way. Unless he is prepared with Mr. Hector Bolitho to become, with care and application, an English novelist,10 the young New Zealand writer must be willing to partake, internally as well as externally, of the anarchy of life in a new place and, by his creative energy, give that life form and consciousness. And this means something more than using the correct stage-properties, be it said. American literature, as D. H. Lawrence points out, has been split almost from the outset.11 The imitation-English tradition still does good business even to-day. I do not suggest that we should pay any attention to such men as Hergesheimer and Cabell (imitation-French in this case.)12 It would be ruinous. We are concerned with the native American tradition, which can be traced as a straight line from Mark Twain right up to Ernest Hemingway. I believe that, from the point of view of the New Zealand writer, “Huckleberry Finn” is the most important novel ever written. That easy-going, casual, gum-chewing attitude toward life of the true colonial is something that concerns us very directly. It is something we know, and understand, and can deal with, whether we regard it with satisfaction or not. We understand Huck, the true colonial, where we can only pretend to understand Tom Brown, the English public-school boy. Once again I say, it is understanding that must count with us. We must discard our snobbery, and exercise a little honesty and humility, if we are ever to be anything but a bad copy of a not-verylikeable English suburb.

Darcy Cresswell (1896–1960) was a New Zealand writer and poet. He advocated for a romantic tradition in poetry, and considered the realism of modern poetry to be a sub-standard style of writing. However, he also strongly advocated for the poet as a legitimate profession, and the rise of a recognizable New Zealand literature and serious engagement with the arts. Hence being caught “between old order, and new anarchy.”

9

Hector Bolitho (1897–1974) was a New Zealand novelist who lived in England from 1923 until his death in 1974.

10

Lawrence discusses the split in American literature between European allegiance and American novelty in chapter 1 of Studies in Classic American Literature: “Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe. Yet no American feels he has completely escaped its mastery.” D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Martin Secker, 1920): 10.

11

Joseph Hergesheimer (1880–1954) and James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) were both prominent US writers at the time.

12

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

375

America, as both Spengler and Lawrence have said, from vastly different points of view but in almost the same words, has falsified her destiny.13 Those who wince when I suggest that we should look to America must remember that the writers I have in mind have been, as colonial Americans, profoundly uncomfortable in cosmopolitan America, which is what we hear most about. Ernest Hemingway got out. But he is a true American, a colonial like ourselves, and closer to us than any Englishman. (I am speaking of my own, post-war generation). The hero of his “Farewell to Arms” is Huckleberry Finn all over again, without being a copy. But if we are to go to school with Hemingway, we must make allowances for the fact that his colonialism has been given some rude shocks by the antics of business-America and by the war, and has in some degree “got nerves.” The same applies to a bigger man, William Faulkner, who is obviously ill-at-ease in his native land. His importance for us lies in his honesty and courage in circumstances not profoundly dissimilar from our own. He refuses to shelve the problem set before him, and insists always on dealing with his material rather than letting it deal with him. His work is vigorous and truthful, and vividly moral, not in the sense of being related (as, say, Hardy’s work is) to an abstract standard of morality, but in that it exploits particular and often spontaneous moral relationships between individuals. One may, if one chooses, regard this as unhealthy. It is at least honest, and not didactic, in a time and place when it is difficult for an artist to be both. It is from these sources—from Faulkner and Hemingway, and others in the true American tradition—that, I suggest, we may draw assistance in building a literature, rather than from Galsworthy, Mr. Walpole, Mr. Priestley and Mr. Aldous Huxley; or even from Dickens and Fielding. What dangers threaten us, other than the one I have indicated? Well, there is the danger of our taking an English fashion, misunderstanding it, and allowing it to harden and become permanent with us long after its originators have discarded it. This has already occurred in Australia, and to a large extent in New Zealand. When Beardsley and Wilde, in their turn misconceiving Baudelaire, put on fancy dress in the ’90s, they were expressing the decadence of bourgeois European art, and the weariness of an old civilisation. It was the most barren and unsuitable model imaginable for a young country to imitate, but Australia, ashamed of her homespun bush ballads, turned snobbishly to this elegant European fashion. As a result, Australian art and literature are to this day overrun with fauns, satyrs, dryads and all the paraphernalia of a shoddy paganism—shoddy enough in Swinburne and Beardsley, but trebly shoddy in their new-world imitators. We find layer upon layer of falseness if we probe the mass of poetry and art the fashion has produced in Australia. The English soon abandoned this costume play. The more healthy of them were shocked out of such silliness by the war, the more disillusioned took to new

Oswald Spengler’s 1933 book Jahre der Entscheidung (Years of Decision; translated into English in early 1934 as The Hour of Decision) was widely reported in the New Zealand press in 1933. An article about the book in the Wellington daily The Evening Post quotes Spengler as saying “America failed, lacks stamina, and has falsified her destiny. The only warrior spirit is the Prussian.” Although the book was translated into English just barely in time for Fairburn to have read it, it is more likely that Fairburn had this newspaper report in mind, especially since the quotation does not appear in the English translation. Compare with Lawrence’s account of American literature: “The real American day hasn’t begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So far it has been the false dawn.” Although Fairburn emphasizes their differences, it should be noted that both authors understand the United States’ true destiny to lie in a rejection of democracy. “Prussian Spirit,” Evening Post 116.98 (October 23 1933): 7; Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 13.

13

376

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

and more exciting fashions in decadence. This fake-pagan Australian art has left imitation goat-tracks all over New Zealand poetry, and there are many older men who still live in the world of the “Triad.”14 But such cases of arrested development must hold no interest for the young writer. Another string which tripped up the feet of New Zealand poets was the Georgian. There are, even today, innumerable young men (and women!) in this country who in their dreams ask nothing better than to be allowed to die romantically in some corner of a foreign field. This sort of thing, bearing little or no relation to our circumstances, must be discarded also. There is another sort of snobbery which claims of such-and-such a poem that it “might have been written anywhere.” It is just this cosmopolitan and rootless view of art which has done such damage to English painters and writers since the war. The work of Thomas Hardy is planted in its native earth. That of Mr. Aldous Huxley has no roots, and no sap. It is dead. Let us avoid such puerile boasts. If a work of art “might have been done anywhere” it is either a very great work or a very feeble one. And it is exceedingly improbable that this country has produced, or will for some time produce, anything in the former category. The history of this country has been a progress from teat-jerk to quidnunc. A dark cloud of earnestness hangs over the land, and our young writers are industriously canvassing for outside aid. If we must be influenced from abroad (and we must), then let us see to it that our search is not led astray by prejudice and snobbery. Let us exercise intelligence and honesty.

The Triad was a literary journal edited by Charles Baeyertz (1866–1943), published in New Zealand from 1893 until 1914, and thereafter in Australia until it closed in 1927.

14

III. ERN MALLEY, POET OF DEBUNK: FULL STORY FROM THE TWO AUTHORS James McAuley and Harold Stewart Originally published in Fact, a supplement to The Sun (Sunday 25 June, 1944): 4.

Ern Malley may be Australia’s most famous modernist poet but, as this article attests, he did not exist. He was a hoax perpetrated by two young poets, James McAuley (1917– 76) and Harold Stewart (1916–95), against Australia’s lone modernist little magazine, Angry Penguins, and its editor, Max Harris. In the aftermath, Angry Penguins ceased publishing, effectively ending European modernism’s brief sojourn in Australia. Despite themselves, however, McAuley and Stewart produced in Malley an influential modernist figure, generated, as this account suggests, out of precisely the kinds of chance operations that characterized Dadaist and Surrealist experiments in Europe and the United States at this time. Malley attracted the admiration of US poets such as Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, and has become firmly canonized in Australian literary history. McAuley, meanwhile, went on to become the inaugural editor of Quadrant, a conservative journal funded by the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (sometimes reluctantly—the Quadrant editorial team was, ironically, too outspokenly anti-Communist for the CCF’s tastes). This account was published in Fact, a supplement to Sydney Sunday Sun newspaper, which billed itself as “the up-to-the-minute Australian news-review.” A teaser on the newspaper’s front page, sitting above news of Allied victories in Europe, directed readers to the “revelations” in the supplement. The article itself was printed alongside headshots of McAuley and Stewart, under the caption “Ern Malley.” This star treatment in one of Sydney’s large-circulation papers offers an intriguing glimpse of how Australian modernism entered the mass media. The classic account of the hoax can be found in Michael Heyward’s The Ern Malley Affair (1993). Many of the documents surrounding the hoax, including the full text of the poems, have been republished in a special feature in Jacket 17 (2002). AM

Last week FACT said it would clear up the “mystery,” motives and merit of the “Poems of Ern Malley.” This week it does so. The works of Ern Malley were deliberately concocted, without intention of poetic meaning or merit, as an experiment to debunk what was regarded as a pretentious kind of modern verse-writing. [The writings were published in a special “Ern Malley” commemorative issue of Adelaide literary journal Angry Penguins, which ranked fictitious Ern Malley as “one of

378

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

the two giants of contemporary Australian poetry,” devoted thirty pages to an allegedly posthumous post who had never lived.]1 •

The “Works of Ern Malley” were written, in collaboration, by two Australian poets, JAMES McAULEY and HAROLD STEWART. Stewart, who lived at Croydon, is a corporal, at present in a military hospital. He is 27. Leiut. McAuley, AIF, lived at Homebush. He is 26. Both are from Sydney, where they were educated at Fort-street High School,2 attended Sydney University. They are attached to the same Army unit, stationed at Melbourne. Co-authors McAuley and Stewart this week made, to FACT exclusively, the following joint statement and explanation: “We decided to carry out a serious literary experiment. There was no feeling of personal malice directed against Mr. Max Harris (coeditor of Angry Penguins). “Nor was there any intention of having the matter publicised in the Press. It became known to FACT in an unforeseen manner. Some public statement is therefore necessary.

“Decay of meaning” “For some years now we have observed with distaste the gradual decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry. “Mr. Max Harris and other Angry Penguins writers represent an Australian outcrop of a literary fashion which has become prominent in England and America. The distinctive feature of the fashion, it seemed to us, was that it rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination. Our feeling was that by processes of critical self-delusion and mutual admiration, the perpetrators of this humorless nonsense had managed to pass it off on would-be intellectuals and Bohemians, here and abroad, as great poetry. “Their work appeared to us to be a collection of garish images without coherent meaning and structure; as if one erected a coat of bright paint and called it a house. “However, it was possible that we had simply failed to penetrate to the inward substance of these productions. The only way of settling the matter was by experiment. It was, after all, fair enough. If Mr. Harris proved to have sufficient discrimination to reject the poems, then the tables would have been turned. “What we wished to find out was: Can those who write, and those who praise so lavishly this kind of writing tell the real product from consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense? “We gave birth to Ern Malley. We represented Ern through his equally fictitious sister Ethel Malley as having been a garage mechanic, an insurance salesman who wrote but never published the ‘poems’ found after his tragic end at the age of 25 by his sister who sent them to Angry Penguins for an opinion on their worth.

Square brackets in original. The special issue was the Autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins, and the quotation comes from Max Harris’s introduction to this issue. Donald Bevis Kerr (1919–42), also published by Harris, was the other “giant of contemporary Australian poetry.”

1

Sydney’s oldest government-funded high school, established in 1849.

2

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

379

“One afternoon” “We produced the whole of Ern Malley’s tragic life-work in one afternoon, with the aid of a chance collection of books which happened to be one our desk: the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare, Dictionary of Quotations &c. “We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them into nonsensical sentences. “We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from a Ripman’s Rhyming Dictionary. “The alleged quotation from Lenin in one of the poems, “The emotions are not skilled workers,” is quite phoney. “The first three lines of the poem Culture As Exhibit were lifted, as a quotation, straight from an American report on the drainage of breeding-grounds of mosquitoes. “The last line in the last poem (printed in Angry Penguins as: I have split the infinite … &c.) read in the manuscript: I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything. “Our rules of composition were not difficult: “1.—There must be no coherent theme, at most only confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as a bait to the reader. “2.—No care was taken with verse technique, except occasionally to accentuate its general sloppiness by deliberate crudities. “3.—In style, the poems were to imitate, not Mr. Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece and others.3 “Having completed the poems, we wrote a very pretentious and meaningless Preface and Statement, which purported to explain the aesthetic theory on which they were based. Then we elaborated the details of the alleged poet’s life. This took more time than the composition of his Works.

“Hypnotism” “Mr. Harris and Mr. John Reed (co-editors of Angry Penguins), Mr. Brian Elliott (Lecturer in Australian Literature Adelaide University), Mr. Harry Roskolenko (the American poet in the US Forces, who had some Ern Malley poems published in New York in an anthology of Australian verse he collected), and others, accepted these poems as having considerable merit.4 “However, that fact does not, as it might seem to do, prove their complete lack of intelligence. It proves something far more interesting. “It proves that a literary fashion can become so hypnotically powerful that it can suspend the operation of critical intelligence in quite a large number of people. “We feel that the experiment could have been equally successful in England. Apparently, it was in America, to the extent that a publisher was taken in. In taking aim at Dylan Thomas (1914–53) and Henry Treece (1911–66), both then in their early 30s, McAuley and Stewart are targeting the younger generation of modernists, rather than the more famous and then highly canonical poets like T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound.

3

Max Harris (1921–95) was the editor of Angry Penguins. John Reed (1901–81) was not its editor but its publisher. Brian Robinson Elliott (1910–91) lectured in English, including but not limited to Australian literature, at the University of Adelaide. Harry Roskolenko (1907–80) published three of Ern Malley’s poems in a special issue of US little magazine, Voices: A Literary Quarterly on Australian poetry, which he co-edited with Elizabeth Lambert: Roskolenko and Lambert, eds., Voices: A Literary Quarterly 118 (1944).

4

380

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

“Such a literary movement as the one we aimed at debunking—it began with the Dadaist movement in France during the last war, which gave birth to the Surrealist movement, which was followed in England by the New Apocalypse school whose Australian counterparts are the Angry Penguins—this cultism resembles, on a small scale, the progress of certain European political parties.5 “An efficient publicity apparatus is switched on to beat the big drum and drown opposition. Doubters are shamed to silence by the fear of appearing stupid or (worse crime!) reactionary. If anyone raises his voice in protest, he is mobbed with shrill invective. The faithful meanwhile, to keep their spirits up, shout encouragements and slogans, and gather in groups so as to have no time to think. “For the Ern Malley ‘poems’ there cannot even be, as a last resort, any valid Surrealist claim that even if they had no literary value (which it has been said they do possess) they are at least psychological documents. They are not even that. “They are the conscious product of two minds intentionally interrupting each other’s trains of free association and altering and revising them after they are written down. So they have not even a psychological value. •

“And, as we have already explained conclusively, the Writings of Ern Malley are utterly devoid of literary merit as poetry. “—JAMES McAULEY HAROLD STEWART.”

McAuley and Stewart were strident anti-Communists and probably have leftist political parties in mind.

5

IV. FROM MODERN TRENDS IN MAORI ART FORMS Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira Originally published in The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties: A Symposium, edited by Erik Schwimmer (Auckland: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1968).

The 1950s and 1960s saw a revival of Māori culture and political activism, known as the Māori renaissance. Māori activists, artists, and educators sought to revive and renovate traditional cultural practices, arts, and crafts, as part of a larger project of strengthening Māori identity in New Zealand. As part of this movement, a number of influential Māori artists and art teachers developed a specifically Māori modernism, which drew on European and American modernist painting and sculptural techniques, in combination with Māori practices and motifs. Focused largely in Northland, the region north of Auckland, this movement was especially concerned with pedagogy and teaching practices. Kāterina Mataira (1932–2011) was a powerful force in this movement. Initially trained as an art educator, she also became one of the country’s most influential proponents of the revival of te reo Māori (Māori language), advocating successfully for Māori language education in schools and the establishment of Māori immersion schools, known as Kura Kaupapa Māori. The following text excerpts the final two sections of Mataira’s influential essay, “Modern Trends in Maori Art Forms.” Earlier sections of the essay describe “MeetingHouses and Associated Crafts,” “Weaving,” “Revised Teaching of Maori Arts and Crafts,” “Music, Song, and Dance,” and “Sculpture.” As these subheadings suggest, the essay as a whole is interested in the revival and renovation of traditional crafts and practices, and in this context, her account of Māori modernism in the visual arts is striking for the lack of tension she perceives between modern and traditional practices. In this, the essay reflects the impulse here and elsewhere (in Africa, for example) to reclaim modernist primitivism as part of an anti-colonial project of nation-building and indigenous identity-formation. The final section intervenes directly in European modernist self-mythologization, suggesting that Māori artists can offer the art world a model for healthy, vigorous, and unproblematically masculine artisthood, as against the emasculated starving artist prominent in the European modernist tradition. AM

Painting Maori children seem to have a special flair for drawing and painting, and some exceptionally good work is coming from the primary and secondary schools. Unfortunately, for most youngsters art work finishes there. Those who continue developing their talents in this field take it up as a career primarily as art teachers and advisers. Of the Maori people who are at present earning for themselves considerable recognition as artists, only two are not teachers. One of these is Selwyn Muru, who has given himself to full-time painting; the other is Mary Wīrepa, a grandmother who started painting only seven years ago. Ralph Hōtere, Para Matchitt, Cliff Whiting, Selwyn Wilson, and Muru Walters are all teachers.

382

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

All of these have made a very strong impact on the New Zealand painting world, and in a way are pioneering what may be termed an ‘emerging New Zealand style’ which has hitherto not been evident amongst the work of New Zealand artists. These people are complete individualists. There has been no attempt to develop a ‘school’ nor to influence each other. Consequently the work is highly varied, showing much experimentation with colour and media. Selwyn Muru, Para Matchitt, and Cliff Whiting have made wide use of the Maori theme, using extensively the Maori motifs of carving and kōwhaiwhai,1 in abstracts and design. Mary Wīrepa’s work has a very strong feeling of mysticism. Apart from the landscapes and local scenes which she loves painting, much of her work is directly influenced and painted from dreams. Selwyn Wilson is both a painter and a potter. He is also a dedicated teacher, finding little time for his own work, but having remarkable success in the development of the art work of his pupils. Ralph Hōtere has just returned after several years’ study in England and the Continent, and is perhaps the most mature of these people. His work has moved a long way from the conservative levels of appreciation and is not readily received by the New Zealand public, although it is some of the most progressive work we have seen from our contemporary painters. Before his overseas study Hōtere’s work was significantly free in execution. This was the period of experimentation. There was no specific technique nor studied choice of colour. What was close at hand in the way of media went on to the canvas. He even tried toothpaste. By contrast his work is now very thoroughly disciplined. Every brush stroke is applied with measured care. This is particularly noticeable in the series of works which he painted after visiting in Italy the grave of his brother killed in action during the War. In these there is an almost hypersensitive feeling for light, texture, and colour. All these people are motivated by forces either conscious or unconscious which they may refuse or find it difficult to explain. Hōtere believes that to speak of these forces would be to give away his soul. Muru Walters on the other hand explains himself quite clearly when he asks: ‘What is nature, where is nature, why nature?’ and goes on to say: I recall the mists and floods of Whakapara, the muddy swamps of Northland, the stink of Rotorua, the agony of Ruaūmoko, the fat pregnant hills of Ahipara. If through the personification of nature in this medium, I am able to identify myself with a period of time emanating from Ranginui and Papa-tūā-nuku,2 when my ancestors roamed the lands and the seas, enjoying the vitality of ‘mana’,3 the fruitfulness of the land, forest, water, birds and animals; If by the personification of things like mountains and trees, I too may in lifetime experience the deep reverence and worship which nature inspired in the Maori heart; And if this should develop in me a character structure of peace and humility which will help me to understand that part of the Maori makeup which is so weak in me, then will I have tasted and seen nature in its highest form.

Traditional Māori patterns, usually a recurring motif, often in red, white, and black, and frequently painted on the rafters of meeting houses.

1

In Māori mythology, the primordial couple—sky father and earth mother—whose coupling and separation brought the world into being.

2

A Māori (and more broadly, Polynesian—see Wendt’s essay in the Pacific Islander publication of the same name below) term for authority.

3

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

383

Walters makes wide use of natural forms—birds, trees, hills, mountains. At times he treats them with the lavish lushness of nature’s own hand, at other times, he strips them to the very marrow of their makeup, exposing, as it were, the very innards of nature for all to see. In the main his work has the simplicity of children’s art, but shows also the restlessness of unrequited seeking. Walters will seldom be satisfied with his work. Always there will be some new goal, elusive, unattainable, beckoning from afar off. I have watched Selwyn Muru at work, and been struck by the sometimes apparent lack of conscious control at the inception of a painting. His motivation is primarily sensory. Media and tools are of prime importance, and he explores extensively the possibilities of each of these. Forms develop under his fingers of their own volition, as it were, and these very often suggest subject matter. It is usually at this stage that he exerts conscious control developing the forms into a particular theme. He does not always work this way. At other times he selects a particular theme and uses it for several works, again using a variety of media in a variety of presentations. Working with mixed media can often result in muddiness, and Muru has had his share of disappointments: but when he has complete control of his medium the results are often very exciting. Those of his works which have been painted from a limited palette are particularly good. Several young Maori people are emerging from the art schools and we await with expectation their contribution to this field. Amongst these people are Buck Nin, Mere Harrison, and Elizabeth Mountain.

The Maori as an artist The New Zealand artist is still trying to establish his rightful place in our society. While the stereotype of an unkempt body starving in a garret is no longer applicable, the New Zealand public still regards him with suspicion—someone who is certainly unorthodox, of doubtful masculinity, perhaps even a little mad. This at least is one notion which the Maori artist can help to dispel. When we consider the reputation of Muru Walters as a Maori All Black,4 and the potential of Hōtere as a golfer, and the fact that all these people lead normal satisfying lives, one must pause to think. The idea of any Maori allowing himself to starve is preposterous. Neither is it likely that any one of them would feel that to be an artist he must suffer immeasurable pain, be a rebel, or cut himself off completely from his fellow man. He does not need to create or seek situations from which to draw inspiration, for he already has a wealth of material to draw upon. The rich heritage of his forebears, the constant struggle of his people to keep their identity and integrity, the stresses and strains evident in the problems of the day, the never-ending stimulus of nature and the elements, as well as man’s own struggle to find himself, his purpose, and his God. All of these and much else are at his finger tips, requiring only the sensitivity, the strength of feeling, the power of expression (which I believe is innate in the Maori) and the skill (which I believe he can acquire) to bring to fruition works which may be a constant inspiration to man.

4 The All Blacks are the New Zealand rugby team, and have an iconic status in New Zealand society. Māori players have been a key part of the team’s success, and it has in turn represented an important route by which Māori men were able to become prominent in New Zealand society.

384

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Add to this the very real quality of aroha5 which the Maori has in abundance and it becomes clear, that if the Maori artist, on the stage, in the graphic and plastic arts, in his music, and in his poetry and writing can imbue society with this quality of aroha, then he will have made his greatest contribution to society and mankind.

A Māori word meaning love, affection, sympathy, compassion.

5

V. TOWARDS A NEW OCEANIA Albert Wendt Originally published in Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1.1 (1976): 49–60.

Albert Wendt (b. 1939) is a Sāmoan writer, today based in New Zealand, and one of the principal figures in contemporary Pacific literature. Trained in New Zealand, where he received an MA on the Mau, an early twentieth-century Sāmoan independence movement, from Victoria University at Wellington, he returned to Western Sāmoa in 1965. He moved to Fiji in 1974 to take up a position at the recently established University of the South Pacific and in 1977 returned again to Western Sāmoa to set up USP’s branch there. During this period, he was closely involved with Mana, a publishing house, whose journal was billed as “a South Pacific journal of language and literature.” It takes its name from an important Pacific Islander concept, denoting authority and respect. Echoing the regional orientation of the University of the South Pacific itself—which has campuses in Fiji, Sāmoa, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, the Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, and Tuvalu—Mana was published in Suva, Fiji, but sought to foster a regional cultural identity and to spur literary production across the Pacific Island nations, as well as among the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand. This essay was published in the first issue of Mana and is the major statement of this Oceanian or South Pacific modernism. The debates that Wendt outlines here, between an anti-colonial position that seeks a return to a pre-colonial Golden Age and one that seeks to build what he calls a “new Oceania,” echo the debates that characterized African and other decolonizing literatures around this time. In this sense, this essay is located firmly within the discourse of anti-colonial modernism. Wendt understands this project—like that of African and Caribbean writers in roughly the same years—as part of a regional and not merely a national undertaking. To this end, he rereads the Māori visual arts modernism described by Kāterina Mataira in the previous essay (14.iv) as part of a larger South Pacific cultural renaissance. That Wendt could do this reflects the rise of Pacific Islander written literature in the seven years between these two texts, in the wake of decolonization in the Pacific and often under the aegis of Mana. Wendt seeks to develop this emerging literature as a collective project by building his argument through poetry and excerpts from fellow Pacific Islander writers, many of whom were still in their twenties and getting their first publishing opportunities in Mana when this essay appeared. This text has been faithfully transcribed from the essay’s first publication, preserving typographical curiosities and errors, and variant spellings wherever possible. AM

386

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

1. A Rediscovery of Our Dead ‘These islands rising from wave’s edge – blue myth brooding in orchid, fern and banyan, fearful gods awaiting birth from blood clot into stone image and chant – to bind their wounds, bury their journey’s dead, as I watched from shadow root, ready for birth generations after ….’ (from ‘Inside Us the Dead’) I belong to Oceania - or, at least, I am rooted in a fertile portion of it - and it nourishes my spirit, helps to define me, and feeds my imagination. A detached/objective analysis I will leave to the sociologist and all the other ‘ologists who have plagued Oceania1 since she captivated the imagination of the Papalagi2 in his quest for El Dorado, a Southern Continent, and the Noble Savage in a tropical Eden. Objectivity is for such uncommitted gods. My commitment won’t allow me to confine myself to so narrow a vision. So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope — if not to contain her — to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain. I will not pretend that I know her in all her manifestations. No one — not even our gods — ever did; no one does (UNESCO ‘experts and consultants’ included); no one ever will because whenever we think we have captured her she has already assumed new guises — the love affair is endless, even her vital statistics, as it were, will change endlessly. In the final instance, our countries, cultures, nations, planets are what we imagine them to be. One human being’s reality is another’s fiction. Perhaps we ourselves exist only in one another’s dreams. In our various groping ways, we are all in search of that heaven, that Hawaiki,3 where our hearts will find meaning; most of us never find it, or, at the moment of finding it, fail to recognise it. At this stage in my life I have found it in Oceania: it is a return to where I was born, or, put another way, it is a search fro where I was born: One day I will reach the source again There at my beginnings

Oceania is a geographical and geopolitical term for the region that this volume calls the South Pacific, incorporating Australia; New Zealand; and the Polynesian, Micronesian, and Melanesian islands.

1

A Samoan word for “foreigner,” used here and in common discourse for European settlers.

2

In Polynesian mythology, Hawaiki is the original homeland of the Polynesian peoples. It is rendered variously in different Polynesian languages.

3

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

387

another peace will welcome me (from ‘The River Flows Back by Kumalau Tawili, Manus, Papua New Guinea)4 Our dead are woven into our souls like the hypnotic music of bone flutes: we can never escape them. If we let them they can help illuminate us to ourselves and to one another. They can be the source of new-found pride, self-respect, and wisdom. Conversely they can be the aitu5 that will continue to destroy us by blinding us to the beauty we are so capable of becoming as individuals, cultures, nations. We must try to exorcise these aitu both old and modern. If we can’t do so, then at least we can try and recognise them for what they are, admit to their fearful existence and, by doing so, learn to control and live honestly with them. We are all familiar with such aitu. For me, the most evil is racism: it is the symbol of all repression. Chill you’re a bastard… You have trampled the whole world over Here your boot is on our necks, your spear into our intestines Your history and your size make me cry violently for air to breathe (from The Reluctant Flame by John Kasaipwalova Trobriands)6 Over the last two centuries or so, that most fearful chill, institutionalised in colonialism, was our perpetual cross in Oceania: Kros mi no wandem yu Yu kilim mi Yu sakem aot ol We blong mi Mi no wandem yu Kros

Cross I hate you You are killing me You are destroying My traditions I hate you Cross (from Kros by Albert Leomala, New Hebrides)7

Kumalau Tawali (b. 1947) is a Papua New Guinean poet. The full poem “The River Flows Back,” can be found in Modern Poetry from Papua New Guinea, vol. 1, ed. Nigel Krauth and Elton Brash (Port Moresby: Papua Pocket Poets, 1972): 16.

4

A word, common to many Polynesian languages, for malevolent spirits or ghosts.

5

John Kasaipwalova (b. 1949) is a poet and playwright from the Trobriand Islands, an archipelago of coral attols off the east coast of New Guinea that is part of Papua New Guinea. He has been active in decolonization movements in the area. The Reluctant Flame (Port Morseby: Papua Pocket Poets, 1971) was his first collection of poetry.

6

Albert Leomala is a ni-Vanuatu poet. The New Hebrides is now known as Vanuatu. The full poem is reprinted in Lali: A Pacific Anthology, ed. Albert Wendt (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1980): 120–1.

7

388

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

The chill continues to wound, transform, humiliate us and our cultures. Any real understanding of ourselves and our existing cultures calls for an attempt to understand colonialism and what it did and is still doing to us. This understanding would better equip us to control or exoricise it so that, in the words of the Maori poet Hone Tuwhare, we can dream good dreams again, 8 heal the wounds it inflicted on us and with the healing will return pride in ourselves — an ingredient so vital to creative nation-building. Pride, self-respect, self-reliance will help us to cope so much more creatively with what is passing or to come. Without this healing most of our countries will remain permanent welfare cases not only economically but culturally. (And cultural dependency is even more souldestroying than economic dependency). Without it we will continue to be exploited by vampires of all colours, creeds, fangs. (Our home-grown species are often more rapacious). Without it the tragic mimickry, abasement, and humiliation will continue, and we will remain the often grotesque colonial caricatures we were transformed into by the chill. As much as possible, we, mini in size though our countries are, must try and assume control of our destinies, both in utterance and in fact. To get this control we must train our own people as quickly as possible in all fields of national development. Our economic and cultural dependency will be lessened according to the rate at which we can produce trained manpower. In this, we are failing badly. In a flash he saw in front of his eyes all the wasted years of carrying the whiteman’s cargo. (from The Crocodile by Vincent Eri, Papua, Papua New Guinea)9 If it has been a waste largely, where do we go from here? My body is tired My head aches I weep for our people Where are we going mother (from Motherland by Mildred Sope, New Hebrides)10 Again, we must rediscover and reaffirm our faith in the vitality of our past, our cultures, our dead, so that we may develop our own unique eyes, voices, muscles, and imagination.

This is a very slight misquotation from “O Africa” (1961), by Hone Tuwhare (1922–2008). The original reads “we may dream/good dreams again.” The poem is published in Tuwhare’s first collection of poetry, No Ordinary Sun (Auckland: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1964).

8

Vincent Serei Eri (1936–93)’s The Crocodile (1970) is often credited as the first novel by a Papua New Guinean writer in English. He later became a politician, serving as Papua New Guinea’s first consul general in Australia from 1975, and then as a member of parliament and the Governor-General of Papua New Guinea.

9

The full poem can be found in Some Modern Poetry from Vanuatu, ed. Albert Wendt (Suva: Mana Publications, 1975): 3.

10

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

389

2. Some Questions and Possible Answers In considering the Role of Traditional Cultures in Promoting National Cultural Identity and Authenticity in Nation-Building in the Oceanic Islands (whoever though up this mouthful should be edited out of the English language!) the following questions emerged: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Is there such a creature as traditional culture ? If there is, what period in the growth of a culture is to be called traditional? If traditional cultures do exist in Oceania, to what extent are they colonial creations? What is authentic culture? Is the differentiation we usually make between the culture(s) of our urban areas (meaning foreign) and those of our rural areas (meaning traditional) a valid one?

Are not the life-styles of our towns simply developments of our traditional life-styles, or merely sub-cultures within our national cultures? Why is it that many of us condemn urban life-styles (sub-cultures) as being foreign and therefore evil forces contaminating/ corrupting the purity of our true cultures (whatever this means)? (f)

(g)

(h)

Why is it that the most vocal exponents of preserving our true cultures live in our towns and pursue life-styles which, in their own terminology, are alien and impure? Are some of us advocating the preservation of our cultures not for ourselves but for our brothers, the rural masses, and by doing this ensure the maintenance of a status quo in which we enjoy privileged positions? Should there be ONE sanctified/official/sacred interpretation of one’s culture? And who should do this interpreting?

These questions (and others which they imply) have to be answered satisfactorily before any realistic policies concerning cultural conservation in Oceania can be formulated. The rest of this section is an attempt to answer these questions. Like a tree a culture is forever growing new branches, foliage, and roots. Our cultures, contrary to the simplistic interpretation of our romantics, were changing even in prepapalagi times through inter-island contact and the endeavours of exceptional individuals and groups who manipulated politics, religion, and other people. Contrary to the utterances of our elite groups, our pre-papalagi cultures were not perfect or beyond reproach. No culture is perfect or sacred even today. Individual dissent is essential to the healthy survival, development, and sanity of any nation — without it our cultures will drown in self-love. Such dissent was allowed in our pre-papalagi cultures: what can be more dissenting than using war to challenge and over-throw existing power - and it was a frequent occurrence. No culture is ever static and can be preserved (a favourite word with our colonisers and romantic elite brethren) like a stuffed gorilla in a museum. There is no state of cultural purity (or perfect state of cultural goodness) from which there is decline: usage determines authenticity. There was no Fall, no sun-tanned Noble Savages existing in South Seas paradises, no Golden Age, except in Hollywood films, in the insanely romantic literature and art by outsiders about the Pacific, in the breathless sermons of our elite vampires, and in the fevered imaginations of our self-styled romantic revolutionaries. We, in Oceania, did not/ and do not have a monopoly on God and the

390

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

ideal life. I do not advocate a return to an imaginary pre-papalagi Golden Age or utopian womb. Physically, we are too corrupted for such a re-entry! Our quest should not be for a revival of our past cultures but for the creation of new cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts. The quest should be for a new Oceania. Racism in institutionalised in all cultures, and the desire to dominate and exploit others is not the sole prerogative of the papalagi. Even today, despite the glib tributes paid to a Pacific Way,11 there is much racial discrimination between our many ethnic groups, and much heartless exploitation of one group by another. Many of us are guilty — whether we are aware of it or not — of perpetuating the destructive colonial chill, and are doing so in the avowed interest of preserving our racial/cultural purity (whatever this means). Maintaining the status quo using this pretext is not only ridiculous but dangerous. The only valid culture worth having is the one being lived out now, unless of course we attain immortality or invent a time machine that would enable us to live in the past or future. Knowledge of our past cultures is a precious source of inspiration for living out the present. (An understanding also of other peoples and their cultures is vital). What may have been considered true forms in the past may be ludicrous now: cannibalism and human sacrifice are better left in the history books, for example. Similarly, what at first may have been considered foreign are now authentic pillars of our cultures: Christianity and the Rule of Law, for instance. It won’t do to over-glorify the past. The present is all that we have and we should live it out as creatively as possible. Pride in our past bolsters our self-respect which is necessary if we are to cope as equals with others. However, too fervent or paranoid an identification with one’s culture — or what one deems to be that culture — can lead to racial intolerance and the like. Hitler too had a Ministry of Culture! This is not to claim that there are no differences between cultures and peoples. Or to argue that we abolish these differences. We must recognise and respect these differences but not use them to try and justify our racist claims to an imaginary superiority. All of us have individual prejudices, principles, and standards by which we judge which sub-cultures in our national cultures we want to live in, and those features of our national cultures we want conserved and those we want discarded. To advocate that in order to be a true Samoan, for example, one must be fully-blooded Samoan and behave/think/dance/ talk/dress/ and believe in a certain prescribed way (and that the prescribed way has not changed since time immemorial) is being racist, callously totalitarian, and stupid. This is a prescription for cultural stagnation, an invitation for a culture to choke in its own body odour, juices, and excreta. Equally unacceptable are outsiders (and these come in all disguises including the mask of adviser or expert ) who try to impose on me what they think my culture is and how I should live it and go about preserving it. The colonisers prescribed for us the roles of domestic animal, amoral phallus, the lackey, the comic and lazy and happy-go-lucky fuzzy-haired boy, and the well-behaved colonised. Some of our own people are trying to do the same to us, to turn us into servile creatures they can exploit easily. We must not consent to our own abasement.

This term was coined by Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, Fiji’s first prime minister, in a speech to the UN in 1970, where he argued that Pacific nations had experienced an unusually peaceful transition to independence. The term was later expanded to suggest a shared Pacific Islands identity and a shared set of interests. Its most influential formulation was published the same year as this essay: Ron Crocombe, The Pacific Way: An Emerging Identity (Suva: Lotu Pasifika Productions, 1976).

11

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

391

There are no true interpreters or sacred guardians of any culture. We are all entitled to our truths, insights, and intuitions into and interpretations of our cultures. No national culture is homogenous. Even our small pre-papalagi cultures were made up of sub-cultures. In Polynesia, for instance, the life-styles of priests and ariki/alii12 were very different from those of the commoners, women, and children. Contact with papalagi and Asian cultures (which are made up of numerous sub-cultures — and we, in Oceania, tend to forget this) has increased the number of sub-cultures or life-styles within our cultures. Many urban life-styles are now just as much part of our cultures as more traditional ones. To varying degrees, we as individuals all live in limbo within our cultures: there are many aspects of our ways of life we cannot subscribe to or live comfortably with; we all conform to some extent, but the life-blood of any culture is the diverse contributions of its varied sub-cultures. Basically, all societies are multi-cultural. And Oceania is more so than any other region on our sad planet.

3. Colonialism: the Wounds Let me take just two facets of our cultures and show how colonialism changed us.

[a] Education Kidnapped I was six when Mama was careless She sent me to school alone five days a week One day I was kidnapped by a band of Western philosophers armed with glossy-pictured textbooks and registered reputations ‘Holder of B.A. and M.A. degrees’ I was held in a classroom guarded by Churchill and Garibaldi pinned up on one wall and Hitler and Mao dictating from the other Guevara pointed a revolution at my brains from his ‘Guerilla Warfare’ Chiefs or persons of the highest rank in Polynesian cultures. The two terms reflect different terminology in different Polynesian languages.

12

392

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Each three-month term they sent threats to my Mama and Papa Mama and Papa loved their son and paid ransom fees each time Each time Mama Papa and grew poorer and poorer and my kidnappers grew richer and richer I grew whiter and whiter On my release fifteen years after I was handed [among loud applause from fellow victims] a piece of paper to decorate my walls certifying my release (by Ruperake Petaia, Western Samoa)13 This remarkable poem aptly describes what can be called the whitefication of the colonised by a colonial education system. What the poem does not mention is that this system was enthusiastically welcomed by many of us, and is still being continued even in our independent nations—a tragic irony! The basic function of Education in all cultures is to promote conformity and obedience and respect, to fit children into roles society has determined for them. In practice it has always been an instrument of domesticating humankind with. The typical formal education process is like a lobotomy operation or a relentless life-long dosage of tranquillisers. The formal education systems (whether British/New Zealand/Australia/American/or French) that were established by the colonisers in our islands all had one main feature in common: they were based on the arrogantly mistaken racist assumption that the cultures of the colonisers were superior (and preferable) to ours. Education was therefore devoted to civilising us, to cutting us away from the roots of our cultures, from what they colonisers viewed as darkness, superstition, barbarism, and savagery. The production of bourgeois papalagi seemed the main objective; the process was one of castration. The missionaries, irrespective of whatever colonial nationality or brand of Christianity they belonged to, intended the same conversion. Needless to say, the most vital strand in any nation-building is education but our colonial education systems were not programmed to educate us for development but

Sapa’u Ruperake Petaia (b. 1951) is a Samoan poet. This poem, “Kidnapped” (1974), is collected in Blue Rain (Western Samoa: USP Center and Mana Publications: 1980).

13

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

393

to produce minor and inexpensive cogs, such as clerks/glorified office boys/officials/nad a few professionals, for the colonial administrative machine. It was not in the colonial interests to encourage industries in our countries: it was more profitable for them that we remained exporters of cheap raw materials and buyers of their expensive manufactured goods. So the education was narrowly academic and benefitted mainly our traditional elite groups who saw great profit in serving our colonial masters who, in turn, propped them up because it was cheaper to use them to run our countries. The elitist and academic nature of this education was not conducive to training us to survice in our own cultures. Colonial education helped reduce many of us into a state of passivity, undermined our confidence and self-respect, and made many of us ashamed of our cultures, transformed many of us into Uncle Toms and reconants and what V.S. Naipaul has called mimic men, inducing in us the feeling that only the foreign is right or proper or worthwhile. Let us see how this is evident in architecture.

(b) Architecture A frightening type of papalagi architecture is invading Oceania: the super-stainless/superplastic/super-hygienic/super-soulless structure very similar to modern hospitals, and its most nightmarish form is the new type tourist hotel—a multi-storied edifice of concrete/ steel/chromium/ and air-conditioning. This species of architecture is an embodiment of those bourgeois values I find unhealthy/soul-destroying: the cultivation/worship of mediocrity, a quest for a meaningless and precarious security based on material possessions, a deep-rooted fear of dirt and all things rich in our cultures, a fear of death revealed in an almost paranoic quest for a super-hygienic cleanliness and godliness, a relentless attempts to level out all individual differences in people and mould them into one faceless mass, a drive to preserve the status quo at all costs, and ETC. These values reveal themselves in the new tourist hotels constructed of dead materials which echo the spiritual, creative, and emotional emptiness in modern man. The drive is for deodorised/ sanitized comfort, the very quicksand in which many of us are now drowning, willingly. What frightens me is the easy/unquestioning acceptance by our countries of all this without considering their adverse effects on our psyche. In my brief lifetime, I have observed many of our countries imitating what we consider to be papalagi culture (even though most of us will swear vehemently that we are not!). It is just one of the tragic effects of colonialism—the aping of colonial ways/life-styles/attitudes/and values. In architecture this has led and is leading to the construction of dog-kennel-shaped papalagi houses (mainly as status symbols, as props to one’s lack of self-confidence). The change from traditional dwelling to box-shaped monstrosity is gathering momentum: the mushrooming of this bewildering soulless desert of shacks and boxes is erupting acros Oceania because most of our leaders and style-setters, as soon they gain power/wealth, construct opulent dog-kennels as well. Our governments’ quest for the tourist hotel is not helping matters either; there is a value to understand what such a quest is bringing. It may be bringing money through the middle-aged retired tourist, who travels from country to country through a variety of climates, within his cocoon of air-conditioned America/Europe/N.Z./Australia/ Molochland, but it is also helping to bring these bourgeois values, attitudes, and lifestyles which are compellingly attractive illnesses that kill slowly, comfortably, turning us away from the richness of our cultures. I think I know what such a death is like: for the past few years I have watched myself (and some of the people I admire) dying that death.

394

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

In periods of unavoidable lucidity, I have often visualised the ultimate development of such an architecture –air-conditioned coffins lodged in air-conditioned mausoleums.

4. Diversity, a Valued Heritage The population of our region is only just over 5 million but we possess a cultural diversity more varied than any other in the world. There is also a multiplicity of social, economic, and political systems all undergoing different stages of decolonisation, ranging from politically independent nations (Western Samoa/Fiji/Papua New Guinea/Tonga/Nauru) through self-governing ones (the Solomons/the Gilberts/Tuvalu) and colonies (mainly French and American) to our oppressed aboriginal brothers in Australia. This cultural, political, social, and economic diversity must be taken into account in any overall programme of cultural conservation. If as yet we may not be the most artistically creative region on our spaceship, we possess the potential to become the most artistically creative. There are more than 1200 indigenous languages plus English, French, Hindi, Spanish, and various forms of pidgin to catch and interpret the Void with, reinterpret our past with, create new historical and sociological visions of Oceania with, compose songs and poems and plays and other oral and written literature with. Also numerous other forms of artistic expression: hundreds of dance styles: wood and stone sculpture and carvings; artifacts as various as our cultures; pottery, painting, and tattooing. A fabulous treasure house of traditional motifs, themes, styles, material which we can use in contemporary forms to express our uniqueness, identity, pain, joy, and our own visions of Oceania and earth. Self-expression is a prerequisite of self-respect. Out of this artistic diversity has come and will continue to come our most worthwhile contribution to humankind. So this diversity must be maintained and encouraged to flourish. Across the political barriers dividing our countries an intense artistic activity is starting to weave firm links between us. This cultural awakening, inspired and fostered and led by our own people, will not stop at the artificial frontiers drawn by the colonial powers. And for me, this awakening is the first real sign that we are breaking from the colonial chill and starting to find our own beings. As Marjorie Crocombe of the Cook Islands and editor of MANA Magazine has written: Denigrated, inhibited and withdrawn during the colonial era, the Pacific people are again beginning to take confidence and express themselves in traditional forms of expression that remain part of a valued heritage, as well as in new forms and styles reflecting the changes within the continuity of the unique world of our Island cultures … The canoe is afloat … the volume and quality increase all the time.14 One of the recent highlights of this awakening was the 1972 South Pacific Festival of Arts during which we came together in Fiji to perform our expressive arts; much of it was traditional, but new voices/new forms, especially in literature, were emerging. Up to a few years ago nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi and other outsiders. Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists and film Marjorie Tuianekore Crocombe (b. 1930) is an academic and author from the Cook Islands, who was an editor and central figure in the various publishing ventures associated with Mana Publications. This quotation comes from her introduction to the 1974 edition of the Mana Annual of Creative Writing, not to be confused with the journal Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature, in which Wendt’s essay appeared and which began publication in 1976: Marjorie Crocombe, “Introducing Mana 1974,” in The Mana Annual of Creative Writing (Suva, Fiji: South Pacific Creative Arts Society, 1974): 1.

14

MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

395

makers, bar-room journalists and semi-literate tourists, sociologists and Ph.D. students, remittance men and sailing evangelists, UNO experts, and colonial administrators and their well-groomed spouses. Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic through the pseudo-scholarly to the infuriatingly racist; from the noble savage literary school through Margaret Mead and all her comings of age, Somerset Maugham’s puritan missionaries/drunks/and saintly whores and James Michener’s rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light. The Oceania found in this literature is largely papalagi fictions, more revealing of papalagi fantasises and hang-ups, dreams and nightmares, prejudices and ways of viewing our crippled cosmos, than of our actual islands. I am not saying we should reject such a literature, or that papalagi should not write about us, and vice versa. But the imagination must explore with love/honesty/wisdom/and compassion; writers must write with aroha/alona/alofa/ loloma15 respecting the people they are writing about, people who may view the Void differently and who, like all other human beings, live through the pores of their flesh and mind and bone, who suffer, laugh, cry, copulate, and die. In the last few years what can be called a South Pacific literature has started to blossom. In New Zealand, Alistair Campbell, of Cook Island descent, is acknowledged as a major poet; three Maori writers—Hone Tuwhare (poet), Witi Ihimaera (novelist), and Patricia Grace (short stories) have become extremely well-known. In Australia, the aboriginal poets Kathy Walker and Jack Davis continue to plot the suffering of their people. In Papua New Guinea, The Crocodile by Vincent Eri—the first Papuan novel to be published • has already become a minor classic. Also in that country poets such as John Kasaipwalova, Kumalau Tawali, Alan Natachee, and Apisai Enos, and playwrights like Arthur Jawodimbari are publishing some powerful work. Papua New Guinea has established a very forward looking Creative Arts Centre, which is acting as a catalyst in the expressive arts movement, a travelling theatre, and an Institute of Papua New Guinea writers, is already a respected literary journal. MANA Magazine and MANA Publications, established by the South Pacific Creative Arts Society (owned/operated by some of us), have been a major catalyst in stimulating the growth of this new literature, especially in countries outside Papua New Guinea. Already numerous young poets, prose writers, and playwrights have emerged; some of them, we hope, will develop into major writers. One thinks of Seri, Vanessa Griffen, and Raymond Pillai of Fiji; of Eti Saaga, Ruperake Petaia, Sano Malifa, Ata Maiai, and Tili Peseta of Western Samoa; of Albert Leomala and Mildred Sope of the New Hebrides; of Celestine Kulagoe of the Solomons; of Maunaa Itaia of the Gilberts; of Makiuti Tongia of the Cook Islands; of Konai Helu Thaman of Tonga. I am proud to be also contributing to this literature. Most of us know one another personally; if we don’t, we know one another’s work well. Our ties transcend barriers of culture, race, petty nationalism, and politics. Our writing is expressing a revolt against the hypocritical/exploitative aspects of our traditional/commercial/and religious hierarchies, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and the degrading values being imposed from outside and by some elements in our societies: But they cannot erase my existence For my plight chimes with the hour And my blood they drink at cocktail parties

Cognates from various Polynesian languages meaning “love,” especially in the sense of compassion.

15

396

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Always full of smiling false faces Behind which lie authority and private interests (from Uncivil Servants by Konai Helu Thaman, Tonga)16 As I walk this rich suburb full of white and black chiefs I hear the barking of a dog I listen to its calls knowing I am that dog picking what it can from the overflowing rubbish tins. I say to you chiefs bury the scraps you can’t eat So no hungry dog will come to eat at your locked gate. Chiefs, beware of hungry dogs! (from Beware of Dog by Makiuti Tongia, Cook Islands)17 In the traditional visual arts there has been a tremendous revival, that revival is also finding contemporary expression in the work of Maori artists such as Selwyn Muru, Ralph Hotere, Para Matchitt, and Buck Nin; in the work of Aloi Pilioko of Wallis and Futuna, Akis and Kauage of Papua New Guinea, Aleki Prescott of Tonga, Sven Orquist of Western Samoa, Kuai of the Solomons, and many others. The same is true in music and dance. The National Dance Theatres of Fiji and The Cook Islands are already well-known throughout the world. This artistic renaissance is enriching our cultures further, reinforcing our identities/ self-respect/and pride, and taking us through a genuine decolonisation; it is also acting as a unifying force in our region. In their individual journeys into the Void, these artists, through their work, are explaining us to ourselves and creating a new Oceania.

Konai Helu Thaman (b. 1946) is a Tongan poet and academic. “Uncivil Servants” is collected in Hingano: Selected Poems, 1966–86 (Suva: Mana Publications, 1987).

16

Makiuti Tongia (b. 1953) is a poet from the Cook Islands. “Beware of Dogs” appears in Korero: Poems (Suva: Mana Publications, 1977).

17

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Modernism of the Ashkenazi Jewish Diaspora EDITED BY ARIEL RESNIKOFF

Modern Yiddish literature arose in eastern Europe in the late-nineteenth century as an expressive medium of Jewish Ashkenazi diasporic civilization in the midst of seismic change. Responding on one side to the new possibilities of Jewish secularization as it spread across Europe following the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and, on the other, to powerful religious counter-Enlightenment forces, especially Hasidism, Jewish writers began to engage with Yiddish for the first time as a modern literary language.1 The advent of modern literary Yiddish is often attributed to the didactic Hebrew prose writer-turned Yiddish novelist, Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh (1835–1917), later known by the pseudonym Mendele Moykher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller, after his primary protagonist), and to his two most significant successors, Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich, 1859–1916) and I.L. Peretz (1852–1915). Sholem Aleichem was the first to conceive of (or invent, as it were) a modern Yiddish literary tradition as such, when he declared Abramovitsh the “Grandfather” of Yiddish literature in the dedication to his first novel.2 And it was Peretz who famously proclaimed Yiddish “a national language of the Jewish people” in 1908 at the first international Yiddish language conference in Czernowitz.3 These three writers are perhaps the best-known early pioneers of a potent, if highly compressed, modern Yiddish literary culture, which flourished for roughly eighty years, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1940s. Ashkenazi diasporic modernism begins in one sense with the enactment of the discriminatory May Laws (temporary regulations regarding the Jews) by Czar Alexander III, on May 15, 1882. These intensely regressive laws, coupled with the ongoing poverty and fierce violence that Jews faced on a day-to-day basis in the Russian Empire, spurred a wave of Jewish mass migration away from Russia (and later, other regions of eastern The term “Ashkenazi” refers to the diasporic Jewish population that crystallized in the Holy Roman Empire around 1000 AD and whose common language was Yiddish. The Haskalah (Enlightenment) was a Jewish intellectual movement that spread from western to central to eastern Europe over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hasidism is a populist Jewish spiritual revival movement that arose in western Ukraine during the eighteenth century.

1

There was, in fact, no proper Yiddish literary tradition to speak of in the nineteenth century, since Yiddish had historically been a Jewish vernacular and not a literary language. Abramovitsh was less than a generation older than Sholem Aleichem and did not particularly appreciate being deemed “the grandfather” of Yiddish literature.

2

The Czernowitz conference, which was held in Czernowitz, Bukowina, was an international conference on Yiddish language and its role within modern Jewish life and culture.

3

398

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Europe) to western Europe and Ottoman Palestine, as well as overseas to the Americas, and above all, to the United States. The Yiddish language—which had been the common vernacular of virtually all Ashkenazi Jews within an internal Hebrew-Aramaic-Yiddish trilingualism for more than half a millennium—now became a powerful vehicle for a modern, soon-to-be modernist, Jewish literature and culture on the move. Between the 1880s and 1920s, over 2 million Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews came from Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Romania to the United States. Yiddish newspapers, presses, and publishing houses were established by Jewish immigrants throughout the country, with New York’s Lower East Side as the densest hub of American Yiddish culture. At least three discrete, though deeply connected (and successive), Yiddish literary “schools” are discernible in the first quarter of the twentieth century in New York. The first, who were active from the mid-1890s until the early 1900s, called themselves “Di Svetshop Poetn” (The Sweatshop Poets) and were populists committed to revolutionary social and political change for the working Jewish masses in the sweatshops of New York.4 The second, who were active from 1907 until around 1917, called themselves Di Yunge (The Young Ones), after a literary journal they briefly published by the same name; these writers—who were influenced by Heinrich Heine, German impressionism, and the Russian symbolists, among others—turned away from the sociopolitical concerns of their immediate predecessors, championing instead more romantic notions of lyric beauty, subjectivity, and free expression in their work.5 The third and most self-consciously modernist camp of New York-school Yiddish emerged in 1919 under the name “Introspectivism” or “Inzikh” (In Oneself), for short; the “Inzikhistn” (Introspectivists) understood themselves to be a part of a distinctly American Yiddish literary avantgarde within a wider international modernist arena, and published a manifesto as the introduction to their first collective work (included here). They called for a casting off of European Yiddish literary history, while simultaneously turning away from the romantic aesthetics of their American Yiddish forebears, Di Yunge, in favor of a more “kaleidoscopic” refraction of the outer world via the prism of the self (zikh).6 Although interbellum New York was an influential center for modern Yiddish literature and culture, including the high modernism of the Introspectivist writers, back across the Atlantic—in the newly formed republics of Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, and especially Poland—Yiddish modernism was thriving. This was in large part due to the Jewish Labor Bund, which had aligned itself with Yiddish as the political language of diaspora nationalism, helping to establish Yiddish school systems from kindergarten to university level, as well as to support Yiddish publishing networks across Europe, and beyond. In Warsaw and Vilna, Brest, Grodno, Pinsk, and even Moscow (in the early years of the Soviet Union), as well as smaller centers of Yiddish in western Europe—London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna—groups of writers and artists were producing, publishing and exhibiting self-consciously modernist work, around the shared language-culture of Yiddish. In each locale (and between each practitioner) the approach to modernism differed, in relation, most often, to the modernist impulses of the surrounding language-cultures, as well as, in Sweatshop poets include Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923), Morris Winchevsky (1856–1932), Dovid Edelshtat (1866–92), and Yoysef Bovshover (1873–1915).

4

Members of Di Yunge include Mani Leib (1883–1953), H. Leivik (1888–1962), Moyshe Leib Halpern (1886–1932), Dovid Ignatoff (1885–1954), and Yitzkhak Raboy (1882–1944).

5

Founding members of Inzikh include Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971), Aaron Glantz-Leyeles (1889–1966), and Nachum Baruch Minkov (1893–1958).

6

MODERNISM OF THE ASHKENAZI JEWISH DIASPORA

399

certain cases, to the language-cultures left behind in migration. Yet the constant between these Jewish diasporic modernists was the Yiddish language, and the belief that Yiddish was, in fact, the ideal language-culture in which a Jewish modernism might germinate, since its poetic and aesthetic sense emerged from the birth pangs of Jewish modernity.7 By the early 1930s, however, Yiddish modernist culture worldwide had already begun to wane. In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act was enacted in the United States, ending a fortyyear wave of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, and subsequently siphoning off the Yiddish American modernist writers from new immigrant audiences. And though the Soviet Union had initially been supportive of Yiddish—making it a governmentsponsored language and literature, and financing Yiddish schools, books, magazines, and newspapers—by the late 1920s it began regulating and eventually censoring Yiddish writing. In the 1930s, Stalinist orders closed most Yiddish institutions in the USSR, and by 1937 Yiddish modernist writers, artists, and intellectuals in the Soviet Union were being arrested, and later, executed. On the eve of the Second World War there were approximately 13 million Yiddish speakers across the globe. That number was cut in half during the Nazi Holocaust. Following the war, the Stalinist repressions in the USSR and the Hebraist language campaign against Yiddish in Mandate Palestine and early Israel, as well as large-scale pressures of language assimilation around the world, eroded the global Yiddish-speaking demographic, and all but put an end to the far-reaching potentials of radical Yiddish modernism. The writings translated and collected in this section present four distinct, though intertwined, approaches to Jewish Ashkenazi diasporic modernism, all of which surround Yiddish language and culture, in particular, as the mother tongue of the Jewish Ashkenazi diaspora. I have focused here on lesser known writers, all of whom engaged specifically with Yiddish (even when writing in Hebrew, in the case of Avot Yeshurun) as a diasporic modernist muse. Thus, while the Introspectivist writers come to a modernist Yiddish praxis from the perspective of casting off the European Yiddish folk tradition, Mikhl Likht, a peripheral member of Inzikh, is concerned with blending Russian, European, and American traditions into what we might understand as an expanded or creolized Yiddish. Where Avot Yeshurun responds to the state-sanctioned modernism of the Zionist revolution by saturating his mongrel Hebrew writing with forbidden Yiddish, Polish, and Arabic influences, Devorah Fogel translates and imports various adjacent European modernist strains into a radical Yiddish “decorativism.” All of these texts, with the exception of the Introspectivist manifesto, appear here for the first time in English. AR

FURTHER READING Bachman, Merle. Recovering “Yiddishland”: Threshold Moments in American Literature. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008.

Some of the most important and well-known Yiddish writers and artists of these years include Avrom Sutskever (1913–2010), Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937), and Chaim Grade (1910–82) in Vilnius; Peretz Markish (1895–1952), Dovid Hofshteyn (1889–1952), and Leib Kvitko (1890–1952) in Kiev; Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896– 1981), Melekh Ravitch (1893–1976), and I.J. Singer (1893–1944) in Warsaw; as well as Moyshe Broderzon (1890–1956) along with the visual artists Yankel Adler (1895–1949) and Marek Szwark (1892–1958) in Łódź, among many others.

7

400

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Caplan, Marc. How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Gluzman, Michael. The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Harshav, Benjamin. The Meaning of Yiddish. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Hellerstein, Kathryn. A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Miller, Stephen Paul, and Daniel Morris, eds. Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Miron, Dan. From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Ponichtera, Sarah. “The Fragmented Self: Individualism in Yiddish Introspectivism.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 18.3 (2011): 290–317. Schachter, Allison. Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012. Wolitz, Seth L. Yiddish Modernism: Studies in Twentieth-Century Eastern European Jewish Culture. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2014.

I. THE INTROSPECTIVIST MANIFESTO Yankev Glatshteyn, Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, and Nachum Baruch Minkov Originally published in Yiddish in Inzikh 1.1 (January 1920), 1–10. Translated by Anita Norich. Translation first published as “Introspectivism” [Manifesto of 1919] in Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav, eds, American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Edition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

The “Introspectivism” manifesto launched one of the great Yiddish American modernist movements in New York City. Published in the inaugural issue of Inzikh, an influential Yiddish magazine that appeared intermittently from 1920 to 1940, the manifesto established the ethos and itinerary of a self-consciously modernist coterie poised between the immigrant poets’ native Eastern European Yiddish milieu and their adopted America. In this programmatic statement, the founding Introspectivists (Inzikhistn)—Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971), Aaron Glantz-Leyeles (1889–1966), and Nachum Baruch Minkov (1893–1958)—position themselves as vanguard successors to the Yiddish American proto-modernism of Di Yunge (the “Young Generation”) and as contemporary practitioners within the emergent field of transatlantic high modernism. While the early Introspectivist circle adopted an international outlook and orientation (translations of Chinese, Japanese, American Indian texts appeared in the early issues of Inzikh), the group gradually became more inwardly focused, as the 1920s wore on, in response to increasing threats to the survival of Yiddish language and culture. The movement’s governing concept of introspection (“in zikh” literally means “in oneself”) connotes a kind of imagist expressionism—imagist in its insistence on natural language free of poetic embellishment and inversion; expressionist in its ambition to faithfully render the poet’s “internal panorama” confronted with the chaos of modernity. If this poetics emphasizes individual experience, it also insists on the fractured and plural nature of modern individualism, in keeping with the sensibility and experience of Jewish immigrant poets writing in a diasporic fusion language. Above all, what distinguishes the group is its loving elevation of the Yiddish language itself as a “poetic instrument” with universal reach. All notes to this text are from the original translation and publication. SJR

1 With this collection,1 we intend to launch a particular trend in Yiddish poetry which has recently emerged in the works of a group of Yiddish poets. We have chosen to call it the Introspective Movement, a name that indicates a whole range of individual character and nuance. We know that introspective poems as such are nothing new. In all ages, poets have occasionally written introspectively; that is, they looked into themselves2 and created

This Introspectivist manifesto, written in 1919, was published as the opening of In Zikh: A Collection of Introspective Poems, Max N. Maisel, New York, 1920. 2 In the original: “In zikh,” which gave the name to the journal and the movement, Inzikhism. 1

402

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

poetry drawn from their own soul3 and from the world as reflected in it. There are introspective poems in modern Yiddish poetry as well, even though the poets did not use this term. The difference, however, between us and those other poets, both Yiddish and nonYiddish, ancient and modern, is that we are dedicated to deepening, developing, and expanding the introspective method. The world exists and we are part of it. But for us, the world exists only as it is mirrored in us, as it touches us. The world is a nonexistent category, a lie, if it is not related to us. It becomes an actuality only in and through us. This general philosophical principle is the foundation of our trend. We will try to develop it in the language of poetry. Poetry is not only feeling and perception but also, and perhaps primarily, the art of expressing feelings and perceptions adequately. It is not enough to say that all phenomena exist to the extent that they enter into an organic relation with us. The poet’s major concern is to express this organic relation in an introspective and fully individual manner. In an introspective manner means that the poet must really listen to his inner voice, observe his internal panorama—kaleidoscopic, contradictory, unclear or confused as it may be. From these sources, he must create poetry which is the result of both the fusion of the poet’s soul with the phenomenon he expresses and the individual image, or cluster of images, that he sees within himself at that moment. What does take place in the poet’s psyche under the impression or impact of any phenomenon? In the language of our local poets, of the “Young Generation” (Di Yunge),4 this creates a mood. According to them, it is the poet’s task to express or convey this mood. How? In a concentrated and well-rounded form. Concentration and well-roundedness are seen as the necessary conditions, or presuppositions, that allow the poet’s mood to attain universal or, in more traditional terms, eternal, value. But this method, though sufficient to create poetic vignettes or artful arabesques, is essentially neither sufficient nor true. From our point of view, this method is a lie. Why? Because the mood and the poem that emerge from this conception and this method must inevitably result in something cut-off, isolated, something which does not really correspond to life and truth. At best, such poems are embellishments and ornaments. At worst, they ring false, because the impression or the impact of any phenomenon on the poet’s soul does not result in an isolated, polished, well-rounded, and concentrated mood. What emerges is more complex, intertwined with a whole galaxy of other “moods,” of other feelings and perceptions. In the final analysis, concentration and well-roundedness of poetry symbolize the lie, the awesome contradiction between literature and life, between all of art and life. We Introspectivists want first of all to present life—the true, the sincere, and the precise—as it is mirrored in ourselves, as it merges with us. The human psyche is an awesome labyrinth. Thousands of beings dwell there. The inhabitants are the various facets of the individual’s present self on the one hand and

The Yiddish word zel, “soul,” is equivalent to Freud’s Seele and can be translated as psyche.

3

An Impressionist, cosmopolitan trend that dominated Yiddish American poetry from 1907 to 1919.

4

MODERNISM OF THE ASHKENAZI JEWISH DIASPORA

403

fragments of his inherited self on the other. If we believe that every individual has already lived somewhere in one incarnation or another—and this belief is often vividly sensed by each of us—then the number of inhabitants in the labyrinth of the human psyche is even higher. This is the real life of a human being. In our age of the big metropolis and enormous variety in all domains, this life becomes a thousandfold more complicated and entangled. We Introspectivists feel the need to convey and express it. In what form and shape does this complexity of moods appear? In the shape of association and suggestion. For us, these two elements are also the most important methods of poetic expression. Of course, poets of all times have used suggestion and association. The pre-Raphaelite Rossetti and the later Swinburne often used these elements in their work. Yet we want to make association and suggestion the poet’s major tools because it seems to us that they are best suited to express the complex feelings and perceptions of a contemporary person. So much about the introspective method. As for individual manner, it is perhaps even more important. Because we perceive the world egocentrically and because we think that this is the most natural and therefore the truest and most human mode of perception, we think that the poem of every poet must first of all be his own poem. In other words, the poet must in every case give us what he himself sees and as he sees it. Essentially, this should be self-evident as a prerequisite for any poetry. It should be but is not. Indeed, most poems, not just Yiddish ones but the majority of non-Yiddish ones as well, lack the full individuality of the poet and hence of the poem, too. In most poems, the poet does not delve deeply enough to see what appears in his own psyche. Perhaps the fault lies with language, which generally works in our lives as a misleading and deceiving category. Be that as it may, we think that, in the great majority of all poetry, the poet is not sufficiently individual. He employs too many stock images and ready-made materials. When the poet, or any person, looks at a sunset, he may see the strangest things which, ostensibly, have perhaps no relation to the sunset. The image reflected in his psyche is rather a series of far-reaching associations moving away from what his eye sees, a chain of suggestions evoked by the sunset. This, the series of associations and the chain of suggestions, constitutes truth, is life, much as an illusion is often more real than the cluster of external appearances we call life. Most poets, however, will not even focus on what occurs inside themselves while they are watching a sunset but will paint it, search for colors, describe the details, etc. If, in addition, they are subjectively attuned, they will perhaps dip their brush into a drop of subjectivity, into a patch of color of their selves, make a comparison with their own lives, express some wisdom about life in general, and the poem is done. For us, such a poem is not true, is a cliché. We insist that the poet should give us the authentic image that he sees in himself and give it in such a form as only he and no one else can see it. If such a poem then becomes grist for the mill of Freudian theory, if it provides traces of something morbid or sick in the poet, we do not mind. Art is ultimately redemption, even if it is an illusory redemption or a redemption through illusion. And no redemption is possible in any other way but through oneself, through an internal personal concentration. Only a truly individual poem can be a means of self-redemption.

404

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

2 Both the introspectivity of a poem and its individuality must use suggestion and association in order to reach full expression. Now, the individuality of the poem has a lot to do with what is generally known as form. In fact, form and content are the same. A poem that can be rewritten in another form is neither a poem nor poetry. They cannot be separated from one another. To speak of form and content separately is to succumb to the influence of a linguistic fallacy. And if we speak of form as a separate concept, it is merely for the sake of convenience, as is the case with many other linguistic fallacies. The generally known aspect of form is rhythm. Every poem must have rhythm. Rhythm is the mystery of life; art which is no more than an expression of life obviously must also have rhythm. But what kind of rhythm must a poem have? There is only one answer: it must have the only possible and the only imaginable rhythm. Each poem must have its individual rhythm. By this we mean that the rhythm of the poem must fit entirely this particular poem. One poem cannot have the same rhythm as any other poem. Every poem is, in fact, unique. And if we see, in certain poets, how the most divergent poems are similar in their rhythm, this in itself is the best sign of their lack of productivity and creativity, and also of their lack of genuine sincerity. We cannot understand how it is possible for a real poet to write one poem about the subway, another about the sand at the seashore in summer, and a third about his love for a girl—all in the same rhythm, in the same “beat.” Two of the three poems are certainly false. But, more certainly, all three are false, because if a poet can write three poems in the same rhythm, this is proof in itself that he does not listen to the music in his own soul, that he does not see anything or hear anything with his own eyes and ears. We demand individual rhythm because only thus can the truth that we seek and want to express be revealed. This leads us to the question which has recently stirred the consciousness of poets in all languages and not least that of Yiddish poets, the question of free verse. Free verse is not imperative for introspective poets. It is possible to have introspective poems in regular meter. Though regular meter may often appear as a hindrance, a straitjacket, free verse in itself is not enough. We Introspectivists believe that free verse is best suited to the individuality of the rhythm and of the poem as a whole; and for that rather than for any other reason, we prefer it to other verse forms. Hence it is the greatest mistake, even ignorance, to claim (as many do) that it is easier to write free verse than to write in measured meters. If comparison here makes sense at all, the opposite is true. It is easier to write in regular and conventional meters because, after some experience, one acquires the knack and the poem “writes itself.” But free verse, intended primarily for individual rhythm, demands an intense effort, a genuine sounding of the inner depths. Therefore free verse more easily betrays the non-poet, revealing the internal vacuum, if that is what is at stake. When non-poets take on free verse, their situation is no easier than when they wrote iambs, trochees, or anapests. On the contrary, while in the latter case they can perhaps produce a certain musicality and thus create the impression that they are writing poetry, in the former case they are unproductive from the first or second moment, and their failure is exposed.

MODERNISM OF THE ASHKENAZI JEWISH DIASPORA

405

Only for the real poet is free verse a new, powerful means of expression, a new, wide world full of unexplored territories. For the non-poet, however, free verse is nothing but a mousetrap into which he falls in his first or second line. Let the non-poets beware of it! We emphasize again that we are not against regular meters as such. Every true poet, Introspectivist or not, may sometimes feel that only in a regular rhythm, in a certain “canonical” meter, can he create a particular poem. It is more correct to say (for poets, it is a truism) that, inside every poet, including Introspectivists, a certain poem will often write itself in a regular meter. Then he does not fight it. Then he understands that it had to be like this, that in this case, this is the truth, this the individual rhythm. If we prefer free verse, it is only for that reason. In general, we think that regular meter, the rhythm of frequently repeated beats, adapted itself perhaps to an earlier kind of life before the rise of the big city with its machines, its turmoil, and its accelerated, irregular tempo. That life was quiet and flowed tranquilly—in a regular rhythm, in fact— in beats repeated in short, frequent intervals. Just as contemporary life created new clothing, new dwellings, new color combinations, and new sound combinations, so one needs to create a new art and new and different rhythms. We believe that free verse is best suited for the creation of such new rhythms. It is like fine, yielding plaster in which the inner image of the poet can find its most precise and fullest realization. For the same reason, we are not against rhyme. Rhyme has its own charm and value. This is natural. The spirit of creative poets has used it for thousands of years as one of its poetic devices. This in itself is proof enough of its value. We say merely that rhyme is not a must. It often sounds forced or leads us on like a delusive, fleeting light. In such cases, rhyme is harmful and best avoided. Rhyme is good only when it is well-placed, when it is woven naturally into the verse. It is unnecessary to seek it, to make an effort to have rhyme at any cost, especially in our time when there is no need to learn poems by heart, when traveling poets do not have to recite their poems to amuse an ignorant or unpoetic audience. Whenever a poet does feel the call of a wandering troubadour to recite his poems for a more primitive audience, as in the case of the American poet, Vachel Lindsay, the rhyme is well-placed and is good. As with regular and irregular rhythm, many tend to assume mistakenly that writing without rhyme is easier than with rhyme. This is false. One can easily learn to make rhymes. And while one can sometimes cover with rhyme a trivial mood, which thus acquires the pretension to poetry, such a camouflage has no place in a rhymeless poem. There, one must be a genuine poet and a genuine creator. If not, the rhymeless poem will betray it much faster and easier than a rhymed one will. The music of a poem—no doubt a desideratum—does not depend on rhyme. Rhyme is merely one element of its music, and the least important one at that. The music of a poem must also be purely individual and can be attained without rhymes, which necessarily produce a certain stereotype: after all, rhymes are limited in quantity and quality. The individual sound combination is really necessary; indeed, because of our Introspectivism, we believe it to be unusually important. Not only do we not deny this element in poetry but we try to give it a new impetus, precisely through the individuality of the poem. The musical and sound aspect of the Yiddish language has been generally neglected by most of our poets. Alliteration as a poetic device has remained almost untouched,

406

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

although it is strongly represented in our language. As far as we can, we will try to remedy this neglect. Individuality is everything and introspection is everything—this is what we seek, this is what we want to achieve. When a certain phenomenon appears to a poet in the shape of colors; when an association carries him away to the shores of the Ganges or to Japan; when a suggestion whispers to him of something nebulous, something lurking in a fragment of his previous incarnation or of his hereditary self—all these are the roads and the labyrinths of his psyche. He must tread them because they are he, and only through the authentic, inner, true, introspective “I” lies the path that leads to creation and redemption.

3 Once this is accepted, it is self-evident that everything is an object for poetry, that for the poet there is no ugly or beautiful, no good or bad, no high or low. Everything is of equal value for the poet if it appears inside him, and everything is simply a stage to his internal redemption. For us, then, the senseless and unproductive question of whether a poet “should” write on national or social topics or merely on personal ones does not arise. For us, everything is “personal.” Wars and revolutions, Jewish pogroms and the workers’ movement, Protestantism and Buddha, the Yiddish school and the Cross, the mayoral elections and a ban on our language—all these may concern us or not, just as a blond woman and our own unrest may or may not concern us. If it does concern us, we write poetry; if it does not, we keep quiet. In either case, we write about ourselves because all these exist only insofar as they are in us, insofar as they are perceived introspectively. For the same reason, we do not recognize the difference between “poetry of the heart” and “poetry of the head,” two meaningless phrases that belong to the same category of linguistic fallacies mentioned above. If the first phrase implies unconscious creativity and the second conscious creativity, then we say that neither we nor anybody else knows the boundary between conscious and unconscious. Certain aspects of the creative process are always conscious and cannot be otherwise. There is no tragedy in that. The modern poet is not, cannot, and should not be that naive stargazer who knows nothing but his little song, who understands nothing that goes on in the world, who has no attitude to life, its problems and events, who cannot even write a line about anything but his little mood, tapped out in iambs and trochees. The contemporary poet is a human being like other human beings and must be an intelligent, conscious person. As a poet, this is what is required of him: to see and feel, know and comprehend, and to see with his own eyes and be capable of expressing the seen, felt, and understood in his own internally true, introspectively sincere manner. If conscious poetry means the expression of underlying thought in poetry, we see nothing wrong in that, either. A poet need not and must not be spiritually mute. A poet’s thought is not a drawback but a great advantage. As a poet, as an artist, he must only be capable of expressing his thought in a proper form, of creating from it a work of art. And this depends on just one condition: that the thought should be his own, that it should be the true result of the fusion of his soul and life; and that he should express it in that form, in those very images, in the same true colors and tones as they take shape inside him, as they emerge and permeate him in the labyrinth of his soul. There is no boundary between “feeling” and “thought” in contemporary man or in the contemporary poet. Both are

MODERNISM OF THE ASHKENAZI JEWISH DIASPORA

407

expressions of the same “I”; they are so closely intertwined that it is absurd to wish to separate them. We make no distinction between intellectual poetry and poetry of feeling. We know of only one distinction: that between authenticity and falsehood, between true individuality and cliché. In the first case, poetry is born; in the second—“mood-laden” as it may be— merely licorice, vignettes, and false tones. Our relationship to “Jewishness,” too, becomes obvious from our general poetical credo. We are “Jewish poets” simply because we are Jews and write in Yiddish.5 No matter what a Yiddish poet writes in Yiddish, it is ipso facto Jewish. One does not need any particular “Jewish themes.” A Jew will write about an Indian fertility temple and Japanese Shinto shrines as a Jew. A Jewish poet will be Jewish when he writes poetry about “vive la France,” about the Golden Calf, about gratitude to a Christian woman for a kind word, about roses that turn black, about a courier of an old prince, or about the calm that comes only with sleep. It is not the poet’s task to seek and show his Jewishness. Whoever is interested in this endeavor is welcome to it, and whoever looks for Jewishness in Yiddish poets will find it. In two things we are explicitly Jewish, through and through: in our relationship to the Yiddish language in general, and to Yiddish as a poetic instrument. We believe in Yiddish. We love Yiddish. We do not hesitate to say that he who has a negative relation to the Yiddish language, or who merely looks down on it, cannot be a Yiddish poet. He who mocks Yiddish, who complains that Yiddish is a poor and shabby language, he who is merely indifferent to Yiddish, does not belong to the high category of Yiddish poets. To be a Yiddish poet is a high status, an achievement, and it is unimaginable that a person creating in Yiddish should spit in the well of his creation. Such a person is a petty human being and an even pettier poet. As to Yiddish as a language instrument, we think that our language is now beautiful and rich enough for the most profound poetry. All the high achievements of poetry—the highest—are possible in Yiddish. Only a poor poet can complain of the poverty of the Yiddish language. The real poet knows the richness of our language and lacks nothing, can lack nothing. Poetry is, to a very high degree, the art of language—a principle that is too often forgotten—and Yiddish poetry is the art of the Yiddish language, which is merely a part of the general European-American culture. Yiddish is now rich enough, independent enough to afford to enrich its vocabulary from the treasures of her sister languages. That is why we are not afraid to borrow words from the sister languages, words to cover newly developed concepts, broadened feelings and thoughts. Such words are also our words. We have the same right to them as does any other language, any other poetry, because—to repeat—Yiddish poetry is merely a branch, a particular stream in the whole contemporary poetry of the world. We regard Yiddish as a fully mature, ripe, independent, particular, and unique language. We maintain that Yiddish separated long ago not only from her mother—German—but also from her father—Hebrew. Everything that ties Yiddish to Hebrew in an artificial and enforced way is superfluous, an offence to the language in which we create. Spelling certain words in Yiddish differently from other words because of their Hebrew etymology

“Yiddish” literally means “Jewish.”

5

408

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

is false and anachronistic.6 All words in Yiddish are equal, it is high time to clean out the white basting of Hebrew spelling from certain Yiddish words. We are not enemies of Hebrew. For us Yiddish poets, there is absolutely no language question.7 For us, Hebrew is only a foreign language, while Yiddish is our language. We cannot forget, however, that Hebrew and Hebraism have kept on disturbing the natural development of the Yiddish word and of Yiddish poetry. We know that, if not for the Hebraism of the Haskalah movement,8 which later branched out into Zionist Hebraism on the one hand and assimilationist anti-Yiddishism on the other, Yiddish poetry would stand on a much higher level than it does today. We know that if Yiddish poetry had developed normally and naturally from the poet Shloyme Etinger9 to now, if the natural course had not been interrupted by Hebraism and the Hebraists, there could be no language problem for anyone; it would perhaps never have arisen. The rich Yiddish literature would have nipped it in the bud. We think, therefore, that one must finally have the courage to sever any tie between our language and any other foreign language. A time comes when a son must break away altogether from his father and set up his own rent. The last vestige of Hebrew in Yiddish is the Hebrew spelling of certain words. This must be abolished. As poets rather than propagandists, we solve the problem first of all for ourselves. We shall spell all Yiddish words equally, with no respect for their pedigree. These are our views, these are our poetic aspirations in the various realms that must concern a poet in general and a Yiddish poet in particular.

4 Our emergence is not intended as a struggle against anybody or as an attempt to annihilate anyone. We simply want to develop ourselves and take our own road, which is, for us, the truest road. We come at the right time, at a time when Yiddish poetry is mature and independent enough to bear separate trends and promote differentiation and diversity, instead of straying hesitantly in one herd. By saying that we come at the right time we admit that everything that has come before us was also at its right time. Mikhl Gordon, Shimon Frug, Morris Rosenfeld, Avrom Reyzin, A. Liessin, H. Royzenblat—they are all good in their own time, but only in their own time.10 All that was necessary for the development of Yiddish poetry, for its gradual progress was contributed by them and thus made our appearance possible. To this extent, we do not fight against

Yiddish, though using the Hebrew alphabet, employs a European-type, close-to-phonetic spelling for words of any origin except Hebrew; the latter preserve their Hebrew, vowel-less spelling.

6

An allusion to “the War of Languages” raging at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which Hebrew and Yiddish competed for the title of “the” national language that would dominate Jewish education and culture.

7

The movement of Enlightenment in European Jewish culture, 1780–1880, promoting aesthetic ideals of German and Russian culture, despising Yiddish as “jargon” and preferring German or Hebrew with Moses Mendelssohn or, with the poet I.L. Gordon, Russian or Hebrew to the language of the masses.

8

One of the few Yiddish poets of the Haskalah, Etinger (1799–1855) was a learned writer who created fine poetry not published in his lifetime.

9

Mikhl Gordon (1823–90) was a poet of the Haskalah in Lithuania; Shimon Frug (1860–1916), a famous poet in Russian and Yiddish, introduced meters in Yiddish poetry; Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923) was a major “sweat-shop poet” in America; and Avrom Reyzin (Abraham Reisin; 1876–1953), A. Liessin (1872–1938), and H. Royzenblat (1879–1956) were major American Yiddish poets at the beginning of the twentieth century.

10

MODERNISM OF THE ASHKENAZI JEWISH DIASPORA

409

them, we do not try to shout them down. On the contrary, we express our gratitude for their role in our emergence. Only one representative of the older Yiddish poets has crossed the boundary of his time and is, for us, not merely a precursor but a fellow poet. This is Yehoash.11 In our view, he is the most important figure in all of Yiddish poetry today. He is a poet who does not stop searching, who has the courage and the talent—we do not know which is more important or more beautiful and greater—to sense at the very zenith of his creativity that this is perhaps not the way and to depart from the well-known path of scanned iambs and trochees to write in new forms and in different modes. Perhaps he should have been the initiator of a new trend in Yiddish poetry and perhaps also, at least in part, of our trend. He did not do this for understandable reasons, and we would like to note that we regard him as one who is close to us. The development of a new group of Yiddish poets would not have been possible without certain intermediate steps. Art, like life, does not leap but develops gradually. On those intermediate steps, we find the so-called Yunge (the Young Generation). Aynhorn, Menakhem, Mani Leyb, Zisho Landoy, Rolnik, Slonim, Schwartz, Ayzland, M. L. Halpern, B. Lapin—they are all good and good in their time.12 They have accomplishments, and not only do we not deny that but we understand and readily admit that only because of their work was a further development of Yiddish poetry possible, of which the Introspective trend is an expression. All these poets led Yiddish poetry out onto a broader road. They brought Yiddish poetry, which was strongly akin to the verse of wedding jesters and rhymesters,13 closer to art and genuine poetry. In the case of poets like Rolnik or Mani Leyb, one could say that they made Yiddish poetry deeper, though as to the latter, it would be more correct to say finer. Slonim has the accomplishment of showing a sensibility for rhythm and, in part, also for individual rhythm. The major contribution of the Young Generation, however, is with respect to language. They introduced a certain Europeanism into the language, a greater artistic authenticity, and raised the level of a Yiddish poem. They canceled Peretz’s “my song would have sounded differently if I sang for Goyim in Goyish.”14 There it remained, however. As for content, even the deepest of them stayed on the surface and the finest hit a wall. With all his sensibility for rhythm, Slonim stopped where he should have, and perhaps could have, started. As for language, there too they came to a dead end. The refreshing, enriching, and refined became ossified and degenerated into a fruitless wasteland.

Yehoash (Solomon Blumgarten, 1872–1927), born in Russia, published most of his books in America. He is famous for his classical translation of the Bible into Yiddish.

11

David Aynhorn (Einhorn; 1886–1973), Menakhem (later: M. Boreysho; 1888–1949), Mani Leyb (Leib; 1883–1953), Zisho Landoy (Zishe Landau; 1889–1937), J. Rolnik (Rolnick; 1879–1955), J. Slonim (1885– 1944), I. J. Schwartz (1885–1971), R. Ayzland (Iceland; 1884–1955), M.L. Halpern (1886–1932), and B. Lapin (1889–1952) were American Yiddish poets of or close to the Young Generation. Most of them continued writing poetry simultaneously with the Introspectivists. 13 An allusion to the poetry of the Badkhonim, wedding jesters who extemporized rhymed verse in Yiddish ranging from coarse comedy to national and topical themes. An example is the popular poet Eliokum Zunser (1836–1913), who was active in Russia and America.

12

I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), one of the three Yiddish “Classics,” expressed in these lines from the opening of the long poem “Monish,” the inferiority complex of his time about the poverty of the “Jargon,” i.e., Yiddish.

14

410

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

As with the older writers, here too there is an exception—namely, H. Leyvik. Leyvik is only in part one of the Young Generation. From the first, he introduced so much that is individual—and even profound—that there can be no talk of his stopping, of his having already completed his poetic mission. We regard him, too, as being close to us. The Young Generation, as a whole, however—as a group—belong only to their own time. If one wants to characterize their contribution, which we consider finished, it is the contribution of an interim stage, of a bridge to a new poetry—a poetry more independent, courageous, profound, and authentic both in content and in form, to use an old formulation.

5 We would like to add a few comments on the mode of writing, points which can be found in most modern trends, such as, for example, in the American Imagists. We will also remark on the way in which this collection, which we consider the first in a series, was compiled. Since we see our trend as an expression of a movement toward life, toward life as it is reflected in us—which is real life—we are in favor of making the language of our poems as close as possible to the spoken language in its structure and flow. We therefore abolish any possibility of “inversion,” the contortion of the natural sentence structure for the sake of rhythm and rhyme. One cannot and under no circumstances should say “bird thou never wert” or “but not your heart away”15 or even worse barbarisms. One must write, “you never were a bird,” “don’t give your heart away,” whether there is a rhyme or not, whether it scans or not. We are against using expressions for their ostensible beauty. There can be no beauty without profound relationship and without authentic meaning. We strive to avoid banal similes, epithets, and other figurative expressions. Their very banality makes them a lie and we seek, first of all, introspective honesty and individuality. We try to avoid superfluous adjectives altogether, which add nothing and are merely an unnecessary burden. “Far distance” or “blue distance” or “snowing snow” do not make the distance or the snow different. Instead, it is always better to have an authentic, individual image. It is always better to use the right word for the corresponding concept, even if it is not “beautiful” according to popular aesthetics. A word in the right place is always beautiful. If anyone has to look it up in the dictionary, this is none of the poet’s business. As to the composition of this collection, the initiative lies with the signers of this introduction. They invited others after agreeing on the tenets and goals of this trend. We have included here such poems as are more or less close to our position. All these rules, as it were, were not formulated in advance of the poems. Should anyone think so, he is guilty of an absurdity. The rules, like the whole movement, grew out of poems already written. It cannot be otherwise. If in the process of writing new rules develop, even contradictory ones, we shall record that, too. The poem creates the rule and not vice versa, and that is why no rule can be considered binding forever.

Here, English equivalents (by Shelley and Housman) to the Yiddish phrases were used.

15

MODERNISM OF THE ASHKENAZI JEWISH DIASPORA

411

The number of poems included in this collection does not by any means indicate the relative importance of a poet. Neither does it have to do with whether the poet was one of the initiators. It indicates merely that someone has written more poems. All participants are equally important. We know that every poet develops better in solitude than in a group. The eight poets whose works are represented here are very different from each other. If we have decided to appear as a group with a particular name (which, by the way, should not be taken literally), it is because, through this collective separation and delimitation, we hope to enhance the individual development of each one of us. We have been led to this collective step by the current internal situation of Yiddish poetry—chaotic, faceless, characterless, and increasingly an obstacle to further development. Jacob Glatshteyn

A. Leyeles

N. Minkov

II. PROCESSION IV: “EVERY NEW POET: PROEM” Mikhl Likht Originally published in Yiddish in Processions and Other Poems, New York: Farlag Gelye, 1932. Translated by Ariel Resnikoff and Stephen Ross.

Mikhl Likht (1893–1953) flourished during the great ferment of Yiddish poetry in New York City during the First World War and its aftermath. An émigré from the Russian Empire (modern Ukraine) to the United States in 1913, he was an important, though controversial, member of the Inzikhistn (“Introspectivists”) and was involved through the 1920s and early 1930s in a range of Yiddish avant-garde projects, publications, and little magazines. During his productive years, he self-consciously channeled North American, European, and Russian modernist innovation into Yiddish poetry regarded in its time as brilliant, forbidding, and (to some) nonsensical. His complete works—published posthumously in Argentina in the mid-1950s and comprising volumes of poetry, short fiction, translation, memoir, and essays—remain largely untranslated.1 This text comes from Likht’s nine-part masterpiece, Processions, a visionary experiment that turns Anglophone modernist exoticizing of the Jewish diaspora—from eastern Europe to the Lower East Side—on its head. Processions brings modernist techniques of collage, citation, and formal innovation to bear on subject matter rarely incorporated into modernist poetry, including impressionistic scenes of daily life in the poet’s native Ukraine, Talmudic, and Kabbalistic concepts and vocabulary, and references to Yiddish vaudeville theater on Broadway. “Every New Poet: Proem” is a preface of sorts to Likht’s “Procession IV,” a poem written in rhyming quatrains that veers between technical Kabbalistic terminology and vibrant slang. The “Proem” lays out, in characteristically acrobatic and ironized form, Likht’s vision of writing a poetry that would bind—like the Yiddish language itself—the timeless sublimity of Hebrew to the quotidian cross-cultural impressionism of the Jewish diaspora. SJR

My luck: I want to find the sublime, stately, sober words and fasten them to my own, imagined, rapt ones—maybe I will successfully reflect life—Jewish life, in particular: although art has nothing to do with life, against all anachronisms, not respecting Shakespeare’s pathetic and bathetic Burshteynisms2 (by my esteemed friends the stamps “talent” and “graphomania” sit in dusty little boxes).—Already the immediate rips in the web, the contradictions. The first bite, hard to swallow, is the imagined words. They stand out—(with golden ateyros and kosherly braided tsitses) in old silk taleysim, wrapped in

Merle Bachman’s pioneering efforts to translate Likht and bring his work to light after decades of neglect deserve special mention. See: Recovering “Yiddishland”: Threshold Moments in American Literature.

1

Pesahke Burshteyn (1896–1986): Jewish-American comedian, singer, songwriter, and director of Yiddish vaudeville theater.

2

MODERNISM OF THE ASHKENAZI JEWISH DIASPORA

413

retsues, shulkhn-orekh’d, zoyer’d with oylem-habe3 purposes, the dictionary words. They shokl4 themselves methodically in alphabetically ordered rows over our coiffures like ripe fruit trees. And I want to be considered like nature and create the regimentation of language that would bring about a new order in human knowledge. How, heaven forbid, is an apple more poetic, though not more meaningful, when rhymed with a dumpling than that which doesn’t rhyme in sound but is formed in the haze of characteristic order?5 And how much sin against words that, graphologically, contradict themselves, though they are wholly and thoroughly philological? “Flesh and stone and gold and fine buildings”6 are more the motif of vehement growth in human language than sun and moon and stars. My friend, a versifier, a reader of mine (fictive, of course) reads my stuff. I say the last word—so he assumes: written, he thinks, it’s lost. He does not know that after my own imagined words appear black on white, the resident-words, the highly-esteemed ones, get all stirred up in their places, and, set up in lines (according to human knowledge) they start shooting with cannons and artillery from their contents. My friend, a reader etc., stands from afar and takes great pleasure: his words, the stately, the sublime ones, accompany, run my gauntlet, whip their skin off with an alkhet lash.7 The critique, he says choking himself on rivalrous gall, the critique is an expert, a distant relative of that which is. The critique, another friend continues with his wellbeing, is a corrupted “this” that doesn’t know who duped him (the friend—one who is idiosyncratic, neologistic, wakes up panting). But Jewish life? The content of art? Huh? Listen to this curiosity: once there was a people, a land … but is it worth it to repeat that which history translated into goles,8 need, shameful shudders, poisonous complaints, begged bread? “Nu, once upon a time in my land, the green land in the hilly corner of the Galilee … with thirty silver pieces”.9 The three-pointed void locks in the story from “alef” to “sof”.10 “The burglary that happened”: Is this the telegram the people send their children?—“I was sent to you by God”: Is this called systematically exchanging a truth for a lie? A bare truth for a gilded lie? Art, says my friend (the former, not the latter) art must defeat one’s own made up words. Art, he says, is the “I won’t be late in life” but rather as long as I’m here I won’t fool around, but grab life by the coat-tails, to provoke, to rouse, so it can bend Newton’s firmly established laws for our sake (my friend is wrong about “firmly established”!); Zeno will philosophize out the truths that I want: my spirit will befriend all those deep, sharp, sublime, and stately words.—

The italicized words in this sentence are Hebrew words rendered in their Ashkenazi pronunciation: ateyros (“crowns”); tsitses (“knotted ritual fringes”); taleysim (“prayer shawls”); retsues (“tefillin straps”); shulkhnorekh’d (a neologism using the name of the Jewish legal code book, Shulkhan Arukh); zoyer’d (neologism using the name of the medieval Kabbalistic text, Sefer Ha-Zohar, and a pun on the Yiddish word for “sour”); oylemhabe (“world to come”). 4 Yiddish: “to rock or sway,” used to describe the traditional Jewish prayer motion. 5 There is a sequence of internal rhymes here on apple [epl], dumpling [krepl], and haze [nepl]. 3

Quoting a passage from Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1909), which Marianne Moore also quotes in “Marriage,” first published in 1923 and then in Observations (1924).

6

“On the transgression” (Hebrew); a prayer of confession recited on Yom Kippur while beating one’s chest.

7

“Diaspora” (Ashkenazi pronunciation of the Hebrew galut).

8

The amount Judas was paid to betray Jesus (cf. Matthew 27:3-10).

9

“From A to Z.”

10

414

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

So be it. I will hardly succeed at reflecting life—the abyss of Jewish life in particular. Art has absolutely nothing to do with life: life means the table on which I’m now writing; the fly that buzzes around my head incessantly; the sun shining through the little window (it sees more than two others, according to the tradition of sublime, stately word-mixtures: really sees? sees what? I doubt it); a man from the other side of the pane who rolls himself by in a made up thing; the dust; the trees that shokl gracefully like a person praying— the trees in the church square. But none of this is true. No table, sun, person, fly, trees, machinery, no church square; but yes, there are stately words that lull my friend,—words sublime way before the music of “The burglary that happened,” or “ … once there was [a] land—in the Galilee … with thirty silver pieces,” long long before “flesh and stone and gold and fine buildings”. Thus my luck improves: I found my way to the dictionary and fastened the sublime, stately words to my own made up ones, taboo. And my friend, a reader etc, will link them hereafter with favorable or unfavorable critique, and consider them in relation—with love or gall—to life and art.

III. “AFTERWORD” TO MANNEQUINS Devorah Fogel Originally published in Yiddish in Manekinen: Lider, Warsaw-Lemberg: Farlag Tsushtayer, 1934. Translated by Ariel Resnikoff.

Devorah Fogel (1902–42) was an innovative writer of Yiddish poetry and prose. She was born in a Polish-speaking secular Jewish home in Burshtyn, Poland (modern Ukraine). Like so many of her generation, however, Fogel was forced to flee Poland during the First World War, first to Vienna, and later to Lwów, where she would live until her death in the Lwów Ghetto in 1942. During the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, Fogel was active in various avantgarde literary circles, publishing in both Yiddish and Polish “little magazines” and journals in Europe and the United States. In particular, she was a regular contributor to the Yiddish-American modernist magazine Inzikh (In Oneself), edited by Yankev Glatshteyn, N.B. Minkov and Aaron Glantz-Leyeles (see “The Introspectivist Manifesto,” 15.i). Over the course of her writing life, Fogel published two books of Yiddish verse, as well as a book of Yiddish and Polish prose vignettes, in addition to numerous essays on art, literature, and culture. The text presented here was first published as the afterword to Fogel’s second book, Manekinen (“mannequins”), a work of remarkable experimental Yiddish modernist poetry. Within it we find a call for a “decorativistic” poetics, one committed to ornamentation as a means of foregrounding artistic artifice. Fogel merges aesthetic and poetic concerns from across discursive fields and movements, weaving together concepts from Idealist philosophy, Constructivist art, and Yiddish lyric poetics. Although critics initially condemned Fogel’s writing for its excessive difficulty and opacity—and above all for being unbecoming of a Jewish woman artist—it will be clear to contemporary readers of Ashkenazi Jewish modernism just how powerful and radical Fogel’s work truly was and still is today. AR

Sorrowfulnesses are a decorative element of life all life can become decorative; this happens when a raw heroic schema, to which the fullness of life gets reduced, unmasks the ur-schema of monotony. One must return then to interpretation (to “the superstructure”) of the few raw facts of life. Like an ornament, the life-zone thus gets filled with events: an ornament of events that doesn’t leave a spare drop of room for monotony. The raw, concentrated, three-dimensional life-clump here becomes like a twodimensional one. Superficial decoration. But with the decorativistic (de)composition of life without any event remainder— there awakens a psychic constellation of reckoning with somewhere existent, ready-made things: things that “need to come,” and the only possible state: of waiting; the awaiting of ready-made possibilities. From “experiences” which can come or not come.

416

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

In this way the decorativistic life-conception leads to a consumptive one; “consumptive” therefore, for waking and nourishing itself with ready-made, independent from us, events. In this volume the poems from the “drink-songs” and “trash-ballads” cycles are an impression from a decorativistic-consumptive life-construction. The “Mannequins” cycle presents constructivism, the continuation of the “Day-Figures.” This dialectic of the content was revealed according to the marvelous Hegelian law. THE THESIS: the raw schematism of life; the coldness and the heroic monotony; the monotonous right-figure as a sign and symbol of a life-rhythm; ambiences and events, which become ill-suited labeled with the names of geometric figures and bearing within themselves the content of figures, the ur-schema of circular and right; (the psychic transposition of the two principles is: the dynamic—the waiting—the modification bound to the image of the elliptical line; the static—the silence of measure—the immutability, to which one must attribute the monotony of return—with the symbol of the right-figure). Such a life-schema agrees with the style of cubism. The continuation of such cubism is constructivism. The main problem here becomes the unmasking of opposing tendencies of life, which now assume the form of fleshliness and mechanicality. Crossing and muddling the border between the mechanical-mechanized and the fleshly-living principle creates the static ambience with the ingredients for life-marvelousness. THE ANTITHESIS: the tragic of monotony and the ur-schema of right. The blind circle of things; the blind-circle of soul-events, where two opposing and singular masculinities manifest from them, unachievable, inexplicable, no luck at all. THE SYNTHESIS: the rehabilitation of that which is accessible and possible; from “the life”. The meaning: the rehabilitation of monotony and the botched, the matter of all important events. And today the time comes again for a new thesis: a raw, hard ur-schema of life becomes necessary. Therefore the presentation of a decorative-consumptive formation demands an enlightenment. Perhaps it can exist in this, that each constructive life-formation develops into decorativeness. Perhaps in the fact of moments, which exposes the two sides of each thing in life : the unending sorrowfulness. The decorativistic principle of sorrowfulness gets rehabilitated then, as something that is always a part of life.

IV. FROM WHOM DID I TAKE PERMISSION? Avot Yeshurun Originally delivered in Hebrew in Tel Aviv on the occasion of winning the 1979 Bialik Prize and also published on February 2, 1979 in Haaretz. Translated by Ariel Resnikoff.

Avot Yeshurun (born Yekhiel Alter Perlmutter, 1904–92) was a translingual-Hebrew poet who fused Yiddish, Polish, and Arabic grammar and vocabulary into his Hebrew writing. He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1925 from Krasnistaw, Poland (today Ukraine), against the express wishes of his parents, never to see his family again, all of whom—save one brother—perished in the Holocaust at Bełżec death camp. Yeshurun worked as a day laborer during his first few years in Mandatory Palestine, passing much of his time in the company of Bedouin and Palestinian Arabs. In 1948, he officially changed his name from Yekhiel Perlmutter to Avot Yeshurun, an anachronistic and polysemic Hebrew phrase, taken to mean “your fathers are/will be watching (you).” In 1952, Yeshurun published a formally difficult and highly controversial translingual poem entitled “Pesakh al kukhim” (Passing Over Caves), in which he suggested a sociopoetic link between the catastrophe of the Palestinians in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and the catastrophe of the Jews in the Holocaust. Yeshurun was derided for this poem, and cast out of the Zionist literary establishment by his contemporaries who were threatened as much by his radical diasporic politics as they were by his innovative poetics, claiming that he wrote “in a language of rags.” Yeshurun composed the present text, “Mi’mi lakakhti reshut?” (“From Whom Did I Take Permission?”) as a speech, which he delivered on the occasion of winning the Bialik Prize (one of Israel’s foremost literary prizes) in 1979 in Tel Aviv. This work functions as a fierce ars poetica of diasporic Jewishness, which challenges the very foundations upon which modern (Zionist) Hebrew language and literary tradition stand, and are understood, until this very day. I laid my fathers there beneath the chestnut trees, so that I’ll be laid here. Since then I’ve moved from one shack to another shack, from one shack to another shack. I’ve buttoned buttons and pins in parts of bodies of those present and memories and living dreams and living double. And suddenly all of a sudden, on January 1st, 1979, in the morning, and here’s notice of a prize. I’m entering an ice age, I tell the notifier. It appears I complicate things. They get the Bialik Prize from the hands of Bialik himself.1 But it’s said that Bialik heated the heart of Hebrew poetry, because he turned the materials of poetry into poetry. He also treaded the carpet before Uri Zvi Greenberg,2 the man who came and arose after Jeremiah, and he’s the master of two eternities: eternity of Jewish nation and eternity of Hebrew nation. Until 1948. Was witnessed an end, since then, to choose the things of poetry—rather than the poetry of things. And until the war of the Holocaust, that since then came a man from the Holocaust and a man from the war, and they weren’t able to Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) was one of the foremost pioneers of modern Hebrew poetry, and is today informally recognized as the State of Israel’s national poet. Yeshurun delivered the speech on the occasion of receiving the prestigious Bialik price for literature, bestowed by the municipality of Tel-Aviv.

1

Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981) was a translingual Yiddish-Hebrew poet and radical modernist.

2

418

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

tell the remains themselves, what’s legible, and if they come with their words, and we, we don’t have their words—there was one man that saw the labors of the Hebrew language Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.3 He executed words like sand of the sea. But it wasn’t necessary to give them words, only necessary to take from them words. To appoint an absorption minister from ourselves. To build a great tent, and call-out: ahlan wa sahlan4 unto the tent, all voiced expression, and hints of soul, all speaking and spokesmanship, you are our brothers, are in our language. The numbered days of the voyage to the land of Israel, in October, and here I recall the migration of the storks in their eastward season, and we the children used to shout at them: “Bocianie, bocianie, pali sie gniazdo!” which is to say: “the stork, the stork, the nest goes up in flames!” And so the days of travel to the land of Israel on the ship were amazingly boring, the people did not recognize, went idle. The ship with its distances more beautiful than at the port, and more maternal than at home. They didn’t hear a sound. But steadfast. From the side emerged a jet of water toward the sea, like toward our Wadi Musrara.5 Suddenly we see the shore on the horizon. Everyone was compelled to write a poem. So everyone who writing needs or doesn’t need, but here, everyone that settles on the establishment and doesn’t leave—they should leave. When I dreamt of the land, I was heavy, and the dream light. Here I am light and the dream heavy. Created the world in six days, like us, when we played in the sand. The animals and the villains and the righteous, they’re all in one hall. We went by foot and the hoe6 upon us. In this land all this happened, the large animals close to creation of the natural world. Here emerges the large camel. Giant lizard. And the land very good and peaceful. No prophecy of protest arose, but after the Amorite and the Perrizite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Girgashite the Hivite and the Yebusite.7 The prophecy comes and the wasp will expel them. Not with your sword and not with your bow. And gave you a land for which you did not labor. Towns you did not build. Oliveyards you did not plant.8 The prophecy came and was transferred to poetry. Because poetry has words. Why is music without words? So that man keeps poetry close to himself. Perhaps not every person is a prophet. But every person is a poet. Because poetry obliges that a person respond to everything. Because she is the khutspit.9 Niskhizsh—the city in which I was born, she is strength and mystery and cemetery of the righteous. With a shack-house for the Rebbe, my mother’s father, who I didn’t see.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) was a Zionist lexicographer and one of the driving forces behind the institutional revival of modern Hebrew.

3

“Welcome” in Arabic; a term of familial greeting.

4

Yeshurun uses the Arabic name for the Ayalon River, which runs in Israel/Palestine from the Judean Hills to the Yarkon in Tel Aviv.

5

Yeshurun uses the Arabic word for hoe: “turiya”. This word has since been absorbed into the modern Hebrew lexicon.

6

Glossing Deuteronomy 7:1: “When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou … ” (KJB).

7

Glossing Joshua 24:12-13: “And I sent the hornet before you, which drave them out from before you, even the two kings of the Amorites; but not with thy sword, nor with thy bow. And I have given you a land for which ye did not labour, and cities which ye built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and oliveyards which ye planted not do ye eat.” (KJB).

8

Yiddish: The female embodiment of khutspa, lit. “gall”; “fresh”; or “inappropriate daring”.

9

MODERNISM OF THE ASHKENAZI JEWISH DIASPORA

419

Krasnystaw—the city in which I grew up, a hilly city, with a cloister, with a farmers’ square on Sunday, with a garden of chestnuts that would explode in their shells seven for every direction. Przedmieście—village of my childhood, with a water-mill with a forest with a meadow with a river with white grandfather my father’s father. War found me and I’m nine years old in the city in which I was born. We returned from the war as refugees in the city in which I grew up. The city was burned. From the pyre rebuilt. Poland in the days of reestablishment elevated the creations of its great writers and poets. A garden of chestnut trees in the city center. The gothic catholic church and the farmers’ square. Against such might. Weakness was to know, if we have a poet. The Hebrew night-course teacher said: we have. Bialik with a scroll of fire. But I wasn’t acquainted. I didn’t study the poems of Bialik in school. I absorbed them in the street. From the beauty on every face of the teenage generation. Between Baba Kama and Baba Metsiya10 was in the war. I read Bialik anyway. Among my peers something penetrated, according to which I translate from memory: “go to the potter and buy a pot, and say: this is how you shatter, you shall shatter!”11 I didn’t know why. But we returned from the war and our hearts were inclined to believe why. The first time I heard of Bialik it was the Polish sound of his name. This gave me strength. There were fires. and there was a battle between Yiddish and Hebrew. I am the elder. I am your maiden sister from the house. There were wreckages and there were fires in the house. I am a maiden I am your sister in the house. Afterward they began shattering me around on abandoning father’s home threw upon me aliyah12 to the land and threw upon me the meeting with the Arabs, who resemble those from the small towns, from home, and threw upon me trains and rails that change. And a train leaves and a train fills up and shaking and quaking mute and muting. My mother outfitted me in materials of clothing and didn’t outfit me in materials of poetry. and even if she had had them. I couldn’t understand. Answer: from the cemetery they don’t take back. I went—I went. I left—I left from bodies from them I split. Poetry is a source and a spring is a source. There is no aqueduct to transfer the springs from there to here. They are another family and we are another family. End of days of eternity. Begins a new eternity. The poetry is not to the words and not to the music. The poetry is between God’s knees and between mother’s knees, who no longer remembers me today. I saw the things of poetry and not the poetry of things. The old Arab village obsolete and the new Jewish kibbutz. As though they were still jumping ahead of me the little towns onto the land to foresee man from here with genealogies and genealogies of genealogies and great miracles from Islam even. Israel has never arrived with empty hands. It’s worthwhile to recall because they came and said to the land of Canaan: Canaanites “fear of God burns all fears”— said the Rebbe of Modjetz. Self-confidence juxtaposed with Arab invisibility redeemed from the Polish frustration. I felt that it wasn’t spoken. An absence they do not write on the issue. There was a community center. They delivered speeches. I had a speech. What—I knew not. Was told to me: they heard my mother in some yard. A reject stood alone and beating. If I heard—what did she say? God left her. Her child left her. I saw Two consecutive Talmudic tractates within the Nizikin (“Damages”) order, which Yeshurun would have been studying in Yeshiva (traditional Jewish academy) during the onset of the First World War.

10

Glossing various prophetic sources, but especially Isaiah 30:14: “And he shall break it as the breaking of the potters’ vessel that is broken in pieces; he shall not spare: so that there shall not be found in the bursting of it a sherd to take fire from the hearth, or to take water withal out of the pit” (KJB).

11

Hebrew: literally “going up”; refers here to the Jewish “right of return” to the Land of Israel.

12

420

GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM

Bialik travelling in a chariot with Ahad Ha-Am13 to the seashore in Tel Aviv. Bialik did not witness the Holocaust. If he had witnessed—what he said: “I saw you again in your disability”.14 And I—from whom did I take permission to lay my ancestors on the chestnuts, beneath the wood and the fire? 13 Shvat Tashlat, 10 February 1979

Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856–1927), primarily known by his Hebrew pen name, Ahad Ha’am (lit. “one of the people”), was an early modern Hebrew writer, and one of the foremost pre-state Zionist thinkers.

13

The title of one Hayim Nahman Bialik’s provocative addresses to the Jews of Eastern Europe. Bialik was known in his poetry—and especially in his most famous poem, “On the City of Slaughter”—to represent traditional eastern European Jewish life as backward, dysfunctional, and quite literally disabled.

14

INDEX

ʿAbbāsid caliphate 187 n.1 Abdul, Raoul 147 Abe Tamotsu 333 Aboriginal people (Australia) 367, 394, 395 Abhiruchi (journal) 269 Abramovitsh, Sholem-Yankev 397 abstract art 49, 109–11, 130, 135, 141, 203, 327, 367 Académie Française 195 n.3 academy. See university Achebe, Chinua 144 Acoli (language) 145 Action (Japanese art group) 324 Action Française 2, 69, 73, 76 n.47, 77 n.53 Adam 322 Adán, Martín 27 Adelaide 366, 377, 379 Adler, Yankel 399 n.7 Adonis. See Adūnīs Adorno, Theodor 150 n.23 Adūnīs 15, 159, 181, 185–90 Aeschylus 126 n.30 aestheticism 8, 9, 69, 70 n.1, 76 n.44, 264, 315, 317, 329, 370. See also fin de siècle Africa 4–5, 10–20 passim, 27, 52–3, 67, 78, 83–5, 87, 91, 98, 100–4, 108, 113–55, 176, 179, 180, 193, 225, 237, 243, 366, 381, 385 African Writers Series (Heinemann) 145 n.5, 145 n.6, 147 n.17 Afrikaans (language) 115, 133–4 Agyeya 241, 243 agriculture 234, 299–300, 330. See also farmers; peasants Ahad Ha’am 420 Ahmadi, Ahmadreza 212 Ahmed, Rehana 248 n.2 Ahmet Cevdet Paşa 208 Ahmet Haşim 193, 194–8, 199, 202 Aidoo, Ama Ata 151–2 Aka to kuro (journal) 320, 321 Akhavan-Sales, Mehdi 212 Akhtar, Javed 248 n.3

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 326–8, 335 al-Ādāb (journal) 158 al-ʿAfīfī, Yūsuf 164 al-Ahrām (journal) 164 al-Bakrī, Fatḥī 164 al-Balāgh (journal) 164 al-Bayātī, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb 158 al-Bārūdī, Maḥmūd Sāmī 158, 159, 188 al-Ḥakīm, Tawfīq 164 al-Hallaj, Mansur 207 al-Jurjānī, ʿAbd al-Qāhir 188, 189 al-Khāl, Yūsuf 159, 185 al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī 158, 167–70 al-Malāʾikah, Nāzik 158, 166–75 al-Musawi, Muhsin J. 158 al-Qays, Imrūʾ 167 n.3 al-Rāwandī 187 al-Rāzī 187 al-Risālah (journal) 161–5 al-Sayyāb, Badr Shākir 158 al-shʿir al-ḥurr 158, 166–75. See also free verse al-shʿir al-manthūr (Arabic prose poetry) 158 al-Tilimsānī, Kāmil 159, 161–5 Alagirisami, Ku. 276 Alcântara Machado, Antônio de 35 Aleichem, Sholem 397 Alencar, José de 39, 42 n.30 Alexander III (Czar of Russia) 397 Algerian War 159, 178 Aliye, Fatima 208 n.11 Amat, Carlos Oquendo de 27 Amauta (journal) 27, 30–1, 32–4 America. See United States; Latin America American Popular Revolutionary Alliance 32 Amīn, Ḥusain Yūsuf 164 Anand, Mulk Raj 242, 248–9 anarchism 33, 73, 102, 320, 321, 374 Anatolia 206 Anchieta, José de 42 Andersen, Hans Christian 341 n.15 Andrade, Marío de 35 Andrade, Oswald de 35–43, 93, 96 n.25

422

Andrzejewski, B. W. 145 Anfās (journal) 159–60, 176 Ángel, Abraham 47 n.16 Angry Penguins (journal) 377–80 ʿAntar 184 anthropology 39 n.18, 44, 135, 136, 137 n.3, 139, 145 n.9 anthropophagy. See cannibalism anti-colonialism 2, 12, 15, 67, 83, 87, 91, 117, 157, 159, 176, 181, 381, 385 anti-communism 283, 294, 296, 377, 380 n.5 anti-Semitism 2, 69, 73 n.10, 73 n.13, 117 apartheid 115, 133 Apollinaire, Guillaume 202 Apollo group. See Apūllū group APRA. See American Popular Revolutionary Alliance Apūllū group 158 Arab renaissance. See nahḍah Arab world 13, 115, 157–90 passim Arabic 15, 145 n.10, 157–90, 193, 199, 202, 218, 251 n.1, 399, 417, 418 Arab-Israeli War 417 Aragon, Louis 81 Aramaic (language) 398 Argentina 26, 27, 28, 54–7, 58, 75, 76, 412 Ariel (José Enrique Rodó) 76 Ariff, Abdullah 361 aristocracy 53, 76, 141, 177, 358, 363. See also monarchism; royalty Armah, Ayi Kwei 4, 11, 113 Armstrong, Louis 102 Arnold, Matthew 83 Art and Liberty group (Egypt) 161–5. See also surrealism art galleries 28, 44, 127, 226, 361–2, 367, 369–70 Art in New Zealand (journal) 371–6 Artaud, Antonin 28 Ashbery, John 377 Ashk, Upendranath 261 Ashkenazi Jewish 397–420 Ashokamitran 276, 277 assimilation 88, 89, 122, 139, 175, 344, 352, 359, 399, 408 Assyria 228 Asunción Silva, José 75 Aśvaghoṣa 274 Ataç, Nurullah 199 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 191, 282. See also Kemalism Athamani, Omari 128

INDEX

Atharva Aso (little magazine) 267 n.5 Audain, Léon 79 Auden, W. H. 347 Austro-Hungarian empire 398 Australia 7, 13, 17, 365–7, 368–70, 371 n.1, 375–6, 377–80, 385, 386 n.1, 388 n.9, 392, 393, 394, 395 authenticité (Zairian policy) 155 autochthonous expression 26, 76, 178 Avant-Gardistes Zaïrois 155 Aynhorn, David 409 Ayzland, R. 409 azad nazm. See free verse Aztec 46, 50, 111 Babbitt, Irving 286 Babıâlî Tercüme Odası (Ottoman translation office) 191 Babylonia 50 n.1, 228 Bach, Johann Sebastian 56 Bachman, Merle 412 n.1 Badi-Banga ne Mwine 155 Baeyertz, Charles 376 n.14 Baghdad 159, 166, 185, 187, 194, 207 n.9 Bahia (Brazil) 37, 43 n.35, 76 n.41 Baldwin, James 100, 103, 104 n.5, 105, 108 Ballav, Pobitra 257 Bamba Ndombasi 155 Bangladesh 242 Baraka, Amiri. See Jones, LeRoi Barbados 67, 68, 97–9, 100–8 Barbosa de Oliveira, Ruy 76 Barcelona 49 Bardaouil, Sam 161 Bardon, Geoffrey 367 Barletta, Leónidas 27 Barnhisel, Greg 17 n.25 barrack towns 321–5 Barrès, Maurice 73, 328 Barthes, Roland 306 Basak, Subimal 257 Basu, Arupratan 257 Basu, Utpal Kumar 257 Battle Flag (journal) 329, 330. See also Japanese Proletarian Arts Federation Baudelaire, Charles 11, 122 n.6, 185, 189, 294, 295, 309, 375 Baxter, Richard 413 n.6 Bayram-ı Veli, Hacı 207 BBC 17, 139 n.10 Beacon (journal) 67, 83–6, 110 n.4 Beardsley, Aubrey 375

INDEX

Beat poets 102, 255 Beckett, Samuel 117, 302, 307 Behere, P. R. 268 Beier, Ulli 144, 145, 147, 152 n.26 Beijing 282, 285, 286, 297, 302 Beirut 159, 181, 185 Belém do Pará 37 Belgium 139, 163 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer 418 Bengali 242, 243, 245, 246 n.3, 255–7, 286 n.1 Benin empire 138 Berber (language) 176 Berger, John 183 Berlin 398 Best Maugard, Adolfo 47 beyaz lisan (white language) 192 Bhagwat, Shri Pu 270–2 Bhandari, Mannu 258, 265 n.32 Bharatendu. See Harishchandra, Bharatendu Bharati, Subramaniya 243, 275, 276, 277, 278 Bhat, K. S. 249 Bhaumik, Satindra 257 Biafra 143, 145 n.6 Bialik, Hayim Nahman 417, 419, 420 Bible, The 118, 409 n.11 Bildungsroman 339 n.9, 343 Bim (journal) 67, 68, 97–9, 100–8, 109 “Black Orpheus” (essay by Sartre) 117, 122 n.7 Black Orpheus (journal) 17, 114, 144, 145 nn.8–9 Black Panthers 266 Blok, Alexander 287 Bloomsbury group 83, 242, 248 blues 100, 102 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 90 n.17 Blumgarten, Solomon. See Yehoash Blyden, Edward Wilmot 129 n.3 Boedo group 27 Bolitho, Hector 374 Bolívar, Simon 74, 76 Bolshevism 37, 287 n.6 Bombay 243, 266, 268 n.10, 269 Bonaparte, Napoleon 40, 42 n.29, 201 Bongo Jerry 67 Bontemps, Arna 148 n.18 Bopp, Raul 35, 36 n.4 Boreysho, M. See Menakhem Borges, Jorge Luis 26, 27, 28, 54, 311 Borkar, Balakrishna Bhagwat 271 Borodin, Alexander 201

423

Boulez, Pierre 102 Bourdieu, Pierre 10 bourgeoisie 33, 34, 63, 80–2, 133, 148–9, 182, 183, 200, 283, 295, 351, 375, 392, 393 Bovshover, Yoysef 398 n.4 Boxer Rebellion 282, 285 Bradbury, R. E. 138 n.6 Braddock, Jeremy 1 Bragança dynasty 43 Brahma 85, 259 n.6 Brathwaite, (Edward) Kamau 66, 67, 100–8, 109, 144 Brazil 25, 26, 28, 35–43 Brémond, Abbé Henri 78 n.60, 195 Brenner, Anita 44–8 Brest 398 Breton, André 11, 12, 28, 67, 81, 123, 161, 162, 164, 189, 203, 349. See also International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art Breytenbach, Breyten 133 Brink, André P. 115, 133–4 Britain 5, 7, 17, 18, 67, 86, 111 n.5, 281, 316, 365, 368 n.4, 373 n.5 British Council Singapore 361 British empire 104, 128 n.1, 138–9, 345, 365, 371, 392 British India 242, 245–7, 248–9, 250 Broderzon, Moyshe 399 n.7 Buddha 85, 259, 274, 406 Buddhism 86 n.2, 292 n.2, 306, 309 Buenos Aires 25, 27, 28, 54 Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 58, 90 Bullāṭah, Kamāl 160, 181–4 Bulson, Eric 17 n.24 Bungakkai (journal) 335 Bungei Shunjū (magazine) 335–41 Burliuk, David 318 Burroughs, William 255 Burshteyn, Pesahke 412 Burton, Richard Francis 137 Byzantium 228 Cabell, James Branch 374 Caesar, Julius 40 Cairo 161, 164 Cairu, Viscount of. See Silva Lisboa, José de, Viscount of Cairu California 294 Callaloo (journal) 70

424

Calles, Plutarco Elías 45 n.1 Calvino, Italo 311 calypso music 102, 103 CAM. See Caribbean Artists Movement camera 290, 332 n.1, 354–5 Campbell, Alistair 395 Camus, Albert 150 n.23, 268 Can Xue 284, 311–13 Canada 7, 73 Candy, Thomas 272 cannibalism 35–43, 93, 96, 285, 390 capitalism 6, 8, 17, 42, 65, 80–1, 88–9, 183, 281, 343 Caras y Caretas (journal) 75 Carasvati 274 Cardoza y Aragón, Luis 48 n.22 Carib people 37, 38, 41 Caribbean 10, 13, 18, 19, 20, 27, 52–3, 65–112, 114, 176, 366, 387 Caribbean Artists Movement 67, 100, 109–12 Carillo Puerto, Felipe 45 Carnival 103 n.3 Carpentier, Alejo 27, 28 caste 103, 150, 238, 241, 242, 248, 259 n.5, 263, 266, 271 n.21. See also Dalit literature; Dalit Panthers Caste War of Yucatán 45 n.5 Castellanos, Julio 47 Castro Alves, Antônio Frederico de 75 Caucasus 225–39 Çelebi, Hızır 207 n.6 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 306 Cenap Şahabettin 208 Central Review (journal) 330–1 Cercle et Carré (journal) 49–51 Cervantes, Miguel de 56, 126 n.30, 311 Césaire, Aimé 15, 67, 69, 87–90, 91–2, 93, 95, 103, 121, 122, 135, 137, 140, 177 Césaire, Suzanne 67, 80 n.1, 91, 93–6, 137 Cevdet, Melih 199–204 Cézanne, Paul 230, 238, 295, 327–8 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 6 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 5 n.9 Chagall, Marc 163, 232 n.3 Chakradhar Swami, Sri 271 Chaldea 50, 237 chambara movies 340 Chang, Eileen 15, 283, 291–3 Charlot, Jean 46 Chattopadhyay, Ahok 257 Chattopadhyay, Bhanu 257 Chattopadhyay, Sandipan 257

INDEX

Chattopadhyay, Shakti 256, 257 Chaudhuri, Supriya 241 Chavchavadze, Ilia 237 Chellappa, Cinnamanur Subramaniam 273, 278 n.38 Chen Duxiu 282 Cheng Fangwu 288 Chesterton, G. K. 89 chhayavad (shadowism) 259 n.14, 260 Chiaureli, Mikhail 234 n.6 Chicago 100, 103 Chile 26, 27, 58–60, 77, 111 n.7 China 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 20, 33, 116, 193, 196, 236, 281–313, 343 Chinese (language, literature and script) 123, 281–313, 328 n.10, 335, 347, 349 n.9, 358, 401 Chinese Communist Party 282, 283, 285, 288 n.13 Chinese Communist Revolution 300 n.7 Chinese Literary Arts Association 294–5 Chinweizu 11, 113, 115, 121, 127, 143–54 Chirico, Giorgio de 163 Chitre, Atmaram 269 n.11 Chitre, Dilip 243, 269 n.11 Ch’oe Chaesŏ 352–5 Chogwang (journal) 353 Chosŏn ilbo (newspaper) 347–51, 352–5 Chosŏn dynasty 343 Chowdhury, Pradip 257 Chraibi, Driss 178 Christ. See Jesus Christianity 42, 76, 80, 81, 127–32, 133, 372, 390, 392, 407 Christmas 46, 372 Chūō shinbun (newspaper) 321–5 Churchill, Winston 391 CIA 17, 114, 121, 127, 377 Círculo y cuadrado (journal). See Cercle et Carré Clark, John Pepper 148 n.18 classicism and neo-classicism 158, 201, 211, 299 Claudel, Paul 236 Clé (journal) 163. See also International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art Clever Ḥasan 163 Coetzee, J. M. 115 Coicou, Massillon 77 Cold War 17, 114 college. See university Collymore, Frank 97, 105 Colombia 48, 75, 76

INDEX

colonialism 5, 13, 25, 39 n.16, 43 n.34, 46, 66, 78, 91, 96, 110, 115, 116, 117, 122, 136, 137, 142, 159, 187, 189, 283, 352, 365, 375, 387, 388, 390, 391–4, 395 Columbia University 44 Columbus, Christopher 321 communism 39, 80, 242, 248, 282, 283, 294, 296, 300 n.7, 304, 315, 377, 380 n.5 Compagnie Générale Transatlantique 95 n.15 Comte, Auguste 73 Confucianism 281, 282, 285, 304 n.6, 322 n.1, 343, 358 Confucius 282, 299 n.6, 328 n.10 Congo, Democratic Republic of the 19, 115. See also Zaire Congress of African Writers of French Expression 121. See also Congress for Cultural Freedom Congress for Cultural Freedom 17, 114, 121, 127, 139 n.10, 145 n.7, 377 conservativism 39 n.17, 43 n.34, 73 n.18, 79 n.65, 116, 159 n.7, 193, 205, 262, 282, 286 n.1, 366, 372 n.2, 377, 382, 389. See also Action Française Constitution of India 258, 259, 262 Constitutional Revolution (Iran) 211 constructivism 49–51, 415, 416 Les Contemporains. See Xiandai. Contemporáneos 26, 47 n.13 Coptic Museum 163 copyright 19 Corcoran Art Museum School (Washington D.C.) 181 Cornell University 149 n.20 Correia, Diogo Álvares 41 n.26 cosmopolitanism 17, 26, 44, 58, 97, 101, 181, 225, 226, 233 n.4, 283, 290, 315, 366, 375, 376, 402 n.4 Costa Rica 61–3 coteries 66, 68, 192, 270, 271, 286, 324, 332, 401 Cotman, John Sell 373 Courlander, Harold 101 n.1 Covarrubias, Miguel 47 Cowley, Malcolm 153 Creacionismo 27 Creation Society (China) 286, 287, 288 n.13 creole 15, 53, 62, 70, 74, 94, 95 n.9, 102, 399 Crescent Moon Society 286 n.1 Cresswell, Darcy 374 Crete. See Minoan civilization Crevel, René 81

425

Crimean War 208 criollo. See creole Cristero Wars 45 Critical Flame (journal) 199–204 Crocombe, Marjorie Tuianekore 394 Crome, John 373 Crusades 187 Cruz, Juana Inés de la 74 Cuba 27, 30, 48, 52–3, 66 cubism 130, 295, 416 Cueto, Dolores 46 Cultural Fever (China) 283 Cultural Revolution 283, 297, 302, 311 Cumhuriyet (newspaper) 205 Cunard, Nancy 1, 117 Curie, Marie 54 Curtius, Anny Dominique 93 Czernowitz conference 397 da Vinci, Leonardo 56 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 34 Dada 151, 192, 226, 295, 325, 345–6, 377, 380. See also Ko Dada Dai Mengou. See Dai Wangshu Dai Shulun 300 Dai Wangshu 283, 289–90, 295 n.1 Dalí, Salvador 81, 163 Dalit literature 242, 243, 266–72 Dalit Panthers 266 Dalit Sahitya. See Dalit literature Damas, Léon 87, 121, 148 n.18 Damascus University 185 dance 27, 65, 89 n.10, 124, 125, 139, 318, 323, 359, 363–4, 381, 394, 396 Dante Alighieri 56, 126 n.30, 311, 350 Dārijah (language) 176 Darío, Rubén 25, 34, 76 Darlington, Levi A. 83 Das Gupta, Basudeva 257 Das, Monohar 257 Daudet, Léon 73 Davis, Jack 395 Davis, Kathleen 5 n.9 Debussy, Claude 56, 298 Decadence 33–4 decolonization 10, 13, 65–7, 114, 116, 127, 128 n.1, 129 n.3, 143–54, 159, 176–80, 181, 241, 243, 316, 365–6, 385–96 Deconstruction (theory) 306 Dede, Kul Hasan 207 degenerate art 159, 161–5 Dekobra, Maurice 78

426

Del Picchia, Menotti 35 Delvaux, Paul 163 democracy 73 n.13, 77 n.48, 110 n.2, 142, 157, 163, 211, 258, 268, 275 n.11, 282, 283, 296, 359, 375 n.13 Deng Xiaohua. See Can Xue Deng Xiaoping 283 Derain, André 228 Dergâh (journal) 194–8 Deshpande, Purushottam Lakshman 269, 270 Dévot, Justin 79 Dewey, John 286 Dhale, Raja 243, 266–72 Dhara, Haradhon 256, 257 dialect 70, 107, 138, 145 n.5, 190, 259 n.13, 278, 306 dialectics 80, 88, 182, 190, 202, 416 diaspora 2, 19, 20, 66, 69, 80, 87, 93, 100, 109, 110 n.4, 114, 121, 135, 144, 359, 397–420 Díaz, Porfirio 47 Dib, Mohammed 178 Dickens, Charles 7, 89 n.11, 373, 375 Dihlavi, Sayyid Ahmad 251 n.2 Dinkar, Ramdhari Singh 258–9 Diogène (journal) 125 divan poetry (Ottoman) 196 n.6, 206 n.5, 207 n.8 Dīwān School (Arabic) 158 Doi Nay (publisher) 357 Dominican Republic 73, 74 n.21 Donatello 368 Donne, John 133 n.1 Doraiswamy, T. K. See Nakulan Dostoevsky, Fyodor 88, 126 n.30, 309, 338 dot painting. See Western Desert Art Movement doudou literature 93–6 Doyle, Laura 13 n.19 Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo Cornado) 44 Drachler, Jacob 148 n.18 drama. See theater drawing 47, 50, 184, 231, 237, 368 n.4, 373, 381 Drumsta, Emily 166 Du Fu 6, 7, 299 Du Mu 292 n.1 Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste 90 n.17 Duerden, Dennis 139–40 Duhamel, Georges 78 n.60 Dumas, Alexandre 61 n.1 Dnyaneshwar 271

INDEX

East Africa 98, 108, 115, 127–32, 145 n.5 East Africa Journal 127 Echeruo, Michael 149–53 École Normale Supérieure (Paris) 93 Edelshtat, Dovid 398 n.4 Eden 105, 386 Edo period 315, 322 n.1, 373 n.8 education 46, 54 n.1, 56, 89 n.11, 122 n.5, 129, 132, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 167, 194, 197, 211, 252–3, 279, 282, 285, 297, 311, 362, 381, 391–3, 408 n.7 Egypt 50, 124, 125, 145 n.9, 157–60, 161–5, 181, 187 n.2, 188 n.6, 237, 253 Ehrenburg, Ilya 287 Einhorn, David. See Aynhorn, David Elahi, Bijan 212 Eliot, T. S. 11, 12, 97, 98–9, 105, 116, 278, 347, 352, 368, 379 n.3 Elliott, Brian 379 Ellison, Ralph 105 Éluard, Paul 81, 202, 349 Ema Shōko 333 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 374 Emre, Yunus 207 England 67, 100, 163, 198 n.7, 245, 279, 318, 361, 371, 372, 374 n.10, 378, 379, 380, 382. See also Britain English (language) 7, 8, 14–15, 19, 21–2, 25, 35 n.1, 66, 104, 115, 123, 137, 145–9, 152, 221, 243, 245, 279, 283, 288, 291, 299, 311, 316, 364, 389, 394 Enlightenment 37 n.8, 191, 397, 408 n.8 Enos, Apisai 395 Enwonwu, Ben 121, 124 n.14, 135–42 epic 85, 145 n.5, 171, 184 n.1, 199, 239, 259 n.8, 274, 303, 326 Eri, Vincent Serei 388, 395 Ern Malley hoax. See Malley, Ern Ernst, Max 163 Esfandiari, Ali. See Yushij, Nima Eshghi, Mirzadeh 212 Esprit (journal) 123 Eşrefoğlu 207 Estridentistas 26, 46 n.8 Etinger, Shloyme 408 L’Étudiant noir 67, 80, 87–90, 93, 121 Evans, Arthur 236–7 Eve 322 existentialism 177 exophony 15 expatriation 15, 67, 68, 97, 281, 366, 368 expressionism 325, 401

INDEX

Eysteinsson, Astradur 3 n.4 Ezekiel, Nissim 243 Fact (newspaper supplement) 377–80 Fagunwa, Daniel O. 149 Fahmī, ʿAzīz Aḥmad 161 Fairburn, A. R. D. 371–6 Faiz, Ahmad Faiz 243 Fanon, Frantz 176 Farrokhzad, Forough 212, 221–3 farmers 62, 178, 330, 336, 419. See also agriculture; peasants fascism 69, 91, 163, 304, 315, 329, 335, 344 fashion 292, 322 n.3, 359 Fatah 184 Faulkner, William 105, 375 Faust 102, 236 Favorables París Poema (journal) 30–1 February Revolution (Trinidad) 103 n.3 Fecr-i Ati movement (Turkey) 194 feminism 1, 32, 54 n.1, 77 n.51, 93, 221, 346 n.2 Feraoun, Mouloud 178 Ferdowsi 212 Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar) 124, 135–42 feudalism 200, 211, 249 Fiallo, Fabio 77 FIARI. See International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art Field, Garrett 242 Fielding, Henry 373, 375 Figaro (newspaper) 318 n.2 Fiji 366, 385–96 Fikret, Tevfik 194, 199, 208 film 36, 215, 221, 263 n.25, 269, 275 n.17, 287, 292, 326, 340–1, 389, 394. See also camera Filostrat, Christian 87 fin de siècle 25, 34 n.3, 226, 295. See also aestheticism First International Conference of Negro Writers (Paris) 104–5 First World Festival of Negro Arts See Festival of Negro Arts First World War 32, 71 n.7, 78 n.55, 226, 260, 262, 316, 321, 412, 415, 419 n.10 Fischer, Ernst 183, 184 Fisher, N. N. 101 n.1 Flaubert, Gustave 122 n.6, 327 n.3 Florida group 27 Flouquet, Pierre-Louis 117 n.1 Fogel, Devorah 399, 415–16

427

folk art and culture 44, 46 n.12, 47, 52, 61–3, 78, 100, 101–2, 104, 105, 107, 110, 131, 146, 148, 149 n.21, 163, 164, 179, 187 n.3, 228, 230, 268, 276 n.19, 277 n.26, 299, 300, 303, 326, 351, 399 Fonte, Maria da 43 foot (poetry) 158, 166–75 Ford, Henry 26 Forster, E. M. 100 Fort Street High School (Sydney) 378 Fort-de-France (Martinique) 91, 93 France 15, 35, 41 n.26, 66, 72, 93, 95 n.15, 124, 133, 139, 176, 178, 233 n.4, 276, 279, 289, 291, 292, 294, 302, 316, 318, 365, 380, 407 France, Anatole 328 Franco-Prussian War 73 n.14 free verse 83, 158, 159 n.5, 162, 166–75, 185, 215, 244, 250–4, 275 n.11, 283, 289, 294, 299, 316, 350, 404–5 French (language) 66, 70, 73, 81, 117, 121, 122–3, 125–6, 159, 161, 176–9, 194, 226, 273, 289, 316, 394 French empire 88 n.4, 118, 122, 365 French Guiana 87 French Revolution 37, 122, 191 Freud, Sigmund 36, 38 n.14, 42, 43, 81, 102, 163–4, 203, 276 n.21, 402 n.3, 403 Friedman, Susan Stanford 3–6, 16, 281 n.1, 299 n.4 Frobenius, Leo 137 Frug, Shimon 408 Fuentes, Carlos 26 Fustel de Colanges 28, Numa Denis 73 Futabatei Shimei 341 futurism 11, 28, 130, 151, 192, 226, 231 n.2, 233 n.4, 317, 318–19, 325 Futurist Art Association (Japan) 318 Fuzûlî 207 Gadgil, Gangadhar 271 Galéot, Antoine-L. 73 Galleria Borghese (Rome) 183 Galsworthy, John 373, 375 Gamio, Manuel 44 Gandhi, Mahatma 262 n.22 Gang of Four 298 Gao Xingjian 15, 284, 302–10 García Calderón, Ventura 76 García Calderón Rey, Francisco 76 n.47 García Monge, Joaquín 61 García Moreno, Gabriel 75

428

Garibaldi, Giuseppe 391 Garip movement 192, 193, 199–204, 250 Gaudí, Antoni 49 Gauguin, Paul 225, 236, 237 Gbadamosi, Bakare 145 n.8, 147 gendaimono film 340 gender 21, 28, 54, 56, 192, 258, 364 Gender of Modernism, The (anthology) 1 Generation of 900 76 n.47 genre 11, 18, 21, 159, 191, 192, 239, 243, 250, 251–3, 278 n.34, 283, 316, 326, 328 n.9, 329, 330, 339 n.10, 340 n.11, 352 George VI of England 107 Georgetown (Guyana) 111 Georgia. See Republic of Georgia German (language) 184 n.3, 221, 407, 408 n.8 Germany 33, 98, 139, 163, 208, 226, 276, 288, 304, 318, 365, 369 Ghana 4, 100, 127, 129 n.3, 151 n.24 Ghani, Najmul 251 n.3 ghazal 199, 213, 250–4 Ghose, Haranath 257 Ghose, J. C. 249 Ghose, Shaileshwar 257 Gibran, Khalil. See Jibrān, Jibrān Khalīl Gide, André 126, 328 Gikandi, Simon 65 Gikuyu (language) 14 Gilbert Islands 394, 395 Ginsberg, Allen 255 Ginsberg, Asher Zvi Hirsch. See Ahad Ha’am Ginza district (Tokyo) 323 n.4, 324, 341 Giraudoux, Jean 71 Girondo, Oliverio 26 Glantz-Leyeles, Aaron 398 n.6, 401–11, 415 Glatshteyn, Yankev 398 n.6, 401–11, 415 Gnanakoothan 276, 277, 278 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 36 n.5, 42, 76, 126 n.30, 311, 339 n.9, 350 Goldman, Jonathan 17 n.23 Gölpınarlı, Abdülbaki 199 Golsorkhi, Khosro 212 Gombrowicz, Witold 308 Gomes, Albert 83 Gomes, Carlos 39 n.17 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 28 Gómez, Juan Vicente 47, 48 n.23 Gonçalves de Magalhães, Domingos José 75 Gonçalves Dias, Antônio 75 Goncharova, Natal’ia 232 n.3 Gordon, I. L. 408 n.8 Gordon, Mikhl 408

INDEX

Goveia, Elsa 110 Goya, Francisco 56, 370 Gracchi 36, 42, 43 n.34 Grace, Patricia 395 Grade, Chaim 399 n.7 Gradgrind, Thomas (Dickens character) 89 Graves, Robert 166 Great Kantō Earthquake 316, 320, 321–25 Great Leap Forward 302 Great War. See First World War Grecia (journal) 28 Greece (ancient) 45, 76, 96 n.21, 171, 368 Greenberg, Clement 110 n.3, 289 Greenberg, Uri Zvi 399 n.7, 417 Griffen, Vanessa 395 Gris, Juan 30 Grodno 398 Grupo dos Cinco (Brazil) 35 Grupo Minorista (Cuba) 27, 52 Grupo Norte (Peru) 30 Group of Five (Brazil) (see Grupo dos Cinco (Brazil)) Group of Nine (Korea) (see Kuinhoe) Guaraci 36 n.2, 40, 41, 43 n.34 Gudiashvili, Lado 234 n.6, 235, 238 Guéhenno, Jean 123 n.9 Guevara, Che 391 Guha, Nihar 257 Guilbaut, Serge 17 n.25 Guillén, Nicolás 27, 52–3, 66, 104 Guinean National Ballet 124 Güiraldes, Ricardo 54 Guo Moruo 287 Gupt, Maithili Sharan 259 Gupta, Amritatanay 257 Gürbilek, Nurdan 192 Guston, Philip 28 Guyana 109–12 ḥadāthah (modernity) 157, 159, 186 Haddad, Malek 178 n.2 Hafez 212 Hagiwara Kyojiro 320, 321–5 Haiti 66, 68, 69–79, 89, 117, 245, 316 Haitian Revolution 66 Hakkı, İsmail 207 Halpern, Moyshe Leib 398 n.5, 409 Hâmid, Abdülhak 196 Hangŭl 345, 347, 349 n.9 Hardy, Thomas 375, 376 Hari Oudh 259. See also Upadhyay, Ayodhya Singh

INDEX

Harishchandra, Bharatendu 259, 260 Harries, Lyndon 145 n.4, 148 n.18, 153 Harris, Max 377–9. See also Malley, Ern Harris, Wilson 107 Harrison, Mere 383 Harte, Bret 374 Ḥasan II of Morocco 176 Hasidism 397 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) 397, 408. See also Enlightenment Havana 25, 27, 52 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 374 Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl 32 Hayot, Eric 16 Hebraism 399, 408 Hebrew 15, 397–9, 407–8, 412, 413 n.3, 417–20 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 80, 81, 416 Heidegger, Martin 54 Heine, Heinrich 76, 208, 287 n.7, 398 Hemingway, Ernest 106, 374, 375 Henein, Georges 163 n.6, 164 Heng, Geraldine 5 Henríquez Ureña, Camila 77 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro 77 Henríquez y Caravajal, Francisco 77 Henríquez y Caravajal, Frederico 77 Heredia, José María de 96 Hergesheimer, Joseph 374 Heyward, Michael 377 Hibbert, Fernand 78 Hidalgo, Alberto 26 Hikmet, Nazım 192, 194 Hindi (language) 242, 243, 244, 248, 249, 258–65, 394 Hinduism 86 n.2, 259, 274 Hirano Jinkei 333 Hirato Renkichi 12, 317, 318–19 Hitler, Adolf 390, 391 Hoàng Đạo 357 Hodeir, Andre 101 n.1 Hofshteyn, Dovid 399 n.7 Hogar, El (journal) 75 Hokusai Katsushika 71, 373 Holland 37 n.12, 163 Holocaust 399, 415, 417, 420 Holy Roman Empire 397 n.1 Home (journal) 368–70 Homer 236, 301 Honarmandi, Hasan 221–3 Hong Huang 297–301 Hong Kong 281, 283, 289, 291, 307

429

Hongō district (Tokyo) 323, 324 Hōtere, Ralph 381, 382, 383, 396 Howe, Irving 150–1 Hu Shih 282, 286 Hu Yaobang 303 Huckleberry Finn 374–5 Hüdaî, Aziz Mahmud 207 Huddleston, Sisley 162 Hughes, Langston 52, 148 n.18 Hugo, Victor 296 Huidobro, Vicente 26, 27, 28, 30 Hulme, T. E. 300 humanism 89, 122, 123, 126, 155, 180, 199, 215, 260, 262, 263, 286 n.1, 313 Hundred Days’ Reform 282 hunger 33, 34, 45, 71, 126, 180, 249, 256, 257, 323, 325, 396 Hungry Generation 243, 255–7 Hungryalists. See Hungry Generation Huxley, Aldous 173, 375, 376 I-novel 316, 326, 327 n.5, 328 n.9, 352 Ibarbourou, Juana de 58, 77 Ibsen, Henrik 126 n.30 Iceland, R. See Ayzland, R. Idanre (Wole Soyinka) 152 Idealism (philosophy) 415 Igbo 145 n.6, 146, 153 n.28 Ignatoff, Dovid 398 n.5 Ihimaera, Witi 395 İkinci Yeni movement (Turkey) 192, 199 Iḷaṅkōvaṭikaḷ 274 n.2 İlhan, Attilâ 199 Iliazd. See Zdanevich, Ilia Im Hwa 343, 353 n.2 imagism 295, 297, 300, 401, 410 imperialism 4, 11, 66, 69, 77, 90, 157, 225, 250–1, 281, 282, 329, 343, 344. See also colonialism impressionism 298, 373, 398, 402 n.4 Inca 111 India 17, 85, 116, 241–79, 407. See also British India India (weekly newspaper) 275 n.11 Indian Constitution. See Constitution of India Indian diaspora 83–6, 128, 359 Indian People’s Theatre Association 242 Indian Progressive Writers’ Association. See Progressive Writers’ Association Indians (American) 39–43, 45, 61, 62, 73–4, 109, 111, 401 Índice de la nueva poesía americana 26

430

indigenism 26, 69–79, 109 indigenous peoples and cultures 13, 14, 15, 20, 26, 27, 28, 35–43, 44, 45, 46 n.11, 61, 62, 66, 69, 74, 111 n.6, 115, 141, 143–54, 155, 176, 302, 365–7, 381–4, 385–96. See also Aboriginal people (Australia); Indians (American); Māori individualism 35, 65, 141, 213, 215, 221, 283, 286 n.2, 294, 354, 374, 382, 401 Indonesia 359 Industrial Revolution 200, 206 industrialization 5, 8, 62, 315–16, 329 inequality 10, 13–16, 19, 21, 52, 316 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 370 institutions 1, 16–19, 39 n.19, 113–14, 121, 193, 206, 208, 248, 336, 399 International Exhibition of Modern Art (Paris) 135 International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI) 161, 163 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (League of Nations) 58 International Settlement (Shanghai) 283, 286, 287 internationalism 27, 157, 159, 161–3, 242, 315, 317 Intrepid (journal) 255–7 Introspectivism 398, 399, 401–11, 412, 415. See also Inzikh (journal) Inzikh (movement). See Introspectivism Inzikh (journal) 398, 401–11, 415. See also Introspectivism Iran 13, 19, 211–23, 239, 250–4 Iraq 19, 157, 158, 159, 166–75, 253 Ireland 245, 276, 308 Islam 157–8, 167, 174, 185–90, 189, 206 n.4, 252, 259 n.9, 419 Islamic Golden Age 187 n.1 Israel 14, 159 n.7, 181, 399, 417–20 Itaia, Maunaa 395 Italy 35, 45, 163, 276, 382 Itrî (Buhurizade Mustafa) 206 Jābir ibn Ḥayyān 187 Jabrā, Jabrā Ibrāhīm 166 Jaci 36 n.2, 40, 43 n.34 Jacket (journal) 377 Jacobs, H. P. 107 n.18 Jacobs, W. W. 373 Jaffe, Aaron 17 n.23 Jāhilīyah 189 Jahn, Janheinz 98 n.4

INDEX

Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 245 Jamaica 78 n.58, 102, 107, 109 James, C. L. R. 65, 83, 109, 110 James, William 40 Jammes, Francis 96 Janakiraman, T. 275, 276, 278 Japan 2, 9, 12, 18, 20, 71, 202, 245–7, 281–3, 285, 288, 289, 291, 295, 315–41, 343–4, 347, 352, 373, 406, 407 Japanese empire 282, 316, 343 Japanese occupation of China 282, 289, 291 Japanese occupation of Korea 316, 329, 343–4, 352 Japanese Proletarian Arts Federation 329 Jawodimbari, Arthur 395 Jayakanthan, D. 275, 276 Jayyusi, Salma Khadra 157 jazz 30, 33, 100–8 Jemie, Onwuchekwa 143, 148 n.19 Jeremiah (prophet) 417 Jesuits 37 n.12, 42, 43 n.35 Jesus 37, 127, 129, 255, 413 n.9 Jewish Labor Bund 398 Jewishness 44, 144, 287 n.5, 287 n.6, 397–420 Ji Xian 283, 294–6 Jiang Qing 298 n.1 Jibrān, Jibrān Khalīl 158 jidaigeki film 340 n.12 Jindyworobak group 366 João VI 40 n.21, 42 Job (biblical character) 134, 184 Johnson-Reed Act 399 Jonah (biblical character) 184 Jones, David 150 n.23 Jones, Leroi 101 n.1, 103, 104 n.5, 148 Joshi, Sharad 263 Joyce, James 4, 54, 113, 152, 305, 308, 332 Jussawala, Adil 243 Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr 167 n.3 Kabbalism 412, 413 n.3 Kabir 259, 260 Kadish, Reuben 28 Kafka, Franz 308, 311, 313 Kahlo, Frida 26 Kaizo (magazine) 326, 336 Kakabadze, Davit 234 n.6 Kakheti province (Georgia) 231, 234 Kalidasa 256 Kalliney, Peter 16, 17 n.24, 114 n.2 Kallol (journal) 242, 243 Kāmil, Anwar 162

INDEX

Kāmil, Fuʾād 164 Kamleshwar 258–65 Kandasamy, Sa. 275, 276 Kandinsky, Wassily 140 n.13, 327 Kantō. See Great Kantō Earthquake KAPF. See Korean Artistic Proletarian League Kapur, Geeta 241 n.2 Kasaipwalova, John 387, 395 Kashani, Molana Mohtasham 213 Kashiwagi Shunzo 333 Kasmaei, Shams 212 Katz, Daniel 14 n.20 Kawasaki Ai. See Sagawa Chika Keijō Imperial University 352 Keita, Fobéda 124 n.17 Kelley, Robin D. G. 161 n.1 Kemalism 192–3. See also Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal Kenya 14, 104, 115, 127–32, 145 n.4 Kenyan Emergency 127 Kerr, Donald Bevis 378 n.1 Keyserling, Hermann 37 Khái Hưng 357 Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed 176 Khaldūn 190 Khanolkar, Chintamani Tyambak 271 Kikou Yamata 71 Kikuchi Kan 331, 335 Kim Haegyŏng. See Yi Sang Kim Inson. See Kim Kirim Kim Kijin 345–6 Kim Kirim 343, 347–51 Kim Myŏngsun 346 Kim Namch’ŏn 343 Kim Ŏk 350 n.10 Kingston (Jamaica) 103, 109 Kinshasa 155 kinto (Georgian street peddler) 228, 230, 238 Kipling, Rudyard 137 n.5 Kishida Kunio 327 Kitasono Katue 332 Klee, Paul 163 Ko Dada 345–6 Ko Hanyong. See Ko Dada Kobayashi Hideo 317, 335–41 Kobayashi Takiji 317, 329–31 Kobi Gallery (Tanzania) 127 Koch, Kenneth 377 Kogito (journal) 334 n.5 Koishikawa district (Tokyo) 323, 324 Kolatkar, Arun 243 Kolocotroni, Vassiliki 20

431

Koothu-P-Pattarai group (India) 276 n.19 Korea 20, 216, 316, 329, 343–55 Korean Artistic Proletarian League 343. See also Japanese Proletarian Arts Movement; proletarian literature Korean War 347 Kuinhoe (Group of Nine) 343, 347 Kulagoe, Celestine 395 Kulbak, Moyshe 399 n.7 Kuomintang 282, 283 Kuriyagawa Hakuson 288 n.12 Kurosawa Akira 326 Kvitko, Leib 399 n.7 Laâbi, Abdellatif 15, 159, 160, 176–80 LaCoss, Don 161 Lagerkvist, Pär 273 Lahouti, Abolghasem 212 Lamming, George 97–9, 100, 104–5, 108 Landau, Zishe. See Landoy, Zisho Landoy, Zisho 409 Lapin, B. 409 Larionov, Mikhail 232 n.3 Larrea, Juan 30 Larreta, Enrique 75 Larsen, Neil 37 n.8 Larson, Charles 4, 11, 113 Latham, Sean 3 Latin America 13, 16, 19, 20, 25–63, 66, 69, 70 n.1, 73–7, 109, 111, 176, 276 Latvia 44, 398 Lautréamont, Comte de 81 Lawrence, D. H. 374–5 Laye, Camara 105 Lazarus, Neil 114 n.2, 144 Lazo, Agustín 47 Le Dentu, Mikhail 230, 231 n.2, 232 n.3, 233 n.4 Le Play, Frédéric 73 Lebanon 157, 176, 185 Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie René 96 Left Review (journal) 248–9 Légitime défense (journal) 67, 68, 80–2 Leguía, Augusto B. 32 Leib, Mani 398 n.5, 409 Leica camera 332 Leivik, H. 398 n.5, 410 Levenson, Michael 3 n.4 Lema Kusa 155 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 80, 379 Lenssen, Anneka 159 n.6, 161 n.1, 162 n.2 Leomala, Albert 387, 395

432

Léro, Étienne 69, 80–2, 122 n.7 Léro, Thélus 80–2 Leroux, Etienne 133 Léticée, Marie 70 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 36, 137, 140 Lewis, I. M. 145 Leyb, Mani. See Leib, Mani Leyvik, H. See Leivik, H. Li Dongyang 299 Li Ji 300 n.7 Liang Shiqiu 286 Lianhe Bao (newspaper) 302–10 liberalism 17, 237 n.1, 283, 335 Liessin, A. 408 Likht, Mikhl 14, 399, 412–14 Lila Charitra 271–2 Lima 25 Lindgran, Allana 16 Lindsay, Vachel 405 Lippit, Seiji 326 Lisbon 42 n.32, 43 n.35, 58 Lithuania 398, 408 n.10 Liu Xiaofeng 310 Liu Zaifu 302 Liyolo Limbe M’Puanga 155 Lizaso, Félix 27 n.2 Lo Liyong, Taban 127 Loach, Allen de 255 Lomax, Alan 147 London 67, 83, 100, 106, 109, 140, 144 n.3, 147 n.17, 152 n.25, 242, 248–9, 368, 398 London Bulletin (journal) 164 London Magazine (journal) 98–9 Longus 327 n.3 Lorca, Federico García 28, 153 Loti, Pierre 71 Lovelace, Earl 106 Loy, Mina 11, 12, 332 Lu Xun 116, 282, 285–8, 303 Lucknow 242, 248. See also Progressive Writers’ Association Lugo, Américo 77 Lugones, Leopoldo 75 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 330, 331 Luṭfī, Abū Khalīl 164 lyric poetry 53, 213, 287 n.4, 295, 299, 333–4, 415 Ma Jianzhong 305 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria 75–6 Madagascar 69, 96 n.20, 117–20

INDEX

Madame Blanche (journal) 332, 333 n.2 Madero, Francisco 47 n.20 Madgulkar, Gajanan Digambar 269–70 Madhavan, Aa. 277 Madubuike, Ihechukwu 143, 148 n.19 Maeil Sinbo (newspaper) 345 n.1 Maeztú, Maria de 54 Magalhães, Couto de 39 n.18 magemono 339, 340 Maghreb 159, 176–80 Maharashtra 267 Maharashtra Dalit Literature Society 243 Mahat, A. 361 Mahimbhat 271–2 Maiai, Ata 395 Mailer, Norman 102 Maisuradze, Archil 235 Makdisi, Ussama 159 nn.6–7 Makerere Art School 127 Makerere College 128 n.2, 130, 145 n.7 Malay 20, 359–64 Malayan Association of Malay Artists 361 Malaysia 359–64 Malevich, Kazimir 232 n.3 Malfatti, Anita 35 Malifa, Sano 395 Mallarmé, Stéphane 153, 185, 189, 294 Malley, Ern 366, 368, 377–80. See also Harris, Max; McAuley, James; Stewart, Harold Mammeri, Mouloud 178 Mana (journal) 385–96 Mandate Palestine. See Palestine Manikkodi group (India) 278 n.34 Manohar (journal) 268, 270 Mansfield, Katherine 286, 366, 367 Manu 259 Mao Zedong 281, 283, 297, 298 n.1, 391 Mao, Douglas 3 Māori 365, 366, 367, 381–4, 385, 388, 395, 396 Maples Arce, Manuel 26 Mara, Ratu Sir Kamisese 390 n.11 Marathi (language) 242, 243, 266–72, 270, 272 Marcelin, Frédéric 78 Marcelin, Pierre 78 n.57 Marcuse, Herbert 183 Marechera, Dambudzo 115 Mariátegui, José Carlos 26–7 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 11, 12, 28, 231 n.2, 318

INDEX

Mariz, Antonio de 41 Markandey 264 n.28 Markish, Peretz 399 n.7 Marley, Bob 102 n.2 Marris, Charles 371 Martín Fierro (journal) 27, 28 Martinique 12, 15, 66–7, 68, 80, 87–90, 91–2, 93–6, 176 Marx, Karl 90 Marxism 26, 67, 80–2, 87–90, 110 n.4, 159, 176, 277 n.26, 329, 330 n.1, 335 Mary (mother of Jesus) 41, 42 n.29 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 143 Mastika (magazine) 359, 361 Mataira, Kāterina Te Heikōkō 367, 381–4, 385 Matchitt, Para 381, 382, 396 Matisse, Henri 28, 228 Matta, Roberto 111 Mau (Sāmoan independence movement) 385 Mau Mau uprising 127 Maugham, Somerset 395 Mauj (journal) 270 n.16, 271 Maurras, Charles 69, 73, 117 Mavi (journal) 199 Mavinga ma NkondoNgwala 155 MAVO group 317, 321, 324, 327 n.6 Mawāqif (journal) 176, 181–4, 185 May Fourth Movement 282, 285, 305, 307 May Laws 397 Maya (Hindu and Buddhist concept) 86 Mayans 45, 111 Mayemba ma Nkakasa 155 Mazumdar, Benoy 257 McCandlish, Laura 311 n.1 McAuley, James 366, 368, 377–80 McClintock, Anne 5 n.10 McGurl, Mark 18 Mead, Margaret 395 Mecca 129 Meehan, Kevin 70 Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna 243 Meiji period 316, 325 nn.9–10 Melbourne 378 Memmi, Albert 178 Menakhem 409 Mendelssohn, Moses 408 n.8 Ménil, René 67, 80–2, 91 Mérida, Carlos 46 Mesopotamia 50 n.1 Mestizo poetics 52–3

433

Mevlana. See Rumi Mexican Revolution 25, 26, 44–8 Mexico 25, 26, 28, 44–8, 49, 74, 75, 77, 111, 163 Mexico City 25, 46 n.8, 47, 48 Mgalobashvili, Ilia 235 Michelangelo 328 Michener, James 395 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 371 Middle East 21, 115, 176, 193, 250 Miller, Christopher L. 87 Miller, Tyrus 3 n.4 Ming dynasty 299 Minkov, Nachum Baruch 398 n.6, 401–11, 415 Minoan civilization 237 Minotaure (journal) 162 Mintz, Sidney 65 Miomandre, Francis de 76 Miranda, Francisco de 74 Mistral, Gabriela 26, 28, 58–60, 61, 77 Misty poetry 283, 297–301 Mitra, Sunil 257 Mitra, Tridib 257 Miura Tokio. See Odakane Jirō Mo Yan 311 Mobuto, Joseph-Désiré. See Mobutu Sese Seko Mobutu Sese Seko 155 Modern Poetry Quarterly (journal) 283, 294 modernismo (Latin America) 25, 32, 34 nn.3–4, 70 n.1, 76 nn.42–3 Modernist School (Taiwan) 283, 294–6 Modotti, Tina 28, 44 Mohammed (prophet) 128 Mokengo Kwekwe 155 Molière 126 n.30 MoMA. See Museum of Modern Art (New York) Mona Lisa 183 monarchism 69, 73, 117, 211 Mondrian, Piet 49 Mongols 187 n.1 Monnerot, Jules-Marcel 80–2 Montaigne, Michel de 37, 89 n.16 Montalvo, Juan 75 Montevideo 49, 58 Moore, Gerald 144, 152 n.26 Moore, Henry 163 Moore, Marianne 413 n.6 Morand, Paul 74, 89 Mori Ōgai 318, 341 Morning Light (journal). See Chogwang

434

Moro, César 27 Morocco 159, 176–80 Moscow 201, 226, 231 n.2, 232 n.3, 233, 234, 398 Mount Pelée 94 n.1 Mountain, Elizabeth 383 movies. See film Mowni 275, 276 Mphalele, Ezekiel 148 n.18 Mu Shiying 283 Mulgan, Alan 371–2 Müller, Hans 339 n.9 Mumbai. See Bombay Munich 369 Munich Artists’ Association 369 n.5 Munich Secession 369 n.5 mural painting 28, 45 n.6, 46, 49, 127 Murang’a Murals 127 Murayama Tomoyoshi 318, 327 n.6. See also MAVO group Muru, Selwyn 381, 382, 383, 396 Museo Michoacano 28 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 28 museums 128, 139 n.10, 163, 361–2, 368, 389 music 26, 27, 39 n.17, 46, 52, 60, 65, 74, 75, 85, 100–8, 109, 112, 118, 119 n.9, 125, 127–30, 132, 147 n.16, 171, 183, 190, 195–6, 201–2, 206 n.5, 207 n.6, 238, 245, 257, 259, 274 n.5, 290, 292, 298, 299, 319, 333, 334, 336, 351, 370, 381, 384, 387, 396, 404, 405, 414, 418, 419 Muthuswamy, Na. 276 Myojo, Kiyoko 18 n.27 Nabuco de Araújo, Joaquim Aurélio Barreto 76 Nadan, Nanjil 277, 278 Nagar, Amritlal 262 Nagarjun 262 Nagi Yoshikawa 345 nahḍah 157, 158, 187, 188 Nahuatl (language) 62 n.2 Naidu, Sarojini 248 Nailî-i Kadim 206 Naipaul, V. S. 393 Nairobi 127, 147 n.17 nakbah 158 Nakulan 275, 276, 278 Nam Phong (journal) 357 NAPF. See Japanese Proletarian Arts Federation

INDEX

Nassir, Ahmad 145, 152, 153, 154 Natachee, Alan 395 Nataraja 85 National Autonomous University of Mexico 44 National Dance Theatre of the Cook Islands 396 National Dance Theatre of Fiji 396 National Struggle (Turkey) 194 nationalism 2, 12, 14, 15, 18, 32 n.1, 73 n.14, 78 n.55, 83, 88 n.5, 126, 128, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163 n.9, 166, 185, 191, 225, 226, 243, 245, 251, 259 n.4, 275 n.11, 282, 300 n.11, 303, 315, 316, 317, 343, 366, 395, 398 Native people. See Indians (American); ­indigenous peoples and cultures; indigenism naturalism 50, 58 n.1, 150, 164 n.10, 323, 326, 327, 336, 339 Nau, Jean-Antoine 93–6 Nauru 385, 394 Nav Kavya (New Wave) 270 Navbharat (magazine) 267–8 Navshakti (newspaper) 268 Nayi Kahaani movement (New Story) 243, 244, 258–65 Nayi Kavita movement (New Poetry) 243, 258, 263 Nazi. See fascism Islam, Kazi Nazrul 242 Nedim 196, 207 negritude 52, 67, 87–90, 91 n.1, 93, 101, 103, 104 n.5, 114, 121–6, 129 n.3, 135, 137 n.2, 140, 145 n.6 Nemade, Bhalchandra 270 Neogy, Rajat 127 Nerlekar, Anjali 266 n.2 Neruda, Pablo 26, 27, 28, 30, 61 Nerval, Gérard de 189 Nervo, Amada 75 New Apocalypse school (UK poetry) 379 New Culture Movement (China) 281, 282, 285 New Hebrides 387, 388, 395 new modernist studies 3, 4 New Orleans 101, 103, 104, 105 New Poetry (Arabic) 157–59, 166–75, 185–90 New Poetry (China) 283, 289, 294–6, 297–301 New Poetry (Hindi). See Nayi Kavita movement (New Poetry) New Poetry (Iran). See She’r-e No New Poetry (Tamil) 244, 275–6, 277–8

INDEX

New Sensationism (Japan) 283, 291 New York 26, 28, 47, 100, 103, 254, 367, 379, 398, 401, 412 New York Times 44 New Zealand 7, 13, 365–6, 371–6, 381–4, 385, 386 n.1, 392, 395 Newborn Generation (China) 297 newspapers 70, 117, 191, 194, 197, 205, 215, 231, 267, 268, 318 n.2, 321, 322, 345, 347, 372, 375 n.13, 377, 398, 399 Newton, Sir Isaac 413 Ngày nay (journal) 357 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 14 Nhất Linh 357 Nheengatu (language) 35 n.1 Nicholls, Peter 3 n.4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 76, 226, 308 Nigeria 100, 108, 114, 115, 135–42, 143–54 Nigeria Magazine 149, 152 Nihon Shijin (journal) 318–19 Nihon University 347 Nin, Buck 383, 396 Nirala 259, 260 Nissabouri, Mostafa 176 Nizan, Paul 87, 88 Njau, Elimo 115, 127–32 Nkrumah, Kwame 129 n.3 Nobel Prize for literature 58, 192, 205, 245, 302, 328 n.11 noble savage 37 n.8, 386, 389, 395 nobility. See aristocracy; monarchism; royalty Noh theater 12 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo. See Walker, Kathy Nord-Sud (journal) 28 Nosotros (journal) 75 La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française (journal) 123 n.9 novelas de la tierra 61 Nsukka. See University of Nigeria, Nsukka Nunes, Benedito 36–41 Nuwās, Abū 159, 185, 187, 188, 189 Ny Fandrosoam-Baovao (journal) 117–20 Nzegwu, Nkiru 138 n.7 Ocampo, Victoria 28, 54–7, 61 Oceania 365–96 Odakane Jirō 334 Oğuz Atay 192 Okara, Gabriel 100, 108 Okeke, Uche 135, 139 n.8 Okigbo, Christopher 145–8, 149, 153–4 Okike (journal) 143–54

435

Oktay Rifat 199–204 Ono Tosaburo 320 Opium Wars 282 Oreamuno, Yolanda 61–3 Orhan Veli 199–204 Orientalism 2, 37 n.10, 96 nn.16–20, 137 n.4 Orozco, José Clemente 44, 45, 46 Ortega y Gasset, José 150 n.23 Ottoman (language) 14, 209 n.12 Ottoman empire 157, 187, 191–3, 194, 205–9, 398 Ouyang Xiu 300 p’Bitek, Okot 145, 153–4 Paa Ya Paa Art Centre (Kenya) 127 Pacific islands 10, 13, 365–6, 385–96 Padhye, Prabhakar Narayan 268 Padmanabhan, Neela 276–7 Pak T’aewŏn 343, 352, 353 Pakistan 241–3, 250 Palés Matos, Luis 104 Palestine 2, 15, 144 n.3, 160, 181–4, 253, 398, 399, 417 Pamuk, Orhan 192, 205 pan-Africanism 114, 176 pan-Americanism 26, 28, 32 n.1 pan-Arabism 159, 166, 176 Panda, Jogesh 257 Pant, Sumitranandan 260 n.16 Papua New Guinea 144, 387, 388, 394, 395, 396 Papunya Tula (art collective) 367 Parācakti 274 Paraguassu (Catarina Álvares Paraguaçu) 41 n.26 Paris 30, 47, 49, 58, 67, 71 n.5, 75 n.32, 76 n.47, 80, 87, 93, 94 n.1, 104, 121, 135, 163 n.6, 164 n.11, 185, 225, 226, 235 n.8, 289, 292, 318 n.2, 332, 369, 398 Parnassianism 25, 96 nn.16–17, 296 Parsai, Harishankar 263 Partition of India and Pakistan 241, 243, 250, 260, 263 Pasuvaiah. See Ramaswamy, Sundara Patel, Gieve 243 Pater, Walter 48 Paton, Alan 106, 107 Paul, Edmond 79 peasants 45 nn.3–4, 61, 62, 78, 105, 229–30, 231, 261, 288 Pedro I of Brazil 42 n.32 Péguy, Charles 77–8

436

pencak silat (martial arts) 363 Penrose, Roland 163 People’s Art Theater 302 People’s University of Beijing 297 Péret, Benjamin 81 Peretz, I. L. 397, 409 Perkins, Christopher 373 Perlmutter, Yekhiel. See Yeshurun, Avot Persia 171, 193, 199, 211–23, 228, 231, 234, 282 Persian (language) 207 n.6, 211–23, 250, 251 Peru 26–7, 30–1, 32–4, 47–8, 75 n.31, 76, 111 Peseta, Tili 395 Pessoa, Fernando 309 Petaia, Sapa’u Ruperake 392, 395 Pétion, Alexandre 74 Pettoruti, Emilio 28 Phoenix (journal) 366 Phong Hóa (journal) 357–8 photography 28, 33, 44, 111, 138, 321, 332 n.1, 354–5. See also camera; film Picasso, Pablo 11, 12, 163, 202, 225, 226, 301 Pichamurti, Na. 276, 277 n.31, 278 Pillai, Raymond 395 Pilotin, Michel 80–2 Pindorama 41, 43 Pinsk 398 Piratininga 42, 29–31, 43 Pirosmanashvili, Niko. See Pirosmani, Niko Pirosmani, Niko 225–39 Pirosmanishvili, Niko. See Pirosmani, Niko Pitt, William 39 Planter’s Punch (journal) 78 n.58 Pleasants, Henry 101 n.1 Plessis, Klara du 23 plot 263, 275, 326–8, 331, 340 Poe, Edgar Allan 56, 172, 276 Poland 233 n.4, 308, 398, 415–16, 417, 419 Polish (language) 15, 399, 415, 417, 419 Polynesia 225, 382 n.3, 386 n.1, 387 n.5, 391, 395 n.15 Port-au-Prince 89 Port-of-Spain 103 Portal, Magda 27, 32–4 Portugal 37, 39 n.19, 40 n.21, 42 nn.28–32, 43 nn.33–5, 309, 315 Portuguese (language) 25, 35–43 postcolonialism 100, 127 post-impressionism 324 Potchefstroom University 133 Pound, Ezra 1, 12, 15, 116, 152, 153, 242, 245, 277 n.31, 300, 347, 379 n.3

INDEX

poverty 13, 45, 105, 117, 232, 237, 249, 292, 321, 325, 392, 397 PPMM. See Malayan Association of Malay Artists Prasad, Jayashankar 260 Praxiteles 237 pre-Columbian 26, 44, 49, 69, 111 Pre-Raphaelitism 198 n.7, 403 Premchand, Munshi 248, 260–1 Présence Africaine (journal) 114, 121–6, 145 n.9, 176 Preston, Margaret 366, 368–70 Price-Mars, Jean 70, 78 Priestley, J. B. 375 primitivism 36 nn.6–7, 50, 62, 93, 102, 110, 111, 136, 137, 140, 150, 225–6, 228, 232 n.3, 234 n.6, 236–7, 239, 381 Princeton University 166 Prisma (journal) 27 Priyamvada, Usha 264 n.30, 265 n.35 Proa (journal) 27 Progressive Writers’ Association 242, 248–9 proletarian literature 317, 329–31, 334 n.5, 336, 343, 345. See also Japanese Proletarian Arts Movement; Korean Artistic Proletarian League proletariat 33, 45 n.6, 63, 65, 81, 128 n.1, 178, 211, 262, 283, 287, 288, 317, 322 n.3, 329–31, 336, 345, 406 Proust, Marcel 56, 117, 305 provincialism 98, 263, 366, 373 n.5 Prussia 375 n.13 Pshavela, Vazha 235, 237 psychoanalysis 80, 81, 96 n.24, 162, 354 psychology 36, 40 n.25, 81, 91, 136, 168, 174, 194, 205, 208, 209, 252, 255, 264, 276, 298, 305, 309, 341, 353–4, 380 Pu La. See Deshpande, Purushottam Lakshman Pu Songling 292 n.4 Puchner, Martin 11 n.18 Pudumaipitthan 275, 276 Puett, Michael 5 n.9 Punch (British comedy magazine) 78 Putu kavitaikaḷ (New poetry) See New Poetry (Tamil). PWA. See Progressive Writer’s Association Qajar era (Iran) 211 qaṣīdat al-nathr (Arabic prose poem) 158 Qing dynasty (China) 282, 286, 288, 300 nn.11–5

INDEX

Quadrant (journal) 17, 377 Quechua (language) 62 n.2 queer theory 58 Quest (journal) 17 Quitman, Maurice-Sabas 80–2 Qurʾān 185, 190, 212 Rabearivelo, Jean-Joseph 69, 114, 117–20, 148 n.18 Rabie, Jan 133 Rabinovich, Sholem. See Aleichem, Sholem Raboy, Yitzkhak 398 n.5 Raghav, Rangey 262 Rai, Debi 256, 257 Rainey, Lawrence 1, 17 n.23 Rainizanabololona, M. J. 120 Rajagopalan, Ku. Pa. 276, 277 Rajanarayanan, Ki. 277, 278 Rajoelisolo, Charles 118, 120 Rakesh, Anita 265 n.34 Rakesh, Mohan 258, 264 n.27 Ram, Harsha 15, 16 Ramalho, João 42 Ramamirtham, La. Sa. 276 Ramanantoanina, Ny Avana 118, 120 Ramaswamy, Sundara 275, 276, 278 n.33 Ranganathan, R. See Gnanakoothan Rangarajan, Sujatha 275 Rasa. See Harishchandra, Bharatendu Rashed, N. M. 243, 250–4 Rassim, Aḥmed 164 Ravitch, Melekh 399 n.7 Raymond, Marcel 150 n.23 Read, Herbert 162–4, 352 realism 8, 17, 61, 83, 128, 135, 141, 167, 177, 191, 199, 230, 243, 244, 251, 260, 263, 264, 277 n.25, 278 n.34, 281, 283, 294, 297, 298 n.2, 302, 303, 307, 341 n.15, 343, 352–5, 369, 370, 374 n.9 Red and Black (journal). See Aka to kuro Reed, Alma 44 Reed, John 379 Refik Halit Karay 194 Reid, Vic 107 Rembrandt 128–9 Renaissance, Arab. See nahḍah Renaissance (European) 45, 50, 124, 206, 229 Renaissance, Māori 381 Renaissance, Mexican 44 Renan, Ernest 73 Renard, Jules 327–8 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 370

437

Repertorio Americano (journal) 61–3 Republic of China (mainland China) 282, 286 Republic of Georgia 225–39 Republic of China (Taiwan). See, Taiwan Residencia de Señoritas (Madrid) 54 n.1 Réunion (island) 96 n.16 Reverdy, Pierre 28, 30 Revista de Antropofagia (journal) 35–43 Revista de Avance (journal) 30–1, 52 revolution 27, 32, 33, 34, 37, 44–8, 56, 65, 66, 67, 69, 80, 87–90, 91 n.2, 103 n.3, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129 n.3, 140 n.12, 141, 155, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163 n.6, 166 n.1, 176–80, 181–4, 186, 191, 206, 211, 226, 230, 233 n.4, 248, 251, 261, 282, 283, 285–8, 297, 298, 302, 303, 311, 330 n.1, 357, 389, 391, 398, 399, 406. See also Chinese Communist Revolution; Constitutional Revolution (Iran); Cultural Revolution; February Revolution (Trinidad); French Revolution; Haitian Revolution; Mexican Revolution; Russian Revolution; Xinhai Revolution Revue de Génève (journal) 75 Revue de l’Amérique Latine (journal) 75 Revue des Conférences Françaises en Orient (journal) 164 Revue du monde noir (journal) 80 Revue indigène (journal) 66, 68, 69–79, 109, 117 Revueltas, Fermín 46 Reyes, Alfonso 54, 75 Reyzin, Avrom 408 Reza Shah 211 Rhodesia 115 Richards, I. A. 352 Riding, Laura 166 Rimbaud, Arthur 81, 123, 189 Rivera, Diego 26, 28, 44, 45 n.6, 46, 47, 161. See also International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art Robakidze, Grigol 226, 228 n.1, 235 n.7, 236–9 Robin Hood 61 Rodin, Auguste 328 Rodó, José Enrique 76 Rodriguez Lozano, Manuel 47 Rogers, Gayle 3, 14 n.20 Rogers, Sarah 159 n.6, 161 n.1, 162 n.2 Rohlehr, Gordon 102 n.2, 103 n.3 Rolnik, J. 409 Romania 398

438

Romanticism 8, 9, 33, 37, 50, 75 n.35, 75 n.38, 124 n.18, 157, 158, 166, 167, 177, 195 n.3, 235 n.10, 251, 259 n.14, 260, 261, 286 n.2, 296, 300 n.8, 303, 308, 318 n.2, 347, 350, 351, 372, 373 n.5, 374 n.9, 389, 398 La Ronde (journal) 69, 70, 71 Rosemont, Franklin 161 n.1 Rosenfeld, Morris 398 n.4, 408 Roskolenko, Harry 379 Ross, Stephen 16 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 403 Roumer, Émile 78 Rousseau, Henri 226 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 36 n.5, 37, 236, 372 Roy, Debi. See Rai, Debi Roy, Raja Rammohan 259 Roy Choudhury, Malay 255–7 Roy Choudhury, Samir 257 Royalism. See monarchism royalty 39, 74, 117, 122, 211, 351, 363. See also aristocracy; monarchism Royzenblat, H. 408 Rumi 196 n.4, 199, 207, 212 Ruskin, John 198 Russia 33, 163, 183, 211, 225–39, 276, 287, 288, 289, 316, 318, 319, 335, 397, 398, 399, 409 n.11, 409 n.13, 412 Russian (language) 123, 225–39, 338 n.8, 408 n.8 Russian Revolution 33, 37, 226, 230, 287 Russo-Japanese War 2, 316, 322 n.2 Saadi 212 Saaga, Eti 395 Sade, Marquis de 81 Sagawa Chika 332–4, 354 n.4 Sahni, Bhisham 258 Saint George 232 Saint-Pierre (town in Martinique) 94 Saint-Saëns, Camille 201 Saint Thérèse (Thérèse de Lisieux) 74 sakoku (Japanese isolationism) 315 Salehuddin, Mohd 360, 361–2 Sāmoa 365–6, 367, 385–96 samurai 333 n.4, 339 n.10, 340 n.11 San José (Costa Rica) 63 Sandino, Augusto César 48 Santos Chocano, José 34, 75 São Paulo 25, 35, 37 n.10, 42 São Paulo Week of Modern Art 25, 26, 35 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 75

INDEX

Sardinha, Pedro Fernandes 43 Sartre, Jean-Paul 117, 122, 150 n.23 Satchidanandan, K. 241 sathottari 266, 267 n.5 Satie, Erik 332 satyagraha 262 Satyakatha (journal) 266–72 Saudi, Mona 184 Saussure, Ferdinand de 188 n.8 Savacou (journal) 67, 109–12 Saʿīd, Mah. mūd 163–4 Scar literature 283, 298 n.2 Scenes by a Stream (Pak T’aewŏn) 352–5 Schwartz, I. J. 409 science 30, 34, 38, 40, 50, 54, 55, 91, 137, 140, 141, 189, 247, 252, 278, 282, 295, 316, 370 science fiction 275 Scott, Bonnie Kime 1 Scottsboro trials 81 Second World War 2, 3, 67, 73, 91–2, 114, 116, 117, 158, 250, 253, 282, 315, 317, 333 n.3, 335, 359, 365, 366, 399 Selçuks (Turkic empire) 206 Self-Reliant Literary Group (Vietnam) 357–8 Seligmann, Katerina Gonzalez 91 n.1 Selvon, Sam 106–7 Sen, Shankar 257 Senegal 18, 87, 114, 115, 121–6, 135 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 18, 87, 89 n.15, 93, 114, 115, 117, 121–6, 135, 137 n.2, 140 Seni (magazine) 359, 363–4 Senki. See Battle Flag (journal) Seri, Veramu 395 Servet-i Fünun (journal) 194, 208 n.10 Sestiger (journal) 133 Sestigers 115, 133–4 Seuphor, Michel 49 Sforim, Mendele Moykher. See Abramovitsh, Sholem-Yankev Shabout, Nada 159 n.6, 161 n.1, 162 n.2 Shahane, Ashok 241, 267, 268 n.10, 271 n.20 Shakespeare, William 56, 76 n.43, 126 n.30, 311, 379, 412 Shamlu, Ah.  mad 212, 215–20 Shanghai 281, 282–3, 286, 287, 289, 291, 292 Shankaracharya 259 Shanmugasundaram, R. 278 Shaw, George Bernard 166, 336 Shawqī, Aḥmad 158, 159, 188 Shen Xiaolong 305 She’r-e No 211, 212, 213–14

INDEX

She’r-e Sepid 215 She’r-e Sonnati 212 Shevardnadze, Davit 234 n.6 Shevardnadze, Dmitri 239 Shevchenko, Aleksandr 226, 232 n.3 Shi to shiron (journal) 332 Shi Zhecun 283, 289 Shiga Naoya 328 Shii no ki (journal) 333 Shinghavi, Snehal 248 n.1 Shiʿr (journal) 159, 185 Shishōsetsu. See I-novel Shiva 85 Shōwa period 317, 335 Sikong Tu 300 Silva Lisboa, José de, Viscount of Cairu 40 n.21 Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos Pintores y Escultores 45–7 Singapore 359, 361 Singer, I. J. 399 n.7 Singh, Dudhnath 264 n.31 Sinha, Raghuvir 258 n.1 Sinha, S. 249 Sinhala 242 Sino-Japanese War, First 282, 285, 316 Sino-Japanese War, Second 282, 291 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 28, 44, 45 n.6, 46, 47 n.18 Siraj, Sayyed Mustafa 257 Six-Day War 160, 177, 181 ska music 102, 103 Slade Art School 135, 368 Slate, Nico 266 n.1 slavery 13, 36, 43 n.36, 66, 69, 75, 84, 86, 88–9, 100–3, 118 n.4, 143, 260, 262, 263 Slonim, J. 409 Sobol, Andrei 287 Sobti, Krishna 265 n.33 social realism 17, 83, 177, 199, 243, 281, 283, 294, 297, 298 n.2, 302, 303, 343 socialism 26, 27, 77 n.48, 78 n.55, 110 n.4, 129 n.3, 150 n.23, 158, 183, 199, 248, 283, 292, 347 Socialist Bloc 183 Society of Georgian Artists 234 n.6 Solomon Islands 385, 394, 395, 396 Somali 145 Somoza, Anastasio 48 n.24 Sóngoro Cosongo (Nicolás Guillén) 27, 52–3 Sonraksia, Chandrakiran 262 Sope, Mildred 388, 395 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 74

439

Sorbonne 133 Souffles (journal) 159, 176–80 South Africa 13, 115, 133–4, 145 n.9, 366 South America. See Latin America South Asia 14, 20, 85 n.1, 128 n.1, 241–79, 292 n.2, 366. See also India; Pakistan South Pacific Festival of Arts 394 South Society (China) 286 n.3 Southeast Asia 359 Southern Thailand 359 Soviet Union 17, 226, 235, 250, 288, 289, 304, 343, 344, 398, 399 Sower, The (journal) 329 Soyinka, Wole 127, 143–4, 148 n.19, 149 n.20, 152 Spain 28, 49, 54, 56, 73 n.19, 304, 370 Spanish (language) 25, 30, 66, 76 n.44, 289, 394 Spanish Civil War 44 Spanish-American War 25 Sparrow 102 n.2 Spender, Stephen 150 n.23 Spengler, Oswald 37 n.10, 375 Sri Lanka 242, 253 St. Petersburg 225 Staffider (magazine) 115 Stalinism 183, 399 State University of Morelia, Mexico 28 Stead, Christina 368 Stendhal 327 n.3 Steer, Philip Wilson 373 Sternberg, Josef von 340 n.13 Stewart, Harold 366, 368, 377–80 Stollmeyer, Hugh 83–6 Storni, Alfonsina 58 Su, Ka. Naa. See Subramanyam, Ka. Naa. Subaru (journal) 318 n.2 Subbaiah, Shanmuga 278 subconscious 172, 173, 202, 203, 305 Subramaniam, G. See Nadan, Nanjil Subramanyam, Ka. Naa. 273–9 Suez Crisis 185 Sufism 207, 252 Sugita, Sho 23, 319 n.3, 345 Sun, The (newspaper) 377 SUNY Buffalo 143 Sur (journal) 28, 54–7 surrealism 11, 27, 28, 37, 39, 67, 80, 81, 91, 111 n.7, 122 n.7, 130, 133, 151, 157, 159, 161–5, 167, 172, 173, 185, 192, 203, 226, 294, 295, 298, 348, 349, 351, 377, 380. See also Art and Liberty group

440

Sūsah Naṣrī ʿAṭā Allāh 162 Sutskever, Avrom 399 n.7 Svetshop Poetn. See Sweatshop poets Swadeshamitran (daily newspaper) 275 n.11 Swahili 145, 148 n.18, 153 Swayambhuva Manu 259 n.6 Sweatshop poets 398 Sweden 276 Swinburne, Algernon 375, 403 Sydney 365, 368 n.3, 377, 378 Sylvain, Georges 69, 70 Sylvain, Normil G. 66, 69–79, 117, 245, 316, 373 n.8 Symbolist movement 8, 9, 25, 34 n.4, 70 n.1, 71 n.3, 96 n.18, 151, 157, 167, 172, 173, 177, 193, 194, 195 n.3, 203, 283, 287 n.8, 289–90, 294, 295, 297, 298, 350, 351, 398 Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. See Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos Pintores y Escultores Syria 15, 159, 181, 185–90 Szwark, Marek 399 n.7 Tabidze, Titsian 226 Tagore, Rabindranath 116, 153, 242–3, 245–7, 248, 286, 316, 373 n.8 Taine, Hippolyte 73 Taishō period 316, 317, 326, 335 Taiwan 281, 283, 294–6, 302, 307 Takamatsu Akira 334 Takii Kōsaku 337 Tale of the Genji 322 n.1, 335 Tall, Papa Ibra 125 Talmud 412, 419 n.10 Tamazight (language) 176 Tamayo, Rufino 47, 111 Tamba Ndembe 155 Tamil 242, 243–4, 273–9 Tammām, Abū 159, 185, 187, 188, 189 tanah Melayu 359 Tang dynasty (China) 6, 7, 281 n.1, 291, 295, 299, 300, 301 Tang, Xiaobing 283 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 326–8, 335–41 Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi 193, 205–9 Tanzania 115, 127 tanzimat 157, 205–9 Tarsila do Amaral 35 Taseer, M. D. 249 Tassili n’Ajjer (park in Algeria) 125 Tawali, Kumalau 387, 395

INDEX

Taymūr, Maḥmūd 164 Tbilisi. See Tiflis Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 201 Tel Aviv 417, 418 n.5, 420 Les Temps modernes 87 Thạch Lam 357 Thaman, Konai Helu 395, 396 theater 12, 46 n.12, 47 n.13, 52, 152, 164 n.11, 188 n.7, 213–14, 230, 242, 245, 259 n.11, 272, 276 n.19, 283, 288, 301, 302, 308, 309, 327 n.8, 336, 370, 371, 395, 396, 412 Thérèse de Lisieux 74 Thésée, Auguste 80–2 Third Generation (China). See Newborn Generation Third Worldism 159, 176–80, 182–3 Thoby-Marcelin, Philippe 78 Thomas, Dylan 379 Thomre, Umakanth 269, 270 Thoreau, Henry David 374 Thyagarajan, Jagadisa. See Ashokamitran Tiananmen Square massacre 284, 302, 308 Tiflis 225, 226, 231, 233 n.4, 234, 235, 238 Timba (journal) 268 Times Literary Supplement 139–40 Tiruvaḷḷuvar 273 Tobago 83, 85 n.1 Tōhoku Imperial University 347 Tokyo 71 n.5, 245, 316, 319 n.3, 321–5, 332, 333 n.2, 337, 338, 341 n.14 Tokyo University 245, 335 Tolstoy, Leo 236, 327 n.3 Toltec culture 111 Tom Brown’s School Days 374 Tomorrow (journal) 366 Tonga 366, 385, 394, 395, 396 Tongia, Makiuti 395, 396 Torre, Guillermo de 28 Torres-García, Joaquín 28, 49–51 Toussaint L’Ouverture, François-Dominique 103 Transcription Centre 139 n.10 Transition (journal) 17, 114, 115, 127–32, 143, 144, 145 n.7 translation 7, 14–15, 18, 22, 54, 71 n.5, 137, 139, 145–6, 191, 211, 273, 278 n.38, 282, 283, 285, 288, 289, 300, 308, 316, 317, 318, 326, 327, 332, 335, 338, 339 n.9, 341, 358, 401, 409 n.11, 412, 413 transnationalism 4, 5, 16, 19, 26, 67, 109, 114, 242

INDEX

Treaty of Versailles 282 Treaty of Waitangi 365 Treece, Henry 379 Triad (journal) 376 Trilling, Lionel 150 n.23 Trinidad 83–6, 102, 103 n.3, 106, 107, 110 n.4 Tropiques (journal) 67, 68, 80, 91–2, 93–6, 122 n.8, 176, 177 Trowell, Margaret 130 n.4 Tsuboi Shigeji 320 Tự lực văn đoàn group. See Self-Reliant Literary Group (Vietnam) Tú Mỡ 357 Tukaram 271 Tulsi Das 259 Tupi 35, 39 n.18, 40 nn.23–24, 41 n.27 Turkey 14, 18, 191–209, 282, 316 Turkish (language) 14 Turkish Republic 191, 192 Turner, J. M. W. 373 Tutuola, Amos 105, 149 Tuvalu 385, 394 Tuwhare, Hone 388, 395 Twain, Mark 374 Tzara, Tristan 30, 81 Uchiyama Yoshiro 333 Uganda 115, 127, 128 n.1, 130 n.4, 144 n.3, 145 n.5 Ugarte, Manuel 77 UK. See Britain Ukraine 397, 399 n.1, 412, 415, 417 Ultraísmo 27, 28 Umm al-shuʿūr 163 Unamuno, Miguel de 59 nn.2–3 UNESCO 135, 386 unions 45 n.6, 48, 95 n.15 Union des femmes françaises 93 United Kingdom. See Britain; England United Nations 250, 390 n.11, 395. See also UNESCO United States 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 28, 44, 47, 48 n.24, 67, 69, 81 n.2, 95 n.15, 100–3, 109, 113, 114, 124, 143, 163, 166, 253, 255, 283, 291, 295, 308, 316, 318, 373–5, 377, 378, 379, 392, 393, 394, 398, 399, 401, 408 n.10, 409, 412, 415 universality 50, 59 n.3, 88 n.5, 89, 121–6, 140 n.12, 215, 238 n.2, 239, 276, 304, 313, 402 university 17–18, 268, 271 n.21, 398 University College, Ibadan 149 n.20

441

University College London 368 University College of East Africa. See Makerere College University of Adelaide 379 University of Cambridge 100 University of Dakar 121–6 University of Hong Kong 291 University of Ibadan 149 n.20 University of Kent 109–12 University of London 130 n.4, 135. See also University College London University of Montevideo 58 University of Nigeria, Nsukka 144, 149 University of Sussex 100 University of Sydney 378 University of the South Pacific 385 University of the West Indies 110 n.2 University of Wisconsin Madison 166 Upadhyay, Ayodhya Singh 259 n.12 Urdu (language) 241, 242, 243, 248, 250–4, 258, 260 n.15, 261 n.19 Uruguay 28, 49–51, 58, 76, 77 n.51 USSR. See Soviet Union Utagawa Hiroshige 373 Valéry, Paul 203, 349 n.8 Valle-Inclán, Ramón del 59 n.3 Vallejo, César 26, 28, 30–1 Valois, Georges 73, 77 n.53 van Dyck, Anthony 370 van Gogh, Vincent 373 Vando-Villar, Isaac del 28 vanguardism 25–8, 30, 32, 33 n.2, 49, 52, 54, 58, 61 Vanî Efendi 207 Vannadasan 278 Vannanilavan 277 Vanuatu. See New Hebrides Varma, Keshavchandra 263 Vasconcelos, José 46 n.11, 47, 48, 61, 77 Vatsyayan, Sachchidananda Hirananda. See Agyeya vaudeville 231, 412 Velázquez, Diego 370 Verhaeren, Émile 71 n.3 Verlaine, Paul 298 n.3 Verma, Bhagwat Charan 261 n.20 Verma, Mahadevi 260 n.16 Verma, Nirmal 258 vernacular 27, 52, 100, 176, 199, 225, 226, 235 n.8, 241, 243, 281, 282, 285, 286 n.1, 344, 397 n.2, 398

442

Veronese 229 Vichy France 73 n.13, 91 Victoria University at Wellington 385 Victorian era 7, 83, 198 n.7, 299, 370, 373 Vieira, Antonio 37 Vienna 398, 415 Vietnam 20, 184, 357–8 Vigny, Alfred de 124 n.18 Vijaya (newspaper) 275 n.11 Vilna 398 Virgil (Roman poet) 125 n.28 Viruthachalam, C. See Pudumaipitthan Voices: A Literary Quarterly 379 n.4 Voronoff, Serge 40–1 Wagner, Richard 291 wakon-yōsai 316 Walcott, Derek 104, 105, 109 Wali, Obiajunwa 145 n.7 Waliszewski, Zygmunt 233 Walker, Kathy 395 Walkowitz, Rebecca 3, 16 Wallerstein, Immanuel 4, 6 Walpole, Hugh 375 Walters, Muru 381, 382, 383 Wang Duqing 287 Wang Fuzhi 300 Wang Hongwen 298 n.1 Wang Meng 303 Wang Qinglin. See Ya Xian Wang Shizhen 300 Warsaw 398, 399 n.7 Warwick Research Collective 4, 5, 6, 16, 113 Weissner, Carl 255 Wellington (New Zealand) 371, 375 n.13 Wendt, Albert 116, 144 n.3, 365, 367, 382 n.3, 385–96 West Africa 115, 128, 145 n.8 West Africa (journal) 152 West Indies. See Caribbean Western Desert Art Movement 367 Westernization 9, 191, 211, 245, 266, 291, 294, 298, 302, 316, 325 n.9, 341 n.14, 343 Weston, Edward 28, 44 White, Patrick 367, 368 Whiting, Cliff 381, 382 Whitman, Walt 278, 299 Wiesse, María 27 Wilde, Oscar 375 William, Kamal 164 Williams, Aubrey 66, 69, 110–12

INDEX

Williams, William Carlos 105 Wilson, Selwyn 381, 382 Winchevsky, Morris 398 n.4 Windrush generation 67, 97 Winkiel, Laura 11 n.18, 13 n.19 Wīrepa, Mary 381, 382 wŏlbuk writers 344 Wollaeger, Mark 16, 144 Woo Dada 346 Woolf, Virginia 11, 54, 332 workers. See proletariat working class. See proletariat World War I. See First World War World War II. See Second World War WreC. See Warwick Research Collective Xi Feng (journal) 291 Xiandai (journal) 283, 289–90, 294 Xiandaishi jikan (journal) 283 Xiao Chi. See Hong Huang Xinhai Revolution 282 Xinshi (journal) 289 Xu Zhimo 286 Xuân Diệu 357 Xuanzang 292 n.2 Ya Hsien. See Ya Xian Ya Xian 302 Yacine, Kateb 178 Yadav, Rajendra 258, 264 n.29 Yahya Kemal 192, 194, 199, 205 Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu 194 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art 283 Yao, Steven G. 14 n.20 Yao Wenyuan 298 n.1 Yashpal 261, 262 Yeats, W. B. 12, 242, 245 Yeru (journal) 266 Yan Yu 300 Yehoash 409 Yenching University 285 Yesenin, Sergei 287 Yeshurun, Avot 15, 399, 417–20 Yi Kwangsu 343 Yi Sang 343, 352–5 Yi T’aejun 343 Yiddish 14–15, 397–9, 401–11, 412–14, 415–16, 417, 419 Yoruba 145, 147, 149, 152 n.25 Young Generation, The. See Yunge, Di Yoyotte, Pierre 80–2 Yu Hua 284, 311

INDEX

Yunge, Di 398, 401, 402, 409, 410 Yushij, Nima 212, 213–14, 215, 221, 223, 250 Zaheer, S. S. 249 Zaidi, Humayun Zafar 248 n.3 Zaire 114, 155 Zakavkazskaia rech’ (newspaper) 234 Zapata, Emiliano 26, 45 Zamyatin, Evgeni 150 n.23

443

Zdanevich, Ilia 230, 231, 232 n.3, 233 n.4, 234 Zdanevich, Kirill 226, 228–35, 237 n.1, 238 Zembilli Ali Efendi 207 Zeno (philosopher) 413 zenshū 18 Zhang Ailing. See Chang, Eileen Zhang Chungqiao 298 n.1 Zimbabwe 115 Zionism 15, 399, 408, 417–20

444



445

446



447

448