New Soundings in Postcolonial Writing : Critical and Creative Contours [1 ed.] 9789004329270, 9789004326415

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New Soundings in Postcolonial Writing

Cross/Cultures readings in post/colonial literatures and cultures in english

Edited by Gordon Collier Geofffrey Davis Bénédicte Ledent

Co-founding editor †Hena Maes-Jelinek

VOLUME 189

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cc

New Soundings in Postcolonial Writing Critical and Creative Contours essays in honour of bruce king

Edited by

Janet Wilson Chris Ringrose

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Indian Dancer (Gujarat). Photo by Kevin Ireland, courtesy of Janet Wilson. The Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949226

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offfers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0924-1426 isbn 978-90-04-32641-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32927-0 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhofff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Table of Contents ——— ጓ ———

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Tilling the Fields of Postcolonial Literature J A N E T W I L S ON A N D C H R I S R I N G R O S E

xi

E SSAY S

IN

C RIT ICISM

THE CA RIB BE AN

A Perpetual Surprise: East Indians in the West Indies J. M I C H A E L D A S H

5

The Present Absence of the Father in the Poetry of Derek Walcott ROBERT D. HAMN ER

15

From “The Rivers of Babylon” to Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes: Intricacies of the Postcolonial and Postwar Jewish Condition KATHL EEN G YSSELS

35

The Rock: Island and Identity in Barbados J O H N T. G I L M O R E

63

ENGLAND

The Many Voices of Post-Colonial London: Language and Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) BÉNÉDICTE LEDEN T

79

A Postcolonial Passage to England: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table G E E T H A G A N A P A T H Y –D O R É

95

S O U T H -E A S T A S I A

“A Message in a Bottle”: On the Pleasures of Translating Arun Kolatkar into French LAETITIA ZECCHINI

113

Jejuri–Bandra–Jejuri: Strolling with Kolatkar ARVIND K RISHN A ME HR OTR A

129

Intertext, Architext, and Métissage: Anita Desai’s Negotiation of Cultural Gaps MART A DV O âÁK

133

Pakistani English Novels in the New Millennium: Migration, Geopolitics, and Tribal Tales MUN EEZA SH A MSI E

149

NE W ZEA LAND

AND THE

SOUTH PACIFIC

Fantasy, Myth, and the Pacific World: Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela J E A N –P I E R R E D U R I X

173

Read Instructions and Shake Carefully Before Use: Fragmented Wholes in Narratives by Bill Manhire and Gregory O’Brien GORDON COLLIE R

193

“The Biggest Adventure”: Indigenous People and White Men’s Wars G E O F F R E Y V. D A V I S

215

C R E AT I V E W RIT ING DAVID DABYDEEN Chinese Mothers

237

K E K I N. D A R U W A L L A Cabral

242

ADIL J US SAW ALLA Memoirs: for Bruce

245

JEET TH AYI L The Book of Bruce

246

OLIVE SENI OR Fabulous Eyelids

249

F R E D D’ A G U I A R For Bruce (& Adèle)

250

TA BISH K HAI R Past Dawn

252

ANAND TH AK OR E Puppet’s Life Ends on String

253

JANE B HAND ARI A Sheet Like Snow

255

MANOH AR SHE TT Y Threshold

256

SMIT A AGR A WAL I Love You (From Mofussil Notebook)

257

JOHN HA YNE S Back

260

KEVIN IRELAND A Mute Biography

261

SHAN TA ACH AR YA Wonder of the Age

262

KART HIK A NAÏ R Habits: Remnants

264

ALA MGI R H ASHMI They Say, They Never Wrote

265

SUSAN V ISV AN ATH AN Conch

266

Notes on the Contributors and Editors Index

271 283

Acknowledgements ——— ጓ ———

The editors would like to express their gratitude to Chantal Zabus for her editing work in the early stages of this project. We would like to thank the editors of Wasafiri for permission to reprint the poem “Cabral” by Keki Daruwalla, and Gordon Collier for his support of this project and his advice during the time of its preparation.

Introduction Tilling the Fields of Postcolonial Literature J AN E T W I L SON

AND

C HRIS R IN GR OSE

——— ጓ ———

T

embraces the idea of ‘new soundings’ in its double meanings: ‘soundings’ in the sense of exploratory fathoming and plumbing of the ocean depths, and ‘soundings’ in the contemporary sense of sonar registrations of the seabed, made in order to hear and notate the invisible, inaudible life and activity below the surface. The metaphoric connotations of depth charges in the former usage point to the various forms of mapping, of the discoveries and expansions associated with the opening-up of what were once conceived of as distant lands, as well as the hazards and betrayals entailed in such colonizing. ‘Soundings’, in the sense of registering sound shapes and effects, implies metaphorically those acts of communication whereby the newly charted, discovered worlds transmit their cultures, heritage, and voices, receiving in return the mixed messages of those who discover and colonize. For such processes of settlement and entrenchment are fraught with contestation, involving new contact zones, encounters with indigenous peoples, recognition of racial and ethnic differences, and ideological reassessment of the nature of civilization. The subtitle’s reference to ‘contours’ invokes the new cultural frames that emerge from such forms of contact, and the organizing, reshaping, and syncretizing of what Homi Bhabha has called the ‘spaces between’1 cultures that contact/collision provokes. Such new cultural landscaping can be found in the critical and creative writing of the last half-century that embodies as well as engages with issues of the postcolonial. The subtitle also refers to the critical essays, poems, and stories collected in this volume, all of which are associated with the discipline of postcolonial studies and might be seen as products of this broad field. Just as the critical contours seek to debate and give wider visibility 1

HE TITL E OF TH IS VOL UME

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 1–2.

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to postcolonialism’s major contestations, so the book’s creative contours showcase some of the movement’s significant themes and imaginative configurations. Both tropes -- of sounds/soundings and contours/contouring – are therefore also potent metaphors for the aspirations of the discipline of postcolonial studies and its predisposition to an often utopian newness. This can be seen, for example, in the way the very term ‘postcolonial’ constitutes a recasting of earlier disciplinary terminologies for studying the cultures of colonial/decolonized nations: Commonwealth literature, new literatures in English, new national literatures, world literature written in English. Matching this capacity to be represented under different banners has been the discipline’s vigorous foray into this terrain of intellectual, critical, and literary investigation by adopting theoretical paradigms and disciplinary perceptions offered by, for example, feminist studies, deconstruction, and poststructuralism. Postcolonialism’s capacity to plunge into the depths, to evacuate, recuperate, re-canonize, and to present its new hearings/bearings within the academy has always been marked. Furthermore, its reflexive self-critical edge and capacity to accommodate to new and emerging disciplines like diaspora studies, globalization, trauma studies, and queer theory, and its refusal to ossify into a singular, monolithic discourse, have given it an extended life and energy.2 These twists and turns, contradictions, and complexities are touched on in many essays in this volume, which testify to the project of re-examining the literature and cultures of decolonized nations under the disciplinary banner of postcolonial studies. The linked metaphors implied in the title to this volume – depth charges, new and rediscovered voices, and reshaped critical and creative contours – are also apt in view of the remarkable contribution to the understanding of postcolonial literatures (and broader contribution to the study of World Literature) of Bruce Alvin King, in whose honour these essays have been brought together. In a career which has spanned many phases, King first engaged with the postcolonial in its earlier incarnation as Commonwealth Literature through studies at the University of Leeds, when he arrived there from the U SA as a doctoral student. His time at Leeds lasted from the mid-1950s to 1960, commencing a long-term relationship with the U K and with British intellectual life. There he 2

On various predictions of collapse and exhaustion, see Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel,” P M L A 122.3 (May 2007): 633– 51. See also Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh, “General Introduction” to Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Wilson, Sandru & Welsh (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2010): 1–12.

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came into the orbit of the multi-talented, influential academic A.N. Jeffares, who, in the Leeds School of English, had introduced programmes in American Literature, Anglo-Irish Literature, and Commonwealth Literature (King remarks that the latter two “were practically [Jeffares’s] inventions”). Jeffares’s encouragement is described in an article King published in 1989.3 It follows that King’s work can be described as a series of soundings in exploring postcolonial writings, through the recuperation of little-known authors and under-researched topics, and a testing of the boundaries between these and other forms of writing -- in an extended engagement with the complex contours of this type of literature, its critical and theoretical frameworks, and the shaping of a new canon. In his long career, King has covered all the major literary genres as a critic, including biography and, most recently, autobiography. Early on, he specialized in drama and theatrical traditions -- his first monograph was on the plays of Dryden -- and, with his talented wife and collaborator, Adèle King, published ground-breaking editions of literary-critical work in this field, notably the English Dramatists and the Modern Dramatist series. The publication in 1977 of a second monograph on the poetry of Andrew Marvell intersected with King’s emerging interest in the geographical diversity of World Literatures in English as it was then called (in 1974 he edited and introduced Literatures of the World in English). From the outset, then, his research into English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries allowed him to bring to bear a breadth of understanding in his investigations of the new literatures in English. With a continuing focus on poetry, he then moved to topics such as modern Indian poetry and the work of the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, who was to be the subject of his exhaustive 2000 biography Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. In turning to postcolonial literature, King used his wealth of expertise in criticism derived from his background in seventeenth-century writing, as well as a firsthand understanding of diverse ex-Commonwealth cultures (New Zealand, Caribbean, African, and Indian). His knowledge of Indian poetry in English, West Indian literature, and white settler fiction, for example, reflects in part his peripatetic travels as a scholar, as well as the flexibility of his cultural antennae. His fundamental contribution to this developing field of study, born of this geographical and critical range, is one that, as he says in the opening pages of New 3

“How with the Help of Derry Jeffares, I (an American) Became a Commonwealth Literature Specialist,” in A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literature Studies – Then and Now; Essays in Honour of A.N. Jeffares, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek, Kirsten Holst Petersen & Anna Rutherford (Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1989): 19–24. This essay, along with others by Bruce King, will be published by Ibidem Verlag (in conjunction with Columbia University Press) in 2016 in a collection titled From New National to World Literature: Essays and Reviews.

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National and Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction, “was brought about by the new political and economic importance of former colonies after the Second World War and the rapid spread of communications and international business during the last third of the twentieth century.”4 New National and Postcolonial Literatures is one the two “landmark books” (as Marta Dvoˀák calls them in her contribution to this volume) by Bruce King. (Dvoˀák also instances The Internationalization of English Literature 1948–2000 [2004], a text that is also highly thought of by Dr James Acheson, a modernist scholar who researches the contemporary novel).5 Bruce King, like other academics of his generation, straddles the boundaries of period and discipline. Born in Philadelphia in 1933, he received his BA from Columbia University in 1954, his MA from the University of Minnesota in 1956, and his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1960. As his scholarly career developed, King engaged with the challenges of the political, ideological, and aesthetic qualities of the postcolonial writing that had begun to penetrate the literary marketplace in the 1970s and which, since Salman Rushdie’s landmark winning of the Booker Prize for fiction in 1981 with Midnight’s Children, has become increasingly valued and accepted into the Western canon. His change of direction was partly instigated by his varied academic appointments, with spells of residence in countries including (among others) the U SA , Great Britain, Nigeria, Italy, New Zealand, France, Israel, India, Germany, and Canada, that allowed him to make life-long friends and colleagues throughout the world, and to experience at first hand the living environments of those cultures about which he writes. Although such mobility has taken him out of the academy for periods, and, as he suggests in his unpublished autobiography, shows him not always fitting into university life, it has given him an invaluable vantage point from which to launch independent critique. Indeed, his willingness to show impatience with posturing and inadequate scholarship, his candour and intellectual directness, have made him an invaluable book reviewer and cultural commentator. When applied to biography, these qualities have made him an irreverent and provocative researcher, as is evident in his interpretations of the lives of key twentieth-century literary figures such as V.S. Naipaul and Robert Graves, as well as Derek Walcott. The biographies are remarkable for their frank appraisals of their subjects, incisive literary analysis, and understanding of what it takes to

4

Bruce King, “New Centres of Consciousness: New, Post-colonial, and International English Literature,” in New National and Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 3. 5 Email communication with co-editor, Janet Wilson.

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live a successful literary life in the twentieth century. They are also rooted in Bruce King’s personal friendships with the three subjects under scrutiny and with those who knew them. When writing on issues of current concern in postcolonial studies, including the complexities of black British fiction and Pakistani writers’ views of the U SA , he has been equally incisive. These engagements with political and ideological issues, combined with sharp critical comment, make his frequent reviews and review articles a source of informed and often controversial opinion: on occasion, reviews published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (formerly World Literature Written in English), to which he has been a regular contributor since its first publication in 2005, have triggered wider debate and comment. Further, the eclecticism of King’s writing and reviewing shows him as equally drawn to the demotic, marginal, and off-beat as to the mainstream and canonical, making the one resonate with the other as he identifies the overlapping cultural modes, discourses, ideologies, and political issues (such as freedom of speech, diaspora, translation, literary heritage, aesthetic orientation) by which they speak. ጓ The exceptional range of King’s scholarly interests, and his mastery of different forms of academic and life writing, are reflected in the essays and creative writings in this book. The offerings of former colleagues and associates from a number of universities, as well as of poets and writers whose work he has written on, they collectively testify to the admiration and respect in which he is held in the world of postcolonial writing. The essays range across Bruce King’s writings and domains of interest, either engaging with his work directly or building upon it as a starting point, while the poetry frequently shows a more personal, direct engagement with King the man, critic, and writer. The first five essays in this collection are on topics relating to the Caribbean, with a strong focus on the oeuvre of Derek Walcott, and testify to King’s extensive contribution to Walcott’s critical reception, through essays on his drama and poetry as well as his commanding biography. M I C H A E L D A S H , in “A Perpetual Surprise: East Indians in the West Indies,” references the connotations of renewal and the unexpected implied in this collection’s title, and its subject recalls Dipesh Chakrabarty’s comment that “newness enters the world through acts of displacement.”6 Dash explores Derek Walcott’s representation of per6

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Belatedness as Possibility: Subaltern Histories, Once Again,” in The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader, ed. Elleke Boehmer & Rosinka Chaudhuri (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2011): 166.

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sonal and geographical dislocation caused by transnationality and diasporic identity and finds that his treatment of the ‘East Indian’ has affinities with the insights of Maryse Condé, Earl Lovelace, and V.S. Naipaul. In a reading of the poem “The Saddhu of Couva” from The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), Dash shows how the portrait of the Saddhu in the cane fields of rural Trinidad culminates in a “moment of fiery renewal” that transcends the elements of anguish and bewilderment in the ‘East Indian’ experience: “ultimately Walcott is attempting to create a fragile sense of order, an imagined Creole community, from a history of privation and displacement.” Dash is able to show how this poetic meditation upon creolization is linked to Walcott’s Nobel acceptance speech, and his arrival at a sense of “elation […] not loss.” R O B E R T D. H A M N E R , in contrast to Dash’s focus on a single poem, ranges across Derek Walcott’s output to suggest how insistently the father-figure recurs in his writing as a site of negotiation and inspiration. The death of Walcott’s father Warwick in 1931, when the poet and his twin brother were only a year old, is the starting-point for a poetic journey and return that employs the theme of the absent father through negotiations with Joyce, Homer, and Hamlet, and that informs Walcott’s poetry from 25 Poems (1948) to The Prodigal (2004). Hamner traces a rich trajectory for Walcott’s poetry, which takes in his father’s paintings, ancestral roots, the lure of Europe and America, and what Walcott calls “my contradicting colour.” Fractured paternity proves to be a motif that Walcott deploys with great skill; as Hamner puts it, He has delved into his divided origins, transported himself to the parts of the world that contribute to the culture of his native islands […] in order to restore the authenticity of a Caribbean sense of being. The absence of his father is emblematic of rich but illusive roots -- be they historical, social, racial, or artistic.

The two essays closing this section consider the construction of the Caribbean as both geographical location and cultural entity. K A T H L E E N G Y S S E L S sees it as a site of suffering, linked to two other locations that resonate for Bruce King: the U SA , where he was born, and France, where he now lives. Gyssels asks probing questions about the theorization and representation of relationships between Jewish persecution and suffering and the Atlantic slave trade, ambitiously examining the literary ramifications of “the troubled history of Black– Jewish relations.” In doing so, she documents the extensive literature that explores connections between the experience of the descendants of Africans transported to the New World, the survivors of the World War Two camps, and the postwar Jewish generation, as they attempt to come to terms with the past and “resist amnesia.” Gyssels uncovers a surprising number of “joint ventures,”

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whereby African American and Caribbean writers have linked Jewishness and blackness. From W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Aimé Césaire to Édouard Glissant, Paule Marshall, and Derek Walcott, she finds a wealth of writing which shares common experiences of deportation and dispossession, disruption, and dislocation. Her analysis of the remarkable novel Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes by Simone and André Schwarz–Bart, with its recurring links between the imaginaries of postwar Jewish and African diasporic conditions -the tropes of No Return, and the Middle Passage or transportation -- argues persuasively for the brilliance of its portrayal of the elderly Martinician protagonist Mariotte. Finally in this section, Bruce King’s profound interest in Caribbean Writing inspires J O H N T. G I L M O R E ’s account of “The Rock: Island and Identity in Barbados,” which depicts the island’s historical inaccessibility and its development as a mercantile entrepôt. Gilmore’s evocation of the relative isolation of Barbados from the other islands in the Caribbean captures the ethos of Barbadian life, and his concise account of its geography and economy allows him to close with some speculations on the perceived character of the islanders – their reputed conservatism, their engagement with migration, and their sense of allegiance to their ‘small island’. ጓ Moving to the theme of Caribbean migration to the UK and to issues of postcolonial language in post-millennial black British fiction as it crystallizes “problems of communication and identity,” B É N É D I C T E L E D E N T examines Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004). Language in these novels is often used in polysemous, alchemical ways to help shape human relations and define Englishness. Nevertheless, Ledent concludes, they differ: in Small Island, Englishness emerges from a process of “occasionally painful mutual adaptation and compromise,” while in White Teeth Smith goes further in suggesting that Englishness might express “the human diversity at the heart of contemporary London.” Like Ledent, G E E T H A G A N A P A T H Y – D O R É considers the themes of migration and relocation of diasporic communities in England. Her subject is Michael Ondaatje’s sixth novel, The Cat’s Table, a text whose locations in Sri Lanka, Canada, and England aptly mirror and reflect the restless relocations of Bruce King that have stimulated and inspired his scholarship. Ganapathy–Doré’s extended analysis of both the novel and Ondaatje's literary practice shows how it exemplifies the mutation of what Salman Rushdie has called the “decentred, transnational, interlinguistic and transcultural postcolonial novel” into a contemporary novel. The text’s treatment of space and time, as

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experienced on the ship Oronsay which, in a three-week journey, takes the young protagonist Michael from Colombo to Tilbury docks, becomes an extended and vividly located meditation on ‘passage’ and identity in migration. On board the ship, power-struggles related to gender and class are enacted. In the re-creation of the journey, which resembles one that he himself undertook as a child, Ondaatje tests the boundaries between truth and lies, biography and fiction. Ganapathy–Doré reveals the novel to be a multilayered meditation on the paradoxes of migration, on authorial perspective, and on novel-writing as therapy. ጓ Three essays follow that focus on South East Asian writing in English, a geographical and cultural terrain in which Bruce King’s contributions seem to have been most welcome. King’s early ground-breaking work in bringing Indian poetry to the attention of European and American readers took him to India in 1983–84, courtesy of a ten-month fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, and in particular to Bombay, where he met, among other writers, Arun Kolatkar. He has since said: to have an idea of the variety, excitement, and vitality of Bombay at this time, read Arun Kolatkar’s great Kala Ghoda sequence of poems with its delight in the ordinary, the living, the absurd, the incongruous, including the city’s history, its dogs, its street lamps, its food vendors, its traffic, monuments, languages, improvisations.7

Bruce King is an avowed admirer of L A E T I T I A Z E C C H I N I ’s brilliant scholarship and her role in writing about Kolatkar and introducing his work to new audiences. For that reason it is doubly appropriate that her essay should be on “ ‘A Message in a Bottle’: On the Pleasures of Translating Arun Kolatkar into French.” Zecchini emphasizes the importance of Kolatkar’s inclusion in Gallimard’s prestigious poetry series Poésie/Gallimard, and conveys the excitement and creativity of her two-year collaboration with Pascal Aquien in preparing the volume for publication. Her essay memorably conveys, too, the demands made on her as a translator who is a lover of the poetry with which she is entrusted: “the struggle to breathe life into a poem, to be true to the ‘tone’ or ‘spirit’ of the poet, to transpose a voice and a rhythm in another language.” She goes on to give authoritative insights into the form and content of Kolatkar’s verse: its “anti-spectacular, anti-style idiom,” and its life-affirming attention to detail, as well as its fabled allusiveness to cultural references from Charlie Chaplin and 7

Bruce King, “An Interesting Life: An Autobiography” (M S ), xix.

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rock ’n’ roll to Nadezhda Mandelstam. M U N E E Z A S H A M S I E draws on her wide and discerning knowledge of the world of Pakistani fiction to portray a “golden generation” of novelists in “Pakistani English Novels in the New Millennium: Migration, Geopolitics and Tribal Tales,” and to pay indirect tribute to Bruce King (whom she cites here), himself an astute reviewer and critic of this genre. Shamsie does justice to the diversity of such writing since 2000, and to the way it has become a major force in world literature. With reference to Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Uzma Aslam Khan, and Kamila Shamsie, she shows how novelists have been searching and courageous in analysing the brutal realities of life in Pakistan in an era of geopolitics, while others such as Mohammed Hanif, Musharraf Farooqi, Moni Mohsin, and Maha Khan Phillips have also deployed political and social satire. The novels of the expatriate Nadeem Aslam deal with religious extremism, while the evocation of experience of the U SA in the aftermath of 9/11 has meant that fine novels by Hamid, Shamsie, and H.M. Naqvi have attracted a global readership. As Muneeza Shamsie points out, the conflict between a closed orthodoxy and intellectual questioning has been intrinsic to Muslim history, and its continuation in Pakistan has proved to be fertile ground for contemporary fiction. A number of novelists, such as Kamila Shamsie in her third novel Kartography and Sorayya Y. Khan in her debut novel Noor (the only Pakistani English novel to graphically depict the 1971 carnage in East Pakistan), have set out to trace the human consequences of recent traumatic events. In evoking the stylistic originality (and sometimes the stylistic sumptuousness) of recent Pakistani fiction, as well as its dynamic engagement with troubled but inspiring times, Muneeza Shamsie’s essay is an invaluable brief guide to a remarkable generation of writers. M A R T A D V O â Á K ’s discussion of “Intertext, Architext, and Métissage: Anita Desai’s Negotiation of Cultural Gaps” is inspired by Bruce King’s work on intertextuality, polyphony, language, and performance, and also by his 1985 essay on Anita Desai, “In Custody: A Chekhovian Comedy.” Dvoˀák emphasizes Desai’s extensive exploration of creolization in its widest and most interesting sense, relating it to Gérard Genette’s notion of “architextual relations,” as well as to Julia Kristeva’s suggestion that poetic language should be read “at least double.” What emerges from Dvoˀák’s reading of In Custody is Desai’s dazzling handling of generic mix (including burlesque, the campus novel, and the fabliau tradition), her ironic inversion of expectations, and her ability to bring different cultural and national traditions into play. Dvoˀák draws convincing architextual connections between Desai’s novel and Chekhov’s plays, which lead her to broader conclusions about the nature of cultural differences, and the way they “have always been negotiated and trans-

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lated – as literature and, more visibly, architecture and the visual and decorative arts testify – increasingly so in contemporary global society.” ጓ

The final section brings together three essays which refer to culture and politics in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific, with reference to canonical Aotearoa New Zealand writers such as Bill Manhire and Greg O’Brien, the Samoan Albert Wendt, and the Mǒori Witi Ihimaera. The Kings spent some time in New Zealand in the 1980s, when he was Professor of English at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch; in recent years, despite never returning, he has renewed his connection with the country by reviewing new fiction as it has appeared. In his essay “Fantasy, Myth and the Pacific World: Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela,” J E A N –P I E R R E D U R I X examines the work of Albert Wendt, in particular his intriguing text The Adventures of Vela, which combines fiction, metafiction, poetry, and storytelling while experimenting with typography and layout. Durix’s essay traces the intertextual elements in The Adventures, its homage to earlier writers and to Wendt’s friends, and the way it “mixes the most personal [of materials] and the wildest form of fantasy.” He also shows how the picaresque elements in this verse-novel blend Rabelaisian humour and satire with Samoan myth, and how Vela’s adventures are used to criticize aspects of Samoan society while parodying the interventions of European colonizers. The essay shows how Wendt’s project emphasizes the connections between postcolonialism and postmodernism, in the sense that it seeks to revive elements from a tribal past but also engage with relativism, hybridity, and cultural change. With its blend of embedded storytelling and oracy, and its mixture of Polynesian and Christian references, The Adventures alternates between mockheroic passages and highly poetic mythic evocations, to bridge the gaps between the different elements of creation and illuminate a world obsessed with its own destruction. The Adventures dramatizes the way in which the goddess Nafanua has had to compete with westernization and the arrival of the Christian God, but is iconoclastic in suggesting that the Samoan gods’ morality can sometimes be suspect. In Wendt’s writing, myth meets modernity, but the parallel worlds he creates are not designed to convert his readers to the ancient religion. Instead, the old atua play their part in a work that presents “parallel modes of existence slightly askew in relation to everyday reality.” Durix portrays Wendt as politically aware in his depiction of the development of a native form of capitalist Christianity, but also aware of the dangers of nostalgia.

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In “‘Read Instructions and Shake Carefully Before Use’: Fragmented Wholes in Narratives by Bill Manhire and Gregory O’Brien,” G O R D O N C O L L I E R analyses two New Zealand fictions from the late 1980s: Manhire’s The Brain of Katherine Mansfield and O’Brien’s Diesel Mystic. Both texts raise questions about the relationship between modernism, postmodernism, and realism, and the viability of the distinction between the local and the parochial. The discussion starts from an analysis of three Manhire poems, which Collier sees as the verbal equivalent of semi-abstract painting, and as original explorations of New Zealand contexts and experiences. The fifty-chapter novella The Brain of Katherine Mansfield, with its intertextual play, and its blend of New Zealand localities and references and global locations and mass culture, hinges partly on “the anxious quest of a small nation for worldwide recognition.” Germanic-Scandinavian sagas coexist here with New Zealand iconography and road movies. The story, in fact, “consists of mere fragments, albeit well-rounded ones, which have to be teased out of the various narrative strands” that both confirm and question the search for a New Zealand identity. Collier shows how Diesel Mystic uses a similar combination of marked regional bias (a brief stretch of road, river, and estuary northwest of Auckland in O’Brien’s case) and proliferating global references, and demonstrates the way Diesel Mystic works as magical realism. In both books, “local history is swiftly dehistoricized into myth and contradiction,” as the writers create a New Zealand that is local but far from parochial, and ‘real’, if not realistic. Taking its cue from the powerful French feature film Indigènes, which traces the lives and deaths of a group of North African soldiers in World War Two, G E O F F R E Y V. D A V I S ’s essay “ ‘The Biggest Adventure’: Indigenous People and White Men’s Wars” explores texts by postcolonial writers which have addressed their country’s participation in European wars on the side of the mother country from which their ancestors had once emigrated. The writers include the Australian David Malouf, the Canadian Timothy Findley, Sol Plaatje, who kept a diary of his experiences in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, and Mulk Raj Anand, author of a 1937 novel of the First World War, Across the Black Waters). However, Davis’s main focus is on the significant role played by Mǒori in World War Two, and the parallel with First Nations soldiers from Canada, particularly in terms of the treatment of survivors on their return home. He compares Patricia Grace’s novel Tu (2004), the story of three young men who enlist in the Maori Battalion in World War Two, with the Ojibwa Canadian author Joseph Boyden’s bestseller Three Day Road (2005), set during World War One and its aftermath. The comparison reveals many parallels between the two novels, both in their determination to tell a neglected aspect of the trauma of war alongside the trauma of colonization, and also in their adaptation of family histories.

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Using the Canadian critic Jo-Ann Episkenew’s concept of ‘counter-discourse’, Davis examines the two books’ narrative experimentation, their treatment of the complex issue of the men’s motivation to enlist, and the potentially-healing qualities of such storytelling. ጓ

The creative writing contributions to this volume are evidence of King’s continuous critical engagement with poetry and his friendships with many poets throughout his life. Study of the poetic endeavour has been a common thread from his earliest work on Dryden and Marvell; since the 1980s, this has developed into an interest in postcolonial poetry’s quest for the new, its search for forms of cultural syncreticity in the fusion of European legacies and Indigenous traditions, and the catalysing of linguistic experimentation. King’s understanding of poetry’s oral base and the sounds of speech finds a counterpart in his passion for jazz, about which he has also written with authority. His account in his autobiography of his obsession with drumming when a student at Columbia College in the 1950s, suggests that the two forms of artistic expression come together for him through his love of rhythm and the musicality of language. Just as the world of jazz is one to which Bruce and Adèle King adhere (they travel to New Orleans for a month every year to listen to jazz), so they have enjoyed the friendships and acquaintances of many poets such as (from his time at Leeds University) Geoffrey Hill, Jon Silkin, and Tony Harrison, and, briefly, American Beats such as Allen Ginsberg. They have also enjoyed the friendship of the generations of contemporary Indian poets writing in English, such as Jeet Thayil and Arvind Mehrotra, and, over many years, that of the Guyanese poet and novelist David Dabydeen, whose prose extract heads the creative-writing section. King has written on such influential postcolonial poets as Kamau Brathwaite, but his ground-breaking books Modern Indian Poetry in English (1987 rev ed. in 1989; repr. in 1992 and 1994) and Three Indian Poets: Ramanujan, Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes (1995, new ed. rev. 2005) have given him something of a cult status among poetry cognoscenti in India. In these studies he critically assessed and celebrated a field of what was then relatively little-known poetry (some of whose members are now recognized as major figures, while others are still becoming known to the West). Jeet Thayil, among others, implies that King’s work broke through the silence about, and critical neglect of, this movement, caused partly by the problem of the English language in writing in multilingual India and the lack of an extended audience, commenting that such poets “are known only unto themselves” and in their own country are “held

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accountable for a failure of national conscience.”8 Likewise, Eunice da Souza acknowledges that King’s initial study was important because it enabled the work of the post-1947 generation of poets, especially women, to be known, by way of overcoming the systemic problems of publication and distribution of Indian poetry in English.9 King’s studies record the stirrings of a distinctively modern/ist voice in what Laetitia Zecchini claims, with reference to Kolatka, were “fecund intercultural and interlinguistic transactions of protean belongings and identities”10 -- namely, avant-garde poetry, black American blues and speech, rock and roll, and British Movement poetry, as well as indigenous traditions and regional languages such as Marathi and Kannada. His ‘discoveries’ include the triumvirate of Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, and Arun Kolatkar, all of whom were dead a decade later, by 2004, and a new generation of poets including Jeet Thayil, Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Mehrotra, Smita Agarwal, Manohar Shetty, Eunice de Souza, Jane Bhandari, Tabish Khair, and Meena Alexander. Appreciation of King’s critical endorsements is reflected in the many tributes paid by these poets in this volume: these include the poet and translator Arvind Mehotra’s reflections in his prose piece “Jejuri” on the flavour of the movement’s early years and his relationship with Arun Kolatkar. (Mehrotra has also edited Kolatkar’s Collected Poems in English.11) The positioning of Mehrotra’s piece next to Laetitia Zecchini’s gestures towards the proximity between the personal and the critical that is characteristic of King’s pioneering spirit. King is a friend of both writers, more recently with Zecchini, whose ground-breaking work on Arun Kolatkar, building on the posthumous publication of his collected works and last volume The Boatride,12 and other Mumbai poets of the 1960s and 1970s, now seems set to establish him as the towering figure of Indian literary modernism.13 New fiction by Arvind Krishna Mehotra and Susan Visvanathan, Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, closes the volume with pages 8

Jeet Thayil, “One Language, Separated by the Sea,” Introduction to Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, ed. Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich & Jeet Thayil (Special Issue 4–5: “Poetry and Truth and Indian Poetry in English,” 2005): 232. 9 Eunice de Souza, “Introduction” to Nine Indian Women Poets: An Anthology, ed. Eunice de Souza (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997): 5. 10 Laetitia Zecchini, Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 2014): 14. 11 Arun Kolatkar, Collected Poems in English, ed. Arvind Mehotra (Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2010). 12 Arun Kolatkar, The Boatride & Other Poems, ed. Arvind Mehrotra (Mumbai: Pras, 2009). 13 See the special issues of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.5 and 52.6 (2016) devoted to ‘The Mumbai Poets’.

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that suggest the depth and breadth of Bruce King’s artistic and academic collaborations, as well as the quality of his achievements and those of the writers he has worked with.

W O R K S C I TE D Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Belatedness as Possibility: Subaltern Histories, Once Again,” in The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader, ed. Elleke Boehmer & Rosinka Chaudhuri (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2011): 163–76. De Souza, Eunice, ed. Nine Indian Women Poets: An Anthology (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997). King, Bruce. “How with the Help of Derry Jeffares, I (an American) Became a Commonwealth Literature Specialist,” in A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literature Studies – Then and Now; Essays in Honour of A.N. Jeffares, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek, Kirsten Holst Petersen & Anna Rutherford (Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1989): 19–24. ——. “New Centres of Consciousness: New, Post-colonial, and International English Literature,” in New National and Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 3–28. Kolatkar, Arun. The Boatride & Other Poems, ed. Arvind Mehrotra (Mumbai: Pras, 2009). ——.Collected Poems in English, ed. Arvind Mehotra (Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2010). Thayil, Jeet. “One Language, Separated by the Sea,” in Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, ed. Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich & Jeet Thayil (Special Issue 4–5: “Poetry and Truth and Indian Poetry in English,” 2005): 232–37. Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel,” PM L A 122.3 (May 2007): 633–51. Wilson, Janet, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh. “General Introduction” to Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Wilson, Sandru & Welsh (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2010): 1–12. Zecchini, Laetitia. Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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E SS AYS IN C RI TICISM

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T H E C ARI BB EA N

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A Perpetual Surprise East Indians in the West Indies J. M I CH AE L D ASH

——— ጓ ———

You can find ‘Asia’ by sailing west, if you know where to look!1

I

to speak of the nightmare of Caribbean history. But the Caribbean’s history of displacement and transnationality is a special nightmare for those who would want to narrowly define cultural identity in the region as a set of binaries that oppose native and outsider, authentic and imported, Creole and pure. In his perceptive essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall argues that there are two ways of treating the problematic question of diasporic identities. One view defines cultural identity “in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’.”2 The second position acknowledges the ruptures and discontinuities of history which make a recovery of the past and one monolithic collective identity impossible. He elaborates as follows: T IS AL M OST A CLICH É

Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.3

1

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 395. 2 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 393. 3 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 394.

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If identity is not therefore a being but a becoming, not an essence but a positioning, the Caribbean presents special difficulty for those who attempt either scientifically or ideologically to fix the complexities of cultural identity in the region. Speaking particularly of anthropological discourse, Michel-Rolph Trouillot warns that theorizing Caribbean identity in terms of the first position outlined by Hall is dangerously misleading, since a history of westernization is what characterizes and defines the Caribbean. Here there is no way to satisfy anthropology’s obsession for “pure” culture. Even populations such as the Island Caribs of Dominica and St Vincent or the mainland Garífuna are known to be products of complex mixtures. Whereas anthropology prefers “pre-contact” situations – or creates “no-contact situations” – the Caribbean is nothing but contact.4

This insightful assessment anticipates an even more global phenomenon which makes the concept of indigenous or authentic problematic. As James Clifford explains with reference to Amitav Ghosh, [the] ethnographer is no longer a (worldly) traveler visiting (local) natives, departing from a metropolitan center to study a rural periphery. Instead, his ‘ancient and settled’ fieldsite opens onto complex histories of dwelling and traveling, cosmopolitan experiences.5

Nevertheless, the temptation to polarize identity invariably emerges in attempts to ground or territorialize nation or ethnicity in the Caribbean. This is particularly true of the treatment of the ethnic group called East Indians. For instance, one of the most recent attempts to define Caribbean culture is Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) by Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau. Despite the disclaimer at the beginning that all are Creole, it is obsessed with anthropological gatekeeping and demonstrating who qualifies for being labelled Creole as opposed to others who are not. In their parochial and often misguided manifesto of Caribbean Creole authenticity, they relegate East Indians to the bottom of the hierarchy; like “the Italians who emigrated massively to Argentina during the nineteenth century, or the Hindus who replaced the black slaves in the plantations of Trinidad, [they] adapted their original culture to new realities without completely modifying them.” 6 4

Michel–Rolph Trouillot, “The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 22. 5 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1997): 2. 6 “De même, les Italiens qui arrivèrent en masse en Argentine au XIXe siècle, ou les Hindous qui remplacèrent les anciens esclaves noirs sur les plantations de Trinidad ont adapté leur culture

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In this regard, these authors differ from their maître à penser, Édouard Glissant, who warns repeatedly against establishing a hierarchy of authentic Creole values as well as seeking explicit and predictable signs of cultural transformation. The blindness of the Créolistes to the role of “Hindous” in Caribbean creolization is no doubt due to the fact that they do not see evidence of “profound interaction,” to use their words, between the Indo-Caribbean populations and the rest of the society. By “profound interaction” they must mean racial mixing. This tendency to racialize and ‘biologize’ the process of creolization is evident as much in the first lines of the manifesto, which concentrate on racial categories such as Asiatic, African, and so on, as in Confiant’s novel La Panse du chacal (2004), which ends with the triumphant emergence of the Creole ideal in racially heterogeneous offspring of Indian and African protagonists. Ethnic métissage is specifically rejected by Glissant, who affirmed in Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity that “Creolization must never be confused with a politics of ‘mixed blood’; that would be too literal and short term a view.”7 Indeed, he has directly addressed this aspect of Creole nationalism in Martinique by condemning their open and explicit ethnic mixing in favour of a more discreet and hidden process: While creolization in Chamoiseau and Confiant is declared [...] and results from an obvious system and an openly manifested intention, I think that I would prefer the poetics of a St John Perse, one of camouflaged creolization, to this practice of the declared creolization of the “text”.8

Indeed, a Glissantian poetics of creolization allows for cultural continuities along with transformation. Creole identity would then seem to be the product of the changing same which combines both transformation and continuity. As he puts it at the beginning of Mahagony, The same one speaking, changed by what he says, returns to the same place in this same country and there he finds that the place also has originelle à de nouvelles réalités sans pour autant la modifier complètement”; Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau & Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), tr. M.B. Taleb–Khyar (Paris: Gallimard, 1989): 30; tr. 91–92. 7 “La créolisation ne se confond en rien avec une politique du ‘sang mêlé’: ce serait là un point de vue bien littéral et à courte vue”; Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996): 31. This and subsequent translations from the French are my own. 8 “Alors que la créolisation chez Chamoiseau et Confiant est proclamée [. . .] et elle passe par tout un système évident et toute une intention manifestée, je crois que je préférerais la poétique de Saint-John Perse, du camouflage de la créolisation, a cette pratique de proclamation de la créolisation du ‘texte’ ”; Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, 54.

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changed, as has changed the perception of it that was formerly held or the chronology of what had happened there. Trees that live a long time always change while they endure.9

As is invariably the case, Glissant treats identity not in terms of an insular or polarized thing-in-itself but, rather, in relational terms in which cultural meanings cohabit unpredictably in constantly changing borderlands. It is telling that a writer not normally associated with Glissantian poetics, Maryse Condé, should have a female “Hindou” protagonist, the daring Vilma Ramsaran, utter the most memorable words in her novel Crossing the Mangrove on the subject of the Créolité movement. This exemplary character in her Guadeloupean microcosm rejects the attempt to stabilize ideologically the convulsive and unpredictable process of social and cultural change when she declares: “‘You don’t cross a mangrove. You’d spike yourself on the roots of the mangrove trees. You’d be sucked down and suffocated by the brackish mud’.” 10 In the anglophone Caribbean, the novelist Earl Lovelace, acutely aware of the play of power and history in dealing with the political realities of post-Independence Trinidad, does not lapse into a blind celebration of the Creole culture of the masses but, in The Dragon Can’t Dance, evokes an evolving Caribbean identity that goes beyond a mere celebration of the Creole. He not only calls into question the blind celebration of collective ritual but boldly includes in his imagined community of Calvary Hill the Indian Pariag and his wife, who are key characters to the understanding of the painful but necessary shift away from what are seen as ancestral values and cultural inheritance. Another Trinidadian novelist, that notoriously ungenerous native informant, V.S. Naipaul, suggests in a 1965 essay that the cultural transformations of those who are called East Indians in the Caribbean, to differentiate them from West Indians, who are the descendants of emancipated slaves, and from Amerindians, the vestiges of decimated pre-Columbian populations, makes them as creolized as any other ethnic group. The temples and mosques exist and appear genuine. But the languages that came with them have decayed. The rituals have altered. There is no Ganges at hand, only a muddy stream called the Caroni. And the water

9

“Le même disant, changé par ce qu’il dit, revient au même endroit de ce même pays, et voilà que l’endroit lui aussi a changé, comme a changé la perception qu’il en eut naguère, ou la chronologie établie de ce qui s’y est passé. Les arbres qui vivent longtemps changent toujours, en demeurant”; Édouard Glissant, Mahagony (Paris: Seuil, 1987): 16. 10 Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove, tr. Richard Philcox (Traversé de la mangrove, 1989; New York: Doubleday, 1995): 158.

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that the Hindu priest sprinkles with a mango leaf around the sacrificial fire is not Ganges water but simple tap water. [.. .] They cannot be judged by the standards of their older culture. Culture is like language, ever developing. There is no right and wrong, no purity from which there is decline. Usage sanctions everything. And these Indians from Trinidad, despite their temples and rituals, so startling to visitors, belong to the New World.11

What one senses in this essay is not the mocking laughter of a writer known for having treated with derision the culture of the Caribbean. Rather, there is a sympathetic treatment of decomposing languages and secularized ritual that suggests a culture in evolution. There is neither cultural retention nor resistance but the inevitable erosions of time and place which, however, do not make this new culture illegitimate or degraded. The special place of the ‘East Indian’ for Naipaul is that of the unexpected and the surprising, beyond the grasp of both cultural purists and Creole ideologues. He continues: To be an Indian or East Indian from the West Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people outside of the region. [.. .] You don’t go to Trinidad expecting to find Hindu pundits scuttling about country roads on motorcycles; to see pennants with ancient devices fluttering from temples; to see mosques cool and white and rhetorical against the usual Caribbean buildings of concrete and corrugated iron; to find India celebrated in the street names of one whole district of Port of Spain. [... ] To be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely.12

As the epigraph from Stuart Hall ironically remarks, you can indeed follow Columbus’s original idea and actually find ‘Asia’ by sailing west, but in the most unlikely and surprising places. The West Indian poet Derek Walcott may have gone further than anyone else in suggesting that not only does one find Asia by traveling west but that the key to being West Indian may lie in the East. In his 1979 book of poems, The StarApple Kingdom, Walcott seems to pick up where Naipaul leaves off. In this book, where the poet evokes the composite and contradictory identities of the inhabitants of this hyphenated kingdom, Walcott presents us with an East Indian Crusoe in “The Saddhu of Couva.” In the banality and chaos of this tiny rural town Walcott dares the reader to contemplate a moment of epiphany in the cane fields of rural Trinidad. At sunset this displaced saddhu contemplates his 11

V.S. Naipaul, “East Indian” (1965), in Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): 37–38. 12 Naipaul, “East Indian,” 35.

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universe, which is marked by the history of plantation slavery and indentureship and by the strident modernity of a world of loudspeakers and cinema hoardings where “there are no more elders/ Is only old people.” When sunset, a brass gong, vibrate through Couva, is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed, like a white cattle bird growing more small over the ocean of the evening canes, and I sit quiet, waiting for it to return like a hog-cattle blistered with mud, because, for my spirit, India is too far.13

The poem dramatizes the futile flight of the saddhu’s soul as an egret which attempts to retrieve the sacred in the world of the profane, to connect with a sacred past but must return to the town of Couva, whose name is Spanish in origin, Cuba, and which is, significantly, also known as “Exchange Village.” The saddhu’s soul is described as “swiftly unsheathed,” suggesting a sword that is bared as well as the tiny bird with long wings, the swift, that is no match for the unending ocean of green, the canes frustrating its homing instincts. “India is too far” and the saddhu’s soul returns as a mere mud-spattered hogcattle. The saddhu must accept the bitter sweet reality of what it means to inhabit the star-apple or caimitte kingdom. But the poem does not end on a note of loss or anguish but a moment of illumination in the tropical twilight. The saddhu imagines himself sacrificed on the pyre of a fiery sunset which both recalls the fires of the cane fields and the fire of mental contradictions. In turning away from the petrifying nostalgia for the lost past, the saddhu, like so many of Walcott’s defiant castaways, experiences a moment of elation, of poetic wonder. The poem closes with this Indian Crusoe symbolically incinerated by a sunset that sets the surrounding cane ablaze. This illuminating fire is both the crematory fire of Hindu death rituals, the mental burning of his contradictory impulses and the blaze of the cane fires before the harvest. Sunset, a bonfire roars in my ears; embers of blown swallows dart and cry, like women distracted, round its cremation. I ascend to my bed of sweet sandalwood.14

13 14

Derek Walcott, The Star-Apple Kingdom (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979): 33. Walcott, The Star-Apple Kingdom, 34.

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The funeral pyre is transformed into the ultimate rite of Creole creativity. This is a trial by fire, not the simple non-creolizing modification of culture proposed by Naipaul’s “startled visitors,” the Martinican Créolistes. This moment of fiery renewal unleashes multiple, darting hyphens, stitching together and recombining broken identities like the “embers of blown swallows.” This poem’s persona is characteristic of Walcott’s unpredictable, reversible Creole universe. In the same way that a simple St Lucian fisherman becomes a Homeric character and Egypt can be transplanted to Tobago, the mythic past of Uttar Pradesh vibrates in the banality of Exchange Village. As he would later explain, From Ramayana to Anabasis, from Guadeloupe to Trinidad, all the archeology of fragments lying around, from the broken African kingdoms, from the crevasses of Canton, from Syria and Lebanon, vibrating not under the earth but in our raucous, demotic streets.15

The Caribbean’s fragments of cultures are not therefore preserved “under the ground” but constantly re-animated in an extravagant street theatre “in our raucous, demotic streets.” Consequently, the metamorphosis of Indian culture in raucous rural Trinidad, far from being on the margins of the process of creolization, becomes an exemplary site of cultural recreation in Walcott’s Antillean poetics. In an often-cited passage from his Nobel Lecture, he develops this idea of creolization as an act of recreation producing asymmetric forms made from the sacred gluing together of the fragments of dispersed cultures. Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love that took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. [... ] Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. (9)

Walcott makes no distinctions between the slave ships of the Middle Passages and the ‘Fatel Rozack’, the ship that brought the first indentured South Asians from the “port of Madras to the cane fields of Felicity.” Creole reinvention from broken forms is the central process that creates new collectivities in the Caribbean. Walcott’s world-weary Adams are not embittered Calibans who rage against the injustices of the past; they construct a 15

Derek Walcott, Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (London: Faber & Faber, 1993): 23. (My emphasis.) Further page references are in the main text.

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fragile wholeness in the present as an isolated, defiant act of faith. It is no coincidence that Walcott often uses religious ritual as a means of understanding this process. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Nobel Lecture begins with a reference to religious ritual and in particular to the Hindu religious drama of the Ramayana. It is not the isolated saddhu who is important here but a fragile new world community held together by religious ritual in a remote Indian village tellingly named Felicity. The lecture takes us through the poet’s own doubt, his initial impulse to dismiss and trivialize what he is experiencing and not sense the strength of the community’s belief, “their delight of conviction,” as he puts it. As he self-consciously looks on at this improvised theatre, his first reaction is to make a literary reconstruction of the dramatic ritual being played out. He conjures up a “colossal wreck” in the empty countryside of the Caroni plain, à la Shelley’s Ozymandias, in order to make sense of what these improvised gods are doing in the cane-fields. He is later forced to confess remorsefully: I, out of the writer’s habit, search for some sense of elegy, of loss, even of degenerative mimicry [... ]. I was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of admiration. I misread the event through a visual echo of History – the canefields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpeting elephants – when all around me there was quite the opposite: elation [...] not loss. The name Felicity made sense. (6)

He becomes a believer and must shake off the doubt and superciliousness that prevent him from feeling this moment of epiphany. Loss, anguish, bewilderment, the petrifying forces of History, must be transcended. Ultimately, Walcott is attempting to create a fragile sense of order, an imagined Creole community, from a history of privation and displacement. As he further states, Why should India be “lost” when none of these villagers ever really knew it, and why not “continuing”, why not the perpetuation of joy in Felicity and in all the other nouns of the Central Plain: Couva, Chaguanas, Charley Village? Why was I not letting my pleasure open its windows wide? I was entitled like any Trinidadian to the ecstasies of their claim. (8)

This is, as he concludes, “that inner Asia of the soul through which the imagination wanders” – Walcott’s Caribbean detour, which yields these “green secrets” of what some choose to see as the “mapless, Historyless” Caribbean. But the poet is careful not to see in these performances of culture the norms of a Creole authenticity. If there is a moment of poetic elation, it is ephemeral and transient. The god is ultimately consumed by fire. The saddhu is incinerated at nightfall. The “island is blest by obscurity.” In this regard, Walcott rejoins Glissant in his concept of a fragile and unpredictable Creole community. Glissant’s

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relational errancy is more daring than that of Walcott, his poetics more explosively unpredictable than Walcott’s imagined community of re-assembled fragments. They both, however, value impermanence, “toppled gods,” and the openness of cultures to each other. As Glissant, with tentative hope, puts it, The cultures of the world explosively forced into contact with each other [.. .] change while exchanging through unpardonable collisions, pitiless wars but also through advancing consciousness and hope which allow us to claim – without being utopian or, rather, in admitting that we are – that humanity today is abandoning with difficulty something they stubbornly clung to for a long time: that is, that someone’s identity is not valid, not recognized, unless it is exclusive of the identity of all other possible human beings.16

W O R K S C I TE D Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau & Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), tr. M.B. Taleb–Khyar (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1997). Condé, Maryse. Crossing the Mangrove, tr. Richard Philcox (Traversée de la mangrove, 1989; New York: Doubleday, 1995). Confiant, Raphaël. La Panse du chacal (Paris: Mercure de France, 2004). Glissant, Édouard. Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). ——.Mahagony (Paris: Seuil, 1987). Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 392–403. Trouillot, Michel–Rolph. “The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 19–42. Naipaul, V.S. “East Indian,” in The Overcrowded Barracoon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): 32–41. Originally as “East Indian, West Indian,” Reporter (17 June 1965): 35–37. Walcott, Derek. Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (London: Faber & Faber, 1993). ——.The Star-Apple Kingdom (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979).

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“Les cultures du monde mises en contact de manière foudroyante [. . . ] se changent en échangeant à travers des heurts irrémissibles, des guerres sans pitié mais aussi des avancées de conscience et d’espoir qui permettent de dire – sans qu’on soit utopiste, ou plutôt, en acceptant de l’être – que les humanités d’aujourd’hui abandonnent difficilement quelque chose à quoi elles s’obstinaient depuis longtemps, à savoir que l’identité d’un être n’est valable et reconnaissable que si elle est exclusive de tous les autres êtres possibles”; Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, 15.

The Present Absence of the Father in Derek Walcott’s Poetry R OB E R T D. H AMNE R

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the house has lived with and without you well1

D

W A L C O T T A N D H I S T W I N B R O T H E R R O D E R I C K were barely a year old when their father Warwick died following ear surgery on 23 April 1931. Anyone reading Walcott’s poetry, essays, and interviews will notice occasional allusions and overt references to this early loss. Aside from marking a personal reaction, in the poet’s hands, the subject may be seen to provide rich imagery and to evolve into a variety of themes. In this essay, I shall enumerate some of these usages; however, my ultimate concern is not simply with the emotional loss of a father, but with the use Walcott makes of the presence of that absence as an artistic motif. Evidence of filial attachment shows up in Walcott’s first two privately-published works. 25 Poems (1948) is dedicated to “A.W. [Alix Walcott] and the memory of my father.” One of the poems in the collection, “In My Eighteenth Year” (also dedicated to his father [Warwick]), supplies the epigraph for my essay. As the eighteen-year-old aspiring poet reflects on his father’s death in this poem, he finds that he cannot curse death or the grave, because ultimately “death’s gift” (with allusions to the bread and wine of Christ) “can [...] / Shine from the perverse beauty of the dead.”2 Here the young poet finds consolation in the fact that, beyond the “bright dust” that had been his father, his faith and his dream live on. Warwick is a less explicit, somewhat more refracted image the following year in Epitaph for the Young (1949).3 This extended poem takes the 1

EREK

Derek Walcott, “In My Eighteenth Year,” in Walcott, 25 Poems (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1949): 18. 2 Walcott, “In My Eighteenth Year,” 18. The poem was republished as “An Elegy” in Walcott, In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962): 13. 3 Derek Walcott, Epitaph for the Young: X I I Cantos (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1949).

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form of a voyage, a quest for identity in a West Indian context. As Paul Breslin points out, this early experimental narrative serves as an urtext for both Another Life and Omeros.4 In this regard, Epitaph introduces many of the stylistic and thematic experiments that attend Walcott’s maturation process. Those which occupy my attention for the purposes of this essay are variations on father/son relationships. The first of several father/son pairings is literary: giving us a satirical turn on James Joyce’s characters Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom (sometimes interpreted as Stephen’s surrogate father). In the guise of a colonial Dedalus, the narrator asks his enervated Bloom (a lapsed writer) “Why did you give up writing sir?” The answer is that after “Fishing the twilight for alternate voices,” he despaired of “Taking arms against a whole tradition.”5 He gave up trying, and predicts that the youth will quit as well. It is worth noting that in his essay “Leaving School,” Walcott says he experienced a phase where he imagined himself “like Stephen, [...] a knot of paradoxes: [...] loving [my] island, and wishing [I] could get the hell out of it” (13). Another pairing surfaces in Canto VI I I of Epitaph for the Young. Following an epigraph from Homer’s Odyssey – “If aught I shall hear of my father’s returning alive / Then may I yet endure this waste for a year” (22) – we find the narrator’s Telemachus figure near Dennery (his sandy Pylos) in St Lucia seeking guidance toward his lost father, Odysseus. A group of somewhat mixed pairings surfaces in Canto VI II , when Icarus, son of the classical Daedalus, alludes to the refining fire of his fatal descent from the sun. Walcott acknowledges the distance between Homer’s Daedalus and Joyce’s Dedalus, but his Icarus knows a familiar, unheralded “snotgreen sea [...] / While the world goes on turning its green trades” (27–28). At the same time, juxtaposing Shakespearean phrases, Walcott manages to conjure up the elder Hamlet’s spectral charge to his son: O my son, the fire That burns, refines, remember the city. Remember me, Although violence undoes us, by violence we are cleaned. (26)

Here the ghost of a father iterates one of the positive aspects of enduring adversity: a cleansing that can be tragic or purgatorial. Throughout his poetry, Walcott confronts transgressions passed down through generations to the New World. Taken together, ramifications of this subject, of course, are larger than any single descendant, more expansive than specific autobiographical details. 4 5

Paul Breslin, Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001): 63. Walcott, Epitaph for the Young, 11. Further page references are in the main text.

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When asked how an outsider might be able to grasp some of his most personal and specific allusions, Walcott answered: “The more specific you get, the more universal you become.”6 Walcott’s broad autobiographical net in Epitaph encompasses not only his plight but also the cultural and social legacy of the West Indies. Given his scholarly performance as a student at St Mary’s College, he might well be the narrator who complains, in the tenth Canto: They fawned over the fact that my mind was maimed, Dissected at each tea-party the surprising abortion Of my contradicting colour. (30)

Experience after graduation from St Mary’s in teaching as a Junior Master could have led him to observe: I teach the word, to a class of several colours, That shall grow up to wear their father’s flesh. [...] Their father’s sons, an epitaph for the young. Lord send my roots rain. (30, 31).

The offspring of white grandfathers and black grandmothers on both paternal and maternal sides, having been born on an island separated from both Europe and Africa, Walcott is but one among a population of mixed-blooded descendants of transplanted individuals and his fellow islanders knowing little that is authentically theirs and only fragments of ancestral roots. From an early age, Walcott determined to draw primary material from the people and experiences nearest his heart. He famously swears in Another Life a joint oath with his boyhood friend Dunstan St Omer, never to leave the island until we had put down, in paint, in words, as palmists learn the network of a hand, all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, every neglected, self-pitying inlet muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves.7

While such noble commitment to home and folk rings of nationalistic fervour, his absorption of classically European education results in “my contradicting

6

Robert D. Hamner, “Conversation with Derek Walcott,” World Literature Written in English 16.2 (1977): 412. 7 Derek Walcott, Another Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973): 52.

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colour.”8 This classically trained, brown St Lucian poet may be too metropolitan to speak for his native island. Yet it would be as futile to apologize for the colour of his skin as for the scope of his imagination. The dilemma of his split paternal heritage necessitates a creative solution. This apparent contradiction is resolved by his decision to exploit his crossed bloodlines to generate a polyglot, authentic West Indian perspective. Homer did much the same, finding precedents in oral Aegean legends and myths. Dante marks an aesthetic transition from Medieval to Renaissance Europe by preferring Italian (his Tuscan dialect) over Latin, while James Joyce outgrows the parochial colonialism of his native Ireland. Each epoch provides greater complexity, expanding and challenging the canon. At an early age, Walcott trained his ear by listening to the best examples of Western masters he could find. Experience led him to claim: The mind endures a tortuous, maddening search to discover its own sound. The search eventually ends in the discovery of other voices, and yet at its end the poet by acquiring all of these demons, becomes himself.9

Credible local examples being few and far between – George Campbell and Saint-John Perse are two he cites – he is left to learn what he can from “alien” models and extrapolate for his own purposes. By 1962 he observes: I often think that the poetry written in the West Indies by people like myself is still precocious and artificial for this society, a society which has not settled and whose languages have a Protean vitality that has not yet formalised its own syntax and accent.10

Furthermore, the learning curve involves both personal and political ramifications. If we accept that poetry has its origins in the myth of the race, in the heredity of the folk imagination, then the poet in the West Indies, exiled from a mythically fertile past, must first explore his origins before he can purify the dialect of the tribe.11

The “tribe” of which he speaks is no longer African nor European, but the historically truncated people of the Antilles. Imperialism, colonialism, and the attendant Middle Passage stand between ancestral origins and a present authenticity. 8

Walcott, Epitaph for the Young, 30. Derek Walcott, “Young Trinidadian Poets: The Search Eventually Ends in the Discovery of Other Voices,” Sunday Guardian (Trinidad; 19 June 1966): 5. 10 Derek Walcott, “Poetry – Enormously Complicated Art,” Trinidad Guardian (18 June 1962): 3. 11 Walcott, “Poetry – Enormously Complicated Art,” 3. 9

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These may all be pieces of the same puzzle, but the assembly of these pieces must begin from the margins and they must move towards a newly emerging centre. Thanks to his absent father, an amateur poet and painter, Walcott’s childhood home on Chaussee Road in Castries provided inspiration on a local, intimate scale. In “Leaving School,” he speaks of Warwick’s domestic gallery: an impression of Millet’s The Gleaners, a seascape with gulls entitled Riders of the Storm, an oil portrait of Alix, a watercolour self-portrait, an avenue among palms, a pad of pencil sketches. Touched by these efforts, along with several volumes containing reproductions of European masters, and Warwick’s copybooks of handwritten verse, Walcott claims to have found his artistic impetus: These objects had established my vocation, and made it as inevitable as that of any craftsman’s son, for I felt that my father’s work, however minor, was unfinished.12

A commendable sentiment, but he undertakes this vocation recognizing certain genealogical absurdities. While he could feel the pulse of his immediate family, hereditary branches of that tree remained in suspension. His well-known essay “The Muse of History” closes paradoxically: I accept this archipelago of the Americas. I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper “history,” for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon.13

An initial problem for the individual citizen as well as the aspiring artist is an endemic amnesia, the void left by European erasure of cultural continuity. Walcott’s calling requires that he find creative means for addressing the ancestral, racial, and historical void in which the Caribbean is suspended. Those who inscribed the “history” of discovery, conquest, and colonization could know at best only partially the significance of unfolding events. Turning back to the poetry, we see various examples of Walcott raising aspects of this amorphous problem – often obliquely, but also deliberately and more fully in his later works. One poem from The Castaway, “The Prince,” gains 12

Derek Walcott, “Leaving School,” London Magazine 5.6 (1965): 9. Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998): 64. 13

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poignancy when we weigh Hamlet’s filial dilemma against a Caribbean background. Walcott’s Prince of Denmark is torn by the oedipal contemplation of his mother’s lust and lechery in having married her husband’s fratricidal brother, and by the moral weight of his sworn vengeance: Calm, she reclines on her maternal couch, Knitting revenge and lechery in my head. I ease the sword, and, like her victim, quaking, I, in my father, stalk my father’s dread.14

The violence, the infidelity, as well as the ambiguity of his sworn obligation are rendered here as congenital. In his own family tree, intersecting bloodlines conjure up vestiges of racial and geographical violence. In three poems prior to the mid-1970s, Walcott alludes to the fiery suicide of his paternal grandfather, Charles Walcott.15 First, “Veranda” from The Castaway (1965) responds to ghosts of planters, Victorian middlemen like his British grandfather, who immolated himself by burning down his house in Choiseul. Walcott’s benediction is that, through his “mixed son,” Warwick, your burnt house, shrills with unguessed, lovely inheritors your genealogical roof tree, fallen, survives, like seasoned timber through green, little lives.16

Next, in “The Train,” from the collection titled The Gulf, we find him transported back across the Atlantic, travelling by rail through his grandsire’s countryside, contemplating the despair that “set his flesh on fire.” In keeping with that portion of his ancestry, he finds that travel creates division; and he concludes: “Like you, grandfather, I cannot change places, / I am half-home.”17 A third reference to the grandfather in this widely separated sequence takes a mere two lines in Another Life to conjure the other side of this personal, oceanic divide. The “fiery grandfather” and his burnt house in Choiseul initiate a negative litany of St Lucian problems: malaria, bilharzia, lethargy, and unemployment.18 With measured irony, Walcott accepts both sides of this unequal division, mining an imperial storehouse to evoke that grandfather’s “unguessed, lovely inheritors,” and their “green little lives.” 14

Derek Walcott, The Castaway (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965): 29. Edward Baugh & Colbert Nepaulsingh, “Annotations,” in Derek Walcott: Another Life: Fully Annotated (Boulder C O : Lynne Rienner, 2004): 255. 16 Walcott, The Castaway. 39. 17 Derek Walcott, The Gulf (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970): 54. 18 Walcott, Another Life, 39. 15

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One fascinating aspect of Walcott’s poetic style is his continual reintroduction and reshaping of familiar materials, whether the topic be autobiographical or contains echoes of international culture. Postmodernism discovers this to be ‘intertextuality’, but before the term came into vogue, practical structuralists knew that the text always derives from a context including authorial experience. Walcott may reject postmodern theoretics, but he never overlooks the interconnectedness of life and art. One of the seminal ideas running through Another Life that would be later expanded is the impact of fractured paternity or its absence on a disenfranchised community. Another Life is but the first in what may be seen as a tripartite bildungsroman. The initial phase may be designated that of the young artist’s orientation, in which he reflects on the legacy left by his absent father. The second is the transcultural passage (as embodied in Omeros and Tiepolo’s Hound) of his physical and imaginative engagement with the foreign influences suggested by Warwick. The third is his restoration to the birthplace of all his ambitions (as in The Prodigal). Walcott’s “Divided Child” of Book One in Another Life recounts the audacity of his youthful presumption: I saw, as through the glass of some provincial gallery the hieratic objects which my father loved: the stuffed dark nightingale of Keats, bead-eyed, snow-headed eagles, all that romantic taxidermy.19

Despite his attachment to the unheralded folk and natural beauty of St Lucia, the hierarchy of icons in his home represents someone else’s dusty mausoleums: But we were orphans of the nineteenth century, sedulous to the morals of a style, we lived by another light, Victoria’s orphans, bats in the banyan boughs. (77)

Drawing towards the end of the book, sensing the betrayal of his departure, it occurs to him that “it is harder / to be a prodigal than a stranger” (150). Unlike the detached stranger, the prodigal must suffer the pangs of separation from a birthright on which he consciously turns his back. This precocious artist may be figuratively orphaned, but his relationship to his New-World environment finds a precedent in the origins of mankind. On the final page of Another Life, he reiterates the joint mission assumed along with the painter Dunstan St Omer: “We 19

Walcott, Another Life, 41. Further page references are in the main text.

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were blest with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam’s task of giving things their names” (152). In the beginning, with no earthly progenitor, at least our earthly prelapsarian father (like Walcott’s stranger) began with a blank slate in creating words for his Eden. The ‘transportation’ stage of Walcott’s life may be said to begin as he launches into his travels: first to Jamaica for university education, afterwards teaching stints still within the region, then off on a Rockefeller grant to study theatre in New York. By 1959, he is back in the Caribbean, founding his Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which he directed over the next seventeen years. By 1977 he begins spending most of each year teaching in New York or Boston, returning home as often as he can, but more as a visitor than as a resident. With part of his 1992 Nobel Prize money he purchases an estate surrounded by sites commemorated in Omeros, just outside Gros Îlet village on Point Becune, with a fine view of Pigeon Island. To illustrate vestiges of the absent father motif during this period of shifting residences, I shall rely primarily on two book-length texts, Omeros (1990) and Tiepolo’s Hound (2000). Omeros is involuted in plot, character, and narrative persona. Integral to this complexity are the numerous variations on father/child concerns. There are close to a dozen separate variations. The earliest occurs when Helen, the lead female character, mentions her pregnancy. Owing to the fact that she is at odds with Achille, the peasant protagonist, and currently living with his arch-rival, Hector, Helen is uncertain who is the father of the child she is expecting.20 Deliberately formed lines of Greek–Trojan parallels here and elsewhere elevate this domestic triangle to the national level because Helen embodies the plight of St Lucia. Capable and independent-minded as Helen is depicted to be, her progeny and the culture of her emerging nation are vulnerable to conflicting influences. Her uncertainties reinforce the broken links, the absences remaining to be filled in Antillean history. Walcott’s second turn to his absent father conjures up the first of two pivotal encounters with the ghost of Warwick Walcott. This initial scene evolves from a pleasant conversational exchange into a solemn admonition, strongly echoing Anchises’ exhortation to Aeneas regarding his duty to Rome. Even the small-talk bears a genetic imprint. Derek notes, as he has elsewhere, that he follows his father’s example in poetry. Then the tone he supplies in his father’s dialogue is rife with Derek’s penchant for verbal play. Warwick, sensing a conundrum, muses: “Now that you are twice my age, which is the boy’s [work], / which the father’s?” (68). Never one to pass up a 20

Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990): 34. Further page references are in the main text.

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coincidence, Derek has Warwick expand on the correspondence of the name given him by his English father, and the Bard’s shire. This leads to punning on Derek’s inherited “Will” to write verse. To compound the line of thought, Warwick remarks on his having died of an ear wound (not unlike that which killed Hamlet’s father) on the very same date (23 April) as Shakespeare’s death, and caps his thought with the pun “Death imitating Art, eh?” (68–69). Walcott’s purpose, however, is not simply to inscribe a stylistic kinship. As the pair stroll the streets of Castries, Warwick becomes more serious as he recalls the lines of women colliers who used to bear baskets of coal up gangplanks of freighters. He commends these unsung labourers to his son as subjects deserving recognition. At this point he exhorts: Look, they climb, and no one knows them; they take their copper pittances, and your duty from the time you watched them from your grandmother’s house as a child wounded by their power and beauty is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice. (75)

Herein is the epical motive for Omeros, attributed to the father whose existence is manifest only in the narrator’s blood and a small collection of amateur verse and drawings. The ghost will appear later with an equally significant insight into the responsibilities of a West Indian artist. The third of these sets of fathers and sons in Omeros materializes out of separate scenes, projected over two centuries apart. Abruptly shifting from the intimate tête-à-tête with Warwick’s ghost, Chapter Fourteen (beginning Book Two) opens with a young midshipman named Plunkett executing a spying mission in a Dutch port at the behest of the British Admiral George Rodney (77–81). Inconsequential as this scene may appear at first, it soon lays the groundwork for events on several levels. First, there is a family connection. Not only was there contention between Dutch and English interests in the West Indies but Walcott’s maternal grandfather was of Dutch extraction – Johannes van Romondt from St Maarten.21 In terms of European history, this is the first intimation that Walcott will draw upon the famous Battle of the Saints and Admiral Rodney’s resounding defeat of the French fleet commanded by the Comte François de Grasse in 1782. For Walcott’s purposes, the most significant outcome of this victory was the final determination of St Lucia as a British rather than a French possession. Furthermore, for the sake of his fictional web, Walcott’s having

21

Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000): 11.

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Midshipman Plunkett die in this fight creates an important connection for another of his main characters. Retired Sergeant-Major Dennis Plunkett immigrated to St Lucia with his wife Maud after the Second World War. The childless couple owns a pig farm, but Plunkett’s chief preoccupation is with research for a history of the island. He, like Hector and Achille, is also struck by the powerful beauty of Helen and undertakes the documentation of “her” history. He, as much as Walcott, is devoted to the nexus of coincidental occurrences – with classically named peasants, Homeric parallels, historical currents. Consolidating this elemental set of parental pairings, Walcott has him discover the name of the ill-fated young Midshipman Plunkett in the manifest of H M S Marlborough (93–94). Suddenly, the Sergeant-Major seizes upon the discovery to adopt the son that fate had denied him through marriage. In keeping with the kind of irony savoured by Walcott, the midshipman’s death brings him to life for Plunkett’s consuming project. The history he has undertaken for Helen now, more than ever, becomes his personal mission. This same Fourteenth Chapter, in a manner far less complicated than the linkage of the separate Plunketts, introduces the fourth of Walcott’s filial pairings. In the brief scene where Admiral Rodney is overseeing the laborious fortification of St Lucia, he is specially impressed by the exertions of one black slave. At that moment, he is inspired to rename Afolabe “Achilles,” after Homer’s epic hero (83). Thus we are introduced to Achille’s African forefather some fifty pages before Walcott elects to begin developing this narrative subplot. This subsequent plotline is presented surrealistically with Achille reversing the Middle Passage back to Africa in a sunstroke-induced dream. As his pirogue is being drawn by a spectral sea swift eastward across the Atlantic, it is as though he is being restored to his lost identity. Envisioning the ghostly face of his father rising from the depths, “for the first time, he asked himself who he was” (130). As Achille’s canoe finds its way up a tributary of the Congo River, a type of Jungian racial memory takes hold, and then the narrator editorializes: Half of me was with him. One half with the midshipman by a Dutch canal. But now, neither was happier or unhappier than the other.(135)

Then, suddenly, ancestral loss evaporates in a surrealistic moment. Achille discerns his own features in the face of a tribesman named Afolabe. Their ensuing dialogue brings out the vital importance of names, and the insubstantiality of any man who has lost his identity (137).

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Ironically, as Achille’s tribal re-education proceeds, he begins to feel homesick for the future that he has left behind in this return to his lost African origins, “as if its proper place / lay in unsettlement” (140). Regardless of the fact that his foreknowledge cannot alter later history, his newly acquired enlightenment provides the elements he can reclaim and reassemble now with greater authenticity. Achille returns to the island and his erstwhile Helen, with whom, after the death of his former friend and rival Hector, he will eventually be reconciled. Soon we find that the Walcott persona-as-narrator is also transported back to St Lucia; this time recounting a visit with his mother, now residing in a nursing home. Given his age, he sees himself now splitting roles as father and son. Struggling through lapses in memory, Alix recalls her three children’s names, then ends pronouncing benediction on him: “‘Warwick’s son,’ she said. / ‘Nature’s gentleman’” (166). The visit stands effectively as a place-marker; the traveller who once left to pursue university education now more than ever leads an unsettled existence. Departing from his mother, Walcott shifts his geographical focus to the U SA , the country where he has been spending more and more of his time since the late 1970s. Preparing for the fifth of his treatments of absent fathers, he again turns back the years to incorporate another example of dislocated peoples – this time the tribal Sioux now starving on reservations in the Dakotas. While Walcott describes the plight of these Native Americans in the late 1890s, the central figure here is Catherine Weldon, a widow from the east coast who has come to live among them as their advocate. For Walcott, she is another type of Helen: a remarkably resilient woman. It is worth noting that her lonely support of Sitting Bull’s displaced tribe so impresses Walcott that, beyond her role in Omeros, she becomes the central figure in his play The Ghost Dance (1989). She loses her only son to tetanus, and without a mate to support her she is subjected to abuse and slander from her own government and white settlers. Concomitant with Weldon’s plight, the narrator’s self-reflexive sense of guilt over his own broken relationships becomes an explicit focus of the text. Walcott identifies with Weldon briefly, and admits using her to mitigate his personal loneliness. When one grief afflicts us we choose a sharper grief In hope that enormity will ease affliction, So Catherine Weldon rose in high relief through the thin page of a cloud, making a fiction of my own loss. I was searching for characters, and in her shawled voice I heard the snow that would be blown

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when the wind covered the tracks of the Dakotas, the Sioux, and the Crows; my sorrow had been replaced. Like a swift over water, her pen’s shadow raced. (181)

One cause of the “sharper” grief turns on countless treaties with native tribes that are broken by the government. Weldon becomes a surrogate, a distraction from the personal despair he is suffering at the current dissolution of his third marriage (to Norline Metivier). An emblematic destruction of legal documents is conflated metaphorically with snow falling across the bodies of dying braves (175, 214). Emerging from this Weldon scenario is Walcott’s sixth variation on the absent father motif. One potential consequence of marital failure is separation from any children produced through the union. Out of Walcott’s first two marriages came three children – daughters Anna, Elizabeth, and son Peter. In describing the breakdown of past unions, he uses the term “natural history.” As usual, rationalizing guilt over lost love offers scant comfort: It could not lift the heavy agonies I felt for the fatherless wanderings of my own sons, but some sorrows are like stones, and they never melt, though our tears rain and groove them, and the other ones, the marriages dissolved like sand through the fingers, the per mea culpa that had emptied all hope . . . the love I was good at seemed to have been only the love of my craft and nature; yes, I was kind, but with such certitude it made others lonely, and with such bent industry it had made me blind. (241)

Because death claimed his father, he has some understanding of that vacancy in his children’s lives. Now his craft as a writer, a calling he bears responsibility for having selected, is in turn depriving his offspring of his physical presence. Death’s inevitability absolves Warwick, but the legacy of his unfilled artistic aspirations may be seen in this light to have negatively influenced his son’s personal relationships. To some extent, that ironic complication is embedded in Omeros and a great deal else that Walcott has written. Early in the poem Another Life, his commitment to St Lucia is tempered by knowledge that artistic fulfilment will necessitate his physically leaving the island. Seventeen years later, by Book Six of Omeros, his craft is again cause for his familial shortcomings: as husband and father. If it occurs to him that art has led to these severed connections, perhaps he can use that knowledge creatively for resolution. Through Achille’s dream, he

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has already prepared an African foundation. His excursion to North America broadens the circumference of his New-World bearings. The remaining element of his healing, preparing him to move forward, is supplied once again by the ghost of his father. At the end of Book Four, Warwick materializes for the second time, now on a cold, windy beach of Marblehead Bay in Massachusetts. The corollary he now adds to his earlier commission requires Derek to tour the storied cities of Europe, to visit the sites that fed Warwick’s artistic imagination before his untimely death. However, advising his son to breathe the air of those legendary cities and absorb their renowned museums only lays the groundwork for his final admonition. He closes by saying: Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere, cherish our island for its green simplicities, [...] a sail leaving harbour and a sail coming in, the shadows of grape-leaves on sunlit verandahs made me content. The sea-swift vanishes in rain, and yet in its traveling all that the sea-swift does it does in a circular pattern. Remember that, son. (187–88)

In keeping with that advice, Book Five carries Walcott to Lisbon, London, Dublin (flavoured heavily with Joyce), and a fantasy sail on the Aegean (with a black Odysseus and crew speaking in West Indian accents), then a brief stint back in North America before fulfilling his requisite Caribbean closure. Book Six begins in Port of Spain, Trinidad, but it soon arrives back in St Lucia. The seventh injection of a variation on the fatherhood motif derives from the coalescence of autobiography, fiction, and Greek myth. Reverting again to his authorial persona, Walcott informs us: “There was Plunkett in my father, much as there was my mother in Maud. [...] there was a changing shadow of Telemachus / in me” (263). It may be that Warwick’s devotion to the island is incorporated into Dennis Plunkett’s history project, also that Alix Walcott’s sewing invests Maud’s bird-adorned tapestry.22 There is a great deal of Telemachus to be found in Derek’s quest – not to restore his absent Odysseus to an Ithacan kingdom, but to carry out his father’s unfinished work. At this point, it might be well to stress that, despite the classical allusions and the Homeric title and solicitation of Homer himself, Walcott is not attempting to re-create a heroic epic in the classical mode. Shortly after the poem came out, he told a New York Times columnist that while he may evoke, he has no desire to emulate or update

22

King, Derek Walcott, 13.

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the classical version of Homeric poetry. After all, Joyce has made that unnecessary.23 Speaking with J.P. White, Walcott asserts that what he is trying to do is “to hear the names of things and people in their own context, meaning everything named in a noun, and everything around a name.”24 In other words, while Omeros exploits Greek parallels, it arises from the innate beauty of authentic, ordinary people involved in their struggle to survive. It is necessary to keep this distinction in mind when Walcott’s narrator– persona conjures up an animated statue of Homer (Omeros) and proclaims him his “master.” Thus, his eighth type of father figure assumes the form of literary guide. Just as Dante expresses his debt to Virgil in the Inferno, our narrator declares: I have always heard your voice in that sea, master, it was the same song [...] of the surf’s benedictions, it rose in the cedars, in the laurier-cannelles, pages of rustling trees. Master, I was the freshest of all your readers. (283)

The “freshness” mentioned here relates to the new unheroic paraphernalia Walcott employs in his poem. As the instructor and pupil traverse the St Lucian coast, ascending to the sulfur pits of Soufriere, Walcott puts into Homer’s mouth enlightenment that complements and extends Warwick’s previous instructions. As it turns out, the wandering, fatherless poet is not one and indivisible. Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy’s shore. Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator; he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys in every odyssey, one on worried water, the other crouched and motionless, without noise. For both, the “I” is a mast; a desk is a raft for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft carries the other to cities where people speak a different language, [.. .] 23

D.J.R. Bruckner, “A Poem in Homage to an Unwanted Man,” New York Times (9 October 1990):

13. 24

J.P. White, “An Interview with Derek Walcott,” Green Mountains Review 4.1 (Spring–Summer 1990): 35.

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but the right journey is motionless; as the sea moves round an island that appears to be moving, love moves round the heart – with encircling salt, and the slowly traveling hand knows it returns to the port from which it must start. (291)

Herein are spelled out the means whereby the poet may be in and of the island even as imagination transports him to the farthest reaches of the earth, physically and spiritually. This is not a new idea. We may be reminded of the literal truth in Wordsworth’s line from “My Heart Leaps Up,” “The child is father of the man.” Taken literally, this represents the ninth of Walcott’s treatments of the son/father interface. In Another Life, the fatherless boy’s heart “leapt” in wonder at the beauty of his island home. That aesthetic transport remains with him even as the man into whom he matures transports himself literally by sea, and imaginatively at a stationary desk, no matter how far he may be from St Lucia. Finally, the tenth notable play on the absent father may be seen as actually an extension of the earliest in Omeros: Helen’s inability to identify the man responsible for her pregnancy (34). As the story approaches its conclusion, Walcott accomplishes yet another of the circular orbits recommended by Warwick. The Sorceress Ma Kilman relates that the deceased Hector is father of Helen’s unborn child. Achille, however, having accepted Helen again as his mate, assumes the role of stepfather and is lobbying for an African name (318). There is no hint regarding the child’s gender, but if a son, Afolabe would re-establish an appropriate ancient link. Throughout Omeros, Walcott exhibits great dexterity in his use of the father– son motif. His next volume, The Bounty (1997), with its title poem dedicated to Alix, is in homage to St Lucia and his deceased mother (d.1990). His father is hardly mentioned in this collection, but emerges again in Tiepolo’s Hound (2000). Although the extended narrative of Tiepolo’s Hound depends upon details from the life of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, strategic autobiographical references to Warwick surface in the first few pages. Although Pissarro spent a number of his early years on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, he migrated to France to develop his career and is therefore associated with other masters of European art. As Walcott presents the case, Pissarro’s decision has two consequences: first, his life and work were barely touched by his early experiences in St Thomas; second, the people and scenery of the West Indies were left unrepresented artistically. By contrast, Warwick Walcott’s amateur experimental impressions of great artists were cut short; early death left only the suggestion of an artistic

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legacy for his precocious son. Walcott cites examples on which he can only speculate. From my father’s cabinet I trace his predecessors in a small blue book: The English Topographical Draughtsmen, his pencil studies, delicately firm as theirs, the lyrical, light precision of these craftsmen – [...] A fine sketch of a cow a copy of Millet’s The Gleaners, Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire, the gathering blow of a storm with tossing gulls, more than a learner’s skill in them, more than mimicry, a gift. But a ticking clerk in a colonial government, his time stopped at the wharf where seagulls lift and pick at liner’s wake in argument. (11–12)

With this fragmentary evidence to hand, the son had to wonder what went through his father’s mind. my father drew from Millet. These distant landscapes which his devotion copied, did they despise the roots and roofs of his island as inferior shapes in the ministry of apprenticeship? (13)

As Walcott describes it, in their youth both his father and Pissarro faced similarly menial careers as clerks: Warwick in the civil service, Camille in the family’s commercial warehouse. In a passage resembling a letter, Joseph Pissarro is quoted giving his restless grandson this sober advice: “follow the business, not turn into a painter” (22). Whereas Warwick, married and with children, did not live long enough to develop his artistic interests – leaving an inspiration for his son – Camille traded the scenery of the New World for the lure of the Old. Just as with the interwoven parallels in Omeros, in Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott emphasizes contrasts. There are two hounds, Tiepolo’s pampered white pet standing for European power and historical masterpieces, the other an unremarkable black mongrel, nosing about the detritus of common byways. Reversed likenesses rise to the surface as he journeys imaginatively back to Pissarro’s nineteenth-century St Thomas. He becomes the young black boy in a pencil sketch:

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my body filled his penciled silhouette in arched Dronningens Gade, my trousers rolled to the calves, in a sisal hat at the market which I now tip in my acknowledgement [.. .] anonymous as my own ancestor, my Africa erased, if not his France. (137–38)

Finally, there is one specially pointed contrast – during the same period in which Pissarro turned his back on St Thomas, [.. .] In Trinidad there was one painter, the Frenchman Cazabon whose embalmed paysages were all we had, our mongrel culture gnawing its one bone. Cazabon and Pissarro; the first is ours, the second found the prism that was Paris. (154)

Walcott can blame himself for leaving St Lucia to make his way as an artist. He can superimpose his guilt on Pissarro for imagining that St Thomas was inadequate, that he would fare better in the Old World. Yet, in both cases, the common narratives of Omeros and Tiepolo’s Hound illustrate the potential in ordinary experience, regardless of location. As ghosts of his father and Homer explain in Omeros, devotion to one’s birthplace encompasses the “sail going out, the sail coming in.” Tiepolo’s Hound traces Pissarro, who sought success abroad, never to return, in contrast to Cazabon, who cast his lot in the Antilles and with Warwick’s curtailed efforts at producing art in St Lucia. The hard reality facing Walcott when he took up his pen as a teenager was that the inclination of artists from the English-speaking Caribbean who wanted to succeed was to migrate to London, New York, and Toronto. There were good reasons: no publishing houses, inadequate native audience, no viable artistic community of their own. The advantage of hindsight reveals that a major portion of Walcott’s writing revolves around the ambiguities generated by this prevalent sense of isolation. Cut off historically from Africa and educated in a European tradition that emphasizes the marginalized circumstances of the colonies, it is no wonder the fatherless, mulatto boy should begin by examining his options. After spelling out the predicament of his origins in several of his earliest works, it is only natural that he also weigh possibilities available from other places and times.

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The third phase of his artistic journey, ‘restoration’, is anticipated as early as Another Life, wherein we see him as a teenager resigned to the fact that he must eventually leave St Lucia to pursue his art (108). The return journey is essential for The Prodigal (2004). The pattern is not new; in fact, because of Walcott’s tendency to project his father as a kind of fulcrum on which to weigh local and foreign values, hints of the prodigal son parable have been readily available. Eventual publication of The Prodigal seemed so anticlimactic that I put off reading it for over a year. Finally, I was curious as to how the wayfarer would round off this latest circular voyage, and I took up the copy my wife bought for me. In the opening, Walcott is now an elderly man in a northern country. In an early scene we find him looking in shop windows thinking to himself: Along the smouldering autumnal sidewalks, the secretive coffee-shops, bright flower stalls, wandering the Village in search of another subject other that yourself, it is yourself you meet. An old man remembering white-headed mountains. And subtly the sense insinuates itself that frequent exile turns into treachery. (6)

A few pages further along, as he absorbs the atmosphere of an Italian city, he pauses to observe “the stillness / exactly like Gros Ilet’s, the sea and the village”; except, “my village was unimportantly beautiful / [...] unlike [this] city and the Via Veneto [...]” (28). This is but the first of several comparisons he makes between scenes from his travels with familiar sights back in Trinidad and St Lucia, until he eventually recalls the idealistic oath he once swore about abandoning his home: but my craft’s irony was in betrayal, it widened reputation and shrank the archipelago to stepping stones, oceans to puddles, it made that vow provincial and predictable in the light of a silver drizzle, in say, Pescara. (95)

He may excuse the decision, weigh reason, try to be “realistic,” but is burdened with regret and guilt over years of wandering. Fittingly, the conclusion depicts, yet again, an approach, this time by sea, to his island. And there is elation in his return. And always certainly, steadily, on the bright rim of the world, getting no nearer or nearer, the more the bow’s wedge shuddered towards it, prodigal, that line of light that shines from the other shore. (105)

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To do justice to the fuller scope of Walcott’s work, however, there is just the suggestion of an even larger destination than his beloved island. The prodigal has its biblical overtones and that “light” shining over an ever-receding horizon “from the other shore” has echoes of our being cut off, in the human condition, from an eternal home that cannot be obtained in this life. Walcott’s father is not explicit in The Prodigal; no need to spell it out, but the son who has chased earth’s constantly receding horizon is being drawn to his elemental home. He has delved into his divided origins, transporting himself to the parts of the world that contribute to the culture of his native islands, and he has done so in order to restore the authenticity of a Caribbean sense of being. The absence of his father is emblematic of rich but illusory roots – be they historical, social, racial, or artistic. The title of Walcott’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech reads “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” The suggestion is that memories abound, but they are severed from their original sources: “The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, “this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong.”25 Long-standing precedent for the “bare forked animal” stripped of his lendings is there in The Tragedy of King Lear and in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. There is one scene in Ibsen’s play that seems particularly appropriate to all the absences played out in Walcott’s poetry. Toward the end of his far-flung life, Gynt is finally held accountable for the essence of his being. He resorts to counting off all the roles he has played, all the identities he has assumed. Metaphorically, he peels off layers of an onion, a layer for each pose, in the assumption that he will delve down to the kernel of his being. Of course, beneath the final layer he discovers no centre: “There isn’t one! To the innermost bit it’s nothing but layers, smaller and smaller. Nature’s a joker!”26 Ironically, however, as existential philosophy teaches us, this “nothing” is substantive; it resonates meaningfully. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, every absence signals something that had been there; a meaningfulness that must be interpreted by each individual. Gynt is all the guises he acquired and his wholeness is greater than the sum of his parts. In the case of Derek Walcott, the present, pressing absence of his father, and all that absence represents, initiated his eclectic poetic odyssey. That search does not end in a fixed genealogical past,

25

Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech),” in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998): 70. 26 Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, in Eleven Plays of Henrik Ibsen, ed. H.L. Mencken (New York: Modern Library, 1935): 1162.

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nor in historic Africa or Europe. It makes peace with all that went before, circles around to the present, in a homeland that is rife with potential for sons and daughters engaged in constructing their own future.

W O R K S C I TE D Baugh, Edward, & Colbert Nepaulsingh. “Annotations,” in Derek Walcott: Another Life: Fully Annotated (Boulder C O : Lynne Rienner, 2004): 219–336. Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001). Bruckner, D.J.R. “A Poem in Homage to an Unwanted Man,” New York Times (9 October 1990): 13, 17. Hamner, Robert. “Conversation with Derek Walcott,” World Literature Written in English 16.2 (1977): 409–20. Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt, in Eleven Plays of Henrik Ibsen, ed. H.L. Mencken (New York: Modern Library, 1935): 1039–185. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000). Walcott, Derek. Another Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973). ——. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998): 65–84. ——.The Castaway (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965). ——.Epitaph for the Young: X I I Cantos (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1949). ——.The Gulf (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970). ——.In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962). ——. “In My Eighteenth Year,” 25 Poems (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1949). ——. “Leaving School,” London Magazine 5.6 (1965): 4–14. ——. “The Muse of History,” in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 36–64. Originally published in Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, ed. Orde Coombes (Garden City NY : Doubleday Anchor, 1974): 1–27. ——.Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990). ——. “Poetry – Enormously Complicated Art,” Trinidad Guardian (18 June 1962): 3. ——.The Prodigal (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004). ——.Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). ——.25 Poems (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1949). ——. “Young Trinidadian Poets: The Search Eventually Ends in the Discovery of Other Voices,” Sunday Guardian (Trinidad; 19 June 1966): 5. White, J.P. “An Interview with Derek Walcott,” Green Mountains Review 4.1 (Spring– Summer 1990): 14–37.

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From “The Rivers of Babylon” to Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes Intricacies of the Postcolonial and Postwar Jewish Condition K AT H LEE N G Y SSE LS

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A

N Y C O M M U N I T Y T H A T H A S S U F F E R E D O P P R E S S I O N and, worse, annihilation, finds that its next generation must struggle with the need both to recall and heal the wounds of the past, and to reconstruct an idea of togetherness, based on a common religion and/or a common culture. For descendants of Africans who had been transported to the New World, as for the survivors of the camps and the Jewish postwar generation, a shared desire to come to terms with the past, to resist amnesia, and to continue the legacy of spiritual and cultural values, can be acknowledged in art, especially in literature, which has a therapeutic, communal, and even ideological purpose. Contrary to what one might think, there is both in the U SA and in the Caribbean a significant number of authors of African descent who write in a joint venture, linking Jewish and black themes. In the first part of this essay, I will present some African Americans, as well as African-diaspora and Caribbean writers, who, in spite of the historical particularities of each ‘holocaust’, articulate Jewishness and blackness. The second part considers a number of Afro-Caribbean authors who link the question of identity, the search for ancestral roots and spiritual heritage, as well as a vision for the future, to the Jewish quests for identity and Judaism. The third part suggests how the French-Jewish author André Schwarz–Bart and his Guadeloupean wife Simone ideally fit the cross-cultural axes between postwar Jewish literature and postcolonial literature. Their first co-authored novel, Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes1 (published almost ten years after he had won the Prix Goncourt for The Last of the Just, 1958), can be read as a saga of common

1

Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (A Dish of Pork with Green Bananas) is the only one of Schwarz–Bart’s novels not yet translated into English. The couple collaborated on this and another, six-volume encyclopedic work, Hommage à la femme noire (In Praise of Black Women).

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experiences of deprivation and dispossession, disruption and dislocation. Consequently, it cautiously maps out the hypothetical intersection between postwar Jewishness and postcolonial Caribbeanness in ways that other critics and fictional writers have also attempted. These include the American Mark Kurlansky’s study The Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry and the German Anna Seghers’s Karibische Geschichten.2 Blacks on Jews: The Rivers of Babylon The Jew’s suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor to the world’s history: this is not true for blacks. [...] The Jew is a white man, and when white men rise up against oppression they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums.3

Very early on – in fact, as soon as the ‘peculiar institution’ was installed in America – racial awareness in the black community went hand in hand with solidarity with the Jewish ‘fate’. It was through the Old Testament, and the cult of the Book, forced upon the slaves in the Deep South, that the identification with the Jews, expelled from their countries in Europe, was made. Oral literature testifies to the borrowing of biblical and, more particularly, Jewish images 2

In her essay on minority writing in the Americas, Doris Sommer deals with writings by African Americans such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and the authors of slave narratives, and by Latin American novelists such as Mario Vargas Llosa. During her childhood in Brooklyn, Sommer noticed how minorities were inclined to practise a “politics of whitening,” which she sees as a direct result of the discrimination against Jews: Any marginalized culture produces self-hatred to the extent that minorities participate in a majoritarian culture that hates them. During my own childhood in Brooklyn, we had a bad name for Jews who were so embarrassed about their ethnicity that they chose not to claim it. They were ‘white Jews,’ troubled and untrustworthy. Whatever utopian or democratizing ideals may have tempted us all toward assimilation, ‘whitening’ was, to many of us, a hasty price for a distant prize. Sommer, Proceed with Caution When Engaged with Minority Literature (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1999): xiv. Also, Léon–Gontran Damas, in several collections of poetry, including Pigments, Névralgies (1972), and Black-Label (1956), addresses his concern with a number of groups of subaltern Others (the Jew, the black woman, the Native American, and the homosexual) in a Republic which was so proud as to declare in 1789 “Les Droits de l’Homme.” 3 James Baldwin, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” New York Times (9 April 1967), quoted by Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (New York: Columbia U P , 1998): 78.

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to consolidate a sense of “blackness” and black community, to define what would become “black spirituality.” Indeed, gospel music and spirituals such as “By the Rivers of Babylon” and “Go Down, Moses” demonstrate the need for a message of hope and of belief in liberation and freedom. Blacks in the Americas had nowhere to turn but to the master‘s religion to encode their hope to return to Africa, to express their trust in the redemptive messages of the Judaeo-Christian faith. On the other hand, they assimilated the enslaver’s religion to express their memory of the motherland and their belief that one day they would escape from bondage, racism, and oppression. As a result of the syncretism that took place in the spheres of beliefs, language, and culture, a vernacular tradition soon developed. It was out of this genuine African American creolization that some African Americans became spokespersons both for blacks and for Jews. W.E.B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), was probably the first to extend his observations on European Jewry in his elaboration of the notion of diaspora, convinced by the similarity in the respective destinies of the African American in the New World and Jews in Eastern Europe, but also in his perception of the difficulties many Jewish “brethren” suffered in a new environment. Du Bois’s insights grw more radical after he had travelled to Poland and seen how, “back there,” in Europe (the Old World), Jews endured systematic stigmatization and social exclusion. It was in France that Du Bois, witnessing the lasting effects of the Dreyfus case, would develop the idea of “double-consciousness,” which could equally be applied to the experience of many Jews living enslaved on European soil. In other words, the international Jewish Question helped Du Bois to refigure the Negro Question at home, with enslavement and diaspora as two of the most evident commonalities. Dale Peterson has similarly studied the close relations between authors of different extraction who share a common commitment to the “wretched of the earth.”4 Tolstoy and Richard Wright, Dostoevsky and “l’auteur antillais d’adoption” André Schwarz–Bart, whose work I will discuss later in this essay, could be “matched” for their emphasis on the analogy between serfdom and slavery. Following Du Bois, the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes wrote Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), a collection of poetry in which he assessed the relationship between the two minorities in a society that was more tolerant towards Jews than towards the descendants of slaves. Like Du Bois, Hughes addresses black–Jewish questions and seeks to understand, through a range of geographical, intellectual, and political analogies, the African American’s 4

Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literature from Russian and African American Soul (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000).

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situation as inevitably associated with the Jewish one: the common denominator is slavery. Indeed, the whole tradition of slave narratives presents striking similarities to camp-testimonials in terms of their exploration of the processes of demoralization and dehumanization. Sandro Portelli has demonstrated how one can read Primo Levi’s work alongside the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845),5 and a special issue of the Martinican journal Portulan has been dedicated to “Mémoire noire, mémoire juive,” reading Paul Celan alongside Aimé Césaire, for instance. Along with the persecution and atrocities, the practice of lynching in the segregated South and the pogroms in Russia, there is the constant casting-out of the black and the Jew on the assumption of ‘race-mingling’, impure blood.6 The obsession in countries with white majorities to avoid mixed couples and crossbreeding (‘limpieza de sangre’, ‘éclaircir la peau’) led to black writers’ exploring the theme of ‘passing’.7 Of the authors who have tackled with delicacy and genius the issue of a disproportionate ‘memory’ on both sides, the foremost is the Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison. She skilfully emphasizes the notions of exile and exodus for all uprooted minorities in the U SA , and defines AfricanAmerican literature as a postcolonial literature, inasmuch as it is generated by what she frankly calls a fascist regime (a term also used by Aimé Césaire in the opening lines of his Discourse on Colonialism, 1955). Before Morrison, the Négritude poets Léon–Gontran Damas and Aimé Césaire8 bravely compared the tragedies of black and Jewish history, invoking a struggle together against the oppressor, having understood Fanon’s call for awareness.9 Morrison is aware that articulations between the darkest pages of European history and those of American history remain difficult and polemical. Nonetheless, she takes an active and principled stand in working out the convergences in the psyche of the victims,

5

Sandro Portelli, “ ‘ Who Ain’t a Slave?’: On the University of Frederick Douglass,” G R A A T 27 (2004): 59–73. 6 Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race and Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2003): 119. 7 To pretend to be white has been the solution for several spokespersons and artists, such as the playwright Victor Séjour. Born in Saint-Domingue (since 1804 Haiti), this artist of mixed origin fled to New Orleans and addressed the problem of going unnoticed as ‘coloured’ in a segregated white society. Other examples of this strategy of passing are represented in novels by Nella Larsen and the Jamaican Michelle Cliff. 8 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, tr. Joan Pinkham (Discours sur le colonialisme, 1955; tr. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000): 29. 9 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; New York: Grove, 1967): 158–59.

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who have been both assaulted and blamed, as well as that of their offspring. The modern and postmodern Jew and the postcolonial or post-segregation African American face the twenty-first century without losing sight of what happened in the past, and this vision must constantly be kept alive and guide them. Morrison’s daring originality can be gauged by the fact that other writers’ approaches to the topic have been infrequent. Only in their later work did Saul Bellow and Philip Roth begin to tackle the taboo sphere of interracial mingling. 10 Exceptions would be Bernard Malamud and Richard Wright (both of Wright’s wives were Jewish), but also the Tunisian-born Jew and émule of Fanon, Albert Memmi, whose Colonizer, Colonized has been republished with an introduction by Nadine Gordimer.11 Memmi, the author of Racism, has never separated the ‘Negro’ from the Jew in his theorizing of repression and has analysed the scapegoating of blacks in the U SA alongside the exclusion and antisemitism suffered by Jews in Europe.12 One reason why joining and articulating both communities’ pasts and presents remains risky and polemical is the endless discussion around the numbers of victims of the respective holocausts. This disagreement on numbers gives a sad twist to the inter-ethnic dialogue. As Toni Morrison makes clear, this absence of agreement is tearing apart communities who suffered common forms of totalitarianism and fascism. She stresses the need on both sides to remember the victims, and for effective ways to heal the wounds of the past. Her literature is a tool for changing the collective and individual mind, for offering a way to rethink racial prejudice and revise the stigmatization of ‘Others’. While acknowledging the difficulty and outrageousness of “comparison,” Morrison makes a bold statement about the historical losses on both sides: Africans were sold as objects, while Hitler conceived the Endlösung of the Jews; Jews could go undercover, whereas Africans could never hide their négritude, as Fanon pointed out 10

Indeed, American-Jewish writers such as Philip Roth occasionally tackle the question of common subalternity. One of his more recent novels, The Human Stain (2000), and its movie adaptation (2003), put invisible otherness at their core, notably with the ‘one-drop rule’. 11 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer, the Colonized, tr. Howard Greenfield, intro. Nadine Gordimer (Portrait du Colonisé précédé du Portrait du Colonisateur, 1957; tr. 1974; New York & London: Routledge, 2013). 12 “In more recent times, Black people in the U S have been burned by lynch mobs, as women were burned during the Inquisition. The genocidal campaign against the Jews, in which fully a third of the world’s Jews were exterminated, was the latest avatar of this ongoing butchery. To exteriorize evil by incarnating it in another separates it from society and renders it threatening. It can be manipulated, managed, destroyed by fire. The common denominator must be understood: fire purifies all, including ourselves [ . .. ] but only by burning the other.” Albert Memmi, Racism, foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2000): 64.

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at length;13 the ghetto is an invention of antisemites while the black ghetto is a ‘free zone’ where jazz, rap, and literature (such as the Harlem Renaissance) nevertheless flourished. Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), is dedicated “To the Sixty Million, and more.” With this one line, Morrison does not pretend that sixty million Africans died, but for reasons of “euphony,” she writes “sixty” to make the reader aware of the number of victims who were sold and died, were killed or tortured, during the three centuries of transatlantic slavery in which five major European nations took part (Spain, France, England, Holland, and Portugal), not to speak of numerous ‘also-rans’ such as the German states, Scandinavia, and Switzerland. This putative number is intended to approximate dispersed groups whose first generation (“we are descendants of those who survived,” states Glissant14) suffers from ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, and whose offspring suffer from the shame and silence surrounding their relatives’ deaths. Morrison’s point is that it is time to pay tribute to all those, Jews and blacks, who perished during World War Two and the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, and whose number is uncountable. Also, she resists futile ‘comparisons’ and attempts at quantification, focusing instead on the work of “remembrance” and “re-memory” that has to be undertaken for and by African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. She underlines the fact that, while close attention is rightly paid all over the world to the Shoah, this is not equally so for the ‘black holocaust’. (Though Chamoiseau and Confiant, in a deliberately controversial comparison, have called the transatlantic slave trade “l’holocauste des holocaustes.”15) Next to the psychological need for “remembrance,” one could also draw a parallel on more physical and material levels. Indeed, while reparations are now being made to the relatives of the Jewish ‘slaves’ in the Third Reich, the black reparations movement16 equally demands compensation for racial degradation, enslavement, and exploitation. Despite the global proportions of these phenomena, I doubt that these demands will ever be satisfied. Alongside all this physical, material, and psychological damage and loss is the absence of places of remembrance that might function as the authorities’ political recognition of their involvement and guilt. While we have the Berlin and Washington museums for the Holocaust, and while many 13

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 160–68. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, sel., tr. & intro. J. Michael Dash (C A R A F Books; Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1989): 50. 15 Patrick Chamoiseau & Raphaël Confiant, Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature (1635–1975) (Paris: Hatier, 1991): 31 (italics in original). 16 Ali Al’Amin Mazrui & Alamin M. Mazrui, Black Reparations in the Era of Globalization (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2002). 14

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French cities have erected monuments to commemorate the victims of the wars – particularly the Jewish déportés – we still lack museums and memorials for the black holocaust. We lack what Pierre Nora has called lieux de mémoire for the sacrifices paid by the black soldiers (tirailleurs sénégalais) or Caribbean and African-American victims of the transatlantic slave trade and the ‘peculiar institution’ in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas. Therefore, Toni Morrison condemns antisemitism among blacks17 and laments: There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There‘s no 300-foot tower. There‘s no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or better still, on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place doesn’t exist (that I know of) the book had to.18

This “missing gravestone syndrome”19 explains why Morrison‘s novel bears the title of “the one word that matters,” from the curtailed epitaph: “To my dearly Beloved.” The African-American author James Baldwin, who grew up in New York and counted many Jews among his close friends and editors (as evidenced by his correspondence with Sol Stein), felt a “stranger in his own land,” since America unites “Christians, Sun-baked Hebrews and Sons of Ham,” as Emily Miller Budick entitles her chapter devoted to Baldwin in Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation.20 Blacks and Jews are entangled in the same crisis of assimilating to the dominant white American norm. Baldwin’s writing and political action in the NAACP were motivated by an awareness of the need to foster black-Jewish 17

Morrison stands against ‘Black nationalism’, which has often been openly antisemitic. While they were allies in the N A A C P (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and during the civil-rights movement, African Americans and Jews are today divided by the success of the Black Muslims. Their leader Louis Farrakhan and, before him, Amiri Baraka have accused Jews of being responsible for the slave trade. (For an exegesis of the Talmud and the myth of Ham, see David Aaron, “Early Rabbinic Exegesis on Noah’s Son Ham and the So-Called ‘Hamitic Myth’,” Journal of American Academy of Religion 63.4 [Winter 1995]: 721–59.) Like extreme right-wingers in France and elsewhere, they banalize the Holocaust; Morrison argues that Farrakhan minimalizes what took place during World War Two (Jack R. Fischel, “The New Anti-Semitic Axis: Holocaust Denial, Black Nationalism and the Crisis on Our College Campuses,” Virginia Quarterly Review 71 [Spring 1995]: 211). 18 Toni Morrison, “A Bench by the Road: Beloved” (1989), interview with Robert Richardson, in Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn D. Denard (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2008): 44. 19 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust, Memorials and Meaning (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1993): 7. 20 Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, 41.

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relations in the U SA . Sol Stein testifies that “we were here, native Americans, charged up, yearning to make it as Americans while trying to shake up America to make it a more congenial nest for the likes of us.”21 James Baldwin edited, with Nat Hentoff, a collection of essays entitled Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (1968). Afro-Caribbean At that moment only will you all understand when they get the idea soon they will get that idea to want to gobble themselves up some nègre like Hitler gobbling up Jews seven fascist days out of seven22

In Caribbean literature, similar attempts have been made to bring into parallel the black–Jewish experience of exile and scapegoating. Through the use of biblical tales (the stories of Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, and the Exodus, in particular the figure of Moses), cooperation was thought possible. But, if the analogy most often made in abolitionist and postbellum African-American writing was with the deliverance of the Jews from Egypt, Afro-Caribbeans focused on the differences between Jewishness and blackness. The Martinican essayist and poet Aimé Césaire,23 as well as his proponent and heir Édouard Glissant, have been intrigued by the common denominators of the Jewish and black fates. In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant reflects that whereas Jews were deported, victimized, and stigmatized because of their “race” and “religion,” Africans who were sold as slaves into the New World faced cultural annihilation and alienation: 21

Sol Stein, Native Sons: James Baldwin and Sol Stein (New York: Ballantine, 2004): 8. Leon–Gontran Damas, “S.O.S.,” in Damas, Pigments, Névralgies (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972), tr. Alexandra Lillehey, Pigments in Translation, Wesleyan College, online (accessed 4 July 2012). 23 Césaire speaks for “l’homme juif / l’homme cafre / l’homme noir,” but stresses that what makes the kinship between Jews and blacks difficult is the fact that white people and the Christian bourgeoisie cannot forgive Hitler for having “exterminated” other white people: “the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa” (Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 36). 22

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The first impulse of a transplanted population which is not sure of maintaining the old order of values in the transplanted locale is that of reversion. Reversion is an obsession with a single origin: one must not alter the absolute state of being. To revert is to consecrate permanence, to negate contact. [... ] The flight of the Jews out of the land of Egypt was collective; they had maintained their Judaism, they had not been transformed into anything else. What to make of the fate of those who return to Africa, helped and encouraged by the calculating philanthropy of their masters, but who are no longer African; the fulfilment of this impulse at this point [... ] is not satisfactory.24

The culture of Africans sold to the New World was almost entirely wiped out, erased, their history obliterated. The St Lucian poet, playwright, and essayist Derek Walcott similarly stresses that the Caribbean was an important place of immigration for expelled Jews,25 who could begin a new life in Trinidad or elsewhere in the archipelago. In What the Twilight Says, Walcott furthermore stresses that the departure of the Jews from Egypt signified liberation and the end of enslavement, while the Africans’ transportation to the New World initiated a hellish Canaan, where they were doomed to become less than human.26 In Omeros (1990), an “Epic of the Dispossessed,” he shows how the Afro-Caribbean author has to transcend “nothingness” and make art out of nothing. The trauma of loss and double dispossession, shared by Jews and blacks, Native Americans, and other minority groups, explains the epic’s central metaphor: the wound. Philoctete’s ailing and “stinking wound” is nothing but the wound of his ancestors who were chained to the slave ship. In seven Books, centuries of West Indian history are related, starting from the present in the Caribbean fishers’ village, and moving through the capture of the Africans and the Middle Passage

24

Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 16–18 (italics in original). “Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle. And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city, Port-of-Spain, the sum of history [ . .. ] a downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without history, like heaven. Because this is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer’s heaven” (Derek Walcott, Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993]: 11). 26 Cf. the “New Aegean” of the Caribbean as “another Canaan”; Derek Walcott, “What the Twilight Says” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970): 15, and “Hebraic suffering, the migration, the hope of deliverance from bondage. [. .. ] the passage over our Red Sea was not from bondage to freedom but its opposite, so that the tribes arrived at that New Canaan chained”; “The Muse of History” (1970), in What the Twilight Says, 44.. 25

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in Book I V , and on to the Jewish neighbourhood in Boston where Walcott lives and teaches. The New World was not a New Jerusalem for Jews or for blacks.27 A third Afro-Caribbean example is the Bajan author Paule Marshall, whose parents came from Barbados, and who grew up in a brownstone house in Brooklyn, New York (hence the title of her 1959 autobiographical novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones). This neighbourhood was inhabited by many Jews from Eastern Europe, before immigrants from the West Indies came to settle in the same brownstones in the Depression years. It comes as no surprise, then, that Marshall should analyse the twisted relationships and rivalry between Jews and blacks: the “Brown Girl” of the brownstone has to wear old clothes, which her mother has been offered by her boss, a Jewish lady. In her collection of short stories Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), which was awarded the Rosenthal Award for Fiction, each story is set in a place starting with a B (Brooklyn, Brazil, Barbados, and British Guyana), so as to map the dispersal of both Jewish and black people. In these new environments and neighbourhoods, such immigrants have often been unable to maintain what Toni Morrison calls “the ancient properties,”28 the respect for the ancestry and religion of their families who fled poverty and religious intolerance, settling in New-World cities such as the East Coast metropolises, New York and Boston. In The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, the cross-cultural Marshall approaches the issue of the Black–Jewish relationship in the context of the Caribbean through a mixed couple on a mission to the fictive island of Bournehill: the American-Jewish anthropologist Saul Amron and the black woman Merle Kimbona, whose name phonetically evokes ‘quimbois’ or ‘black magic’ in Martinique and Guadeloupe. When one happens to be born with a black skin and is female and poor, one must look for solace in spiritual and magical-realist practices. In general, however, Jews remain secondary characters in the work of Dutchspeaking,29 anglophone, and Spanish-Caribbean authors. In the writing of the 27

Yvette Christiansë, “The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Derek Walcott’s Poetry,” in Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Jamie S. Scott & Paul Simpson– Housley (Cross/Cultures 48; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2001): 199–224. 28 Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers: 1950– 1980, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1984): 339–45. 29 Ellen Ombre (Paramaribo and Amsterdam) brings to the forefront the presence of Jewish coloured offspring in the Dutch Caribbean. See, for instance, Negerjood in Moederland (2004), a novel I have dealt with elsewhere. See Kathleen Gyssels, “La juive noire, entre mémoire et malmémoire: Negerjood in moederland d’Ellen Ombre (Surinam/Amsterdam),” in La Production de l’étrangeté dans les littératures francophones, ed. Béatrice Bijon & Yves Clavaron (Paris: Champion, 2009): 99–111.

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francophone realm of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti, such figures had been absent until, recently, the novelist Maryse Condé parodied the cult of victimizing both Jews and blacks. In I, Tituba, her satirical pastiche of the slave narrative, she includes a discussion between the Jew Benjamin Cohen de Azevedo and his black slave and lover, Tituba Indian: who suffered more is the theme of the conjugal debate. It emerges that on all levels the Jew has had less to endure from the evils of discrimination and persecution. Through her ironic treatment of Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo as a good loyal husband to his ‘property’, Condé makes it clear that the Jew turned out to be a good master – at least, better than the Puritan minister of the Bay Colony of Salem.30 This (historical) fact seems confirmed in other narratives, such as The Confessions of Nat Turner31 or Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup,32 where Quakers and Jews take better care of their ‘livestock’ than other white masters. Through such comparisons, Condé contests the allegations of Louis Farrakhan, who has repeatedly accused Jews of having been enslavers and complicit in the slave trade. In spite of the way Jean– Paul Sartre embraced both black and Jew, or Fanon’s call for caution, or even the words of the Négritude poet Léon–Gontran Damas quoted in the exergue to this essay, the paying of equal attention to both Jews and blacks33 is far from widespread, to say the least. Whenever efforts are made in the French-Caribbean sphere, works emblematic of ‘dialogue’ are absent. For example, in a special issue of the journal Portulan34 devoted to Jewish and black memory, there is not a single article on work of the Schwarz–Barts. 30

See Kathleen Gyssels, Sages sorcières? Révision de la mauvaise mère dans “Beloved” (Toni Morrison), “Praisesong for the Widow” (Paule Marshall), et “Moi, Tituba” (Maryse Condé) (Lanham M D & Oxford: U P of America, 2001). 31 William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Vintage, 1966). The Reverend Nat Turner’s first master is a Jew – Nat dwells on the strange star he sees figured in his library. The star, moreover, is inscribed in the pages of the novel as an iconographic representation of otherness. 32 Neta Alexander, “Between ‘12 Years a Slave’ and Anne Frank: Steve McQueen Sits Down with Haaretz,” Haaretz (17 January 2014): http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/premium1.569188 (accessed 14 February 2014). 33 Jean–Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1946) and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), where Fanon responds in fact to both Sartre’s essay and his famous introduction, “Orphée noir,” to L’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948): 9–44. See also Robert J.C. Young, “Sartre, the African Philosopher,” preface to Jean–Paul Sartre, Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, tr. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer & Terry McWilliams (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): ix–xxviii. 34 “Mémoire nègre, mémoire juive,” Portulan (February 1998), edited by Roger Toumson, a Guadeloupean essayist.

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A Novel of ‘Gaps’ (Trou/s) Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967) by Simone and André Schwarz–Bart is a highly elusive, unconventional novel in which nothing, or almost nothing, happens. The critic Betty Wilson sees it as a confluence of history and memory, a stream of consciousness of an uprooted black Martinican facing death.35 André Schwarz–Bart’s next novel was La Mulâtresse Solitude (1972), an historical treatment of slavery in Guadeloupe and the first, averted abolition of it; it is written in Free Indirect Discourse and enters the mind of the enslaved Bayangumay and her daughter Solitude, who was hanged after giving birth to her child. This book contains an Epilogue in which the narrator puts Solitude’s story next to that of the victims of the Warsaw uprising. Bella Brodzki aptly considers La Mulâtresse Solitude a “nomadic” text, since it is impossible to define its genre or specific sub-genre: “not quite a Holocaust novel, not quite a Caribbean slave narrative.”36 Un plat de porc is even more difficult to categorize, as it deals essentially with loss and absence, leaving unanswered many questions asked by both narrator and reader as they discover the contents of Mariotte’s diary: the firstperson narrator revisits in daydreams her native island, a small village in Martinique, and her unhappy relations with her mother and grandmother, both of whom have rejected her. The Martinician protagonist seems to want to come to terms with the reasons for such a hostile attitude – whether because she is a bastard daughter, or because of her skin colour. Even the narrative form, as the diary of an old lady who dies in Paris, attests to its emptiness and vagueness. In fact, the very metafictional devices in the “hybrid poetics”37 as performed by the authors convey the impossibility of coming to terms with one’s past, the “unspeakable” testimony that Spivak attributes to the subaltern38 or s/he who is disempowered, imprisoned in one of society’s controlling institutions such as the prison or the psychiatric hospital. The futility of writing down memories, of

35

Betty Wilson, “History and Memory in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes and Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle,” Callaloo 15.1 (Winter 1992): 179–89. 36 Bella Brodzki, “Nomadism and the Textualization of Memory in A. Schwarz–Bart’s La Mulâtresse Solitude,” in Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations and Nomadisms, ed. Françoise Lionnet & Ronnie Scharfman (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1993): 214. 37 Ronnie Scharfman, “Towards a Poetics of Hybridity,” in Discours sur le métissage, identités métissées, en Quête d’Ariel, ed. Sylvie Kandé (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999): 191–207. 38 Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York & London: Routledge, 1998).

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even writing at all, is at stake, much in line with Adorno and Levinas’s questioning of the possibility of ‘literature after Auschwitz’.39 Among the narrative devices that articulate the black and the Jewish experience, there is a deliberate emphasis on haunting, the ghostly presences of the past. Both Mariotte and Louise Duployé, an old French woman who is literally bent (“ployée”) under the weight not only of her own past but of the entirety of World War Two, carry the burden of a past so traumatic that they are driven mad. For Mariotte, it is the rejection by none other than her own grandmother, Man Louise, that resonates in her old age in Paris. The memory of that old woman, who yelled on her death bed: “remove the skin, remove the skin, wash me hard,”40 has traumatized her. Man Louise could be said to have worn the shackles of slavery in her head long after slavery had been abolished on the island of Martinique in 1848. During her grandmother’s wake, Mariotte heard how this negrophobic woman despised her own daughters – and most of all her grandchild, because of her dark complexion. Mariotte is “une câpresse,” darkerskinned than the mulatto, and therefore assigned a bad reputation as primitive, savage, and disobedient. Venerating her alleged father figure Raymoninque, imprisoned for having participated in the 1878 riots, Mariotte grew up with the feeling of being ugly and blaming her mother and aunt, proud and beautiful “red negro women.” Forced to leave her native island because of the eruption of the volcano Mont Pelée (1902), Mariotte escapes the dreadful cage of Martinique’s racist structure: Secretly infernal Martinique and its cage [... ] where the white man scorns the Octoroon, who scorns the Quadroon, who scorns the Mulatto, who scorns the Griffe, who scorns the Zambo, who scorns the Negro, who scorns his Negress, who scorns the Indian who scorns his Indian girl, who, ha-ha, beats her dog.41

39

Maha Ben Abdelahim demonstrates the importance of Levinas’s concept of “responsibility for the other” in “Plat de porc ou ‘l’Autrement qu’être’ de la Relation,” Nouvelles Études Francophones 26.1 (Spring 2011): 81–94. 40 “enlevez la peau, enlevez la peau, nettoyez-moi fort”; Simone Schwarz–Bart & André Schwarz–Bart, Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (Paris: Seuil, 1967): 93. Further page references are in the main text. 41 “Martinique secrètement infernale, avec sa cage [. . . ] où le Blanc méprise l’Octavon, qui méprise le Quarteron, qui méprise le Mulâtre, qui méprise le Câpre, qui méprise le Zambo, qui méprise le Nègre, qui méprise sa Négresse, qui méprise le Zindien qui méprise la Zindienne, qui ha ha, frappe son chien” (127). All translations from French are by Dr Kim Andringa of the University of Liège, whom I thank warmly.

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She seems to have searched in vain across sites in three continents (namely Bogotá, Casamance in Senegal, where the authors lived for years, and Europe) for a new home – as the reader learns from the annotations in her diary. This practice of writing down her sad impressions functions as therapy – an attempt to work through the oppressive past and the painful memory of her own life, which she tries to understand as death approaches. Like writings from the camps and like diaries by Holocaust survivors, the novel remains deliberately fragmentary and vague and is hardly ‘dialogic’ at all. In order to remedy the absence of a reader, Mariotte goes so far as to speak to herself in the third person, as well as switching from “je” to “tu.” A selective set of memories of Martinican childhood, interspersed with dreadful descriptions of old people dying and declining, constitutes the main ‘narrative’. On the first page of the book there is an “auto picture,” hastily drawn on a piece of blueprint paper (which Mariotte describes in detail on pages 54–56). As in other postcolonial novels dealing with absence and loss, the paratextual elements attract our attention. The Epilogue of André Schwarz–Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude (La Mulâtresse Solitude) is a case in point. This historical novel about slavery in Guadeloupe finishes with the collective suicide of three hundred maroon slaves. Separately, and on the novel’s last page, their collective suicide is set alongside the massacre of those involved in the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. By locating this act of resistance through suicide (as a reaction to the re-introduction of slavery in Guadeloupe by order of Napoleon, after eight years’ freedom from 1794 to 1802) as adjacent to the heroic image of the totally erased ghetto, the author invites the reader to come to terms with massacres deriving from persecution on account of race and religion. The maroons, led by the mulatto Louis Delgrès42 and the heroic, pregnant mulatto woman Solitude, prefer to die rather than surrender and be fettered again. So, in his 1972 novel, André Schwarz–Bart claims the right to speak both for the Jews, his own community, and for Afro-Caribbean people, by invoking Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, who defended the principle that each individual might stand up for another individual, regardless of skin colour, religion, or nationality. When he switched from writing on the Holocaust to the Guadeloupean slave revolution, André Schwarz–Bart had to defend his “empathy” with the descendants of the Africans. “Each human being can legitimately speak of his or her fellow human

42

62).

Much more widely acclaimed as a hero than was Solitude (see Glissant, Caribbean Discourse,

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beings,” assured the author in a rare interview on the release of Un plat de porc.43 Moreover, Un plat de porc is dedicated to both Elie Wiesel and the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, a clear gesture of double offrande or dual offering. Thus, the Schwarz–Barts offer their first work of fiction to two spokesmen who have been widely acclaimed for their accounts of life in the concentration camps and life in a French colony, respectively. The more we read from the seven “Cahiers” of Mariotte, the more we can sense the Jewish experience in postwar France, in the shadow of war and of deportation. What is transposed through the gaps of this diary is the overall suspicion about camp survivors and ex-colonized subjects in the centre of the “power machine,” the so-called First World with its impressive and imperial metropolises. Paris is a society where, despite appearances, the “l’ère du soupçon,” as Nathalie Sarraute aptly called it, still seethes with old, widespread prejudices about race, religion, and gender. Everyone “different” becomes suspect and, as she comments in the brief portrait of herself, Mariotte warns the reader of the dangers of such a practice (writing/self-representing/auto-ethnography). The “auto picture,” commented on in the diary, calls to mind not only the illustrations of slave narratives (such as that of Olaudah Equiano) but also the hazards of the practice of auto-ethnography in a white racist world. Other associations that arise when one looks at the frontispiece in the original edition of Un plat de porc are the rapid sketches which some prisoners made of themselves or their fellow inmates in the camps.44 As Mariotte says, writing down her memories and observations on her present life has to be done secretly in order to save something for the after-world, to leave a trace of her existence. She nicknames the old people’s home “le Trou” (the Hole), which may be reminiscent of the way Theresienstadt, Treblinka, and Auschwitz were called the anus mundi. Schwarz–Bart elaborates in interviews on the use of the concept of “l’univers concentrationnaire” to designate places in “normal society” where dissidents and outcasts languish. For the old, dying Martinican lady, it is only dreams that give voice to her past. Her Notebook, however, accounts for all those fragile, voiceless bodies, exhausted by pain and anxiety: samples of costumes, of headwear, of heads that have a look of madness about them, even the serenest and the best preserved [...]. Lacking: here a leg, tightly pressed against the bone. There the neck of a spring puppet.

43

“Chaque humain peut légitimement parler de tous ses semblables”; André Schwarz–Bart, “Pourquoi j‘ai écrit La Mulâtresse Solitude,” Le Figaro (26 January 1967): 22. 44 Kathleen Gyssels, “André and Simone Schwarz–Bart’s Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes: Shoah and Slavery Intertwined,” I U P Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2.2 (2010): 7–23.

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There a goiter. There a crazy eye, wide as the page upon which would be drawn each stage of a calvary next to which Jesus’s modest adventure is to be considered touching. (57)45

“Writing in the Trou” (like writing after Auschwitz) becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, and Mariotte constantly reminds the reader of the multiple constraints. First, her eyes are bad; second, the “outsiders” spy on her. They cannot believe that a black woman can handle a pen so well and at one point they try to comfort her by telling her that she is not really a black person, since she has been seen writing and reading. Also, they ask about her blood-line: an embarrassing question she simply responds to with irony, saying she has “red blood” (196–97), while knowing full well that they are actually asking about her mixed origins. In fact, her origins are an enigma with which she still wrestles. She does not know who her father is. This genealogical mystery partly explains the painful, haunting nature of the past and her childhood memories (61). To describe this re-surfacing of a past she wilfully wanted to erase, Mariotte would need a wholly new language. It seems that the much-adored and fetishized language of the master does not entirely suffice. Boundaries of language also produce stops and silences in her testimony; for instance, “clapotis,” a rare French word with water-associations, comes naturally to her instead of the standard word ‘événement’ (event). Sometimes a word which would suit as a ‘translation’ of an impression does not have the Creole nuance she desires. Her status is that of a little fish drowned in the Parisian aquarium (81). This issue of standard vocabulary and grammar being unfit and unsuitable to translate experiences in the camps and colonies has been discussed by Jewish or postcolonial authors such as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Édouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris. In what language, with what words, can one describe what happened, since the tragedy of slavery and antisemitism is unspeakable, unimaginable, inconceivable, unfit for human language, as André Schwarz–Bart recalls in his posthumously published ‘circumfession’ Morning Star: “the nameless, even the unnameable” could only be translated in music:46 the French language was incapable of evoking a single day of hell in Auschwitz.

45

“Manquaient des échantillons de toilettes, de coiffures, de têtes dont les plus sereines et les mieux conservées ont un air de folie [. . .]. Manquaient telle jambe serrée contre l‘os. Tel cou de marionnette à ressort. Tel goitre. Tel oeil dément, grand comme la page, où seraient dessinées chacune des étapes d‘un calvaire auprès duquel la modeste aventure de Jésus prête à commentaires attendris.” 46 André Schwarz–Bart, Morning Star, tr. Julie Rose (L’Étoile du matin, 2009; tr. New York: Overlook, 2011): 185 (italics in original).

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The environment of “le Trou” intensifies racism, antisemitism, and sexism. Not only is Mariotte stigmatized as “the dark other,” the terrifying black witch, but her body is also perceived through the white male’s eyes as a commodity and as still capable of providing sensual and sexual pleasure. She is the “doudou,” the black doll: Being the only woman of West Indian origin in the old people’s home I have the privilege of being called “doudou,” and Mr Moreau calls upon me to authenticate even the most fantastic of his descriptions of life in the tropics. The fear Mrs Bitard feels for my supposed practice of bewitchment through the use of effigies, photographs, nail clippings etc., I owe to him. As for the rest, my skin colour brings him back memories of his nights on the town. (32)47

Because of her black skin, Mariotte is spoken to in an impoverished lexicon, reduced to onomatopoeia. She has to indulge the “Miam Miams” – the allusion to cannibalism being another stigma. She is believed to be able to use “black magic” and practise voodoo. In other words, the black inmate is associated with the occult, which is a way of excluding her and accusing her of backwardness and obscure, despicable practices. The same insulting remarks (“Youpin”) have a far more damaging impact on Louise Duployé, about whom the reader can only guess what really happened before her arrival at the old people’s home. She is the “surrogate victim,” described by Dominick LaCapra,48 who, besieged by bad faith and guilt, develops symptoms such as auto-mutilation, and neurasthenic behaviour. Consumed by loneliness and the loss of many relatives and friends, this character behaves with “empathic unsettlement” and puts herself in the “Youpin”’s place. By situating Louise alongside the uprooted Martinican, the Schwarz–Barts raise the question of the appropriate attitude towards Holocaust survivors – how to protect them from this vile treatment and these mean reminders, and how to protect first-hand witnesses, as well as those like Louise, 47

“Seule Antillaise de l‘hospice, j‘ai droit au titre exclusif de ‘doudou,’ et M Moreau fait appel à mon témoignage pour authentifier ses descriptions les plus mirobolantes de la vie aux tropiques. Je lui dois la crainte qu‘inspire à Mme Bitard ma pratique supposée de l‘envoûtement par effigie, photos, rognures d‘ongle, etc. Quant au reste, la couleur de ma peau ranime en lui des souvenirs de bordées.” 48 Dominick La Capra deals with post-apartheid South Africa and post-Nazi Germany, and mentions slavery as an historical loss that produces not only survivor guilt but also the syndrome of the “surrogate victim”: “the attentive secondary witness does not entail this identity, it involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place.” See LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25.1 (Summer 1999): 727.

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nicknamed la Biquette, who suffer from the syndrome of the guilty survivor. She scratches her arm in search of an imagined scar every time the inmates make jokes: “looks like those crematoria were incubators....”49 The constant violence among the elderly women is upsetting and frustrating for the narrator, nicknamed “Number Fourteen” – yet another reminder that Mariotte ends her life in a strange environment evocative of the camps. Malcolm X refused the name imposed by white planters and slave-owners; not only is Mariotte’s African clan name erased but even her first name is replaced by the number fourteen. As a “monomaniaque solitaire” (78), Louise Duployé cannot overcome the trauma of loss of neighbours and citizens, and imposes on her own body the violent practices of victims of torture and terror. She is forever separated from the others, and unable to share emotions or to communicate with Mariotte. Another strong parallel with Jewish narratives of exclusion and hysterical public reactions to miscegenation is the obsession with blood: alongside the concern for purity of ancestry and the segregation between black and white is the irrational fear and collective phobia of mingling blood – and, worse, of consuming the other’s poisoned “liquid.” The novel reminds us that racial purity and America’s obsession with the one-drop rule has its roots in medieval, Christian times; the Other has long been suspected of poisoning and contaminating the “pure blooded” Christian. Interestingly, Caryl Phillips’s 1997 novel The Nature of Blood juxtaposes the superstitious tales of anti-Judaism in Europe with the apparently rational ‘Nuremberg Laws’ that led to the expulsion and elimination of Jews during the Holocaust, a drama that Phillips links to segregation and fear of miscegenation on American ground. These interrelated histories of colonialism and the ghettoization of Jews were most probably inspired by Schwarz– Bart’s Goncourt Prize-winning novel, The Last of the Just.50 Empires (colonial or not) have been obsessed with keeping the Other on the periphery, fearing that the blood would become tainted: the “disease” or disorder of the Jew was thought to be cured by Christian blood.51 In the same manner, Mariotte is an 49

“à ce qu’il semble, leurs crématoires, c’étaient des couveuses” (78). See Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge M A : Belknap Press/Harvard U P , 2005): 472. 51 Susan Gilman, Blood Talk: American Race and Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2003): 46. Blood appears as a legal concept in the U S through the one-drop rule of racial identity; as an allied scientific term in the movement to measure and classify racial differences; as a medico-religious concept justifying anti-Semitism through medicalized notions of the disease/disorder of the Jew and his ‘cure’ through the ritual use of Christian blood; as a basis for scientific and social-scientific theories of the heredity (and degeneracy) of racial 50

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outcast because she is accused of having “dark” blood, given the lineage with a certain revolting “negro” Raymoninque, a black “devil” who is in prison for participating in rioting against the béké bosses. In despair, cut off from the surrogate Jew (Louise) as well as from all the other “pensionnaires gaga,” Mariotte makes a final attempt at escape. With nothing to lose by leaving this “concentration universe,” she roams the streets of Paris, begging for money and cigarette butts; as the Parisians pass by, she imagines that their charity is a way of redeeming their crimes, committed against Negroes, Jews, and other oppressed peoples: At last, a man stops to give me a light. A plain sample of humanity. Somewhat fattish. [...] As he strikes the match, I wonder: [... ] What corpses are there, weighing on his heart, what misconducts in the past that make him pity me? But my story is a bit too good to be true, and as he puts the match close to my face, his soft agates turn to sea water, crested with fear. The match falls. [... ] As if by rote, I have whispered to this draughtof-air man: What do you think you saw – the Devil?” (161) 52

Mariotte carries the double weight of Otherness because of her pigmentation and of what is assumed about her ‘religion’ – that it is a primitive cult requiring her to be ostracized as a “cannibal” or fearful Sycorax character. She symbolizes, at the back of their minds, the individual who becomes the double outcast: the revolting, peripheral Other, a black, and a surrogate sympathizer with Jews in the “occupied” zone of the “madhouse.” Experiencing disgust and repulsion in the eyes of the Other,53 acknowledging the racist gaze, Mariotte is doomed to remain the Other inside, as well as outside the walls of the old people’s home. In the city, the black is always reminded

characteristics; and as a quasi-mystical figure for nation and racial purity (‘Anglo-Saxon blood,’ e.g.). 52 “Enfin, un homme s’arrête pour me donner du feu. Quelconque échantillon d’humanité. Un peu grasselard [. . . ] tandis qu’il craque l’allumette, je me demande: [. . .] Quels cadavres sont couchés sur son coeur, quelles fautes commises autrefois qui le rendent compatissant? Mais je lui la bâille [sic] un peu trop belle; car, au moment qu’il approche l’allumette de mon visage, ses douces agathes tournent en eau de mer, crêtée d’effroi. L’allumette choit. [ . .. ] Je lui ai murmuré machinalement à cet homme courant d’air: tu crois donc avoir vu le Diable?” 53 “‘ The Jew and I’: Not satisfied with racializing myself, by a happy stroke of fate, I was turning more human. I was drawing more close to the Jew, my brother in misfortune. Disgraceful! At first glance it might seem strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the Negrophobe. It was my philosopher professor from the Antilles who reminded me one day: ‘When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention; he is talking about you.’ [ . .. ] quite simply, [ . . . ] the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; tr. New York: Grove, 1967): 101.

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of his/her allegedly negative and repulsive image and being.54 As the Parisians pass by, pretending not to see her, or afraid of seeing her, she is puzzled by what she calls the “comical question”: namely, that in each of us a Hitler might be hidden, an evil force could be concealed: How many potential slave traders? Out of thirty unknown passers-by in the street, Mariotte? How many potential trench heroes? ... potential children’s torturers? ... potential kind souls, ready to kill a Jew [... ] potential large carnivores. ‘Idealists’ of all sorts and kinds? ... Oh, ... how many? (165; ellipses in original)55

It is the trauma of the Middle Passage, on the one hand, and of the Holocaust, on the other, that linger in Mariotte’s head and makes her particularly suspicious of anyone she encounters in the Parisian streets. She continues to see an oppressor in every citizen. To conclude the brief analysis of this narrative that intertwines Jewish and black experiences, I want to focus on two images which converge neatly in the respective ‘imaginaries’ of both postwar Jewish and postcolonial African-diasporic conditions. First, there is the “Door of No Return.” Even if her ancestors’ journey across the Atlantic is not narrated as such, Mariotte evokes in her “blueprint for a negro writing” (to borrow a term from Richard Wright) a past visit to Casamance, a place in Southern Senegal. Mariotte speaks of the sense of betrayal and profound hurt that she experiences on board a ship taking her from the coastal town of Seleky to the island of Carabane. Did she visit one of the slave castles along the Gold Coast? Did she experience her moment of awareness and ancestral empathy facing “The Door of No Return”? In any case, the detail is significant, since it links this “Journal” to the novel that follows: namely, A Woman Named Solitude (1972), in which Diola Bayangumay is deported from this part of Africa to Guadeloupe to give birth to Solitude, Mariotte’s grandmother. For many African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, this image of the 54

The constant awareness of her négritude, her fear of death, the many reflections on the body recall those features analysed by Fanon as the foundation of the subaltern condition inflicted on both blacks and Jews. Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks repeatedly alerts one to such consequences of racism. In his incisive reading of Fanon, Jean Khalfa argues that blacks (and, one could argue, Jews as well) are doomed to be constantly aware of their body, since it is the locus of the colonial (and fascist) power, to be “écorché.” Khalfa, “ ‘ Corps Perdu’: A Note on Fanon’s Cogito,” Forum for Modern Language 40.4 (2004): 435. 55 “Combien de possibles négriers? Sur trente passants anonymes dans la rue, Mariotte? Combien de possibles héros de tranchées?… de possibles tortionnaires d’enfants? … de [. . . ] de possibles bonnes âmes tueuses de juifs [ . . . ] de possibles grands carnassiers ‘Idéalistes’ de tout poil et de tout acabit? … Combien… oh?”

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“Door of No Return” causes the same painful shock of identity as the sight of the entrance gate to Auschwitz, with its barbarically cynical slogan A R B E I T MA C HT F R E I , which is imprinted on the minds of the first- and second-generation Holocaust survivors, as well as on those of modern-day visitors. In A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), the Afro-Canadian Dionne Brand is haunted by an undisclosed trauma of colonialism and the dislocations of immigration: The Door of No Return “is a passport which, after boarding the plane, [they] are unable to make disappear by tearing it up and throwing it into the toilet.” 56 The second image is that of the Middle Passage or transportation. Striking parallels are drawn between slave ships and the overcrowded cattle cars en route to the extermination camps: both The Last of the Just (Le Dernier des Justes) and A Woman Named Solitude (La Mulâtresse Solitude) have a fragmented structure in which two worlds and places are radically opposed through a ‘rupture’ or blank: the first section of the latter novel closes with the protagonist embarking on the slave ship. The next page, the African Bayangumay, is set on a Guadeloupean plantation where the Diola will give birth to the fruit of the rape on board theslave ship. The author has clearly conceived the volume as a combination of two radically different books, the first one set in Senegal, the second in Guadeloupe, and entitled Solitude. Similarly, La Mulâtresse Solitude translates the terrible confusion of bodies, young and old, male and female, chained next to each other. In Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, during her last walk through Paris in search of the Creole restaurant of an old friend, Mariotte gets lost and falls in the snow. She has visions of her years before the disaster, seeing a young black woman crossing a street. Overcome by sudden grief for her disappeared friends, especially one, Moritz Lévy, she mourns them and realizes how she herself is cut off from her family and native island. Mariotte’s fear of not being remembered, of being separated from her family and buried in unholy ground far from home, “unaccounted for,” therefore illustrates the pessimism and despair of the immediate postwar era.57 Cross-Cultural Dialogues André and Simone Schwarz–Bart link the victims of the Holocaust textually and historically with those of the Atlantic slave trade; they speak for Jews and blacks. The Holocaust and slavery are two dark pages of Europe’s history, and the condition of slavery resembles in many respects that of the persecuted Jew: the 56

Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday, 2001): 48. David Weinberg, “Between America and Israel: The Quest for a Distinct Jewish Identity in the Post-War Era,” Jewish Culture and History 5.1 (Summer 2002): 92–94. 57

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genocide and mass deportation of Africans to be enslaved in the most cruel way are deeds inflicted upon humankind in ‘modern times’ which have been recognized as ‘crimes against humanity’. But if the destruction of Jewry had been faced up to in 1960 by virtue of the Eichmann trial, the transatlantic slave trade had to wait until 2005 to be collectively acknowledged in France and other European nations as a crime against humanity. As Henry Weinberg argues, If the one crime (the tragedy of the Negro, the dehumanization perpetrated on the African slave) does not equal the other (the barbarism of the twentieth century), it may have mentally prepared it.58

However, nine years after Schwarz–Bart’s Jewish memorial, The Last of the Just, readers had formed high expectations, and when the novel co-written with Simone came out in 1967, they were puzzled by a narrative so different in every respect from the first Goncourt Prize-winning ‘saga’ of ten generations of the Lévy family, even if what remained constant was the grim and very dark portrayal of characters. In Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes there is no space for laughter, apart from the pitiless mockery at the expense of the protagonist and her fellow inmate, the mysterious Louise Duployé, in the “asile” nicknamed “le Trou.”59 In this fictional ‘testament’ by an exiled black woman, the inmates of “le Trou” are portrayed as antisemites and racists. Ten years after the Holocaust – Mariotte starts her diary in 1953 – France seems to struggle with anti-Jewish and anti-black resentment, which the authors pinpoint through the poisonous atmosphere in the old people’s home. While Mariotte had thought that all the women facing the same degradation of body and mind would grow closer to each other, there is instead growing suspicion and mistrust, intolerance of the alleged “strangers.” They openly mock the alleged Jewish inmate (Louise) and the Martinican Mariotte.60 That the novel itself took years to complete, that the Schwarz–Barts needed the encouragement of Aimé Césaire and Elie Wiesel to bring it out – that is, to depict the common scars of Holocaust and slavery survivors – confirms the desolation and despair of creative writers who are nevertheless convinced of the need to practise remembrance. As Césaire urged in his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, the poet should be the spokesperson for all oppressed people (whether they be black or white, coolie or Jew, etc.), a 58

Henry Weinberg, “André Schwarz–Bart’s La Mulâtresse Solitude,” French Review 46 (1972–73):

1071. 59

Joë Friedeman, “Le Dernier des Justes d’André Schwarz–Bart: De l’humour au ricanement des Abîmes,” Lettres Romanes 42 (February–May 1988): 97–112. 60 Sander L. Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can The Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films,” Critical Inquiry 26.2 (Winter 2000): 279–308.

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message certainly understood by the Schwarz–Barts, who partake in both remembrances. They clearly take a stand in the debate about common suffering and the need to work out the burden of the past in order to render similarly outrageous and unforgettable “fascisms” impossible in the future, Both writers are, hence, situated in-between as they speak for both the postcolonial and the post-Holocaust subject. However, their open-ended novel suggests in its unfinished last cahier the disconnection from family and the impossibility of mourning as a result of spiritual emptiness and the loss of origins and roots in a context of displacement. In Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, there are clear limits to the claims made about unity and solidarity, of “common grounds.”61 Glissant thinks that the African diaspora “has not brought with it, not collectively continued, the methods of existence and survival, both material and spiritual, which it practiced before being uprooted”; therefore Africans are “stripped migrants” who had to adapt to their new environment. They were “transformed elsewhere into another people,” while “Jews fleeing the pogroms and massacres in Russia were not.”62 Needless to say, this is a very simplified account – first, because Glissant does not specify the different time lag of the respective waves of migration, and, second, because he is blind to the many secular Jews who, to use his lexis, were wholly creolized in the New World. Conversely, some Africans did maroon the colonies: the three Guyanas are the best example of maroon communities which did not conform to imposed ‘americanization’. So, while Glissant’s concept of a ‘poetics of Relation’63 might very well be synonymous with a new fusion and synthesis, with mixed cultures and thus rhizomatic identities in the archipelago and beyond, there would appear to be some limitations. Recent works try to put the record straight, posthumously rectifying Glissant’s omissions: Nicole Lapierre heralds Glissant as the most important mediator between blacks and Jews, specifically in a chapter on the Schwarz–Barts.64 Yet, in several of his essays 61

Kathleen Gyssels, “Glissant & Schwarz–Bart face à la diaspora: Un long compagnonnage,” Revue des Sciences Humaines 309 (2013): 73–94. 62 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, 15. 63 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Poétique de la Relation, 1990; tr. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1997). 64 Nicole Lapierre, “Solitude en partage,” in Lapierre, Causes communes: Des Juifs et des Noirs (Paris: Stock, 2010): 193–232. Just for the record: Lapierre’s father-in-law Alain Plénel received, à titre posthume in 2009, from Glissant’s hands the literary Prix Carbet, even though he never published a book, while his son Edwy Plénel was for many years director of Le Monde des Livres, which promoted media attention to publications by both Chamoiseau and Glissant, as well as other Haitian and French-Caribbean authors.

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Glissant seems, rather, to partake in the troubled history of Black–Jewish relations. This is not to say that I am accusing the Martinican author and critic of antisemitism, but to pose the question of whether some intellectuals (consciously or not) fail to find common ground between blacks and Jews, yet cannot avoid questioning the troubled relationship. While Schwarz–Bart defines himself as a Luftmensch, he expresses in Morning Star his regret at not having had a spiritual family, supposedly among the French-Caribbeans: in spite of all the praise of Creoleness and rhizomatic identity, the next-door neighbour who inhabited precisely that contact zone has remained out of sight.

W O R K S C I TE D Aaron, David. “Early Rabbinic Exegesis on Noah’s Son Ham and the So-Called ‘Hamitic Myth’,” Journal of American Academy of Religion 63.4 (Winter 1995): 721–59. Alexander, Neta. “Between ‘12 Years a Slave’ and Anne Frank: Steve McQueen Sits Down with Haaretz,” Haaretz (17 January 2014), http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-send/premium-1.569188 (accessed 14 February 2014). Baldwin, James. “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” New York Times (9 April 1967). ——, & Nat Hentoff, ed. Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (New York: Baron, 1969). Ben Abdelahim, Maha. “Un plat de porc ou ‘l’Autrement qu’être’ de la Relation,” Nouvelles Études Francophones 26.1 (Spring 2011): 81–94. Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday, 2001). Brodzki, Bella. “Nomadism and the Textualization of Memory in A. Schwarz–Bart’s La Mulâtresse Solitude,” in Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations and Nomadisms, ed. Françoise Lionnet & Ronnie Scharfman (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1993): 213–30. Budick, Emily Miller. Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (New York: Columbia U P , 1998). Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism, tr. Joan Pinkham (Discours sur le colonialisme, 1955; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). ——.Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, tr. Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939; Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 2001). Chamoiseau, Patrick, & Raphaël Confiant, ed. Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature (1635–1975) (Paris: Hatier, 1991). Christiansë, Yvette. “The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Derek Walcott’s Poetry,” in Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Jamie S. Scott & Paul Simpson–Housley (Cross/Cultures 48; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2001): 199– 224.

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Damas, Léon–Gontran. “Pigments in Translation,” tr. Alexandra Lillehei (Pigments Névralgies, 1972; tr. Wesleyan College (2010), http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/view content.cgi? article=1705&context=etd_hon_theses (accessed 4 July 2012). Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; tr. New York: Grove, 1967). Fischel, Jack R. “The New Anti-Semitic Axis: Holocaust Denial, Black Nationalism and the Crisis on Our College Campuses,” Virginia Quarterly Review 71 (Spring 1995): 210– 26. Friedeman, Joë. “Le Dernier des Justes d’André Schwarz–Bart: De l’humour au ricanement des abîmes,” Lettres Romanes 42 (February–May 1988): 97–112. Gillman, Susan. Blood Talk: American Race and Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2003). Gilman, Sander L. “Is Life Beautiful? Can The Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films,” Critical Inquiry 26.2 (Winter 2000): 279–308. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, sel., tr. & intro. J. Michael Dash (C A RA F Books; Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1989). ——.Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Poétique de la Relation, 1990; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1997). Goffman, Ethan. Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature (Albany: State U of New York P , 2000). Gyssels, Kathleen. “André and Simone Schwarz–Bart’s Un plat de porc: Shoah and Slavery Intertwined,” I UP Journal of Commonwealth Literature (July 2010): 7–23. ——.Filles de Solitude: Essai sur l’identité antillaise dans les (auto-)biographies fictives de Simone et André Schwarz–Bart (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). ——. “La juive noire, entre mémoire et mal-mémoire: Negerjood in moederland d’Ellen Ombre (Surinam/Amsterdam),” in La Production de l’étrangeté dans les littératures francophones, ed. Béatrice Bijon & Yves Clavaron (Paris: Champion, 2009): 99–111. ——. “Un long compagnonnage: Glissant & Schwarz–Bart face à la diaspora,” Revue des Sciences Humaines 309 (2013): 73–94. ——.Sages sorcières? Révision de la mauvaise mère dans “Beloved” (Toni Morrison), “Praisesong for the Widow” (Paule Marshall), et “Moi, Tituba” (Maryse Condé) (Lanham MD : U P of America, 2001). ——. “A Shoah Classic Resurfacing: The Strange Destiny of The Last of the Just,” Prooftexts 31.3 (Fall 2011): 229–64. Khalfa, Jean. “‘Corps Perdu’: A Note on Fanon’s Cogito,” Forum for Modern Language 40.4 (2004): 426–37. Kincaid, Jamaica. “Introduction” to Simone Schwarz–Bart, The Bridge of Beyond, tr. Barbara Bray (Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle, 1972; tr. 1972; New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2013): vii–xii. Kurlansky, Marc. A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry (New York: Ballantine, 2002). ——.The White Man in the Tree (New York: Ballantine, 1995).

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LaCapra, Dominick. “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25.1 (Summer 1999): 696– 727. Laor, Yitzhak. “Who Shall We Blame It On? Y Laor Reports From Tel Aviv,” London Review of Books (20 February 2003): 35–36. Lapierre, Nicole. “Solitude en partage,” in Lapierre, Causes communes: Des Juifs et des Noirs (Paris: Stock, 2010): 193–232. Mazrui, Ali Al’Amin, & Alamin M. Mazrui. Black Reparations in the Era of Globalization (Trenton NJ : Africa World Press, 2002). Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer, the Colonized, tr. Howard Greenfield, intro. Nadine Gordimer (Portrait du Colonisé précédé du Portrait du Colonisateur, 1957; tr. 1974; New York & London: Routledge, 2013). ——.Racism, foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Minneapolis; U of Minnesota P , 2000). Morrison, Toni. Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). ——. “A Bench by the Road: Beloved,” in Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: U P Mississippi, 2008): 44–50. Interview with Robert Richardson, originally in The World 3 (January–February 1989): 4, 5, 37–41. ——.Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1992). ——. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers: 1950–1980, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City NY : Doubleday Anchor, 1984): 339–45. Ombre, Ellen. Negerjood in Moederland (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2004). Peterson, Dale E. Up from Bondage: The Literature from Russian and African American Soul (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000). Phillips, Caryl. The Nature of Blood (London: Faber & Faber, 1997). Portelli, Sandro. “‘Who Ain’t a Slave?’: On the University of Frederick Douglass,” G R A A T 27 (2004): 59–73. Sartre, Jean–Paul. Colonialism and Neocolonialism, tr. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer & Terry McWilliams (1964; London: Routledge, 2001). Preface by Robert J.C. Young, “Sartre, The African philosopher.” ——. “Orphée noir,” introduction to L’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948): 9–44. ——.Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Seuil, 1954). Scharfman, Ronnie. “Towards a Poetics of Hybridity,” in Discours sur le métissage, identités métissées, en Quête d’Ariel, ed. Sylvie Kandé (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999): 191–207. Schwarz–Bart, André. Le Dernier des Justes (Paris: Seuil, 1958). ——.The Last of the Just, tr. Stephen Becker (Le Dernier des Justes, 1959; tr. New York: Atheneum, 1960). ——.Morning Star, tr. Julie Rose (L’Etoile du matin, 2009; tr. New York: Overlook, 2011). ——.A Mulatto Named Solitude, tr. Ralph Manheim, foreword by Arnold Rampersad (La Mulâtresse Solitude, 1972; tr. Berkeley C A : D.S. Ellis, 1985).

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——. “Pourquoi j’ai écrit La Mulâtresse Solitude,” Le Figaro littéraire (26 January 1967): 1, 8/9. ——, & Simone Schwarz–Bart. Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Seghers, Anna. Karibische Geschichten (Berlin: Aufbau, 1962). Spivak, Gayatri. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York & London: Routledge, 1998). Styron, William. Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Vintage, 1966). Sommer, Doris. Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Literature in the Americas (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1999). Stein, Sol. Native Sons: James Baldwin and Sol Stein (New York: Ballantine, 2004). Sundquist, Eric. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge MA : Belknap Press/Harvard U P , 2005). Toumson, Roger, ed. Mémoire nègre, mémoire juive (special issue of Portulan, February 1998). Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust, Memorials and Meaning (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1993). Walcott, Derek. Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993). ——. “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998): 36–64. ——. “What the Twilight Says” (1970), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998): 3–35. Weinberg, David. “Between America and Israel: The Quest for a Distinct Jewish Identity in the Post-War Era,” Jewish Culture and History 5.1 (Summer 2002): 91–120. Weinberg, Henry. “André Schwarz–Bart’s La Mulâtresse Solitude,” French Review 46 (1972–73): 1071–72. Wilson, E. Betty, “History and Memory in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes and Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle,” Callaloo 15.1 (Winter 1992): 179–89. Young, Robert J.C. “Preface: Sartre, the African Philosopher,” in Jean–Paul Sartre, Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, tr. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer & Terry McWilliams (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): ix–xxviii.

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The Rock Island and Identity in Barbados J O H N T. G I L MOR E

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I

“ T H E S C H O O N E R F L I G H T , ” Derek Walcott has his narrator Shabine invite the reader to “open the map” of the Caribbean, commenting: “More islands there, man, / than peas on a tin plate, all different size.” 1 This essay attempts to offer some reflections on what living on an island – a very “singular island” – has meant to the people of one Caribbean country, and the part that simple facts of topography may have played in shaping their sense of identity. “Barbados – a singular island!” was a slogan used by the Barbados Tourist Board in the 1970s. It was, in part, intended to discourage the belief, still sometimes found among people not familiar with the Caribbean, that Barbados is a group of islands rather than an island on its own. The mistake stems from the fact that older writers referred to Barbadoes, or ‘the Barbadoes’, a term derived from ‘Los Barbados’, the form first found in the earliest references to the island in Spanish documents of the sixteenth century. The name appears to mean ‘the bearded ones’, but whether this is in fact the case, and, if so, whether it refers to bearded men, bearded fig trees, or the appearance of the waves breaking on the coral reefs which fringe the island, are matters which continue to be disputed.2 The similarly named Barbuda, which forms part of the country of Antigua and Barbuda, is far to the north, in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, something that does not stop overseas mail destined for Barbados being mis-sent there. Confusion over names also ensures that mail for Barbados sometimes gets sent

1

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Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948–1984 (New York: Noonday, 1986): 360. “The Schooner Flight” was published in the author’s earlier collection The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979). 2 See entry on “Barbados (name)” in Sean Carrington, Henry Fraser, John Gilmore & Addinton Forde, A–Z of Barbados Heritage (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2003): 16.

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to the Bahamas (which is a group of islands) or to Bermuda, which (contrary to widespread belief) is not in the Caribbean at all, but in the North Atlantic. The small, offshore Pelican Island (just large enough for the few buildings which enabled it to be used as a quarantine station) was joined to the mainland of Barbados during the construction of the Deep Water Harbour (1956–61). Culpepper Island is the rather grand name given to a geographical feature just off the east coast of Barbados, which was more appropriately referred to on an eighteenth-century map as “Culpepper’s little isle,” named after a local landowner. It is close enough to the shore for it to be easily reached by wading at low tide, and it is no more than about 30 metres or 100 feet long. I have swum round it, though this is not something I would recommend, as strong currents and sharp rocks await the foolhardy on the sea-side. There are a few smaller rocks on or within sight of the shore which achieve the dignity of being named, but they can hardly be said to affect the status of Barbados itself as “a singular island.”3 While usually regarded as a Caribbean country, Barbados is well to the east of the main arc of islands in the Eastern Caribbean, 160 kilometres from its nearest neighbour, St Vincent. In the days before modern systems of navigation, this meant that it was not always easy to find – one seventeenth-century English visitor said: “The Barbados may well admitt of this simile, to be like sixpence throwne downe vppon newmarkett heath, & you should command such a one to goe & finde itt out.”4 Nevertheless, for some three centuries its location, and the prevailing winds of the North Atlantic, made it often the first port of call for shipping going from Britain and Ireland to the Caribbean and South America. Barbados was also likely to be the first port made after leaving Africa by ships engaged in the transatlantic slave trade – one of the best-known slave narratives, that of Olaudah Equiano, describes in some detail his arrival in Barbados and sale there before he was trans-shipped to North America.5 This was certainly a major factor in the 3

See the entries (both illustrated) on “Culpepper Island” and “Pelican Island” in Carrington et al., A–Z of Barbados Heritage, 61, 150. 4 “The Voyage of Sir Henry Colt” (1631), in Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667, ed. V.T. Harlow (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925): 63. 5 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, facsimile reprint with new introduction by Paul Edwards, 2 vols. (1789; London: Dawsons, 1969), vol. 1: 83–90. The research of Vincent Carretta has cast doubt on the authenticity of Equiano’s account of his early life, but if this passage was an invention by Equiano, it would appear to have been intended to be representative of the experience of many victims of the slave trade. See Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: U of Georgia P , 2005).

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development of the wealth which Barbados owed to its position as a mercantile entrepôt as well as to its being a plantation colony producing crops for export. It also gave the island a strategic significance: during the many wars between different colonial powers in the Caribbean from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Barbados was often a headquarters for British military and naval forces, and derived economic benefit from this. By the time the aeroplane and modern telecommunications reduced the importance of the prevailing winds, a firm foundation had been created for the continuing development of Barbados in the later-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries as a centre for export-oriented assembly and light manufacturing industries, for regional distribution, and for service industries such as data-processing and insurance. The suggestion that the island’s position as the first port of call for slave ships resulted in the strongest slaves being sold there, and created a gene pool which has caused the remarkable success that Barbados has enjoyed in the sport of international bodybuilding, is perhaps a little more fanciful.6 However, there is a further point worth making about location. In the days of sailing ships, it was relatively easy to get from Barbados to other Caribbean islands, less easy to get from those other islands to Barbados. Regular communication, commercial relations, and political ties connected Barbados with Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, North America (which was a major source of plantation supplies in the period before the American War of Independence), rather than with other Caribbean islands. While impossible to prove or to quantify with any precision, it would seem likely that this relative isolation has contributed to the strong sense of local identity which has existed in Barbados among all sections of the population at least since the eighteenth century. One of the island’s leading planters, Robert Haynes, General of Militia and Speaker of the House of Assembly in the early-nineteenth century, said: “’tis to me the first country in the world,”7 while in much the same period a visiting observer noted that the slaves of Barbados “proudly arrogate a superiority over the Negroes of the other islands.”8 Outsiders have occasionally found this excessive. In 1876, the Bishop of Barbados – an Englishman – allegedly compared Barbadians generally to the white snails of Hans Christian Andersen, who, living under burdock leaves upon which the rain-drops

6

See entry on “Bodybuilding” in Carrington et al., A–-Z of Barbados Heritage, 27. Quoted in Karl Watson, The Civilised Island, Barbados: A Social History 1750–1816 (Barbados: Caribbean Graphic, 1979): 52. 8 George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1806), vol. 2: 76. Pinckard visited Barbados in 1796. 7

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pattered, flattered themselves that the world consisted of white snails and that they were the world.9

Nevertheless, such critics do not seem ever to have pondered why what they would have called patriotism in a large country should be condemned as bombast in a small one. Barbadians, perhaps especially those living overseas, sometimes refer to their homeland as ‘The Rock’ (as in the enquiry ‘You been back to The Rock lately?’). Apparently self-deprecating references to the size of the island go back a long way – in 1842 the upper house of the local legislature, in an address to the new governor, referred to Barbados as “this dot in the ocean.”10 However, size is a matter of perception, and can be perceived in different ways. When Barbadians refer to ‘small islands’, they often mean some of their Caribbean neighbours– which implies a comment about perceived levels of development, not a statement about geographical area. Somewhere like St Lucia or Dominica can be referred to as a ‘small island’, though both are in fact considerably larger than Barbados. Barbados is not, in this sense, a ‘small island’ (though citizens of some other Caribbean territories, such as Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago, might disagree). Nevertheless, the facts are that, at its greatest extent, Barbados is approximately 21 miles (34 kilometres) long and 14 miles (23 kilometres) wide, yielding an area of about 167 square miles or 431 square kilometres. The traditional comparison for British readers has been with the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, which is slightly smaller, at 147 square miles or 381 square kilometres. An American comparison is offered by the CIA World Factbook, which says that Barbados is “2.5 times the size of Washington, DC .”11 Before considering possible effects of the island’s size, some other aspects of its geography require mention. Barbados is largely of coral formation, though in what is known as the Scotland District (about one-seventh of the total area of the island) underlying sedimentary and oceanic deposits have been forced upwards and erosion has removed the coral cap. While the Scotland District is hilly, Barbados as a whole is relatively flat, with gentle rises from the shore in most places to higher levels inland. The white sandy beaches found along much 9

This is from a summary (by an avowedly hostile third party) of a speech by Bishop Mitchinson, as reported in The Times (Barbados), 19 February 1876; quoted in John Gilmore, The Toiler of the Sees: A Life of John Mitchinson, Bishop of Barbados (Barbados: Barbados National Trust, 1987): 60. 10 Address of the Legislative Council to Governor Sir Charles Grey, 11 April 1842, quoted in Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, The History of Barbados (1848; London: Frank Cass, facs. ed. 1971): 498. 11 “Barbados,” C I A World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/bb.html (accessed 21 January 2015).

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of the coast are an important part of the island’s attraction for visitors, and sustain a tourist industry which has grown from modest beginnings in the later nineteenth century to being the main earner of foreign exchange and a major source of employment. The highest point, Mount Hillaby (more or less on the edge of the Scotland District), is only 1,116 feet (340 metres) above sea-level. In comparison with the rivers found in some other Caribbean islands or the three great rivers of Guyana, Joe’s River and the Constitution River in Barbados are mere streamlets, though it is true that the latter at least is not what it once was – while modern engineering works have turned the Constitution River into little more than a storm-drain, it was still possible to row boats up it for a considerable distance in the early-twentieth century. Nevertheless, fissures in the coral form numerous gullies across the island, and there are massive underground cave systems providing natural reservoirs which preserve a significant proportion of the island’s rainfall after it has been filtered through the rock. These supply a few natural springs and the system of piped water which began in 1861 and now supplies drinkable water to virtually every household in the country. In the past, rainwater was also stored in numerous natural and artificial ponds, many of which have been allowed to dry up as the population came to rely on the piped water system. To the relatively flat terrain and the availability of water must be added the fact that at various points the island has benefitted from the fall of considerable quantities of volcanic ash borne on the winds from eruptions in neighbouring islands. The eruptions in Martinique and St Vincent in 1902 and 1903, for example, scattered an estimated average of thirty-four tons of ash over every acre of Barbadian soil, and these and other eruptions in historical and prehistoric times have contributed significantly to the fertility of the non-volcanic island.12 Circumstances created an island ideal for agriculture. The Amerindian population of the pre-Columbian period cultivated cassava and fished the in-shore reefs. The English settlers who arrived in the early-seventeenth century appear to have found Barbados uninhabited. Within a few years of their settlement in 1627, they had destroyed nearly all of the forest that covered most of the island in their efforts to create an economy based on the cultivation of cash crops for export. A combination of factors too complex to explore here in the space available meant that initial experiments with tobacco, ginger, indigo, and cotton gave way to sugar, which became the mainstay of the island’s economy from the 1660s to the 1960s.

12

See entry on “May Dust” in Carrington et al., A–Z of Barbados Heritage, 124.

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The soil of Barbados was, and is, particularly suited to the cultivation of sugar. In turn, the nature of the sugarcane plant and the requirements of the process which extracted sugar for export from the plant led to the consolidation of land-owning in Barbados, so that, while the small proprietor did not disappear entirely, by the later-seventeenth century most of the land in the island was absorbed into a comparatively small number of sugar-plantations, a pattern which continued virtually unchanged into the early-twentieth century. Sugar required labour, and (again for a number of reasons) by the later-seventeenth century the importation of indentured servants from Europe had given way to the importation of slaves from Africa, creating a population which was, and remains, one of predominantly African descent. The intensive cultivation of the soil, and the persistence of patterns of landownership which until the middle of the twentieth century gave almost exclusive political and economic power to a small and predominantly white group, meant that, long after the abolition of slavery in 1834, there were few opportunities outside the plantation system for most of the population. Nevertheless, the population continued to grow, and even in the mid-nineteenth century the population density of Barbados was matter for comment. The English novelist Anthony Trollope, who visited the Caribbean in late 1858 and the first half of 1859, claimed to have been told that the population of Barbados “was larger than that of China, but my informant of course meant by the square foot. He could hardly have counted by the square mile in Barbados.”13 The Barbados Government Information Service gives the resident population as 284,589 in 2013, yielding 622 persons per square kilometre and making the country the sixteenth most densely populated in the world.14 As significant areas are still devoted to agriculture, it will be appreciated that the population of residential areas can be very dense indeed. (I will merely mention in passing that there has now for many years also been a very high level of private vehicle ownership, to give an idea of the infrastructural problems which result.) The size of the island, the nature and history of the plantation system, and the resulting population density are perhaps the most important factors in creating two apparently contradictory aspects of the national character (if such a thing can be said to exist). On the one hand, Barbadians have traditionally been viewed by people from other parts of the Caribbean as more conservative,

13

Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859; London; Chapman & Hall, 5th ed. 1862): 194. 14 Barbados Government Information Service (B G I S ), http://gisbarbados.gov.bb/index.php? categoryid=36 (accessed 15 January 2015).

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more conformist – dull, even. Many stereotypes do contain an element of truth, and it was certainly the case that in Barbados getting ahead in life, or even just getting by, often depended on not upsetting those in positions of power and influence (ranging from the plantation owners to the local clergy of the Church of England and the village schoolmaster), and that this was probably the case to a greater extent than in some other Caribbean societies where there were more opportunities to achieve, for example, the comparative independence of peasant proprietorship. However, there must have been many like the character described by the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite – Uncle Tom holding his hat in hand to hide his heart.15 Another negative consequence of the island’s size and population density – and one that persists to the present day – is the way in which everybody appears to know everybody else’s business, and the consequent widespread fondness for gossip and rumour, which is not always reliable. On the other hand, it must have been exactly the same circumstances, the same lack of other opportunities, that created the spirit of enterprise which has historically led so many Barbadians to emigrate. During the period from 1904 to 1914, for example, perhaps as many as 60,000 Barbadians, or about one-third of the island’s total population at the time, went to Panama to work on the construction of the canal. It is commonly said that, wherever you go in the world, you are bound to find a Barbadian. Nevertheless, emotional attachment to ‘The Rock’ can survive a separation of many years and many miles. In 1841, for example, the survivors of a group of former slaves from Barbados, who had been exiled from the island for their part in the great slave rebellion of 1816, and who had ended up in Sierra Leone, petitioned Queen Victoria to “be allowed to return back to Barbados, the place of our Nativity.”16 To this day, while many emigrants remain overseas, many send money back to relatives, and many physically return to Barbados, often with new ideas as well as economic capital. It was this phenomenon that, in the early-twentieth century, began the transformation of the island’s politics and economy which led to Barbados becoming an independent nation in 1966. Modern Barbadians have developed a democratic society enjoying a degree of stability and prosperity enviable by the standards of many other, much larger countries – and which they themselves regard as ample justification for the national motto of ‘Pride and Industry’. Conformity and conservatism can still be found, but now coexist with radical thinking, entrepreneurship, and astonishing artistic creativity. Many things have contributed to all this, not least the very large part of government spending which has 15 16

Edward Brathwaite, “Tom,” in Brathwaite, Rights of Passage (London: Oxford U P , 1967): 14. See entry on “Rebellion of 1816”, in Carrington, et al., A–Z of Barbados Heritage, 164–65.

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consistently been devoted to education for the last half-century, but the ‘singular island’ itself and the relationship it has created with its inhabitants have certainly played a part over the years. It is not surprising, therefore, that Barbadian writers have paid attention to the landscape of what Frank Collymore (1893–1980) called “this island land, / This flyspeck limned in pale green / And mottled white upon the everlasting blue.”17 Possibly the earliest extended treatment is that given by Griffith Hughes, a Welsh Anglican priest who was curate and later rector of the island’s most northern parish, St Lucy, from c. 1735 until 1750 or after. While much of his Natural History of Barbados (1750) treats of the island’s land animals, plants, and marine life, he does give descriptions of the landscape: Its Surface generally appears covered with a grateful Verdure, which, variegated with lofty Trees, and large buildings, affords many different, and those very beautiful Prospects.

He noted the absence of “large Forests of Trees,” which he thought conducive to health, and emphasized “The great Fertility of the Land” and the large number of inhabitants it supported.18 This was, of course, the result of the intensive cultivation which, by the time Hughes was writing, had long subordinated the island’s terrain to the needs of the sugar industry. The motivation was profit, and the means was the exploitation of enslaved, and, later, emancipated but under-paid black labour. This was recognized by Hughes, who discussed the manners and customs of the enslaved in Barbados at some length, and, while apparently regarding slavery as inevitable or even justifiable, recognized some of the misery it entailed, and clearly felt uneasy about it: For although God suffered the Children of Israel to be made Slaves in Egypt, till such wholesome Severity recalled them to their Duty; yet he brought Plagues upon the Egyptians for their Cruelty and Inhumanity towards them.19

Slavery and the plantation system shaped the island’s landscape, and Collymore (while acknowledging the perception of the mid-twentieth-century “sugarkings” as “a grasping lot / Who grudge the peasant all”) offered “Homage to Planters,” expressing his “gratitude” to them (rather than to their labourers) for

17

Frank A. Collymore, “This Land,” in Collected Poems (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1959): 30–31. 18 Griffith Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados (London: The author, 1750), quotations from pp. 1, 3, 22. 19 Hughes, Natural History, 18.

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“The loving care which wrings / Such beauty from the soil and o’er / Our land its patchwork flings.”20 Agriculture nevertheless left some wild spaces, and Hughes included a description of the neighbourhood of Hackleton’s Cliff: Here the high impending Rocks yield a dreary rueful Appearance: The several deep Chasms below, over which they project, are imbrowned with the thick Foliage of lofty Trees. The adjacent steep Declivity is crouded with irregular Precipices, and broken Rocks, the whole view View terminating in the tempestuous Sea, over whose craggy Shores the foaming Waves incessantly break.–- All solemnly awful, if not horrifying Scenes!

Even more highly coloured is Hughes’s account of Cole’s Cave, where he combines a prosaic description of the “Icicles” (i.e. stalactites) with an extended comparison between his own venturing into “such a dreadful Den of Darkness” and Virgil’s account of Aeneas’s descent into the Underworld.21 Writing not long after Hughes, the Barbadian-born poet Nathaniel Weekes describes at some length the vegetable productions of the island, which furnished British consumers with exotic pickles, preserves, and liqueurs. He says little about the terrain itself, though he endeavours to create a pleasing image of the sugarcane harvest, with the enslaved as picturesque figures in a landscape viewed from a sufficient distance to avoid revealing too much in the way of embarrassing detail (at this point, Weekes is writing in England). Although he refers to the “work-hating gang” and the “snap of hateful Whips,” he simultaneously claims that “I mourn their wretched Fate, / And share their ev’ry Woe!” and insists that the slaves are happy, at least during Crop: “There’s not a Slave, / In spight of Slav’ry, but is pleas’d, and gay; / For this is their delightful, darling Time!”22 A different approach is taken by John Singleton, a British writer who had travelled extensively through the eastern Caribbean and who appears to have spent several years in Barbados. Singleton says very little about cane cultivation, though he invites his readers to “Traverse with me the hills, the varied slopes, / The levell’d plains, crown’d with transcendent bloom,”

20

Collymore, “Homage to Planters,” Collected Poems, 34. Hughes, Natural History, 23–24, 55–59. 22 Nathaniel Weekes, Barbados: A Poem (London: J. and J. Lewis, for R. and J. Dodsley, 1754), quotations from pp. 56–58. Similar things can be found in other writers of the period, most notably in Grainger; see John [T.] Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s The SugarCane (London: Athlone, 2000). 21

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Where ever budding spring, and summer gay, Dance hand in hand, and, with incessant joy, Lead up the jocund harvest to the mill; Whilst the rich planter, well rewarded, sees Perpetual produce springing all the year [...]

While he discusses aspects of slavery elsewhere, the processes and labour necessary to “Lead up the jocund harvest to the mill” are passed over in silence. Barbados itself, “Thou lovely Eden of these western isles,” is viewed as picturesque scenery which can be presented by means of classical parallels: “such a prospect as fair Tempe once, / Or blest Elysium to the poet’s eye / Presented.” The manmade nature of the view is emphasized in a way that accepts and celebrates the power of the planters: When first my ravish’d eye thy beauties caught, To me another paradise appear’d; Gardens and palaces in mingled scenes Rose to my view, and each a villa seem’d Of some proud lord [... ]

But wilder scenery also has its appeal to Singleton. Like Hughes, he describes “that steep cave / Which takes its name from Cole,” though his disturbing of the bats is a detail which is certainly not borrowed from Hughes, and suggests personal experience: “ten thousand birds / Of night, awaken’d by th’unwelcome torch, / Flapping their leathern wings, fly round the flame.” He also describes at length the Animal Flower Cave in the St Lucy cliffs, and the sea anemones which gave it its name: “A prize which yet the sage philosopher / Never found class’d among his wonders rare.”23 Like Weekes, Matthew James Chapman (1796–1865) was a Barbadian by birth who had left the island at a relatively early age and was writing in England. His 23

John Singleton, A Description of the West-Indies: A poem, in four books (London: T. Becket, 1776), quotations from pp. 2–3, 50, 53, 56–57, 59. I have cited this edition, since it is available on Eighteenth Century Collections Online (E C C O ) and is therefore more widely accessible. Singleton’s poem was originally published as A General Description of the West-Indian Islands, As far as relates to the British, Dutch and Danish Governments, from Barbados to Saint Croix (Barbados: George Esmand & William Walker, for the author, 1767). The Barbados edition includes many passages which were later omitted from the London editions of 1776 and 1777, and several of these give the author’s views on slavery and Caribbean society more generally in considerable detail. For analysis of these, see John [T.] Gilmore, “‘Too oft allur’d by Ethiopic charms’? Sex, Slaves and Society in John Singleton’s A General Description of the West-Indian Islands (1767),” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 38.1 (January 2007): 75–94. Hughes, Natural History, 293– 98, describes the Animal Flower Cave, but while Singleton may have known Hughes’s book, his description suggests that he had visited the cave himself.

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lengthy poem “Barbadoes,” published in 1833, was in part a nostalgic tribute to his native country. There are vivid descriptions of a hurricane (“the awful blast of dread affright”), presumably based mainly on that of 1831, and of the “May Dust,” a fall of volcanic dust in 1812 as a result of an eruption in the neighbouring island of St Vincent, when “on one well-remembered morn, there rose / Or seemed to rise, no sun.” Chapman notes the beneficial effects of the dust on the fertility of the Barbadian soil (the “wearied soil regains / Its ancient worth”), and although he emphasizes the considerable variety of scenery to be found in a relatively small island, and has a description of the Animal Flower Cave, where “The shrinking flower of sense delights to dwell,” his main concern is with a landscape that is devoted to the production of sugar by means of slave labour: From their embowered huts come forth in throngs The sable race, and wake their joyful songs: They come to labour, but they come with joy, While themes of happiness their minds employ. [.. .] All to their different tasks with speed repair, Where guides their steps the planter’s ruling care. Each trim plantation like a garden shines – Here waves the cane, there creep the nurturing vines, Which hide their treasure in the fruitful ground [...]

Chapman asks the reader to [.. .] gaze upon a peaceful scene, On clumps of verdure, and on fields of green; The toil of oxen, and the work of swains; Mills, buildings, dotted o’er the fertile plains.

He repeatedly endeavours to suggest that the enslaved are happy with their lot, and that many of the poor in European countries are much worse off. Yet at the same time he is writing, unlike his predecessors, in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and of major slave rebellions in the British Caribbean (Barbados, 1816; Demerara, 1823; Jamaica, 1831–32). He insists that the enslaved are not ready for freedom, and fears that British activists’ demands for Emancipation will make “rapine, murder, anarchy defile / The peaceful glories of the bearded Isle,” and imagines the consequences in lurid detail. The inherent contradictions of his argument – if the enslaved were genuinely happy, why would they revolt? – are never addressed.24 24

M.J. Chapman, “Barbadoes,” in Barbadoes, and other Poems (London: James Fraser, 1833): 1– 108; quotations from pp. 69, 13, 15, 21, 10, 32, 84.

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In the twentieth century, Frank Collymore emphasized the sea as much as the land itself, writing that “Like all who live on small islands / I must always be remembering the sea” and calling the sea “Symbol of fruitfulness, symbol of barrenness, / Mother and destroyer, the calm and the storm!”25 This is a theme which has been taken up by others, such as the contemporary calypsonian Anthony “Gabby” Carter (b. 1948) in his song “Bajan Fishermen.” 26 Nevertheless, the land itself and the details of the landscape remain prominent in the literary imagination. Anthony Kellman’s novel The Coral Rooms is set in a thinly disguised Barbados called Charouga (based on Ichirouganaim, recorded in the seventeenth century as an Amerindian name for the island). Exhausted by the pursuit of status and material goods, and guilt-stricken by the means he has employed to achieve what passes for success, the protagonist Percival Veer gives up his job at the Federal Bank of Charouga to explore the island’s limestone caves. This does not takes him into something like Harrison’s Cave, which was known in Barbados in the eighteenth century, but later forgotten and only rediscovered in 1970, after which it was developed as a tourist attraction, with visitors driven through its large and impressive chambers in little electric carts. Instead, Veer rediscovers himself and seems to achieve redemption through a near-death experience in a still-natural underground landscape which appears to be based on Cole’s Cave.27 There is not necessarily a direct connection between the representations of Cole’s Cave in Hughes, Singleton, and Kellman. Rather, it is a case of the same landscape having its effect on different writers, a process which Kamau Brathwaite refers to explicitly as “tradition,” defining this as “about culture being what filters & fuses in / to you from yr landscape people happenings mysteries fossils histories time.”28 This is in the context of Brathwaite’s describing his discovery of Chapman’s passage on the May Dust of 1812, after he himself had written about a similar phenomenon, the May Dust of 1902,29 and of how, in spite of what Brathwaite correctly describes as Chapman’s “proPlanter” stance, he felt that he and Chapman, across the gap of more than a century, had been “writing the

25

Collymore, “Hymn to the Sea,” Collected Poems, 48–49. Recording available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fett3Ro6Lmw (accessed 21 January 2015). 27 Anthony Kellman, The Coral Rooms (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1994). On Ichirouganaim, see entry on “Barbados (name)” in Carrington et al., A–Z of Barbados Heritage, 16. 28 Kamau Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems (Kingston & New York: Savacou North, 1994): 83. 29 Cf. also Edward Brathwaite, “The Dust,” in Brathwaite, Rights of Passage (London: Oxford U P , 1967): 63–70, and “Cane,” in Islands (London: Oxford U P , 1969): 68–72. 26

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same poem.”30 Brathwaite’s Mother Poem is the outstanding example of the landscape informing the Barbadian literary imagination. Beginning with “The ancient watercourses of my island,” Brathwaite evokes Barbados itself as mother, “the stone wrinkled, cracked and gave birth to water,” “this tilted cracked fragmented landscape,” and he laments those aspects of development which have brought about a situation where “her inheritance is swallowed by strangers” – not just the effects of the tourist industry, but the consequences of people losing touch with their roots. The mother is not only the island but all Bajan mothers who have toiled in the fields and in menial jobs to survive and support their families, and yet the most striking image is that of the male sugarworker who has been maimed at the mill: look at his hands: cactus cracked, pricked, worn smooth by the hoe, limestone soil’s colour: he has lost three fingers of his left hand falling asleep at the mill [...]

The people have created the landscape, and in turn the landscape has created the people. Mother Poem ends with the mother as “his secret limestone cavern,” perhaps the womb in which the poet is ceaselessly reborn, and with her being eternally transformed into the island itself, “travelling inwards under the limestone / widening outwards into the sunlight / towards the breaking of her flesh with foam.”31

W O R K S C I TE D Barbados Government Information Service ( BGIS ), http://gisbarbados.gov.bb/index .php?categoryid=36 (accessed 15 January 2015). “Barbados,” C I A World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/bb.html (accessed 21 January 2015). Brathwaite, Kamau. Barabajan Poems (Kingston, Jamaica & New York: Savacou North, 1994). ——. [as Edward Brathwaite]. Islands (London: Oxford U P , 1969) ——. [as Edward Kamau Brathwaite]. Mother Poem (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1977). ——. [as Edward Brathwaite]. Rights of Passage (London: Oxford U P , 1967).

30

Kamau Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems, 83. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Mother Poem (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1977); quotations from pp. 3, 16, 41, 52, 115, 117. 31

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Carrington, Sean, Henry Fraser, John Gilmore & Addinton Forde. A–Z of Barbados Heritage (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2003). Carretta, Vincent. Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: U of Georgia P , 2005). Carter, Anthony “Gabby”. “Bajan Fishermen.” Recording available at https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=fett3Ro6Lmw (consulted 21 January 2015). Chapman, M.J. Barbadoes, and other Poems (London: James Fraser, 1833). Collymore, Frank A. Collected Poems (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1959). Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, facsimile reprint with new introduction by Paul Edwards, 2 vols. (1789; London: Dawsons, 1969). Gilmore, John [T.] The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (London: Athlone, 2000). ——.The Toiler of the Sees: A Life of John Mitchinson, Bishop of Barbados (Barbados: Barbados National Trust, 1987). ——. “ ‘Too oft allur’d by Ethiopic charms’? Sex, Slaves and Society in John Singleton’s A General Description of the West-Indian Islands (1767),” A RI EL : A Review of International English Literature 38.1 (January 2007): 75–94. Harlow, V.T., ed. Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925). Hughes, Griffith. The Natural History of Barbados (London: The author, 1750). Kellman, Anthony. The Coral Rooms (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1994). Pinckard, George. Notes on the West Indies, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1806). Schomburgk, Sir Robert H. The History of Barbados, facsimile ed. (1848; London: Frank Cass, 1971). Singleton, John. A Description of the West-Indies: A poem, in four books (London: T. Becket, 1776). ——.A General Description of the West-Indian Islands, As far as relates to the British, Dutch and Danish Governments, from Barbados to Saint Croix (Barbados: George Esmand & William Walker, for the author, 1767). Trollope, Anthony. The West Indies and the Spanish Main, 5th ed. (1859; London; Chapman & Hall, 1862). Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Noonday, 1986). Watson, Karl. The Civilised Island, Barbados: A Social History 1750–1816 (Barbados: Caribbean Graphic, 1979). Weekes, Nathaniel. Barbados: A Poem (London: J. & J. Lewis, for R. & J. Dodsley, 1754).

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The Many Voices of Postcolonial London Language and Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) B É N É D ICT E L ED EN T

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in Caribbean novels of migration to London, crystallizing the problems of communication and of identity – both individual and collective – that affect the West Indian newcomers and their English ‘hosts’. Accent, syntax, lexicon – all contribute to giving a picture of who the characters are, even if, in the case of the Caribbean protagonists, they just speak varieties of the same idiom as the local English population, for, as George Lamming reminds us, English is “a West Indian language.”1 Probably the best-known example of the role played by the linguistic medium in the fictionalization of postcolonial London by Caribbean writers is Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). Written in a re-created idiom akin to English-based Trinidadian Creole, both in narrative and in dialogue, this novel renders the disillusionment of its protagonists, who end up, as Susheila Nasta puts it, “setting up home in a city of words.”2 If English, particularly English place names, have contributed to the characters’ mental colonization and made them view London as a new Eldorado, their own creative use of the speech of the former master becomes a mark not only of otherness but also of agency, limited yet nonetheless real. For Selvon, Nasta argues, “it is only through [...] the reclamation of an authentic language for identity that [he] can begin to rescue his [...] community from the illusory myths of the imperial centre.” 3 1

ANG UAGE H AS OFTEN B EEN A CEN TRAL I SSUE

George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (1960; London & New York: Allison & Busby, 1984): 44. I owe this reference to Edward Baugh, “Friday in Crusoe’s City: The Question of Language in Two West Indian Novels of Exile,” A C L A L S Bulletin 5.3 (December 1980): 12. 2 Susheila Nasta, “Setting up Home in a City of Words: Sam Selvon’s London Novels,” in Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto, 1995): 48–68. 3 Nasta, “Setting up Home in a City of Words,” 52.

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More recent novels on multicultural London by writers with Jamaican roots, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), are no exception to this almost traditional linguistic focus in Caribbean literature, even if they testify to a change in perspective.4 Indeed, for the younger writers the language issue is perhaps less a question of mental decolonization, which it was for Sam Selvon and other authors of the 1950s and 1960s, than a question of establishing the heterogeneous character of the city and, by extension, of the nation. I would like to argue in this essay that Smith and Levy are not so much interested in West Indian identity abroad as in the meaning of Englishness. Not only do they include in their writing ‘englishes’ that depart from the norm: i.e. from so-called standard British English, but they also draw attention to the linguistic processes that underlie intercultural encounters and human relationships in general. In what follows, I endeavour to show how the multiplicity of tongues in White Teeth informs a mongrelized speech community, which demystifies the notion of purity and therefore stands in opposition to all forms of fundamentalisms, linguistic or otherwise. Small Island, too, interweaves several voices which, as I will demonstrate, convey the variegated configuration of postwar London and epitomize not only its sometimes painful experience of cross-culturalism but also its inherent human richness. Language variety is thus a central preoccupation in both novels. However, while White Teeth seems to gesture towards the hybridity that this vocal multiplicity entails – what Smith has called, in an article on Barack Obama’s flexibility of voice, “our collective human messiness”5 – Small Island, which is set around the Second World War, tends, rather, to focus on the difficulties arising from linguistic pluralism. It indeed presents, according to Cynthia James, “language [as] a battleground on which British and West Indian cultures and identities clash and make accommodations.”6

4

Smith’s and Levy’s novels also share with Selvon’s the fact that they can be regarded as comedies. As Michael L. Ross has shown, the humour of these three novels is informed by their use of language. See Ross, “Samuel Selvon and the Comedy of Reverse Colonization” and “The Empire Laughs Last,” in Ross, Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2006): 179–202 and 269–80 respectively. 5 Zadie Smith, “Speaking in Tongues,” New York Review of Books 56.3 (26 February 2009), http: //www.nybooks.com/article/22334 (accessed 26 February 2009). 6 Cynthia James, “‘You’ll Soon Get Used to Our Language’: Language, Parody and West Indian Identity in Andrea Levy’s Small Island,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 5.1 (Spring 2007): para 1, http://anthurium.miami.edu/volume_5/issue_1/james-language.html (accessed 24 November 2008).

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It should be obvious to any reader that the reflection on English identity at the heart of White Teeth is underpinned by a conspicuous interest in linguistic matters. Not only does language serve as a deftly handled representational tool for the novelist but it is also an apt metaphor for a world characterized by unpredictability and teeming with diversity. An examination of Smith’s treatment of the linguistic question requires a brief introduction to her impressive gallery of characters. In spite of widely different origins and diverging experiences of life, these have at least two common denominators: on the one hand, the “white teeth” of the title – a multi-faceted symbol that, apart from being a sign of vitality in human beings, represents both their need for rootedness and their predatory impulses – and, on the other, rather obviously, an ability to communicate through speech. The major characters in Smith’s huge human fresco, almost exclusively set in London, are Archie Jones, a generous, slow-witted white working-class Englishman, and Samad Iqbal, an educated Bengali who is a waiter in a restaurant. Smith traces fifty years of their unlikely friendship, from the end of the Second World War, when they were both fighting with the British army in Bulgaria, to the 1990s, when they both live in the North London area of Willesden. The two friends’ younger wives, Clara Bowden, a woman of Jamaican descent, and Alsana, Samad’s unexpectedly tenacious arranged bride, constitute another focus, together with their respective children: Irie, a bucktoothed girl suffering from teenage angst caused by weight and hair problems, who wants to become a dentist, and the twins Magid and Millat. The latter follow totally divergent paths, Magid studying law and Millat being involved in religious fundamentalism. As the novel unfolds, the two families interact and their fate becomes tied to that of a third one: the Chalfens, a white, middle-class, half-Jewish family of liberal intellectuals who have been in Britain for two generations. Many other figures people Smith’s lively world and can be heard in the novel. Suffice it to say that they are all depicted with a keen sense of observation, combined with an extraordinary talent for presenting their verbal idiosyncrasies. White Teeth is told with gusto by an omniscient, occasionally intrusive narrator in an inventive English that ranges from the formal to the utterly informal. At one point, for example, the narrator describes, in the same breath, the face of Abdul-Mickey, a Muslim pub-owner from whom a customer has just ordered a bacon sandwich, thus: “Oh, the struggle that could be seen on Mickey’s kisser at that moment! Oh, the gargoylian contortions!”7 This juxtaposition of a col7

Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000; London: Penguin, 2001): 450. (My emphasis.). Further page references are in the main text.

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loquialism, “kisser,” and quasi-academic terms, “gargoylian contortions,” characterizes a highly hybrid medium, a kind of self-contained linguistic continuum, where “mad” alternates with “nutso” to describe mentally ill people. This language is also peppered with Latin and French phrases, and with innumerable, often hyphenated compounds, the appropriate embodiments of the characters’ cultural or racial in-betweenness. Yet, far from being fully in control of the tale, the main narrative voice seems to absorb the features of all the other surrounding types of language and weave them into a kind of verbal kaleidoscope, a possible reflection of the process of cultural cross-breeding constantly at work in globalized spaces like contemporary London. White Teeth is basically a polyphonic novel, integrating dozens of different voices. The major yarns in its fabric are Bengali English, Jamaican patois, and north London slang, three language varieties that surface in the morphology, lexicon, syntax, and phonology adopted by the characters. The Iqbals often use run-on words, like “whateverhernameis” (235) or “whitecliffsdover piesnmash jellyeels royalvariety britishbulldog” (241), a feature which has been described as a typically Rushdiesque linguistic marker inherited from South Asian speech.8 In the Bowdens’ lilting language one finds “ting” instead of “thing” and “me kyant” for “I can’t.” And Ryan Topps, a white man with a Cockney accent, says “somefing” and “nuffink,” in a voice presented as “missing key consonants and adding others where they were never meant to be” (388). These three tongues are, together with Gujarati, the components of the language spoken by the Raggastanis, a street crew with a hybrid ethos led by Millat Iqbal. Appropriately described as a “social chameleon” (269), the boy seems to personify the mongrelization that typifies a new generation of Londoners, whose cultural references combine hip-hop, brand names like “Nike” and “Adidas,” and Shakespeare. Quite a number of other varieties and tongues, sometimes only snatches of conversation, resonate around this pied linguistic kernel: the English written by Horst Ibelgaufts, Archie’s Swedish pen-friend; that spoken by Archie’s Italian 8

Agnes Scott Langeland, “Rushdie’s Language,” English Today 45.12.1 (January 1996): 20. In her analysis of White Teeth, Claire Squires concludes that “the greatest influence that Rushdie may have had on Zadie Smith is linguistic” and mentions Rushdie’s “technique of creating neologisms by running words together.” Squires, Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” (New York & London: Continuum, 2002): 16. In a 2000 interview, however, Zadie Smith pointed out that she had not read Rushdie when she wrote White Teeth, which, of course, does not exclude the possibility of South Asian English influencing her writing. “Zadie Smith with Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina,” in Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk, ed. Susheila Nasta (London & New York: Routledge, 2004): 273.

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first wife and his Spanish home help; the Irish English spoken by one of Mickey’s customers; the Indian English spoken by a shopkeeper; or the pidgin spoken by the Bulgarian children asking Archie and Samad for chewing gum and “mixing up the few words they had learnt, placing them in any order” (94). Zadie Smith is an astute observer of linguistic phenomena and does not limit her scrutiny to languages that are, in origin at least, geographically determined. She also explores social registers and repeatedly describes how her characters adapt to circumstances, whether it is the voice put on by Hortense, Irie’s grandmother, “when she had company – an over-compensation of all the consonants – the voice she used for pastors and white women” (40) or the “bud-bud-dingding accent” (319) put on by Millat to mock the Chalfens’ thirst for exoticism. Unlike skin colour or hair texture, language is an identity marker that can easily be modified, and therefore may be more “[resistant to] easy categorization,” a feature which, as Caryl Phillips points out, also applies to White Teeth.9 In addition, Smith also tracks the language distortions or euphemisms brought about by the socio-political context, as in her rendition of linguistic political correctness in two scenes. The first of these is a meeting of “parentgovernors,” taking place at the school of Archie’s and Samad’s children in 1984, of all years, perhaps an allusion to George Orwell’s “Doublespeak.” During the meeting, a woman insists on being called Ms – instead of Mrs – which makes Samad say: “And this is some kind of linguistic conflation between the words Mrs and Miss? [...] Something to describe the woman who has either lost her husband or has no prospect of finding another?” (128)

– an unwittingly challenging remark which somehow humorously questions the validity of this title adopted by U S feminists in the 1970s.10 The second episode focuses on the comprehensive school attended by Irie and Millat, whose headmaster announces a “move away from behaviour chastisement and towards constructive conduct management” (302–303), and speaks of “post-class aberration consideration periods” instead of “detention” (304, 308). Apart from their strong potential for humour,11 these examples also remind us of the power of 9

Caryl Phillips, “White Teeth, by Zadie Smith” (2000), in Phillips, A New World Order (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001): 284. 10 See Eve Kay, “Call me Ms,” Guardian (29 June 2007), Comment & Features Section: 12–13. For the Oxford English Dictionary the neutral alternative ‘Ms’ goes back much earlier, around the 1950s. 11 For some critics, humour is the primary effect of Smith’s use of an “intermix of languages.” See Melita Glasgow & Don Fletcher, “Palimpsest and Seduction: The Glass Palace and White Teeth,” Kunapipi 27.1 (2005): 82.

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language to hide, distort or blur reality, which may also be Smith’s indirect challenge to the power of fiction to render this reality, thus questioning the factual reliability of her own work. This ability of speech to conceal appears clearly at many points in the novel. For example, “K E VI N ,” an acronym that immediately evokes a very common English name, stands for “Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation,” a Muslim fundamentalist group. Likewise, O’Connell’s Pool House, the name of Archie and Samad’s hangout, is rather misleading, as it is “neither Irish nor a pool house” (183). The deceptiveness of language is also memorably illustrated by the word “chief,” which, for some inexplicable reason hidden in the etymology of North London slang, [is used by young people to mean] fool, arse, wanker, a loser of the most colossal proportions. (163)

Language, like appearances, the novelist suggests, cannot be relied on to get at the heart of the real. Smith’s novel has been said to provide a survey of the linguistic landscape of postwar London;12 it has also been praised for capturing each voice with proficiency.13 I am not going to dispute this. However, beyond the mimetic representation of a Babelian world – in some areas of London, such as Brent, the novel says (292), as many as 123 different languages are reported to be spoken – it is important to perceive that Smith’s juxtaposition and intertwining of divergent voices have subversive overtones that bear upon the construction of a new Englishness. By presenting language, a crucial identity marker, as inherently multiple, impure, and unpredictable, White Teeth, indeed, undermines what Caryl Phillips has called “the mythology of homogeneity,” which endures in Britain in spite of evidence to the contrary and “prevents countless numbers of British people from feeling comfortable participating in the main narrative of British life.”14 Appropriately, in White Teeth, so-called standard British English is no longer the major language; it is de-centred, as it were. The ‘Queen’s English’ is spoken by only a handful of characters, among them the smug Chalfens, the “stuffy registrar” (50) who deals with Archie’s and Clara’s wedding, Mr Hamilton, an old man who reminisces about colonial Congo in a voice “from a different class, a different era” (169), and, finally, BBC presenters (197). In short, Standard English is spoken by the representatives of institutions and of some form of paternalism, 12

Maya Jaggi, “The Power of Babel,” review of White Teeth, Guardian Weekly (3–9 February 2000): 19. 13 See, for example, Jan Lowe, “No More Lonely Londoners,” Small Axe 9 (March 2001): 174. 14 Caryl Phillips, “Extravagant Strangers” (1995), in Phillips, A New World Order, 288.

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like the Chalfens, whose feeling of superiority is conveyed again and again in linguistic terms, since they refer to themselves as nouns, verbs and occasionally adjectives: It’s the Chalfen way, And then he came out with a real Chalfenism, He’s Chalfening again, We need to be a bit more Chalfenist about this. (314).15

Quite ironically, Standard English is also spoken by Magid, one of the twins sent by his father to Bangladesh in order for him to be brought up far from the corrupting influence of the West. On his return to England, the boy is “more English than the English” (365). His careful choice of words and sophisticated grammar prompt the following observation by one of his father’s friends: “ ‘Speaks fuckin’ nice, don’t he? Sounds like a right fuckin’ Olivier. Queen’s fucking English and no mistake’” (449). Clearly, in Smith’s London, the vernacular seems to have become the norm, but a norm that cannot be pinned down, because it is heterogeneous and always in flux. Therefore, if White Teeth can be said to describe what is called a ‘speech community’, this socio-linguistic notion can only be understood here as a group of people who “share not just a single language but a repertoire of languages or varieties,” as “a complex interlocking network of communication whose members share knowledge about and attitudes towards the language use patterns of others as well as themselves.” 16 Smith’s focus on linguistic heterogeneity has a second implication: none of the voices is pure – they either undergo the influence of the others or exert some influence over them. In short, they interact closely in a web-like manner. For example, the Jamaican idiom spoken by Hortense Bowden is laced with quotations from the Bible, and the language spoken by Alsana and Samad misuses, though one could also say revises, English idioms, collocations, or words. In Alsana’s mouth, “squeeze water out of a stone” becomes “squeeze water out when you’re stoned” (78); in Samad’s, “as nutty as a fruitcake” becomes “many raisins short of the fruitcake” (198) and “reveries” becomes “revelries” (84). So, if the Chalfens, in their missionary zeal, can be said to “Englishify” (345) Millat and Irie – that is, influence their manners and language – the Samads in turn “Bengalize” English vocabulary, a double process whose reciprocity has often been ignored. For, usually, English people are seen as teachers of the proper tongue while so-called aliens are supposed to be either dangerous contami15

Note the pun on the notion of Queen’s English: a flashback on Archie’s life turns out to be “a short, unedifying viewing experience, low on entertainment value, the metaphysical equivalent of the Queen’s Speech” (13–14) and Mr Hamilton, with a clear inflection of public-school homosociality, describes himself and some fellow settlers in the Congo as “old Queens” (172). 16 Bernard Spolsky, Sociolinguistics (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1998): 24–25.

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nators or grateful learners. Admittedly, a thirst for purity exists in every people. It even surfaces, according to the narrator, in Jamaican grammar, where “there is no choice of personal pronoun, no splits between me or you or they, there is only the pure homogenous I” (327). Yet, the novel shows, this purity is only a myth. As Alsana points out, “you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think that anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy-tale!” (236)

If the linguistic motif in White Teeth calls into question the notions of unity and purity, it also challenges the concepts of predictability and determinism that are at the core of all fundamentalisms, represented in the novel by science and religion, whose discourses strangely converge. There is, on the one hand, Marcus Chalfen with his genetically programmed mouse, called the Future Mouse, which holds out the tantalizing promise of a new phase in human history where we are not victims of the random but instead directors and arbitrators of our own fate. (433)

On the other, we have Hortense Bowden who, as a Jehovah’s Witness, keeps announcing the apocalyptic end of the world, as well as the Muslim extremists, who all want to “eliminate the random” because, as Marcus Chalfen says, when “‘you eliminate the random, you rule the world’” (341). Although these ideologies – scientific and religious – first bring people from different ethnicities together (Marcus and Millat; Hortense and Ryan; Millat and his group), they eventually promote an essentially divisive ethos, since they require separating the “sheep from the goats” as in the Scriptures, quoted by Hortense (34, 43), from which she concludes: “Black and white never come to no good. De Lord Jesus never meant us to mix it up. Dat’s why he made a hol’ heap a fuss about de children of men building de tower of Babel. ’Im want everybody to keep tings separate.” (385)

Even more important, scientific and religious discourses, which are messianic in nature,17 make people believe that “the past is always tense and the future, perfect” (541). This almost incantatory sentence with recurrent echoes in the novel highlights the tension between past and future that marks human life, in particular that of the migrant. At the same time, with its inbuilt pun, this quotation is a tongue-in-cheek expression of the close link that Smith’s novel establishes 17

George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber & Faber, 2001): 7.

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between existential issues and grammar, which could be defined, in the words of George Steiner, as “the articulate organization of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve-structure of consciousness when it communicates with itself and with others.”18 However, even if White Teeth deconstructs the hope offered by science and religion by exposing their deceptive agendas, it is not based on a grammar “of nihilism.”19 As its structure indicates (the first six chapters go forward then backward in time, while the last two go forward), it is resolutely turned towards the future. Not a perfect future, but still a promising one made of ambiguity and embodied in Irie’s unborn baby, whose father may be Magid or Millat, the twins whose “genes, those prophets of the future, have reached different conclusions” (463). Unlike the allegedly predictable and controllable future promised by science and religion, this future contains its fair share of randomness and uncertainty – just like the language of postcolonial London. Very much like White Teeth, Small Island is a thick, plot-driven novel which gives pride of place to language – both as a major instrument in its narrative strategy and as a theme – to convey the cultural plurality of postwar London. However, while White Teeth is mostly interested in depicting a Babel-like city to represent the diversity and vigour of today’s English heterogeneous society, Small Island has an apparently more ‘intimist’ canvas and uses language and linguistic varieties mainly to underline the difficulties of postcolonial relationships. As an historical novel ending in 1948, it might also be read as providing a contextualization for the contemporary London that is depicted in Smith’s fiction. Like White Teeth, Small Island is a polyphonic novel. It alternates among four characters, two Jamaican and two English, and between two different time periods. There are four sections titled “before”; in each of them, only one of the four protagonists speaks. The other five sections, which interlock with the former, are titled “1948,” the year of the first massive arrival of West Indians on English soil, and they contain several voices, a gradual vocal heterogeneity which reflects the increased diversity of London and England in general. The four main characters speak English, and their speech habits match both their background and their personality. Like Smith, Levy has been praised by reviewers for her ability to render her characters’ “individual timbres and rhythms” skilfully.20 Mild-mannered, easy-going Gilbert, a former RAF serviceman, who 18 19 20

Steiner, Grammars of Creation, 5. Grammars of Creation, 9. Elizabeth Kiem, “Lives hop from Jamaica to Britain, yet they never actually leave home,” San

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arrives in England on the Empire Windrush in 1948, unashamedly speaks a form of Jamaican English, including the legendary habit of teeth-sucking, which a sergeant in charge of the West Indian RAF volunteers finally forbids because he views it as “an act of insubordination.”21 Gilbert is joined in London by his priggish, educated wife Hortense who prides herself on using hypercorrect, occasionally old-fashioned Standard English as a means of escaping her mother’s peasant origins, of living up to her father’s position as a government man, but also of making good in the former imperial centre. Another instance of ‘upward linguistic mobility’ is Queenie, an outspoken, pragmatic, English woman, a butcher’s daughter, who starts taking elocution lessons when she settles with her aunt Dorothy, “[her] Mother’s posh sister from London, who pronounced her aitches with a panting breath even where there were no aitches to be pronounced” (247). Incidentally, this idiosyncrasy is very close to the typically Jamaican habit of placing “aitches” everywhere. Queenie lives in Earl’s Court and rents rooms to black lodgers, Gilbert among them, while her boring, taciturn husband, Bernard, has in 1948 not yet returned from his war posting in Asia. “Proud to be part of the British Empire. Proud to represent decency” (379), he constantly refers to the “gibberish” (361) spoken by the Indian “natives,” whom he calls, among other things, a “ragged bunch of illiterates wanting to run their own country” (375). This brief synopsis suffices to show how central and recurrent linguistic references are in Small Island. As John Mullan rightly concludes, “this is a novel whose characters are preoccupied with how they and others speak.”22 My aim in the remainder of this essay is to analyse the role played by language in how the characters interact with each other and with society at large, and, at a further remove, to explore how linguistic mechanisms inform the prejudices that human beings entertain about each other, particularly in the context of postcolonial migration to London. In other words, while the novel clearly shows that speech is a determining element of individual identity, whether social or psychological, it is also a major factor in the complex web of communication or, Francisco Chronicle (29 March 2005), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03 /29/DDG8RBV8321.DTL (accessed 4 July 2005). See also Mike Phillips, “Roots Manoeuvre,” Guardian (14 February 2004 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004 /feb/14/featuresreviews .guardianreview10 (accessed 17 April 2004), and Dan Silkstone, “Small Island,” The Age (17 April 2004), http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/14 /1081838786858.html (accessed 12 September 2009). 21 Andrea Levy, Small Island (London: Review, 2004): 135. Further page references are in the main text. 22 John Mullan, “Mind Your Language,” Guardian (11 December 2004), Review Section: 23.

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rather, miscommunication in which the characters are involved. A case in point is what Hortense calls the “silly dance of miscomprehension” (332) when, in spite of her well-rehearsed English accent, she fails to get her message across in a London grocery shop. The novel contains dozens of other scenes where a failure to make oneself understood or to understand others triggers intolerance or disappointment on both sides of the cultural divide. Clearly, “incomprehension” often goes hand in hand with sheer prejudice, both individual and institutional. The case of Hortense might again be used to illustrate this point. She has been conditioned by the colonial system to think of England as a paradise on earth, so she arrives in London fully convinced that, as a qualified teacher in Jamaica, she will get a suitable job in England. She fully trusts her English accent, dutifully imitated from the BBC , to do the trick, as well as “two letters of recommendation [which] each contained words that would open up the doors of any school to [her]” (448). But she soon realizes that words cannot do much against the discrimination enforced by a system that refuses to recognize her Jamaican qualifications, so that, in the end, “[her] voice faltered into a tiny squeak” (452), an appropriate vocal expression of her powerlessness. In a sense, Hortense’s misadventures might be viewed as the result of an attitude that Mr Todd, Queenie’s racist neighbour, sums up as follows: “‘You’ll never understand, let alone believe, a word that any of those worthless people say to you’” (116). The linguistic motif in Small Island seems to send us back again and again to the question formulated by Bernard about the victims of the Blitz whom Queenie is trying to help: “‘Are these people our sort?’” (285). However trivial, this question encapsulates much of what is going on between the communities represented in the novel. Indeed, language is repeatedly used in this context as a way of gauging people’s degree of otherness or belonging, in many cases just to confirm the information apparently conveyed by their complexion. These linguistic and racial assumptions are, however, often proven wrong, being, as they are, the result of ignorance or paternalism, as the following instances demonstrate. At one point, villagers approach West Indian soldiers, wondering whether they actually speak English (138) and then conclude “‘There, I told you. They speak it just like us, only funnier’” (138); some people even expect them not to be able to speak at all. As Gilbert remembers, a little boy calls after him: “‘It speaks, Mummy, it speaks’” (165).23 But such biases run both ways, as some

23

One cannot help recalling here the classic instance of racist identification – “‘ Look at the nigger! .. . Mama, a Negro!’ ” – that pursues Frantz Fanon obsessively in his chapter “The Fact of

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educated West Indians, obviously unaware of the English class-system and the attendant sociolinguistic variations in England, also wonder “how so many white people come to speak so bad – low class and coarse as cane cutters” (140). Clearly, then, in a multicultural society, language no longer functions as a reliable way of placing people, as Queenie learns when, as a young girl, she visits the African pavilion at the Empire Exhibition in the mid-1920s. There she comes face to face with an African, to her child’s eyes, a “monkey man [...]. Blacker than when you smudge your face with a sooty cork”; Queenie is quite surprised when he expresses himself in “clear English” (6) because this seems to run counter to what she expects of an alleged savage. For her father, this man could only “have been a chief or a prince in Africa, [because] when they speak English you know that they have learned to be civilized – taught English by the white man, missionaries probably” (7). For Queenie, however, this experience is formative and could explain her later relative colour-blindness, since it intimates to her that this man is like anyone else (6), his accent possibly illustrating what it means to be both black and British. Small Island attempts to challenge these language-related prejudices by showing that thoughts and actions might eventually matter more than words, or should at least be taken into account as well, even if the novel also substantiates the fact that, as Queenie says, “there are some words that once spoken will split the world in two” (491). So, while recognizing the unquestionable power of language in shaping human relations, the novel is also replete with acts of generosity which go well beyond words, even if these kind gestures are occasionally somewhat clumsily rendered. Gilbert and Hortense’s eventual adoption of the baby that Queenie had by a Jamaican airman, who happens to be Hortense’s cousin, is a case in point, even if this ending also seems to undermine the narrative’s cross-cultural potential. Another, less striking but nonetheless telling, example occurs when Gilbert, whom Hortense regards as an “uncouth ruffian” (323), proves “true to [his] word” (104) and sends for his bride to join him in the “Mother Country,” in spite of their initially loveless marriage. Similarly, at one point, when Gilbert is depressed by the discrimination around him, which is often expressed verbally, he meets a middle-aged English lady in the street who gives him a cough sweet; Gilbert concludes: it was a salvation to me – not for the sugar but for the act of kindness. The human tenderness with which it was given to me. I had become hungry for the good in people. Beholden to any tender heart. All we boys Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 1986): 113.

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were in this thankless place. When we find it, we keep it. A simple gesture, a friendly word, a touch, a sticky sweet rescued me as sure as if that Englishwoman had pulled me from drowning in the sea. (328)

Interestingly, there is an enigmatic character in Small Island who seems to embody the necessity of going beyond language in order to capture man’s essential nature: Bernard’s father, Arthur Bligh, whom Queenie significantly views in grammatical terms as “a human apostrophe,” that is, “a mark to show where something is missing” (288). Arthur, who has lost his voice after taking part in World War One, is a sensitive man, generous and devoted entirely to Queenie while her husband is away. His only words, expressed in a voice as “posh as the BBC ” (308) and pronounced when Queenie has been injured in a bombing, are a sort of declaration of love (“I would die if anything happened to you,” 308). His death during a race riot involving soldiers and military police might express his insignificance in a world dominated by verbal and physical violence, whether actual or racial, where being inarticulate is synonymous with being practically non-existent. In addition to seeing how language defines human relationships – for better or for worse – in Small Island, it is also worth examining the stylistic features of the narrative, in particular its extensive use of similes. The novel contains dozens of them, not always very effective, in my opinion. Ideally, these should be classified and carefully analysed, but this would require another essay altogether. Suffice it to say here that by associating words or ideas that do not automatically belong together (“flattened like a hut before a tank,” 170) or, in some cases, by introducing apparently ‘exotic’ elements into the narrative (“her wide brown eyes alert as a cobra’s,” 26), these similes indirectly draw attention to the fusion and confusion that characterize London, especially in its postWindrush phase. A similar alchemy of words operates in the polysemic title. Obviously, “Small Island” refers at once to Jamaica, England, and London. At the same time, however, it suggests that each individual, too, is a small island, unable to cross the often linguistic divide separating him or her from others. In sum, both White Teeth and Small Island contribute through their focus on language to a reflection on what it means to be English. In Small Island, Englishness is presented as the outcome of an ever ongoing process of occasionally painful mutual adaptation and compromise whereby, to quote Cynthia James, people have to literally and metaphorically “get used to each other’s language.” 24 It seems, however, that White Teeth goes further in its exploration of identity than Small Island, in part thanks to its contemporary setting, for it suggests a 24

James, “‘You’ll Soon Get Used to Our Language’,” § 29, p. 11.

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redefinition of Englishness, one that jettisons concepts of fixity and unity and more confidently expresses the human diversity at the heart of contemporary London.25

W O R K S C I TE D Baugh, Edward. “Friday in Crusoe’s City: The Question of Language in Two West Indian Novels of Exile,” A C LA L S Bulletin, 5th series, 3 (December 1980): 1–12. Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness,” in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 1986): 109– 40. Glasgow, Melita & Don Fletcher, “Palimpsest and Seduction: The Glass Palace and White Teeth,” Kunapipi 27.1 (2005): 75–87. Jaggi, Maya. “The Power of Babel,” review of White Teeth, Guardian Weekly (3–9 February 2000): 19. James, Cynthia. “‘You’ll Soon Get Used to Our Language’: Language, Parody and West Indian Identity in Andrea Levy’s Small Island,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 5.1 (Spring 2007), http://anthurium.miami.edu/volume_5/issue_1/jameslanguage.html (accessed 24 November 2008). Kay, Eve. “Call me Ms,” Guardian (29 June 2007), Comment & Features Section: 12–13. Kiem, Elizabeth. “Lives hop from Jamaica to Britain, yet they never actually leave home,” San Francisco Chronicle (29 March 2005), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f =/c/ a/2005/03/29/DDG8RBV8321.DTL (accessed 4 July 2005). Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile (1960; London & New York: Allison & Busby, 1984). Levy, Andrea. Small Island (London: Review, 2004). Lowe, Jan. “No More Lonely Londoners,” Small Axe 9 (March 2001): 166–80. Mullan, John. “Mind Your Language,” Guardian (11 December 2004), Review Section: 23. Nasta, Susheila. “Setting up Home in a City of Words: Sam Selvon’s London Novels,” in Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto, 1995): 48–68. Phillips, Caryl. “Extravagant Strangers” (1995), in Phillips, A New World Order (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001): 288–97. ——. “White Teeth, by Zadie Smith” (2000), in Phillips, A New World Order (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001): 283–87. Phillips, Mike. “Roots Manoeuvre,” Guardian (14 February 2004), http://www .theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/14/featuresreviews.guardianreview10 (accessed 12 February 2009).

25

I would like to thank Shirley Chew, Isabel Hoving, Judith Misrahi-Barak, Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso, and Daria Tunca for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

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Ross, Michael L. “The Empire Laughs Last,” in Ross, Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P, 2006): 269–80. ——. “Samuel Selvon and the Comedy of Reverse Colonization” and “The Empire Laughs Last,” in Ross, Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2006): 179–202. Scott Langeland, Agnes. “Rushdie’s Language,” English Today 45.12.1 (January 1996): 16– 22. Silkstone, Dan. “Small Island,” The Age (17 April 2004), http://www.theage.com.au /articles /2004/04/14/1081838786858.html (accessed 12 September 2009). Smith, Zadie. “Speaking in Tongues,” New York Review of Books 56.3 (26 February 2009), http://www.nybooks.com/article/22334 (accessed 12 February 2009). ——.White Teeth (2000; London: Penguin, 2001). ——. “Zadie Smith with Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina,” in Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk, ed. Susheila Nasta (London & New York: Routledge, 2004): 266– 78. Spolsky, Bernard. Sociolinguistics (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1998). Squires, Claire. Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” (New York & London: Continuum, 2002). Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation (London: Faber & Faber, 2001).

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A Postcolonial Passage to England Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table G E E T H A G ANAPAT HY –D OR É

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N HIS SIXTH NOVEL,

published in 2011, which was nominated for the I MPAC Dublin Literary award in 2013, Michael Ondaatje recalls the journey to England that he undertook in 1954, to reunite with his mother. He proposes a fictional version of it coloured by other places he has known and other memories that inhabit him. The journey becomes a trope for translation in the novel. The Oxford English Dictionary points out that ‘translate’ derives from Middle English and the old French Latin, translat, ‘carried across’, the past participle of transferre; so etymologically it originally meant ‘to remove from one place to another’. Being part of the maritime idiom, the novel’s title, The Cat’s Table, is an invitation to include the text in any discussion of postcolonial migrations and translation dealing with the crossing of, and relocation in, space. The novel’s narrative form, complexity, style, characters, and point of view are some of the many instruments with which the author problematizes journeying as a rite of passage and writing as an itinerant trace of this learning experience which proves to be traumatizing and educative at the same time. This essay will first deal with the representation of the four dimensions of space–time in Ondaatje’s novel and the power struggles with regard to gender, class, and race that transform the migrant’s gaze; it will go on to examine the place of writing in the becoming-Other of the migrant self. It will also look at the different interpretations of the notion of ‘passage’ in the novel: as alteration, as death or impasse, or, on the contrary, as a possibility of renewal and renaissance, as distance to be crossed or as poetic elevation. Such an analysis will help us understand the mutation of the “post-colonial novel, [...] de-centred, transnational, inter-lingual, cross-cultural,”1 into a contemporary novel in Ondaatje’s 1

Salman Rushdie, “In Defence of the Novel, Yet Again” (2000), in Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002): 57.

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literary practice. The transition from the postcolonial moment to the globalization moment in the history of the novel is subtly made by the narrator, whose voice, using the pronoun “we,” speaks in the name of all of us on many occasions and especially at a crucial point in the narrative (157).2 Born in 1943 in a country that was then called Ceylon, Ondaatje spent eight years (1954–62) in England before travelling to and settling in Canada. Although his award-winning novel The English Patient pays indirect homage to his English educators (given the fact that he completed his secondary education at Dulwich College), Ondaatje devoted some of his earlier books to the trips he had made back to Sri Lanka. These memoirs (Running in the Family), fiction (Anil’s Ghost), and poems (The Cinnamon Peeler, Handwriting) are quite silent about Ondaatje’s detour via England.3 The Cat’s Table opens a door on this hitherto unmentioned period and unveils details of his journey to England. Ondaatje, who is well versed in fictional biographies and autobiographies, experiments here with a new genre of the novel which hovers between travel writing, bildungsroman, adventure novel, detective novel, fictionalized autobiography, autobiographical novel, and autofiction. The way in which the narrator shares the author’s name, the known episode of reunion with his mother, the geographical point of departure (Colombo) and arrival (Tilbury) are quite a few landmarks confirming the fact that what we have here is an autobiographical gesture. The author’s peritextual note at the end of the book specifies that “although the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional” (367). In an interview,4 Ondaatje emphasizes the role of pure invention in the novel. What was supposed to be an innocent tale of children displacing themselves without fear or mystery towards their known destination with the help of a well-charted itinerary is transformed in the course of writing into an adventure novel, by the inclusion of the enigmatic prisoner Niemeyer. The creative tension between truth and lies is a recurrent motif in Ondaatje’s fiction. Truth, which makes its way through many a rumour, ends in the birth of an anecdote; the novel is constructed as a tapestry interwoven with micro2

Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table, A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011): 157. Further page references are in the main text. 3 Michael Ondaatje, The Cinnamon Peeler (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992); Running in the Family (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993); Handwriting (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2000); Anil’s Ghost (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000). 4 Andrea Baillie, “Michael Ondaatje on his New Novel,” C T V News (2 September 2011), http: //www.ctvnews.ca/michael-ondaatje-on-his-new-novel-the-cat-s-table-1.691859 (accessed 31 January 2014).

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narratives that criss-cross the text in the form of notes, letters, reminiscences, meetings, reunions, separations, and losses. The transformation of real facts into fiction, thanks to the magic of the imagination, reveals what Ondaatje calls, in the acknowledgements page of Coming Through Slaughter, the truth of fiction.5 The main story is fairly straightforward. In the 1950s, the eleven-year-old only son of a divorced couple leaves Colombo for London to find his mother. He travels in a ship called the Oronsay,6 which transports around six hundred passengers, making stopovers in Aden, Port Said, and Gibraltar. This passage lasts three weeks. Fifty years later, the narrator recalls the moments spent with his cabin mate, the card-playing Hastie, his aunt Flavia Prins, his cousin Emily de Saram, and the nine guests at the Cat’s Table – the least privileged place, reserved for the tourist class. Many other narratives, among which the most intriguing concern the Sri Lankan philanthropist Sir Hector da Silva and the prisoner Niemeyer, are embedded in the main story in the form of vignettes. Ondaatje’s account ends in the British Columbian paradise of Bowen Island, where his cousin Emily has made her home after her divorce. The narrator takes the reader with him on board the Oronsay and allows him to perceive its length, width, and depth through very original pictorial strategies. Michael’s running from the tourist class to the first-class decks, and his escapades in the bar, give the reader an idea of the dimensions of this floating castle. The boys’ discovery of the turbine room and the botanist Larry Daniel’s hidden garden enables the reader to take stock of the ship’s infernal depths. The tale of the misadventure experienced by Michael and his former classmate and co-passenger Cassius enables the reader to discern the ship’s width, as Ondaatje portrays them tied with ropes to some V-shaped rivets on the Promenade Deck in order to weather the storm, and picked out by the searchlight “focused down from the bridge” (99). The flashbacks and flash-forwards in the narrative highlight the temporal dimension. This is how the narrator places the reader in the belly of the beast, in what Michel Foucault calls a ship’s “heterotopian space,”7 and transforms the co-passengers into voluntary or forced migrants. Verses from Dante’s Purgatory quoted in the text reinforce the idea that this crossing or passage is an allegory of the migrant experience:

5

Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976). The name Oronsay is derived from the Scottish gaelic word orasaigh (‘island of low tide’). For some photos of the interior of this ship see http://www.ssmaritime.com/ssOronsay.htm. As Ondaatje points out in the note, there have been several ships with this name. 7 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (“Des espaces autres,” 1967), tr. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22–27. 6

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‘That one is’ he replied ‘provenzan Salvani; And he is here because he had the ambition To carry all of Siena in his hands.’ (239; italics in original)

The journey becomes a distillation of life, and Michael a representative of all human beings constrained to solve the enigma of existence. Salman Rushdie was the first to formulate the idea that “journeying itself is home.”8 The young boy Michael, exiled from both maternal love and the mother country, lost between the family home that he has had to abandon and the hypothetical home he expects to find in England, discovers an unexpected refuge in the enclosed space of the ship and the limited time of transit. The stay on the Oronsay very much resembles a pregnancy.9 The migrant puts up with the passage as an inevitable spatio-temporal test, making his arrival in the dreamt-of land a new birth, the premise of a new life that the migrant hopes will be more beautiful, even if, at the end, it might prove to be quite disappointing. The narrator Michael’s friends give him the pet name of “Mynah.” The mynah, a black bird with a red beak that imitates the human voice, stands for the migrant and his voice that, like the mynah, mimics the language of the host country by reproducing the sounds he hears. Michael’s account is a sort of time capsule, written in homage to Cassius, who has become a renowned painter and with whom Michael has lost contact. Indeed, it was when visiting Cassius’s exhibition devoted to their stopover in El Suveis that Michael decided to bid farewell to the memories of tumultuous teenage years by immersing himself in the travails of writing. He reconciles himself to the passage to adulthood by taking recourse to formal education. “Time to go to school,” as his cousin Emily puts it when he alights from the boat at Tilbury docks (287). By writing his novel after seeing Cassius’s paintings, Michael remains loyal to his identity as “Mynah,” as if it would allow him to retrieve his past and inhabit it afresh. Rather than produce a self-portrait, Ondaatje draws the portrait of a migrant artist as a young boy. Michael helps a character called Baron to steal some valuable objects from Sir Hector da Silva’s suite. At one point he catches sight of his own image in the mirror:

8

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988): 94. Jhumpa Lahiri uses pregnancy as a metaphor in her novel The Namesake (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003) for the palpable uneasiness of migrants under the unsettling gaze of the others (49). The Senegalese writer Fatou Diome also uses the metaphor of the belly to depict the crossing of the Atlantic by migrants. Madicke, the brother of the female protagonist in The Belly of the Atlantic, tr. Ros Schwartz & Lulu Norman Le ventre de l’Atlantique, 2003; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2008), wants to join his sister in France to forge a new identity as a professional football player. 9

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I walked into one fully mirrored bathroom and suddenly saw receding images of myself, semi-naked, covered in black oil, just a brown face and spiky hair. There was a wild boy in there, somebody from one of the Jungle Book stories whose eyes watched me, white as lamps. This was, I think, the first reflection or portrait that I remember of myself. It was the image of my youth that I would hold on to for years – someone startled, half formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet. I became aware of the Baron on the edge of the mirror frame, watching me. He had a considering look. (90)

Later on, Emily attaches a Singhalese caption to this image: yakka, demon. Ondaatje’s word-portrait could be compared to David Hockney’s “Self-Portrait with Charlie” (2005).10 The weight of the Other is evidenced here thanks to the objective reflection perceived in the mirror (oneself as another), the subjective image that the artist has of himself (internalized image), the image he makes of himself through the reflected image which refers him back to the memories of Mowgli he had read in Kipling’s Jungle Book, the image of the young boy as the adult spectator sees him, and the image of the narrator that the reader is led to fabricate and compose from these superimposed bits and pieces. At the time of embarkation, Michael does not possess sufficient self-awareness. His self is in a fractured state like the parts of the radio he had not been able to assemble but which he carries in his suitcase. The construction of his identity has thus to be carried out by finding his own voice. The narrative voice, therefore, is multiple. Sometimes we come across the first person, singular and plural. At other times, the narrator is omniscient. On other occasions, it is the voice of women with internal focalization. The whispers carried in the wind, the bits of sentences noted in a school notebook, and the several titles of songs alluded to in the novel conjure up anonymous and celebrated voices. These are important for the orchestration of the narrative. The play with narrative voices, novel forms, foreign words, and the symbols in the pack of cards represent the human being tested by frontiers: 10

See the National Portrait Gallery website for a photographic reproduction of the painting: http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw129528/David-Hockney-Self-Portrait-withCharlie (accessed 31 January 2014). Ondaatje’s fiction biographies could be compared to portrait paintings. The fact that Michael Ondaatje’s brother Christopher donated three million pounds in 2000 to the National Portrait Gallery to help it build its Ondaatje wing shows the family’s interest in portraiture. From the point of view of critics, there are comparisons to be made between autobiography and self-portraits. See Michel Beaujour, “Autobiographie et autoportrait,” Poétique: Revue de Théorie et d’Analyse Littéraires 32 (1977): 442–58. Norman Rockwell’s 1960 “Triple SelfPortrait” is well known. David Hockney added a new and complex dimension to the genre of the self-portrait by painting himself with another in the picture.

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lines or zones, strips of land, which are places of separation and contact or confrontation, areas of blockage and passage (or passage on payment of a toll). Fixed or shifting zones, continuous or broken lines.11

These are overdetermined, polysemic, and heterogeneous, as Étienne Balibar defines them. Michael is drowned in an ocean of confusion during the projection of the film The Four Feathers simultaneously in two different places on the ship, because the projection is not properly synchronized and images continue to be projected in the empty space above the sea due to the ship’s rocking movement in stormy weather, which renders the projector’s focus unsteady. Michael comes out of this trial with more maturity, but not unscathed. He will become fully aware of the violence of uprooting that he has suffered and the damage it has caused in his life, when, years later when they are breaking up, his girlfriend obliges him to look back. “‘Someone damaged you. Tell me what happened when you came to England’” (219). The novel thus performs a therapeutic function by healing the artist from the repressed trauma of involuntary departure and the uneasiness of exile. As a novelist, Ondaatje has always tried to manipulate point of view, as a way of signifying the changing power of the gazing subject. The English Patient uses a camera’s-eye perspective.12 In Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje borrows the gaze of an artist who paints Buddha’s eyes by turning his back on him while looking at Buddha’s image in a mirror before the netramangla ceremony takes place. In The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje resorts to the long-distance gaze. Writing about life on board a ship enables him to look at the earth from a distance, as does the way he reports this experience after an interval of fifty years and from a different location. “Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place” (274). As Manav Ratti points out, such a distancing strategy is “constitutively a semioethical gesture” that “foregrounds the problem of ‘perspective’ and ‘framing’.”13 This third position is a direct response to Joseph Conrad’s vision quoted in the incipit to the

11

Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, tr. Christine Jones, James Swenson & Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002): 77; “c’est-à-dire des lignes ou des zones, des bandes de séparation et de contact ou de confrontation, de barrage et de passage (ou de ‘péage’). Fixes ou mobiles, continues ou discontinues”; Balibar, “Qu’est-ce qu’une ‘frontière’?” in Asile, violence, exclusion en Europe: Histoire, analyse, prospective, ed. M.C. Caloz–Tschopp & A. Clevenot (Cahiers de la Section des Sciences de l’Éducation; Geneva: Université de Genève, 1994): 338. 12 Ondaatje quotes Stendhal in The English Patient (London: Bloomsbury, 1992): 91. “A novel is a mirror walking down a road.” 13 Manav Ratti, The Postsecular Imagination (London: Routledge, 2012 ): 115.

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novel. Conrad suggests in Youth14 that he fashioned his gaze on the Orient from the perspective of an observer on a small boat. This gaze differs from what Rushdie calls “the stereoscopic vision”15 of the migrant which is influenced by both his country of origin and his country of residence. But writing from a place which is distant from both his country of origin and his host country gives Ondaatje more creative freedom. What he writes about migrants in the novel is as interesting as the place from which he writes: i.e. the cat’s table, which symbolizes the liminal albeit transformational space that is assigned to the postcolonial subject16 and from which he or she should grow and build a vision of the world: What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves. (81)

Several characters in the novel, such as the children Michael and Cassius, the dominated women Emily de Saram and Perinetta Lasquetti, and the handicapped girl Asuntha, are subalterns who are hardly visible and rarely listened to. A parallel could be drawn between the long-distance gaze of these dispossessed people (who are remote from the ‘centre’ but aware of what is happening there) and the point of view of a little boy looking at the world from below found in Jacques Henri Lartigue’s photographs.17 This gaze hides their wound but reveals the traps of patriarchy and empire. Thus, the confidential letter that Perinetta writes to Emily (shamelessly opened by Michael) becomes the purloined letter18 14

Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative (1898; London: Forgotten Books, 2012): 41. Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands” (1982), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 19. 16 See Charli–Ann Punt, “Stories of Liminal Voyage in the Indian Ocean: Michael Ondaatje’s ‘The Cat’s Table’ & Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘By the Sea’” (M A thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2013), http://mobile.wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/13612/Master%27s%20Thesis %20%20Charli-Ann%20Punt.pdf?sequence=2 (accessed 31 January 2014). 17 The narrator Michael compares Cassius’s point of view to Lartigue’s (143) while visiting the exhibition of Cassius’s paintings at Waddington Gallery in London. Lartigue’s credo was: “I paint, I write, I photograph.” See Patrick Roegiers, Jacques Henri Lartigue : Les tourments du funambule (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2003): 7. Lartigue started writing a diary in 1900 which he kept updated until his death in 1986. He would duplicate his photographs with sketches and caricatures for fear that his photos might not come out well. In a way, Michael’s narrative seems to duplicate Cassius’s paintings of the night they spent in El Suweis as boys on the journey from Ceylon to London. 18 See Lacan’s essay on Poe, which he concludes by saying that “what the ‘purloined letter,’ nay, the ‘letter in sufferance,’ means is that a letter always arrives at its destination”; “Seminar on ‘The 15

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that discloses the violent shock of her erotic encounter with her employer Horace Johnson in the Ortensia villa. Johnson intimates to Perinetta, via the tapestry in the Grand Rotunda, the way this encounter with Johnson reveals the secret of power rooted in desire: “‘This is where the power is, you see. Always. The underneath’” (238). In the course of his liaison, Horace wounds Perinetta with the sharp end of a pair of scissors. She learns how to cope and take care of herself in a foreign city – Florence in this case, where as a native English speaker she strains to convey her pain in Italian. Thinking back on her encounter with Johnson, Perinetta reflects: The thing is that men, with the kind of power that comes with money and knowledge, assume the universe. It allows them an easy wisdom. But such people close doors on you. Within such a universe there are codes, rooms you must not enter. (238)

Migrants can escape the dominating gaze of the Other by adjusting their focal length, and remaining true to themselves. Sometimes, however, no such tactics are available and they find themselves irreversibly altered. When Cassius and Michael pass a language test to get the chance to pursue their studies in England, Cassius tells Michael that the female of ‘dog’ is ‘cat’. However grotesque this caricature of gender stereotypes might seem (aggressive and masculine dog, as against pliant and feminine cat), it perfectly represents the paradox of identity in migration. The sea-voyage pictured in the novel is an allegory of all migratory experiences. It could be compared to the spiritual journey of the soul in the Hindu and Buddhist conceptions, according to which the ocean (sagara) serves as a metaphor for the passage of life on earth (samsara). The Sanskrit ‘samsara’ means ‘transmigration’ and refers to the transit of the soul through different worlds before it is finally liberated. Although its title refers to the cat, the novel depicts more dogs than cats. By displacing the consonants and vowels of a Sinhalese expression, Hector changes a Buddhist priest (battaramulle) into a urinating dog (mutaraballa). The curse of the angry priest metamorphoses Hector’s dog into a mad one that bites its master. A stray dog Ramdhin introduces into the vessel in Aden deals the coup de grâce to Hector. The dog mysteriously disappears after this. The Weimaraner hunting dog escapes from the boat when Mr Hastie is dismissed as Head Kennel Keeper. The dog appears again in the Purloined Letter’ ” (1957, tr. 1966), tr. Jeffrey Mehlman, in Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Emanuel Berman (New York: New York U P , 1993): 296. See also Jacques Derrida’s commentary on Lacan’s seminar on Poe,“Le facteur de la vérité,” in The Postcard from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, tr. Alan Bass (La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, 1980; tr. Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1987): 411–96.

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text when Perinetta sees the son of her Italian employer caress a dog woven in a tapestry entitled “Verdura with Dog.” Michael, rediscovering Ramdhin’s dog reincarnated in the paintings of Cassius, finds a mirror of himself in the hunting dog perturbed by the stormy weather in Canada. This canine subtext is a transposition of the modalities of camouflage postures that a migrant adopts to survive in a hostile milieu. Thus Michael assumes the roles of thief, spy, troublemaker, confidant, absent friend, divorced husband, writer. The metamorphosis of dog into cat in the novel illustrates the evolution of words and their meaning in the history of languages. Jacques Derrida maintains that it is “impossible to count the languages.”19 A word borrowed from one language may acquire a wholly new meaning in the course of its occurrence in different illocutionary contexts. The migrant’s encounter with an unfamiliar signifier while he is familiar with the signified (the hallucinatory plant used to treat Sir Hector da Silva is called datura in Latin and unmattaka in Singhalese) makes him realize that he, too, is a sign subject to a permanent process of translation. Between the captain’s table, where there is no place for Michael, and the Cat’s Table where a place is reserved for him, between the Verandah Bar’s table where his aunt invites him to have tea and the good-humouredly improvised table in the strange underground garden of Larry Daniels (a heterotopic place in the already heterotopic space of the ship), the migrant is a shifting persona looking for a place to stabilize himself, like the lover in the poem by Robert Creeley that Ondaatje quotes in the novel: Broken heart, you timeless wonder what a small place to be. (125; italics in original)

According to Derrida, “translation is another name for the impossible.”20 The dining scenes evoked above could be seen as the author’s repeated effort to translate Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” The sharing of a good meal and a story around a table in order to foster love harks back to agape.21 Novelistic narration thus becomes a moment of fraternal communion.

19

Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, tr. Patrick Mensah (Le monolinguisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine, 1996; Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1998): 30. 20 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 57. 21 Agape is the Greek word for the love of humanity. In the New Testament, it refers to “the fatherly love of God for humans and their reciprocal love for God. The term extends to the love of one’s fellow humans. The Church Fathers used the Greek term to designate both a rite using bread and wine and a meal of fellowship that included the poor,” according to the Merriam–Webster

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Sometimes parting involves more than the death of what one loves. The migrant may leave his native territory in search of a better space elsewhere, but the promised paradise is forever deferred and, by luck or by fate, it is a tragic passage to the other world that is offered to him. Hector da Silva, who travels to England in the hope of getting better treatment, dies en route, bitten by an enraged dog. Ramdhin, whose weak heart prevents him from participating in exciting adventures on the ship, does not die during the voyage but much later in England, knifed to death by the boyfriend of a young girl to whom he gives maths lessons. The prisoner Niemeyer’s plans to escape his jailers’ surveillance and regain his liberty fail. In everybody’s life there may come a moment when one entertains fateful alternatives – between remaining a prisoner of restrictions, either self-imposed or imposed by others, and seeking escape in death. While some migrants experience the psychic ordeal of exile as equal to death, others find an opportunity for renewal and rebirth in the gap opened up by journeying and migration. The crossing represents a difficult moment for the migrant, where all identity is suspended. In order to signify the conscious emptying, or unconscious disordering, of the substance of identity, the narrator uses the figure of displacement. The loss and shadowing of identity is symbolized by the masked clown of the Jankla troupe. The clown steals precious objects from the passengers without their knowledge and later returns them, as if preparing them for the trials and tribulations of migration which inevitably involve loss – of possessions and aspects of identity – and efforts to retrieve them, with no guarantee of success. No wonder Perinetta assumes the guise of Marcel Proust for the fancy-dress party in Villa Ortensia. The identity of the plain-clothes policeman who keeps an eye on the prisoner remains mysterious up to the moment when Emily chooses to reveal that he is the tailor Gunesekera. During the trip, M. Nevil, the ship dismantler, takes pleasure in pointing out to Michael that “‘anything can have a new life’” (78). It is enough to assign “a new role and purpose” (274) to the disassembled parts in order not to lose anything. Michael remembers these lessons in recycling while re-assembling his memories in order to write the novel. For some migrants, the sense of deterritorialization that comes from being uprooted brings the benefit of a detachment that enables dispassionate analysis. It is in the Canadian cold that Michael and Emily come to grasp what happened in the temperate waters of the Mediterranean. By recalling the events and retracing their sequence, they come to see their own lives with a sense of detachment. Emily, though in the grips of a drug, is not guilty of the murder of Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agape (accessed 31 January 2014).

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Perera. Emily’s whole life has been an attempt to escape the brutality of her father, while Michael understands that Emily acted as the transitional mother enabling him to face the disaffection of his own mother, who had temporarily abandoned him. Both Cassius and Michael find their salvation in art. Michael finds the Narayan of his childhood days in the writing of his namesake – the Indian English author R.K. Narayan – and engages in dialogue with the latter’s post-imperial writing in order to hone his own style, which is simple on the surface but subversive at the core. Through his namesake, the narrator Michael, Ondaatje is able to observe himself from a distance. Sublimation through art is staged in the novel thanks to the image of a cellist whom Horace Johnson observes like a sexual predator, but whose absorption in her art has lifted her to heights inaccessible to him. For Australian writers, the tour of Britain was an obligatory rite of passage,22 as the Grand Tour of Europe had been for eighteenth-century English aristocrats.23 Many postcolonial writers have sought to decipher the enigma of their arrival in England. The work of Caribbean writers such as Sam Selvon, George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, and Caryl Phillips, African writers such as Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri, and Indian writers such as G.V. Desani, Nirard Chaudhuri, Firdaus Kanga, and Salman Rushdie forms part of what Sandro Mezzadra calls the “never accomplished transition” of the postcolonial framework.24 If Sam Selvon captures the enigma of arrival of the migrant in the snapshot of a Jamaican family disembarking onto the platform of Waterloo Station taken by a reporter from an English newspaper,25 George Lamming dwells on the passage from Guadeloupe to London by Caribbean migrants in his novel The Emigrants. There are obvious intertextual links between The Emigrants and The Cat’s Table. One of the characters in the novel, the writer named Collis, is, like Michael, fleeing his country: It mattered to be in England. Yes, it did matter. Wherever there was life, there was something, something other than no-T H I N G . There was also unemployment, a housing shortage. These were not important. Or were they? There was Starvation, Death. Yes, Even death. These were not

22

For example, Murray Bail, Homesickness (1980; London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (London: The History Press, 2003). 24 Sandro Mezzadra, “The Postcolonial Condition: A Few Notes on the Quality of Historical Time in the Global Present,” Postcolonial Text 2.1 (2006), http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct /article/view/393/819 (accessed 31 January 2014). 25 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Penguin, 2006): 11. 23

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important, for what mattered supremely was to be in England. To be in England [...] To be in England was all that mattered.26

While the narrator, obsessed by the idea of the new home, wonders whether the journey to England could be considered an adventure, ignorance, or suicide pure and simple, another character, Tornado, sees assimilation as a love story: they hear about the people in these faraway places as though it was all a story in a book, but they never seem to understand that these people in these places got an affection for them that is greater than that of any allies in war-time.27

The condition of the unnamed and silent couple transported to France for trial on charges of treason28 and a possible death sentence in The Emigrants is a mise en abyme of the migrant condition, which could be summed up as a sentencing to live a life-in-death without any complaint. This couple reminds us of Niemeyer in Ondaatje’s novel. In Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage, crossing the Atlantic to England is depicted from the point of view of a young mother determined to find her own mother in England and begin a new life for herself. 29 For Desani’s eponymous protagonist in All About H. Hatterr, England is demystified by his encounter with the microcosmos of Liverpool, “as unexpected a whole as I never expected.”30 Nirad Chaudhuri,31 from whom I have borrowed the expression ‘Passage to England’ (which in turn, of course, rewrites the title of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India), and Firdaus Kanga (in Heaven on Wheels32) never cease comparing the England of the mind they had dreamed up with their reading and the real England that they discover – all the time bearing in mind its shadow existence in India. For Naipaul, the passage to England was an inevitable stage in the evolution of his writing career, a refuge far from the stifling small-town mentality of Trinidad.33 This was also the case for Wole Soyinka, who, before coming to study theatre at the University of Leeds, felt that he had become a stranger in his own land. Ben Okri declares that he came to England

26

George Lamming, The Emigrants (1954; London: Allison & Busby, 1982): 106–107. Lamming, The Emigrants, 186. 28 The Emigrants, 20. 29 Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage (1985; London: Vintage, 2004). 30 G.V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1948; New York: New York Review Books, 2007): 35. 31 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, A Passage to England (London: Macmillan, 1959). 32 Firdaus Kanga, Heaven on Wheels (London: Bloomsbury, 1992). 33 V.S. Naipaul, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 7 December 2001: http://www.nobelprize.org /nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture.html (accessed 31 January 2014). 27

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because it embodied the house of literature.34 Rushdie’s reason for coming to England was twofold: a young boy’s desire to discover the England of his books and the teenager’s eagerness to break with the monotonous certitudes of his family and test his capacity for survival in another place.35 Drawing on the lessons of his experience, Rushdie considers migrant writers to be translated beings, those who have been literally and metaphorically borne across.36 The decentering perspective that Canada offers helps Ondaatje to use the creative potential available to writers from the margins and to surpass what Julia Kristeva, reflecting on James Joyce’s fiction, calls the adolescent economy of writing: “The novel prolongs the adolescent and replaces his acts with a narration and with polymorphous and indecisive interpretations.” 37 Instead of being the work of a perpetual adolescent subject, Ondaatje’s novel purports to be a communal book of plural subjects waiting for a new world. His characters are willing to sit down and take the time for an intimate conversation. “We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie” (157), Michael reflects, while remembering the troubling circumstances which prevented his family from mourning his death properly, and his own divorce from Massi, Ramdhin’s sister, which only re-enacted the separation for the family instead of repairing and healing the earlier loss. Ondaatje’s novelistic text is a translation into writing, and a transposition in contemporary times, of the tapestry “Verdura with Dog,” woven in Flanders in 1530 by more than a hundred women. More than the man who painted the scene, or the women who transformed it into tapestry, it represents the singular meeting of the place and the period that brought it into existence. “Before a novel is born in the mind of the writer, it isn’t a novel. Before a short story is conceived, it isn’t a short story,” explains Ben Okri: The point I am trying to make is that, before they become what they are, all these forms are an insubstantial swirl of a mood inside us. How often has the mood or an idea of a short story become a novel? Or the mood or idea of a novel become a short story? It is all in its original, pre-creative state. This becomes the germ of an idea, and depending on its inner potential for drawing all sorts of related elements in one consciousness,

34

Ben Okri, “Alan Ryan: Talking with Ben Okri,” Newsday (19 July 1992): http://emeagwali .com/nigeria/biography/ben-okri-19jul92.html (accessed 31 July 2014). 35 Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012): 28. 36 Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 17. 37 Julia Kristeva, “The Adolescent Novel,” in New Maladies of the Soul, tr. Ross Mitchell Guberman (Les Nouvelles Maladies de l’âme, 1993; New York: Columbia U P , 1995): 148.

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it will take a certain form. Which form this is depends on the inner magnetism of the idea itself. So I stress the idea of listening.38

Listening has thus become a structural element of the contemporary novel wherein the orality of tales is subsumed. Michael Ondaatje’s narrative “we,” which integrates a dialogue between the self and the other, shows how he has constructed his novelistic text from the foundations laid down by Boccaccio and Chaucer in the form of recounted and connected tales. W O R K S C I TE D Bail, Murray. Homesickness (1980; London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). Baillie, Andrea. “Michael Ondaatje on his New Novel,” CTV News (2 September 2011), http://www.ctvnews.ca/michael-ondaatje-on-his-new-novel-the-cat-s-table-1.691859 (accessed 31 January 2014). Balibar, Étienne. Politics and the Other Scene, tr. Christine Jones, James Swenson & Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002). ——. “Qu-est-ce qu’une ‘frontière’?” in Asile, Violence, Exclusion en Europe: Histoire, analyse, prospective, ed. M.C. Caloz–Tschopp & A. Clevenot (Cahiers de la Section des Sciences de l’Éducation; Geneva: Université de Genève, 1994): 335–43. Beaujour, Michel. “Autobiographie et autoportrait,” Poétique: Revue de Théorie et d’Analyse Littéraires 32 (1977): 442–58. Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (London: The History Press, 2003). Chaudhuri, Nirad C. A Passage to England (London: Macmillan, 1959). Derrida, Jacques. “Le facteur de la vérité,” in The Postcard from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, tr. Alan Bass (La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, 1980; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1987): 411–96. ——.Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, tr. Patrick Mensah (Le monolinguisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine, 1996; Stanford CA : Stanford U P , 1998). Desani, G.V. All About H. Hatterr (1948; New York: New York Review of Books, 2007). Diome, Fatou. The Belly of the Atlantic, tr. Ros Schwartz & Lulu Norman (Le ventre de l’Atlantique, 2003; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2008). Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces,” tr. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22–27. Lecture given at the Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 March 1967, originally published as “Des espaces autres,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–49. Kanga, Firdaus. Heaven on Wheels (London: Bloomsbury, 1992). Kristeva, Julia. “The Adolescent Novel,” in New Maladies of the Soul, tr. Ross Mitchell Guberman (Les Nouvelles Maladies de l’âme, 1993; New York: Columbia U P , 1995): 135–53. 38

Ben Okri, “Interview with Saskia Vogel,” Granta (7 April 2011): http://www.granta.com/NewWriting/Interview-Ben-Okri (accessed 31 January 2014).

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Lacan, Jacques. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (“Le Seminaire sur ‘La Lettre Voiee’,” 1956, tr. 1966), tr. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 38–72. Repr. in Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Emanuel Berman (New York: New York U P , 1993): 270–99. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Lamming, George. The Emigrants (1954; London: Allison & Busby, 1982). Mezzadra, Sandro. “The Postcolonial Condition: A Few Notes on the Quality of Historical Time in the Global Present,” Postcolonial Text 2.1 (2006), http://postcolonial.org /index .php/pct/article/view/393/819 (accessed 31 January 2014). Naipaul, V.S. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (7 December 2001), http://www.nobelprize .org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture.html (accessed 31 January 2014). Okri, Ben. “Alan Ryan: Talking with Ben Okri,” Newsday (19 July 1992), http://emeagwali .com/nigeria/biography/ben-okri-19jul92.html (accessed 31 July 2014). ——. “Interview with Saskia Vogel,” Granta (7 April 2011), http://www.granta.com/NewWriting/Interview-Ben-Okri (accessed 31 January 2014). Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000). ——.The Cat’s Table: A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011). ——.The Cinnamon Peeler (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992). ——.Coming Through Slaughter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976). ——.The English Patient (London: Bloomsbury, 1992). ——.Handwriting (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2000). ——.Running in the Family (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993). Phillips, Caryl. The Final Passage (1985; London: Vintage, 2004). Punt, Charli–Ann. “Stories of Liminal Voyage in the Indian Ocean: Michael Ondaatje’s ‘The Cat’s Table’ & Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘By the Sea’” (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2013), http://mobile.wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539 /13612/Master%27s%20Thesis%20-%20Charli-Ann%20Punt.pdf?sequence=2 (ac cessed 31 January 2014). Ratti, Manav. The Postsecular Imagination (London: Routledge, 2012). Roegiers, Patrick. Jacques Henri Lartigue: Les tourments du funambule (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2003). Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands,” in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 9–21. Originally published in the London Review of Books 4.18 (7 October 1982): 18–19. ——. “In Defence of the Novel, Yet Again,” in Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002): 54–63. Originally published in the New Yorker (24 June 2000): 48–55. ——.Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012). ——.The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988). Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Penguin, 2006). ጓ

S OUTH - E AS T A SIA

“A Message in a Bottle” On the Pleasures of Translating Arun Kolatkar into French L AET IT IA Z E CCHI NI

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I

to his exquisite translation of Prakrit love poetry compiled in the second century AD , Arvind Krishna Mehrotra observes that translating is sharing “the excitement of reading.” 1 There may be no better reason to explain what prompted me to translate Kala Ghoda Poems into French, apart from the anticipated pleasure of having to converse for more than two years with Arun Kolatkar’s extraordinarily personal, tender, and playful voice. Kala Ghoda, Poèmes de Bombay has just appeared in the prestigious Poésie/Gallimard series directed by the French poet André Velter.2 Let me attempt to explain why this is an occasion to rejoice, while also reflecting on the process of translation per se, on the excitement, pleasures, and risks of the adventure, as well as on the exceptional singularity of Kolatkar’s poetry. The Gallimard poetry series was started in 1966 with Paul Éluard’s Capital of Pain. This pioneering volume is still one of the bestsellers of the series, along with Apollinaire’s Alcools, Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Rimbaud’s Poésies, and The Nature of Things by Francis Ponge. Although Poésie/Gallimard has opened up to the world, most of the 250 published writers are twentieth-century French or francophone poets, and fewer than twenty of the almost five hundred titles are bilingual (works by Pablo Neruda, Paul Celan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini are among these). There are today four Indian poetry titles, and, apart from Kolatkar, it is telling to note that they are all related to Tagore, with two collections by the Nobel Prize Laureate (including André Gide’s translation of

1

N THE INTROD UCTI ON

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, “Translator’s Note,” in The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala, tr. Mehrotra (1991; Penguin Modern Classics; New Delhi: Penguin India/Ravi Dayal, 2008): ix. 2 Arun Kolatkar, Kala Ghoda Poems (Mumbai: Pras, 2004); Kala Ghoda, Poèmes de Bombay, ed. Laetitia Zecchini, tr. Pascal Aquien & Laetitia Zecchini (Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 2013).

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Gitanjali) and a third collection of Kabir’s verse translated into French from Tagore’s own English re-creations of Kabir. With a print run of 5,000 copies and paperbacks at an average price of eight euros at the time of writing, these volumes are perhaps the only poetry books that sell well in France. It was therefore nothing short of a miracle to learn that, out of the fifteen publishers to whom the Kala Ghoda manuscript was sent in September 2011, Poésie/Gallimard was accepting this one. It seemed miraculous because, as the number of Indian titles in the collection makes clear, the interest in Indian poetry in France is – to say the least – limited. What is more, the series usually brings out texts that have already been published, either because they are already part of the Gallimard catalogue or because they come from other publishers’ backlists. It thus meant that Gallimard were making an exception for Kolatkar by accepting both an original translation and a voluminous manuscript – since we were determined to bring out a bilingual edition. Finally, most of the poets published in the series are canonical figures and fairly celebrated classics. Out of the fourteen British titles, for instance, there are several Shakespeare translations followed by the ‘usual suspects’: Keats, Milton, Coleridge, Hardy, Wordsworth, Donne. In the American poetry section, there are two titles by Sylvia Plath, and then we come to Melville, Poe, Faulkner, and Whitman. But no William Carlos Williams, and no Allen Ginsberg (two formidable poets I mention advisedly, since they were two of Kolatkar’s literary heroes). The Poésie/Gallimard series is not the only Gallimard series in which Indian poets can be published. There is, for instance, a U NE SCO /‘Connaissance de l’Orient’ series,3 with a specific Indian section which includes the devotional compositions of Surdas and of the varkari Marathi ‘saints’ Namdev and Tukaram, beautifully rendered into French by Guy Deleury, whom Kolatkar knew well and greatly admired. What makes the publication of Kolatkar particularly significant, however, apart from the much-needed representation of a contemporary Indian voice, is that Kolatkar is not being published in a foreign, Oriental, postcolonial or South Asian literature series, but simply as a poet among other poets. So, what might this very sketchy account of the foreign poetry scene in France, through the lens of one publisher, indicate about the knowledge and representation of Indian literature outside India? To be sure, this representation is extremely selective. This diagnosis is too well known to need rehearsing here, 3

The Gallimard/‘Connaissance de l’Orient’ series was the oriental series of the U N E S C O Catalogue of Representative Works, a U N E S C O translation project active until 2005.

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but suffice it to say that Indian literature is often reduced abroad to certain novelists in English; modern or contemporary poetry, with the notable exception of Rabindranath Tagore, is virtually inaudible. Amit Chaudhuri, Neil Lazarus, and other critics have argued that Salman Rushdie has become both a godhead and a synecdoche for Indian literature, signalling the advent of polyphonic national allegories or “huge baggy monsters,” as monumental (if not ‘monstrous’!) as the Indian subcontinent is supposed to be.4 Rushdie’s pre-eminence also signalled the advent of a hybrid, exuberant or baroque poetics. That is where the Orientalist theory of difference (between the West and the ‘Rest’) that was so important in the discursive formation of colonialism does indeed seem to live on in our appreciation of Indian literature. It is constructed as European literature’s Other – Amit Chaudhuri believes, and I with him, that it would actually be much more unsettling (and/or exhilarating) for the European reader to realize that these literatures are not as ‘different’ as they have often been made out to be, but share with Western literatures traditions, lineages, concerns, and sometimes a common idiom. That is very much, for instance, what my experience of working on contemporary poets like Kolatkar has made clear. That is also what the very first responses of Kolatkar’s French readers seem to reveal. Their initial reaction seems to be one of surprise. They are startled, taken aback. Kolatkar’s voice does not correspond to what they had expected or fantasized Indian poetry to be. And once the surprise subsides, most of the time a space is cleared for wonder. In a 1997 article recently reprinted in a collection of essays edited by the poet Jerry Pinto, Adil Jussawalla recalls how, in his first year at Oxford, he tried to convince a fellow undergraduate that there was more to Indian literature than Tagore. But he failed, because, as the undergraduate put it, “if there was much more, we’d have heard about it.” What you see just doesn’t exist, adds Adil Jussawalla, commenting on this staggering blindness.5 Translating Kolatkar seemed the only way to ensure that this poet – and not only Tagore or Rushdie, outstanding writers as they may be – would be seen by the French and would register on the map of world literature. Translation may also be an act of love. You can stumble upon a poem or a work of literature by chance, in the same way you fall in love. In an unpublished

4

See Amit Chaudhuri, Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008), and his “Introduction” to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): xvii–xxxiv. 5 Adil Jussawalla, “What’s This? A New Two-Nation Theory?,” in Maps for a Mortal Moon (New Delhi: Aleph, 2014): 47.

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fragment from Kolatkar’s papers, the poet suggests that a poem is like a “message in a bottle.”6 The message is meant for anyone who may find it, on any shore, whatever the time it takes to reach its destination. The role of the translator is only to make possible this “strange kind of dialogue where what you say may take a thousand years to reach me”; a dialogue between poet and poet, poet and reader, poet and translator, sometimes hundreds of kilometers, centuries, and worlds apart. The impulse for translating Kolatkar was born of the conviction of having indeed stumbled upon a treasure of sorts, a secret that had to be shared with as many people as possible. Kolatkar actually said something similar about Marathi bhakti7 poets like Tukaram, Namdeo, and Janabai, many of whose compositions he had memorized by heart. He found these poets so fantastic that he wanted others to know about them, hence started re-singing their compositions into English. The ‘discovery’ for me happened on a hot summer day in 2003, at the Sahitya Akademi library in Delhi, as I was leafing through anthologies of modern Indian poetry I would feel sufficiently strong about to embark on a dissertation. One day, and it may have been in Mehrotra’s Twelve Modern Indian Poets,8 I came across a poem, “The Butterfly,” from Kolatkar’s first (and, at the time, his only) collection in English, Jejuri. Suddenly a voice sounded right, almost miraculous, and it was speaking to me: There is no story behind it. It is split like a second. It hinges around itself. It has no future. It is pinned down to no past. It’s a pun on the present. It’s a little yellow butterfly. It has taken these wretched hills under its wings. Just a pinch of yellow,

6

I am very grateful to Ashok Shahane for giving me permission to quote from Arun Kolatkar’s unpublished papers. Most of these passages also appear in Laetitia Zecchini, Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines (London, New York & New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2014). 7 Many different strands of medieval devotionality are known as bhakti. This compelling and non-exclusive movement of popular devotion included men and women from all castes who opposed Brahmin orthodoxy and rejected Sanskrit to produce extraordinary poetry and bhajans (devotional songs) in the vernaculars. 8 The Oxford Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1992).

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it opens before it closes and closes before it opens where is it.

If translating is about sharing the excitement of reading, the whole process of translating Kolatkar has indeed been a shared pleasure. Pascal Aquien and I saw each other every Friday afternoon for more than two years, in his flat overlooking the roofs of Paris on the hill of Belleville. We could spend entire months on a few lines, confronting drafts, deleting stanzas, drawing up lists of synonyms in French, reciting the poems over and over again to get the feel and music of the words, but also resorting to all kinds of expedients. We had to mime a lot, for instance: a street-ogress washing a furious, foaming boy on the edge of the pavement, or a woman putting on a sari in “The Barefoot Queen of the Crossroads,” a technical ritual of sorts that becomes a choreography of fingers and folds unfolding a malleable city: One end of her sari (red like the city in May, with all its gulmohurs in bloom), say the downtown end, wrapped around the petticoat, damp no more, and secured at the hips; and the uptown end arranged over the left shoulder and left dangling behind she holds the sari away from her at arm’s length at a halfway point along the border, from where it’s a short walk to the belly for her three ѭngers and thumb, as they collect the sari along the way in neat accordion folds ᄬѮip Ѯap, Ѯip Ѯap, Dadar, Parel, Lalbaug, Byculla, Bori Bender, Ѯip Ѯap, Flora Fountain

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and Ѯip, we come to Kala Ghoda, which is where we’ve been, all along)

We also resorted to making drawings and sketches: the different stages of the flight of a crow before it hits ground, the eclectic ‘assemblage’ of a kerosene cart or a little boy running in crazy circles with a pinwheel on the Kala Ghoda traffic island. If one of the preconditions of translation is to understand the poem perfectly before you can translate it, in the case of Kolatkar, who was both a graphic artist by profession and a graphic poet who wrote extraordinarily concrete, visual, kinetic, and at times cinematic poetry, we also had to visualize the poem first. In a text entitled “Making Love to a Poem,” which is published as an appendix to The Boatride & Other Poems and deals with issues of translation and multilingualism, the poet talks of the “carnal knowledge” that translation requires – translation is like having an affair, “making love to a poem / with the body of another language.”9 There is something illicit and risky about the venture. Yet Kolatkar, the bilingual “piebald animal”10 and pirate of a poet, constantly disqualifies notions of legitimacy and authenticity of languages or traditions. He also disqualifies issues of legality and originality, derides debates over the ‘right’ to translate or the ‘right’ to write in English, and challenges the patrimonial urge to guard a culture or a tradition from possible perversions of history or ‘foreign’ hands in different guises. Instead, he claims the ‘right’ to scavenge, borrow or cannibalize, to re-sing and re-create bhakti, to make “stealing raids” (the expression is Mehrotra’s11) on his literary neighbours, to write in Marathi and in English. In the process, he also blurs frontiers between what comes first or second, what is native or alien, Indian or Western, original or derivative. In the same text, Kolatkar quotes a few lines from a letter Marina Tsvetayeva addressed to Rilke: “to create a poem means to translate from the mother tongue 9

Arun Kolatkar, The Boatride & Other Poems, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Mumbai: Pras, 2009): 345. The Boatride was published posthumously and draws on uncollected poems and unpublished material. The volume was reprinted, along with the poet’s three published collections in English, in Arun Kolatkar’s Collected Poems in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2010). 10 In “Making Love to a Poem,” Kolatkar wonders if he is two different animals, or a single one with a striped skin, piebald. Kala Ghoda Poems opens with the poem “Pi-dog,” a mirror-image of the poet, referring to a stray dog of the streets of Bombay who asserts his hybrid lineage and “a pirate’s regard” for accuracy. 11 Arvind Krishna Mehrotra likens literary tradition to an “anthill,” whose inhabitants make “occasional stealing raids on their close neighbours.” See Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012): 253.

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to another language [...] no language is the mother tongue.”12 You always write literature in a foreign language. And in his unpublished diaries, Kolatkar copied words by the American poet Tess Gallagher: “Poetry is the only second language I’m ever likely to have.”13 Translation requires skill, patience, and delicacy, the poet also observes. That is because the intimacy, the “carnal knowledge,” to which Kolatkar refers is never something given. You have to wrestle with a poem, and necessarily compensate for losses. Sometimes, Kolatkar writes in another unpublished passage, the poem comes apart in your hands when you start translating it. And you realize that what you have created may be reasonable enough, resemble the original poem in all respects, except one: there’s no life in it and what you have in your hands is not a living body but a corpse, a dead poem. I am sure every translator has been exposed to such a danger; at least, it is what we experienced time and again with Kala Ghoda Poems. And it means that you have to try again, change direction and strategy, use cunning, and take the text up once more, with no assurance of success. To a certain extent, you can never be finished with a translation and you are never completely satisfied with it. It’s an inexhaustible task and it’s a struggle: the struggle to breathe life into a poem, to be true to the ‘tone’ or ‘spirit’ of the poet, to transpose a voice and a rhythm into another language. It’s a struggle because to translate is to experience the difference of languages. French, for instance, is a much more abstract, intellectual language than English. And Arun Kolatkar’s language is exceptionally concrete, anti-discursive, and immediate. It is a language that does not demonstrate anything, but that makes us see and look again. “No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams,14 and Georges Perec opens one of his books with the following epigraph: “Look with all your eyes, look.”15 Taken together, these two utterances might well serve to encapsulate the spirit of Kolatkar’s poetry. His language is the exact opposite of the ‘baroque’ or exuberant language that is often associated with Indian writing in English. Kolatkar writes in an anti12

Quoted in English in Arun Kolatkar, “Making Love to a Poem,” in Kolatkar, The Boatride & Other Poems, 232. The ultimate source is “Dichten ist schon übertragen, aus der Muttersprache – in eine andere [.. .]. Keine Sprache ist Muttersprache”; Marina Tsvetayeva, “Muttersprache und Orpheus,” in Rainer Maria Rilke & Marina Tsvetayeva, Ein Gespräch in Briefen, ed. Konstantin M. Asadowski (Frankfurt am Main & Leipzig: Insel, 1992): 77. 13 Gallagher, “Poetry in Translation: Literary Imperialism or, Defending the Musk Ox,” Parnassus: The Poetry Review 9.1 (1981): 148. 14 William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1963): 6. 15 “Regarde de tous tes yeux, regarde”; Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual, tr. David Bellos (La vie mode d’emploi, 1978; Boston M A : David R. Godine, 1987).

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spectacular, anti-style idiom, which does not draw attention to itself but stretches poetry as far as it can go, always on the brink of falling outside of its boundaries, and yet never lapsing into flatness. His poetry is heir to the great modernist revolution that, from Tristan Tzara to Guillaume Apollinaire, William Carlos Williams to Allen Ginsberg, Duchamp to Dubuffet, rejected all formalisms and academisms to reveal the “marvellous quotidian”16 and to blur the line between art, junk and found objects, newspapers and poems, poetry and song, literary language and spoken language, ‘talking pictures’, moving images and texts. His poetry is also related to the “infra-ordinary,” which Georges Perec describes as the opposite of the spectacular, gigantic, and apocalyptic: What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary, the front-page splash, the banner headlines. [... ] As if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal. [... ] What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? [... ] Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. [...] Question your teaspoons.17

From the window of the same coffee-house, the Wayside Inn in the South Bombay area of Kala Ghoda, overlooking a traffic island that operates like a stage where the whole street-world converges, Kolatkar patiently engaged with “what happens every day and recurs every day”: the bums, drunks, and lepers, old pipe-smoking mammas, sweeper-ladies and errant children, fisherwomen, potato peelers, and paralytics, who eat, bathe, love, dress, sleep, play, flirt, work, comb or delouse each other in the open and who congregate at the heart of the long “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda” sequence: The little vamp, the grandma, the blind man, the ogress, the rat-poison man, the pinwheel boy, the hipster queen of the crossroads, the Demosthenes of Kala Ghoda,

16

Cf. “le merveilleux quotidien”; Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1926): 16. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed., tr. & intro. John Sturrock (Espèces d’espaces, 1994; London: Penguin, 1997): 209–10. 17

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the pregnant queen of tarts, the laughing Buddha, the knucklebones champ.

Like Meera (a “character” of Kala Ghoda and the title of a poem), the poet–ragpicker and mystic-bhakta18 who collects what is used, useless, and abandoned on the wayside to turn it into art, Kolatkar registered “all the rest,” the unobserved life of things, animals, birds, and trees: piles of rubbish, old bicycle tyres and plastic jerrycans, crows, pi-dogs and rats, statues and stone medallions, street games and string cots, posters and pinwheels, gulmohurs, ebonies, jamun trees and, wild almonds. The poet also records a string of ordinary sights and scenes: the first kiss of a moth-eaten kitten bestowed on a shrimp, the highly sensual and concrete, Pina Bausch-like choreography of a “barefoot queen” drying her hair at the crossroads, a drunk hugging an empty bottle of rum to his bosom, a blind man stringing a cot with rope-dancing fingers, a little boy “shooting a perfect arc of piss” in the morning sun. But the poet–observer is poet–storyteller as well. Kolatkar awakens the memories that lie dormant in the streets and that sometimes lie “within a simple name, folded up inside this thimble like the silk dress of a fairy” (the expression is Michel de Certeau’s19). Kala Ghoda Poems indeed reveals Bombay to be a sedimentation of stories which are folded into specific names, as in “Kala Ghoda,” the black horse whose story unfolds a “manic night” in the poem “David Sassoon.” Memories are also absorbed by the walls of Bombay, like the storytelling wall of the Wayside Inn in “The Rat-poison Man’s Lunch Hour,” which can remember old places, love stories, and old songs: The wall can talk about an old hat shop that doesn’t even exist anymore. It can talk about cheerful red-checked tablecloths, blue Delftware and rose windows.

And it’s because Bombay is a bricolage of all the histories and debris of the world that, in the streets and poems of Kala Ghoda, the poet summons up Baghdad and Basra, London and the Tigris in spates, a Texas state penitentiary and the tower of Pisa, Bessie Smith, the Beatles, Boccherini, and Guns and Roses.

18

“Meera” is a direct reference to Meerabai (alternatively Mira or Mirabai), a sixteenth-century bhakti devotional poet who sang her love for Krishna, and is immensely popular in the Indian subcontinent. 19 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven F. Rendall (Arts de faire, 1980: tr. 1984; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1998): 143.

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Another reason for mentioning Perec is a book he wrote in 1975 entitled Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien.20 For several days, from the vantage point of three different cafés, Perec sat in front of St-Sulpice, taking notes, registering the bus numbers, the types of cars, and the people passing by, what he ate or drank. Yet Kolatkar’s aim is, I think, less to ‘exhaust’ a space than to revel in its inexhaustible impermanence. It is also to give time. The poet, out of whom his close friends say that it was impossible to get anything in a hurry, took his time (almost twenty years to write the Kala Ghoda Poems, for instance), but also expanded time. His poems are often long poems, and it is far from incidental that the central thirty-page poem of the collection is the aforementioned “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda” – a breakfast that is said to have “created a bubble in time, / shimmering with the joy of living.” His poetry also draws on the resources of orality; the orality of a language that is alive precisely because it is spoken. The poet drew inspiration from American and British slang, but also from the blues, from rock and roll and from bhajans of which he had weekly ‘sessions’ in the company of folk singers whose untrained, rugged, and raw voices he admired. It is an area, Kolatkar said about bhajans, in the unpublished book proposal Balwant Bua, “where some of the world’s best poetry – the bhakti poetry – meets folk music. It’s people’s music, rather than musician’s music, a joyous noise, and it’s for everybody.” The pleasure of translating Kolatkar also has to do with the poet’s palpable delight in playing with words, sounds, and rhythms. Because of the highly acoustic dimension of his poetry, we had to work on these lines as ‘sound material’ first, in order to transpose and re-create the numerous assonances. One of the poems in the collection “To a Crow” is, on a very obvious level, about a bird, but it is also a text on poiesis, on the making of poetry from ordinary words and ordinary things, from sound, scratch, and scrap. The crow is described as swooping down from the Y axis of a tree, circling around a twig, then picking it up and examining it from every angle, gauging its shape, balance, and musical potential: “Does it shine? Does it sing? / Does it spark and crackle? Does it sting? / Does it scan? Does it rhyme?” These are the questions that we had to ask ourselves continually as we were translating Kolatkar: do the lines sing, scan, and rhyme? Music, in fact, abounds in the collection, from the “triple sonata” of the pi-dog who uses his eyes like a musical instrument in the opening poem, to the “boomtown” band of lepers with drumsticks and maracas tied to their bandaged hands. Hear, for instance, the sensual splash of idlis (steamed rice cakes) sighing 20

Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, tr. Marc Lowenthal (Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, 1975; Cambridge M A : Wakefield, 2010).

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with pleasure and rushing to the exit as soon as the tight lid of the aluminium box opens: a landslide of fullmoons slithering past each other, to tumble in a jumble, and pile up in a shallow basket, an orgy, a palpitating hill of naked idlis slipping and sliding clambering over and suffocating each other.

This acoustic dimension is manifest in the frequent list-like inventories of rubbish that are also assemblages of words and sounds: cardboard cartons, pots and pans, bundles of cloth, a beheaded doll, a small transistor, a beachball on a Primus stove.

If we included as few explanatory notes as possible to gloss the meaning of this or that Indian word, it is because Kolatkar himself never suffered notes and other forms of paratext for his books. It is also because the dense alliterative and rhythmic fabric of many of these poems makes sense. In the seventh poem of “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda,” for instance, when the poetic voice hovers over the different eateries and cuisines of Bombay, notes are superfluous because sound is meaning, the music of the words constituting the poem: they’re serving khima pao at Olympia, dal gosht at Baghdadi, puri bhaji at Khailash Parbat aab gosht at Sarvi’s kebabs with sprigs of mint at Gulshan-e-Iran, Nali Nehari at Noor Mohamadi’s.

Food is fundamental to this collection, where sensual and carnal pleasure is omnipresent and bodies exult outside the constraints of propriety. The eating/ reading/writing metaphor seems to run throughout the poet’s work. Works of literature are as embodied as languages, and they become diversely seasoned dishes. In a humorous passage from Kolatkar’s papers, the poet describes him-

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self as an adventurer cultivating a taste for exotic poets and exotic foods, as indiscriminately reckless and bulimic in his eating habits as in his reading, consuming poets living and dead only after they have themselves been consumed and ‘seasoned’ by translators: i’ve supplemented my diet at various times with canned Catullus smoked Baudelaire reconstituted Villon pickled Apollinaire salted mashed Mandelstam and cured Tomas Tranströmer.

Both the poetry and the translation become a form of cuisine. Kolatkar, like other poets, wrote with everything he read, saw, and heard, and with the stories people told him, in particular those he heard from Balwant Bua, a real, larger-than-life bhajan singer in the varkari tradition of bhakti singers with whom Kolatkar had weekly talking–singing sessions. Remember the crow diving on a twig, making poetry and music by recycling the scraps of ordinary words and sounds? Kolatkar himself recycled a lot – newspapers, for instance, of which he was a voracious reader. At the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, where much of the poet’s monumental library is stored, I came across thick files with articles from the Sunday Times, the National Geographic, the New York Review of Books, and Le Monde Diplomatique. There are also specific ‘Kala Ghoda’ folders with photographs, dictionary entries, notes on books, and numerous clippings. The third poem of “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda” (“Leja dreams it’s raining bread …”) sprang from a September 1986 National Geographic article for which a handwritten note by Kolatkar exists: Leja Szmidt 90 years old in the village of Baniocha outside Warsaw lives with her cat alone in a one room apartment the only Jew in Baniocha … dreams of the bread factory her family owned.

Another article, from a 2000 issue of the Daily Mail and entitled “Death Row Diners,” describing the last suppers of condemned men in a Texas prison, with their names, photos, crime, date of execution, and detailed menus is also recycled at the beginning of the same poem: In the state penitentiary of Texas, a condemned man is tucking into a T-bone steak, two cheeseburgers, French fries, a tossed salad with thousand island dressing and four cartons of milk.

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Perhaps the translator, too, translates with everything she has read, or that the writer makes her read, watch, and listen to. Kolatkar has opened worlds for me. Of course, one of the great joys of following the poet’s ‘trail’ has been getting to spend a lot of time with amazing people, his family and friends, many of whom, like Balwant Bua, are larger-than-life characters waiting to be caught in the pages of a novel. But Kolatkar also led me to Buster Keaton and to Charlie Chaplin, to Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll and to the movie Woodstock, to documentaries on Khandoba and to the 1936 film Sant Tukaram, to Woody Guthrie and to Chicago/Detroit blues, to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Fernand Braudel, and the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam... it is in this sense that translators turn into detectives. Of course, it would be impossible to track down the innumerable references and allusions in a work like Kolatkar’s. But when you do discover these references, they can contribute to a better understanding of the poem, and possibly, just possibly, to a better translation. The “pi-dog” echoes Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” for instance, which opens with the line “Glory be to God for dappled things.” Retracing such a lineage may be important, because Kolatkar’s poetry is also a poetry of praise and celebration, and because the Kala Ghoda poems, like the impermanent rubbish installations in front of the Jehangir Art Gallery, are “Homages to Bombay.” In “Boomtown Leper’s Band,” you obviously hear the Beatles, Bill Haley’s Comets, and Elvis Presley (“let the coins shake, rattle and roll”), but also other, more cryptic and parodic, rhythms, like the famous lines in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock” – “In the room the women come and go / talking of Michelangelo,” which becomes “Here we come (bang) / and there we go (boom) / pushing the singer in a wheelbarrow.” The poem “Meera” is a direct reference to Meerabai but it also recasts Baudelaire’s “The Rag Picker’s Wine” and the mystical poetry of Rumi: “the vine of my body become wine, when the wine-presser stamps on me and spurns me underfoot.” “To a Charas Pill” echoes some of Neil Sedaka’s hit songs of the 1960s and ’70s, such as “Little Devil” and “Bad Blood” (“the only thing bad blood do is mess up a good man’s mind”), which we tried to transpose by using lines from a song by Georges Brassens, “Heureux qui comme Ulysse.” “To a Crow” obviously evokes Ted Hughes’s Crow and Rimbaud’s “Crows” that swoop down from the great skies, disperse, and rally, but, more importantly still, Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In the poem “Watermelons,” you hear the first line of a Wordsworth poem, “My heart leaps up when I behold,” and it would be hard not to recall Marcel Duchamp’s first readymade when you read “An Old Bicycle Tyre,” or Charlie Chaplin in the “little tramp” of the poem “Silver Triangle.”

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In a very moving passage from his diaries, Kolatkar imagines the heaven where all good poets go when they die: and from wherever they are it may be they are watching over me i feel they are right here now listening to every word i say i feel their collective presence in the air [.. .] i write for their combined eye the collective ear heine blake mandelstam apollinaire baudelaire vallejo catullus villon tufu kabir tukaram they’re all there

May the “message in a bottle” continue to travel and may poets of today and tomorrow also write for the ear and eye of Kolatkar, who, from a Bombay wayside, brings the whole world to light.

W O R K S C I TE D Aragon, Louis. Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1926). Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven F. Rendall (Arts de faire, 1980: tr. 1984; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1998). Chaudhuri, Amit. Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008). ——. “Introduction” to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): xvii–xxxiv. Gallagher, Tess. “Poetry in Translation: Literary Imperialism or, Defending the Musk Ox,” Parnassus: The Poetry Review 9.1 (1981): 148–67. Jussawalla, Adil. “What’s This? A New Two-Nation Theory?,” in Maps for a Mortal Moon (New Delhi: Aleph, 2014): 46–48. Kolatkar, Arun. The Boatride & Other Poems, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Mumbai: Pras, 2009). ——.Collected Poems in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2010). ——.Kala Ghoda, Poèmes de Bombay, préface & notes Laetitia Zecchini, tr. Pascal Aquien & Laetitia Zecchini (Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 2013). ——.Kala Ghoda Poems (Mumbai: Pras, 2004). Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. “Translator’s Note,” in The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala, tr. Mehrotra (1991; Penguin Modern Classics; New Delhi: Penguin India/Ravi Dayal, 2008): ix–xiii.

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——.Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012). ——, ed. The Oxford Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1992). Perec, Georges. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, tr. Marc Lowenthal (Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, 1975; Cambridge MA : Wakefield, 2010). ——.Life: A User’s Manual, tr. David Bellos (La vie mode d’emploi, 1978; Boston MA : David R. Godine, 1987). ——.Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed., tr. & intro. John Sturrock (Espèces d’espaces, 1994; London: Penguin, 1997). Tsvetayeva, Marina. “Muttersprache und Orpheus,” in Rainer Maria Rilke & Marina Tsvetayeva, Ein Gespräch in Briefen, ed. Konstantin M. Asadowski (Frankfurt am Main & Leipzig: Insel, 1992): 76–79. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1963). Zecchini, Laetitia. Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines (London & New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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Jejuri–Bandra–Jejuri Strolling with Kolatkar A R V I N D K R I S H N A M E H R OTR A

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P U N E in September 2004 to see Arun Kolatkar, who had been seriously ill and who died that week, I read in the Times of India a report on the changing face of Jejuri. Until then, although I knew that Jejuri was a town in western Maharashtra, I had not seen it in this way. For me, as for many others, it had always been associated with a book of that name. It came as a shock, then, to read that Jejuri also existed outside the imagination of its readers, that like any other place on the map it had ordinary people walking about its ordinary streets and living their day-to-day lives. This ‘real’ Jejuri, which city newspapers reported on and information technology was transforming, had seemed unreal and abstract to me at the time; it still does. The main attraction of Jejuri is the temple dedicated to Khandoba, a folk god popular with the nomadic and pastoral communities of Maharashtra and north Karnataka. Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri 1 is a record of a visit to the town. Here are the opening verses of “The Bus”: N A VISI T TO

The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down on the windows of the state transport bus all the way up to Jejuri. A cold wind keeps whipping and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin at your elbow. You look down the roaring road. You search for signs of daybreak in What little light spills out of the bus. 1

Arun Kolatkar, Jejuri, intro. Amit Chaudhuri (1977; New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2005).

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After “a bumpy ride” when “all the countryside you get to see” is “Your own divided face in a pair of glasses / on an old man’s nose,” the bus comes to a halt “in front of the priest” who has been patiently waiting for it all morning. And here is why: “purring softly,” the bus has A catgrin on its face and a live, ready to eat pilgrim held between its teeth. (“The Priest”)

Only incidentally is Jejuri about a temple town or matters of faith. At its heart, and at the heart of all of Kolatkar’s work, lies a moral vision, whose basis is the things of this world, precisely, rapturously observed. So, a common doorstep is revealed to be a pillar on its side, “Yes. / That’s what it is”; the eight-armed goddess, once you begin to count, has eighteen arms; and the run-down Maruti temple, where nobody comes to worship but which is home to a mongrel bitch and her puppies, is, for that reason, “nothing less than the house of god.” The matter-of-fact tone is easy to get wrong, and Kolatkar’s Marathi critics got it badly wrong, finding it to be cold, flippant, at best sceptical. They were forgetting, of course, that the clarity of Kolatkar’s observations would not be possible unless he had abundant sympathy for the person or animal (or even inanimate object) being observed; forgetting, too, that without abundant sympathy for what was being observed, the poems would not be the acts of attention they are. The last poem in the book is “The Railway Station.” In it, from the stationmaster to “the young novice at the tea stall,” no one is prepared to tell the narrator “when the next train is due.” The book had opened with daybreak; it closes with sunset: the setting sun large as a wheel

Apart from a “young woman” who arranges “A Little Pile of Stones” in the belief that if the pile does not topple over she will have a long and happily married life and a “teen age bride on her knees” who performs a ritual under the watchful eyes of a smiling priest, ready-to-eat pilgrims are absent from Jejuri. The opposite was true on the day I visited the Bandra Fair in Bombay. Held every September for one week to coincide with the feast that follows the nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I had gone there on the evening of the last day, which explained the rush of pilgrims on the roads that led to Mount Mary Church. The BE ST bus I was in kept getting stuck in the traffic and it seemed quicker to walk the rest of the way. The crowd that had looked like a mass of slow-moving ants from my window seat in the upper deck felt more like a

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swiftly flowing river once I was part of it. Stalls lined the pavement, and I had to push hard against the current to get to them. They were selling candles and what, to me, looked like toys: motor cars, houses, doll-like figures, all made of wax. Some of the toys, unlike any other toys I’d seen, were body parts: wax models of dentures, hands, arms, legs, eyes, and breasts. Also on sale were waxcovered photocopies of 100-rupee banknotes and a wax sheet with a row of tiny protuberances down the middle, which I could not immediately identify. It was a model of the spine and the tiny protuberances were the cartilage discs. The models corresponded to specific boons the pilgrims sought – for the childless, the doll; for those who wanted money, the banknote; for those anxious to own property, the house; for those who wished to avoid a trip to the dentist, the set of teeth; and for those looking for relief from back pain, the spine. It had started to drizzle. The pilgrims continued to arrive, unmindful of the rain that was now falling steadily. They stood around the stalls, made their purchase, and continued on their way to Mount Mary. I hesitated for a bit, then crossed the road to join the stream of people who had lit their candles and made their offerings and were now headed in the opposite direction, towards Bandra Station. But before doing so I bought, out of an old collecting habit, a banknote and a few body parts. Our Blessed Virgin’s counterpart in Jejuri is Yeshwant Rao. Called “only a second class god,” he is not much to look at: Yeshwant Rao, mass of basalt, bright as any post box, the shape of protoplasm or a king size lava pie thrown against the wall, without an arm, a leg or even a single head.

While he cannot “double your money,” “triple your land holdings,” or “put a child inside your wife,” in some things the “mass of basalt” is as effective as Our Lady of the Mount: Yeshwant Rao. He’s the god you’ve got to meet. If you’re short of a limb, Yeshwant Rao will lend you a hand and get you back on your feet.

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In Dilip Chitre’s short film on Kolatkar,2 there are shots of Jejuri, including one of Yeshwant Rao. He looks exactly how Kolatkar has described him, a rock “the shape of protoplasm” and daubed with red paint. Another shot shows the replicas of the limbs – a crudely made arm, a leg – that pilgrims have offered at the shrine. Fittingly for a god in rural Maharashtra, the replicas are life-size and fashioned from wood.

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2

Dilip Chitre, dir. Arun Kolatkar (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi; India 2004, reissued 2010; 27 min.).

Intertext, Architext, and Métissage Anita Desai’s Negotiation of Cultural Gaps M AR T A D V OâÁK

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P A R I S in 2006, devoted to Derek Walcott’s writing and reading practices, Walcott himself participated in a panel on influence and métissage alongside John Thieme and Janet Wilson, in which he openly acknowledged that writing was consubstantial with reading and absorbing other texts.1 Walcott also took part in an exciting writers’ session, interacting with his fellow Caribbean writer E.A. Markham, with whom Bruce King had kindly put me in touch. The papers, as well as Walcott’s talk and congenial discussion with Markham, were subsequently published.2 The essays engaged with issues such as intertextuality, polyphony, language, and performance – particularly burning issues in an intense zone of hybridization like the West Indies, often considered to be a paradigm for syncretic cultures. Yet they also addressed the more general questions of writing and reading practices and the dynamics of reception in an age of an increasingly transnational readership, issues which Bruce King has investigated in two landmark books.3 One of King’s contributors, Michael Dash, judiciously posits that métissage or creolization – that mode of “mixing and crossing languages, forms, and styles”4 which had been theorized by Elleke Boehmer and Walcott5 (with an

1

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“I’m a real sponge,” Walcott declared at the workshop moderated by John Thieme, “Textuality and Intertextuality: Postcolonial Literatures and the Poetics of Métissage,” held on 18 March 2006, as part of the Derek Walcott International Colloquium. 2 Derek Walcott, ed. Marta Dvorak (special issue of Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 28.2, Spring 2006). 3 See New National and Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), and The Internationalization of English Literature 1948–2000, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004). 4 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1995): 117–18.

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emphasis on its dynamic and creative aspects) – is now a global phenomenon.6 I adhere to King’s belief in the continuous international circulation of ideas and aesthetic as well as intellectual currents. And I align myself with Dash, who argues that the poetics of creolization, which involve not only cultural and linguistic interplay but also “reversals, contradictions, and recombinations,” and which call into question “the idea of sacred origins and pure beginnings,” overlap in fact with postmodern thought and its preoccupation with displacement and incompleteness.7 This perspective on global tendencies in literary creation and cross-cultural dialogism between production and reception is what framed my subsequent investigations of the dynamics of intertextuality in Indian fiction. I specifically examined its strategies of displacement and métissage, which undermine monologic axiologies by multiplying the sources from which it freely and shapeshiftingly borrows. The Indian writer Anita Desai’s novel In Custody (1984) is a test case for the relations between text and world (configured through the fraught prism of Hindi/Urdu and Hindu/Muslim language and identity-politics) but also, coterminously, between text and text, or even between text and architext. 8 I wish to pursue here the bifurcation of voice which refracts the discourses of entire incorporated genres – the architextual relations explored by Gérard Genette in his study of transtextuality9 – and which dovetails with the notion of mimicry. Desai metatextually situates her novels within a long cultural continuum or dialogic interdependence of texts,10 illustrating Julia Kristeva’s affirmation that “any text is the absorption and transformation of another,” and that poetic

5

See Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 36–64. 6 See J. Michael Dash, “Psychology, Creolization, and Hybridization,” in New National and Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 45–58. 7 Dash, “Psychology, Creolization, and Hybridization,” 52. 8 See, for example, Marta Dvorak, The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s “In Custody” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008). 9 An architextual relation is that which exists between a text and a genre or general category – its archi-text, argues Gérard Genette in Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982). 10 Desai’s B A in English literature from Delhi University (1957) reinforced her mastery of the canonical texts making up the standardized curriculum that Great Britain had set up throughout her Empire; moreover, she read voraciously, citing as influences French and Russian writers such as Camus, Rimbaud, and Dostoevsky, as well as British and American writers. See Ramesh K. Srivastava, “Anita Desai at Work: An Interview,” in Perspectives on Anita Desai, ed. Ramesh K. Srivastava (Ghaziabad: Vimal, 1984): 208–27.

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language is to be read “as at least double.”11 Through abundant epigraphs, quotations, and intertexts interpolated in the manner of a collage, Desai’s creolization has always negotiated a gap between worlds. I argue, in contrast to the traditional Orientalist stance, that a writer like Desai can not only translate Indian history, culture, and mind-set for a Western audience through the prism of her multiple appurtenances, but can also translate European culture into Indian terms. Both In Custody (1984) and Clear Light of Day (1980) (displaying as thought-provoking epigraphs extracts from Wordsworth’s “Rob Roy’s Grave” and T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” respectively) can be seen as relativizing or even mediating between not only Eastern and Western traditions, but also between Hindu and Muslim traditions and their normative value-references of origins. These are derived from outside and beyond the society, and effectively connect Indian literature to international postmodern concerns. It is Desai’s less overt dialogue with the genres of tragedy and comedy that I want to address here, since it was an article by Bruce King – who is as knowledgeable about Indian fiction in English as he is about West Indian literature – that triggered my investigations in this direction. My being based in Paris did not make it easy to track down King’s article, but its provocative title alone, “In Custody: A Chekhovian Comedy,”12 put me on an exciting and fruitful scent.13 The track involves connecting belief-systems separated by epochs as well as by geography and then collocating them in a framework which harbours idealistic as well as ideological resonances. Ultimately, such an analysis discloses the manner in which the literatures of the globe can be brought together both cross-culturally and architextually. The subgenres that Desai dips into range from the burlesque fabliau and fabula to the campus novel, comic forms all grounded in the ordinary, hence low, experience of realism. Desai constructs her Urdu poet–protagonist Nur from the traits of multiple stock figures. Nur’s recurrent gluttony and gormandizing, as well as the recurrent textual allusions connecting him with brothels, notably conform to the lecherous clowning figure of Pantaloon in the harle11

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, tr. Thomas Gora, Alice A. Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (Sèméiôtikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse, 1969; Columbia U P , 1980): 66. 12 See Bruce King, “In Custody: A Chekhovian Comedy,” Sewanee Review 93.3 (Summer 1985): lix–lxii. I have qualified the title as provocative because it goes against the grain of many critical articles, which even today situate Desai’s novel as a form of tragedy. 13 A subsequent conversation with the writer Mavis Gallant encouraged me to pursue this track. When I asked Gallant in May 2008 for her impressions of Desai’s Clear Light of Day, a copy of which I had offered her, she affirmed that she had found it immensely Chekhovian.

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quinade, adopted from the farces popularized by the commedia dell’arte. The connection with the fabliau tradition is visible in the bawdy, even toilet, humour evocative of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Nur’s attachment to the flesh calls up Chaucer’s repulsive senex amans Januarie in “The Merchant’s Tale,” who marries the young “fresshe May” and drinks all the potions and drugs listed in De Coitu so as to “better labour till the break of day.”14 Desai’s feast scene, which culminates in the hero’s wiping up of Nur’s vomit with papers that turn out to be sought-after new verse, partakes of the conventions of the comic fabula, as do the earthy remarks of Nur’s Urdu followers, who propose to combat Hindu hegemony with vigorous farts.15 These forms of the burlesque can be taken to embody the transcultural nature of the narratives, icons and symbols with which we construct significance. A more contemporary manifestation is the campus novel, with which critics such as Christian Gutleben have identified In Custody.16 Earlier forms of fiction addressing the role of academics have operated along the traditional quest paradigm, turning on the hero’s search for knowledge and truth (and incidentally fame or fortune), leading to errors, misgivings, and the inevitable collision between reality and fantasy and the questioning of the role of literature and of the intellectual that we find in Desai’s novel. Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard can be said to belong loosely to such a paradigm. Both plays by the Russian satirist denounce the parasitical role of scholars with a satiric stance that veers from amused Horatian detachment to the moral indignation of Juvenal.17 Vanya’s anti-intellectual rant in the first Act, directed at 14

But Januarie cannot hide from the bride who submits to his desires the “slakke skyn” which “aboute his necke shaketh.” Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston M A : Houghton Mifflin/Cambridge Riverside Press, 2nd ed. 1957): 1849. 15 Fabliau codes notably call for a deliberately low style with corresponding lower-class characters, and with a diction modelled roughly on actual speech, evocative of the ribald Bottom interludes in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 16 See Christian Gutleben, “Generic Displacement: Difference and Repetition in Anita Desai’s Campus Novel,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 31.2 (Spring 2009): 124–32, as well as the earlier article by Rosalia Baena, “The Condition of Life and Art in Anita Desai’s In Custody,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 22.2 (Spring 2000): 59–68. Certain Rabelaisian convergences between In Custody and David Lodge’s Small World (both published in 1984) spring to mind, notably the parallel between two scabrous comic scenes based on excreta: the scene in which Nur’s verse is used to wipe up his vomit, and the power failure during which Lodge’s character inflicted with diarrhoea inadvertently uses the only copy of his conference paper as toilet paper. 17 Desai, too, veers from benevolent Horatian satire to militant satire with respect to the role of intellectuals and critics, through the invective of Nur’s junior wife, the dancing girl-cum-poet Imtiaz Begum, who accuses the college lecturer Deven of predation:

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the retired Professor and the learned scholars he stands for, could well have influenced Desai’s phagic treatment of intellectual ineptness and critical parasitism.18 Proclaiming the old Professor’s life to be “as stale as a piece of hardtack,” Vanya pursues the food imagery which paves the way for an irreverent form of chiasmus (involving the double confrontation of “clever men [...] stupid ones” and “know [...] be interested”): the man has been writing on art for twenty-five years, and he doesn’t know the very first thing about it. For twenty-five years he has been chewing on other men’s thoughts about realism, naturalism, and all such foolishness; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing things that clever men have long known and stupid ones are not interested in.19

The old scholar’s former young wife was Vanya’s younger sister, and following her death he has once again married and monopolized the sexual favours of a beautiful young woman that Vanya moreover covets. These elements position the play within the parameters of the farces I have been discussing and develop convergences with Desai’s poet and scholar, as well as with Desai’s underlying tropes of life/art and illusion/reality.20 In Custody is also in apparent dialogic relations with the Juvenalian invective in The Cherry Orchard, which questions the pertinence of culture and the status of intellectuals in a society in which conditions for most of the population are brutish. In the second Act, the student Trofimov declares: The vast majority of these intellectuals whom I know seek for nothing, do nothing, and are at present incapable of hard work [...] they treat the peasants like animals [...] about science they only talk, about art they understand little. [...] They philosophize, and at the same time, the vast majority of us [...] live like savages, fighting and cursing at the slightest ‘I know your kind – jackals from the so-called universities that are really asylums for failures, trained to feed upon our carcasses. Now you have grown impatient, you can’t even wait till we die – you come to tear at our living flesh.’ —Anita Desai, In Custody (1984; London: Vintage, 1999): 126. 18 Although eating with the impure left hand is taboo for Hindus and, to an even greater degree, Muslims, the renowned poet that Deven worships is shown plunging both hands into his greasy biryani, which drops and leaks onto his lap. Expected to expound on the finer spheres of art and poetry, the “deity” prefers to debate the merits of rum over whisky. 19 Anton Chekhov, “Uncle Vanya” (“Dyadya Vanya,” 1899), in Six Famous Plays, tr. Julius West & Marian Fell (1949; London: Duckworth, 1958): 191. 20 Vanya notably adds in his monologue that for twenty-five years the Professor “has been masquerading in false clothes and has now retired, absolutely unknown to any living soul; and yet see him stalking across the earth like a demi-god!” Chekhov, Six Famous Plays, 191. (My emphasis.)

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opportunity, eating filthily, sleeping in the dirt, in stuffiness, with fleas, stinks, smells, moral filth, and so on.21

Desai’s ironic inversions are manifest. It is her poet who philosophizes, but also her poet who curses at the slightest opportunity, eats filthily, and lives in moral turpitude. Deven’s difficulty in making Nur “perform,”22 in “separating prose from poetry, life from art” (169), a life presented in metaphoric terms as “stained, soiled, discoloured and odorous rags” (173), serves to fuel a metatextual dynamic that debunks the larger generic framework of tragedy which the narrative instance constructs, only to systematically invalidate it.23 In/validating Tragedy The mechanics of the tragic genre are partly set up from the start through the expectation raised by Deven’s name (king/god), which confers upon him the semi-divine or at least heroic aura required by ancient Greek tragedy, for Aristotle’s Poetics makes it clear that, for the compulsory fall in fortune to occur, the tragic hero must belong to the heights of those who possess a certain wealth and fame. Deven undeniably possesses aspirations and sensibilities that place him ostensibly higher than the characters around him. It is to buttress this tragic vantage point that the rather heavy-handed trap/cage/maze motif is unfolded. Yet the tragic spirit requires a world ruled by a natural moral order which the hero is brought to violate. The trap that closes in on the hero of Greek tragedy is of a transcendent nature involving cosmic forces, and thus a dearth of hope. By contrast, the traps in In Custody are of a contingent nature, involving the prosaic socio-economic dynamics of budgets and bills. In spite of the elevated decorum deploying markers of doom and desolation that multiply katabatic metaphors, the heavily pecuniary lexicon, which attributes a commercial value to all the objects singled out as significant, deflates any possible claim to ineluctability and debunks the tragic machinery of determinism. The ambivalent status of Desai’s protagonist (hero/antihero) has been the key building-block in the tension the novelist engineers between tragedy and 21

Chekhov, Six Famous Plays, 277–78. Anita Desai, In Custody (1984; London: Vintage, 1999): 165. Further page references are in the main text. 23 While I find attractive Afzal-Khan’s seductive confrontation positing that Narayan dilutes realism through myth while Desai dilutes myth with realism, I argue that the process (through the tragic mode, notably) involves not so much diluting as debunking. See Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie (University Park: Pennsylvania State U P , 1993): 60. 22

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comedy, between the grand and the trivial, in a Chekhovian manner. Deven aspires to great things24 and becomes pompously persuaded that he has been “allotted a role in life” (112), that of preserving a great poet’s art for posterity, but his amused addressee, Siddiqui, detects a gap between the project and the subject (“that craven young man” [103] who had prospected for a job in the Urdu department). When Deven systematically bungles the tasks he is assigned, he does indeed call up Ivanoff’s ineffectual Ivan, and the inept bungling of Uncle Vanya’s buffoonish eponymous protagonist, who in burlesque fashion deflates audience expectations of suicide or murder. In the tension between high and low which creates the ambivalence of the tragicomic, Desai constantly deploys a deflationary dynamic to underscore the status of antihero for her protagonist. These accumulated personal and professional shortcomings are synthesized and listed in an instance of heteroglossic overcoding so as to transform the protagonist into an embodiment of failure – yet not wholly devoid of grand resonances.25 Error follows error, and just as Deven erases Nur’s verse with vomit, he subsequently tears up potentially interesting new material written by a female poet which he could have submitted for publication (217). For Deven, “The inherent weakness in his father that had made him an ineffectual, if harmless, teacher and householder, had been passed on to him.” This act is presented in metaphysical terms as an “empty hole” he has been “staring at all his years, intimidated by its blackness and blankness” (138). The metaplasm, combined with the full alliteration, assonance, and consonance (blackness/blankness), underscores the similarity in these different shapes of absence, figuring his lack of achievement but also a notion of a personal (cosmic) destiny, as it were. The ambivalence of this dark comedy is manifested when Deven resolves in anti-tragic terms “not to venture out of the familiar, safe dustbin” of his world but to “sink back on the dustheap,” but then justifies this decision on cosmic grounds which consolidate his status as a victim of fate yet ironically and aporetically rule out a Fall:

24

When telling his colleague Siddiqui (Head of the Urdu Department) about his encounter with Nur, Deven “felt that the occasion called for pomposity, a state to which he had always secretly aspired; ‘I have had many conversations with him. In fact,’ he plunged on recklessly, ‘I may do more than an article for Awaaz – I might write a biography. He has even said he might dictate his memoirs to me’ ” (103). 25 “Every effort he had made had ended in defeat: most of the poems he had written and sent to Murad had been rejected, his monograph never published; his wife and son eyed him with blatant disappointment; nor had he won the regard of his colleagues or students” (138).

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It was not only all that he deserved but all he was fit for and therefore could expect from life, from fate. Justice was not unrelated to fate, after all; was not that the teaching of – of...? He couldn’t remember. (66)

No, Deven cannot really fall. He can merely “stumble a little but climb on to the familiar track again eventually” as he realizes himself when he decides to go back to class, “hunching his shoulders to protect his ears, his head” (65), a posture which evokes the attitude of a dog with its tail between its legs. It is true that in his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Arthur Miller declares that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.”26 In his introduction to his Collected Plays, Miller goes so far as to state that the corner grocer is perfectly suitable as a tragic figure, insisting that what was true for Aristotle and his (slave) society cannot apply to modern times, and that there is no more reason today “for falling down in a faint before his Poetics than before Euclid’s geometry.”27 Nonetheless, Miller qualifies the corner grocer/tragic figure paradigm by stipulating that the career of the grocer in question needs to engage with such issues as “the survival of the race, the relationships of man to God.”28 He takes care to raise Willy Loman, his salesman protagonist, to such a metaphysical level through the tragic tropes of madness, of hallucinations and visions, as well as the disruption of man-made clock-time.29 Interestingly, interconnecting with the katabatic dynamics of romance, it is precisely in this manner that Deven’s visions or anamnesic recollections of his father and mother effectively blur the boundaries between past and present and between the living and the dead, as does his descent into “the grotesque world of hysterics, termagants, viragos, the demented and the outcast” (217). Like Miller, Desai insists on the tragedy-laden relationship between time and loss (of things, people, dreams, love). In his essay “The Nature of Tragedy,” Miller asserts that the tragic differs from the merely dramatic or pathetic, in that tragedy brings us “not only sadness, sympathy, identification and even fear” but also “knowledge or enlightenment.”30 He goes on to specify that the knowledge must pertain to “the right way of living in the world,” and his “illumination of the ethical”31 does indeed

26

Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949), in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, ed. Robert A. Martin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978): 3. 27 Miller, “Introduction to The Collected Plays” (1957), in Theatre Essays, 145. 28 “Introduction to The Collected Plays,” 145. 29 See Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. 30 Miller, “The Nature of Tragedy” (1949), in Theatre Essays, 9. 31 “The Nature of Tragedy,” 9.

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resonate with the strong didactic undercurrent of In Custody. Are we, then, entitled to consider that Desai’s novel fits the architextual frame of the (modern) tragic genre? If we accept Miller’s bottom line, which is that “a man’s death is and ought to be an essentially terrifying thing,”32 it is undeniable that Desai does not have Deven die. In her final chapter, she painstakingly constructs the expectation of imminent death, only to introduce an ultimate twist. Nur writes that his pigeons are dying of an ineluctable disease that is wiping them out. Deven receives a (death) threat from one of his students, “tight with hate” (222). In the dead of night, Deven walks out to the canal, hoping to meet the student with the knife and thus escape from pending disgrace. He has a vision of Nur’s bier and the family “weeping and wailing around it” and sees “the shroud, the grave – open” (225). Pathetic fallacy is deployed, from the thunder in the distance, the dark rushing water, and the reedy slippery banks to the “wild, startled cry” of a lapwing in the darkness (223). When murder does not set him free, selfmurder is suggested in the penultimate paragraph. Deven stared at the water that stopped and turned concentrically in a whirlpool at that point. The whirlpool was an opening into the water, leading into its depths. (226)

But at the last moment, Desai has Deven turn back from the brink, in a manner reminiscent of the way Chekhov plays with audience expectation in the iconoclastically hybrid, tragicomic Uncle Vanya. The Russian playwright arranges for a shot and a scream to be heard off-stage. Audience expectations of lethal violence rise when a struggle with a revolver ensues on stage. But derision replaces melodrama and tragedy, when Vanya Voitski once more bungles his attempt to shoot Professor Serebrakov; the stage directions require him to miss, fling the gun on the floor, and drop helpless into a chair. What prevents Deven from drowning himself is the illusion of a heroic stature: “He had accepted the gift of Nur’s poetry and that meant he was custodian of Nur’s very soul and spirit. It was a great distinction” (226). Many critics have seen the final paragraph, in which night leads to day and in which Deven prepares to run and face the day’s calamities imaged in military, even cosmic terms (“they would flash out of the sky and cut him down like swords,” 226), as a concession to epic grandeur and a sign of authorial hope.33 They point out the deliberate ambivalence of the title which is foregrounded in the excipit, 32

Miller, “Introduction to The Collected Plays,” 146–47. “Deven suddenly finds his own inner strength and learns to accept his responsibilities with fortitude,” declare K. Mani & Shela Ratna, “Irony in Anita Desai’s In Custody,” in Critical Essays on Anita Desai’s Fiction, ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya (Delhi: Ivy, 2000): 133. 33

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involving Deven’s becoming custodian of Nur’s poetry and Nur’s becoming his custodian, an alliance which is either “an unendurable burden – or else a shining honour” (225) or perhaps both/and in the postmodern aporetic manner. I have posited that it is the illusion of heroic stature that stops Deven from throwing himself into the whirlpool. I argue that his potential self-destruction had already taken on grotesque contours when the inner focalization collapsed the sublime into the trivial, revealing that the ‘doom’ which awaits the hero is simply the fate of having to cough up money: When Nur was laid in [the grave] would this connection break, this relation end? No, never – the bills would come to him, he would have to pay for the funeral, support the widows, raise his son. (225; my emphases)

As with this slide from the transcendent to the contingent, Deven’s decision that his position of custodian is “a great distinction” (226; my emphasis) echoes a previous passage in which the protagonist deludes himself with the grand prospects allegedly on the point of being accomplished: Given a little more time – another week, or perhaps two – he would have not only a brilliant recording with which to dazzle the Urdu department of his college – and, who knew, such distinguished Muslim institutions as the Jamia Millia and the Aligarh University as well – but enough material for an interview and perhaps even a slim volume of memoirs. He could almost see it lying between his hands – he would have it bound in a soft, sky-blue cover like a sheet of the sky in which Nur’s pigeons flew, and its title inscribed in the poet’s hand, distinctively. (177; my emphases)

Underlining the virtual dimension of the prospects, and the fabricated nature of the visualized scene with all its sensual but spurious details, are the recurrent markers of uncertainty (“perhaps [...] who knew”) and the deployment of the conditional which blends with the frequentative mode. The suppositional and virtual quickly collide with the real, for we learn in the contiguous sentence that “What he was actually gazing at was the stationery shop” (177, my emphasis). To amplify the structural as well as the dramatic irony, the protagonist, already savouring his future renown, is treated with contempt by the shopkeeper when he “shamefacedly” reduces his purchases to the single copybook he can afford. Consequently, Deven’s echoic (“distinctively”/”distinguished”) self-aggrandizement in the excipit is suffused with dramatic and structural irony implying that the new series of conditionals looking ahead to grand achievements will (forever) never turn out as expected:

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Soon the sun would be up and blazing. The day would begin, with its calamities. They would flash out of the sky like swords. He would run to meet them. (226)

Buttressing my argument that Desai is debunking heroic (re)action, one can find the bathetic permutation of battle imagery substituting thorns for swords: “He ran, stopping only to pull a branch of thorns from under his foot” (226). Arguably, the ending is ambivalent. Deven is obeying the call of his dharma, and does pull the branch of thorns from his foot, auguring future victories over obstacles. Yet, if the thorns are to connote a higher sphere (particularly in the Christian belief-system), in spite of the earlier deflation from crown of thorns to scatological throne of thorns,34 we ought to remark in the light of Hindu cosmology constructed around the notions of high and low, head (consubstantial with grandeur and dignity) and feet, that the protagonist is wounded in the lowly foot, which is the very last word the novel ends on, certainly not gratuitously. Desai’s text is clearly in a dialogic relationship with Arthur Miller’s seminal Death of a Salesman, but Miller’s play is undeniably more earnest in its construction of a modern (arguably oxymoronic) yoking of tragedy and the ordinary. In Custody diverges from Miller’s text through a strategy of deflation, by replacing tragic failure with “only a mess” (221) and the tragic hero with a bungler, and by debunking death. For Greek tragedy was both exalting and grim, and devoid of earthy comic relief, which was provided in the ribald satyr play making up the last part of the conventional tetralogy. Furthermore, the clowning interludes in Elizabethan tragedy never involved buffoonery on the part of the hero. Similarly, in the Indian theatre tradition, whether it be the yatra or the modern Hindi film, the hero is invariably noble, strong, and pure.35 By contrast, In Custody is suffused with the same burlesque dynamics found in the campus novel, with an academic so inept that when he is asked for his preferences in poetry he “mumble[s] and cast[s] around wildly for one title or one line that would save him from giving the impression of total illiteracy” (171). Desai’s novel can, consequently, be more closely aligned with that other text equally staging a collision between two worlds, two axiologies, and therefore two aesthetics: Chekhov’s tragicomic Uncle Vanya. Both texts deride the very culture from which they emerge, and choose a hybridized genre analogous to a world order

34

Nur’s weeping complaints about his haemorrhoids or metaplasmic “throne of thorns” (43) debunks the sublimity of both Christian muthos with its crown of thorns and Persian poetic wordplay traditions. 35 Interestingly, the recent, more globalized productions (especially the films shot in Delhi) have begun to transgress against these codes.

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undergoing mutation. Desai’s refusal to resort to classical tragedy involves several parameters. There are the social and cultural factors inherent in modernity which make for the absence of the tragic spirit and of the heroic protagonist. Desai suggests that neither heroic action nor heroic genre is possible in our modern world, where banquets have replaced battles. Traditional forms of literature such as the tragedy arise from a unified vision, a coherent view of the universe and the human being’s place in it. And just as satire does not flourish without some accepted norm, the shock of tragedy does not occur unless there is a believed-in moral order that can be disrupted. Desai’s transgressive phagic dynamics36 systematically demonstrate the modern erosion of values and bewildering axiological confusion that Chekhov, too, figured through alimentary metaphors and finally made explicit in Uncle Vanya, which addressed the destruction of the old aristocratic order.37 Intratextual resonances with The Cherry Orchard can be detected, a play likewise engaging with socio-political upheavals, in which the former serf Fiers compares the preEmancipation “old days” with the present turn of the century: The peasants kept their distance from the masters and the masters kept their distance from the peasants, but now everything’s all anyhow and you can’t understand anything.38

Postmodern texts such as In Custody, which are prolongations of the ontological and epistemological interrogations of modernism, suggest that modern society (and not simply Western society) no longer provides the ordered system from which these forms of expression develop. As Arthur Miller judiciously puts it,

36

The transgressions of the alimentary codes (and thus ortho-practical values) of the upper castes are designed to generate readerly opprobrium at the characters’ deviance from doxa, for, despite what is actually done, there is a consensus on what is right. 37 When the Professor and his young new bride arrive in the first act of Uncle Vanya, the old nurse, Marina, complains: Such a confusion in the house! The Professor gets up at twelve, the samovar is kept boiling all the morning, and everything has to wait for him. Before they came, we used to have dinner at one o’clock, like everybody else, but now we have it at seven. The Professor sits up all night writing and reading, and suddenly, at two o’clock, there goes the bell! Heavens, what is that? The Professor wants some tea! Wake the servants, light the samovar! Lord what disorder! When they finally leave in Act four, Marina rejoices, significantly equating the return of orderly mealtimes with a religious doctrinal belief-system: “Now we shall have things as they were again: tea at eight, dinner at one, and supper in the evening; everything in order as decent folks, as Christians like to have it” (Chekhov, Six Famous Plays, 189, 233). 38 Chekhov, Six Famous Plays, 276.

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“where no order is believed in, no order can be breached.”39 Or, to borrow from Miller once again, It goes without saying that in a society where there is basic disagreement as to the right way to live, there can hardly be agreement as to the right way to die, and both life and death must be heavily weighted with meaningless futility.40

The Chekhovian mode of derision reigns in Desai’s closing scene of demolition, which in turn echoes the initial description of Mirpore’s countryside transformed by “tractors and tyres” in the name of a “progress and prosperity” which the implied-authorial voice eschews (17). In the demolition scene, the author implies that capitalist forces have triumphed. Out of the self-indulgent, expensive practices which he terms his “weakness,” Siddiqui, the last representative of the formerly powerful Muslim community, has accepted the offer by a Delhi businessman to demolish and “develop this land”: build a block of flats with shops on the ground floor, cinema house at the back, offices on top – all kinds of plans for putting this wasteland to use. (209)

The T.S. Eliot intertexts cannot fail to overcode the choice of the term “wasteland” for past grandeur with ironic connotations. The transformation of the last grand ancestral home of the diminished Muslim community into a block of flats, shops, and offices, metonyms of modernity, also summons up The Cherry Orchard, in which the allegorical chopping-down of the centuries-old cherry orchard41 and the sale of the land and contracting out to a housing development stand for the destruction of the old aristocratic order (pre-Emancipation) and the advent of the new (deemed “vulgar”).42 In Custody resonates well with Chekhov’s carnivalesque paradigm of inversion, in which Lopakhin, the descendant of the now bankrupt family’s former serfs, buys up the estate. Lopakhin’s speech in the third act makes clear the allegorical equivalence between the individual and the general, the private and the public, the homely and the historical:

39

Miller, “The Nature of Tragedy,” 14. Miller, “Introduction to The Collected Plays,” 147. 41 The metonymic function of the cherry orchard, which stands for the nation, is made explicit in one of Trofimov’s long, meditative monologues, beginning: “All Russia is our orchard”; Chekhov, Six Famous Plays, 281. 42 When Lopakhin in Act Two advises Lubov, the mistress of the property, to lease off her land for the construction of villas so as to avoid her property being auctioned off to pay her debts, she replies, “Villas and villa residents – it’s so vulgar, excuse me.” Chekhov, Six Famous Plays, 273. 40

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If my father and grandfather rose from their graves and looked at the whole affair, and saw how their Ermolai, their beaten and uneducated Ermolai, who used to run barefoot in the winter, how that very Ermolai has bought an estate, which is the most beautiful thing in the world! I’ve bought the estate where my grandfather and my father were slaves, where they weren’t even allowed into the kitchen!43

Refracting Meanings The textual dialogism entertained in In Custody contains both referentiality and auto-referentiality, with allusions to preceding self-reflexive texts serving metatextual and auto-referential purposes. Analysing one work such as In Custody demonstrates that a novel is indeed a tiered intersection of multiple textual surfaces overlapping with deeper inscribed authorial intents which need to be inferred and decoded. My discussion has shown that, to borrow Linda Hutcheon’s terms, these can be “intramural”44 (concerned with aesthetic norms) or “extramural” (concerned with social or moral norms), which are, notably, at the heart of satire. The two are, of course, coterminous, and often consubstantial. In spite of an undeniable anchorage in referential reality, Desai favours the romantic mode which continues to raise associations of aristocracy and chivalry, but which, in an amphibological fashion, has taken on in our modern era the resonances of ethnos or nation. Reader empowerment resides in the fact that only the reader can activate these textual interactions. Successful decoding depends not only on the skill of the authorial encoder but also on that of the readerly decoder. This may involve acquiring and implementing notions of a backgrounded context, but access is often available through the congruent cultural codes of the receptor, for these codes have migrated and intermingled over the centuries, and are widely shared by cultures across the globe, as are (essentially and increasingly) values. The architextual parallels I have drawn between Desai’s novel and Chekhov’s plays have shown that old conceptions of the world recurrently collapse and new systems giving meaning need to be built. Ultimately overlapping, these range from the European medieval and Renaissance belief-systems (shattered by books45 or by revolutions) to the rise and fall of empires and the emergence 43

Chekhov, , Six Famous Plays, 296. I borrow Hutcheon’s terms from A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of a Twentieth-Century Art Form (1985; Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P , 2000): esp. 25. 45 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were notable for the shock-waves created by such thinkers as John Locke, Condillac, Thomas Paine, and David Hume. 44

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of cultural and ideological interstices in spaces from Russia to India. Cultural differences have always been negotiated and translated – as literature and, more visibly, architecture and the visual and decorative arts testify – increasingly so in contemporary global society. Perhaps the view of alterity as a feature of a material location, rooted in a specific spatial, socio-political, linguistic, or religious context – one that critics have been engaging with for the past few decades – may end up shifting back to an older philosophical enquiry going back to Descartes and even Ovid: the distinction between the self and the epistemic Other (arguably destined to dissolve). As Diana Brydon remarks, with globalization “cosmology and cultural paradigms are in flux but through their changes they continue to refract the meanings that stories make and unmake.” 46

W O R K S C I TE D Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie (University Park: Pennsylvania State U P , 1993). Baena, Rosalia. “The Condition of Life and Art in Anita Desai’s In Custody,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 22.2 (Spring 2000): 59–68. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1995). Brydon, Diana. “Storying Home,” in Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context, ed. Marta Dvorak & W.H. New (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2007): 33–50. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin & Cambridge MA : Riverside, 2nd ed. 1957). Chekhov, Anton. “The Cherry Orchard” (“Vishnyovy sad,” 1904), in Six Famous Plays, tr. Julius West & Marian Fell (1949; London: Duckworth, 1958). ——. “Uncle Vanya” (“Dyadya Vanya,” 1899), in Six Famous Plays, tr. Julius West & Marian Fell (1949; London: Duckworth, 1958). Dash, J. Michael. “Psychology, Creolization, and Hybridization,” in New National and Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 45–58. Desai, Anita. Clear Light of Day (1980; London: Vintage, 2001). ——.In Custody (1984; London: Vintage, 1999). Dvorak, Marta. The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s “In Custody” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008).

46

Diana Brydon, “Storying Home,” in Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context, ed. Marta Dvorak & W.H. New (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2007): 44.

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——, ed. Derek Walcott (special issue of Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 28.2, Spring 2006). Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982). Gutleben, Christian. “Generic Displacement: Difference and Repetition in Anita Desai’s Campus Novel,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 31.2 (Spring 2009): 124–32. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of a Twentieth-Century Art Form (1985; Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P , 2000). King, Bruce. “In Custody: A Chekhovian Comedy,” Sewanee Review 93.3 (Summer 1985): lix–lxii. ——, ed. The Internationalization of English Literature 1948–2000 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004). ——, ed. New National and Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, tr. Thomas Gora, Alice A. Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (Sèméiôtikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse, 1969; New York: Columbia U P , 1980). Lodge, David. Small World: An Academic Romance (New York: Macmillan, 1984). Mani, K., & Shela Mani. “Irony in Anita Desai’s In Custody,” in Critical Essays on Anita Desai’s Fiction, ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya (Delhi: Ivy, 2000): 131–46. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman (1949; New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1980). ——. “Introduction to The Collected Plays” (1957), in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, ed. Robert A. Martin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978): 113–70. ——. “The Nature of Tragedy,” in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, ed. Robert A. Martin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978): 8–11. Originally in the New York Herald Tribune (27 March 1949): 1–2. ——. “Tragedy and the Common Man,” in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, ed. Robert A. Martin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978): 3–7. Originally in the New York Times (27 February 1949), Sec. 2: 1, 3. Narayan, Shyamala. “Recent Trends in Indian English Fiction,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 31.2 (Spring 2009): 5–14. Shamsie, Muneeza. “Covert Operations in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 31.2 (Spring 2009): 15–25. Srivastava, Ramesh K. “Anita Desai at Work: An Interview,” in Perspectives on Anita Desai, ed. Ramesh K. Srivastava (Ghaziabad: Vimal, 1984): 208–27. Walcott, Derek. “The Muse of History,” in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 36–64. Originally published in Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, ed. Orde Coombes (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1974): 1–27.

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Pakistani English Novels in the New Millennium Migration, Geopolitics, and Tribal Tales M U N EE Z A S HAMSIE

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A

S A BOD Y OF WOR K,

Pakistani English fiction has become increasingly dynamic. Talented new novelists are emerging every year, to great critical acclaim. Several, including Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Uzma Aslam Khan, and Kamila Shamsie have depicted the brutalization of society against a backdrop of geopolitics, Mohammed Hanif has written the first political satire in Pakistani English fiction; Musharraf Farooqi, Moni Mohsin, and Maha Khan Phillips bring their own unique voices to the traditions of social satire. Two septuagenuarians mark new directions: Jamil Ahmed (1931– 2004) with rare insights into Baluchistan’s tribal culture, and the distinguished Urdu writer Abdullah Hussein (1931–2015), with a rare novel in English. Furthermore, as Pakistan approached the fortieth anniversary of its dismemberment, when East Pakistan broke away and became an independent Bangladesh, an increasing number of Pakistani English novelists, including Shamsie and Sorayya Y. Khan, addressed the 1971 war. Both these writers and Feryal Ali Gauhar also explore violence against women. The rise of religious extremism is central to the novels of the expatriate Nadeem Aslam, while an experience of the U SA in the aftermath of 9/11 runs through novels by Hamid, Shamsie, and H.M. Naqvi. This essay focuses on Pakistani English novelists who have emerged in the twenty-first century, although there has been a continuous tradition of Pakistani English fiction since the creation of Pakistan, and several established writers, including Sara Suleri, Hanif Kureishi, and Aamer Hussein, have also, since 2000, published important works engaging with current events. Among the most interesting recent developments in Pakistani English fiction is the publication of a contemporary English novel (not a translation) – Émigré Journeys by Abdullah Hussein, author of several Urdu novels and a long-time resident in Britain. This underrated and little-known work focuses on the lives of Pakistan’s rural poor and their desperate existence as illegal immigrants in

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the U K . Through his character Parvin, a second-generation Asian Briton, Hussein makes a powerful statement on migration and language: [What] [...] I want [is] this, a language like God has a language and my mother has hers, and my father has his own; even Jenny with a single tongue-wrinkle of a missed soft d has a separate voice, but not I, I have the verbs and nouns and adjectives and all the grammar but no language. I speak like everybody else and I am not everybody else.1

Émigré Journeys was developed from Hussein’s Urdu story “Waapsi ka Safar” (The Journey Back) which became a BBC telefilm2 and tells of Amir’s early years as an illegal immigrant. The novel, set a generation later, alternates between Amir and his teenage daughter Parvin. Amir recalls his traumatic past; Parvin rages against the present. Amir believes Parvin is possessed by jinns. Parvin fumes: “ ‘Jinns in fuck’s name! I feel like banging my head against the wall’.”3 Amir describes the overcrowded Birmingham house that he shared with seventeen others. Their lives are disrupted when Mary, a young white woman, moves in with the household leader. New rules, confusions, and tensions culminate in murder, and an innocent man is convicted. These events define Amir long after he becomes a legal immigrant and sends for his family. He is determined that his children, Parvin and Hassan, should adapt to England, but there are lines which cannot be crossed. To Parvin, Amir is a distant, uncomprehending figure, with no understanding of their daily lives or their aspirations. Amir, for his part, comes to believe that the defiant Parvin is insane. The immigrant experience is also explored by the Scottish Pakistani physician and novelist Suhayl Saadi. His first novel, Psychoraag, employs a rich and racy combination of English, Scottish, and Urdu. For six hours (and some 600 pages) Zaf, a DJ , hosts the last episode of an all-night radio programme. Zaf merges music, language, and memory as his narrative moves seamlessly from public persona to private, telling of his life, his lover Babs (a blonde biker), and his parents, who, defying Pakistani class and society, eloped to Britain. Saadi has been described as “a writer of rare, raw, risk-taking talent”4 but tends to over-write, particularly in his ambitious second novel, Joseph’s Box, 1

Abdullah Hussein, Émigré Journeys (London: Serpent’s Tail 2000): 246. Further page references are in the main text. 2 Udayan Prasad, dir., Brothers In Trouble, screenplay by Robert Buckler (B B C Films 1995; 102 min.). 3 Hussein, Émigré Journeys, 17. 4 Simon Kovesi, “Joseph’s Box by Suhail Saadi: Review,” The Independent (11 September 2009): http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/josephs-box-by-suhayl-saadi1784898.html (accessed 11 October 2011).

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which spins an opulent, intricate, and often surreal, multicultural fable inspired by the Quranic/Sufi legend of Yusuf and Zuleikha (Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in the Old Testament). Zuleikha Chasm Framareza Macbeth, daughter of a Pakistani mother and Scottish father, fishes a mysterious box out of the River Clyde, with the help of Alexander Wolfe, a passerby. The box contains seven others; each reveals a secret, including a map and a statue of St Joseph. Alex and Zuleika are impelled into a series of strange and unexpected adventures that take them from Scotland to Sicily and Pakistan: the plot, imbued with metaphors and history, symbolizes that quest for the human soul embodied by Yusuf/Joseph in Sufi lore. Mystical Islamic themes combining multilayered, spiritual, and worldly innuendoes are central to the literatures of the Muslim world, ranging from the Urdu poetry of Mirza Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz to Orhan Pamuk’s Turkish novel My Name is Red.5 The mystical and metaphoric use of ancient legends such as that of Yusuf and Zuleikha or Laila and Majnoon has appeared increasingly in the English narratives of Muslim writers, as Claire Chambers points out.6 She refers to the novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah (Zanzibar), Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan), and Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan), as well as the short stories of the Pakistanis Nadeem Aslam and Aamer Hussein. The conflict between a closed orthodoxy and intellectual questioning has been intrinsic to Muslim history and remains so in Pakistan. In 1947, when Pakistan was created by the Partition of India, it was led by men with a modernizing ethos. To a large extent, this state of affairs continued for the next three decades, even though an increasingly assertive military-bureaucratic elite derailed the political process. General Zia ul-Haq forged an alliance with the religious right. He overthrew the civilian government government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and executed him. Zia introduced “Islamic” laws such as the Blasphemy Law and the notorious Hudood Ordinance, which did not differentiate between divorce and adultery; these targeted the most vulnerable, women and minorities. In 1979, following the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, “the U S saw a God sent opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims against what Reagan called the Evil Empire [...] to fight in the great jihad.”7 The U SA enlisted Zia ul-Haq to 5

For an analysis of mystical strands embedded in Pamuk’s novel, see Muneeza Shamsie, “Benim Adim Kirmizi [My Name is Red],” The Literary Encyclopedia (23 February 2006): http://www .litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16880 (accessed 11 October 2011). 6 Claire Chambers, “A Comparative Approach to Pakistani Fiction in English,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (2011): 125–26. 7 Eqbal Ahmad, The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmed, ed. Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo & Yogesh Chandrani (Karachi: Oxford U P , 2006): 265.

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its cause. After his assassination in 1989, there followed a period of political and economic instability. The rival elected governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif came into office on two occasions each. Each time, they were arbitrarily dismissed. Both elected leaders found it expedient to foster religious extremism. In 1994, Benazir Bhutto’s government decided to support the Taliban in proxy wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir. In 1990, Sharif passed laws [legalizing] the ancient Muslim custom of giving blood money as atonement for a murder instead of the death penalty, subject to agreement of the next kin. The sum liable to a woman victim’s heir was half that of a man. [… Consequently] murders in Pakistan increased over 42% between 1991-2000 [.… particularly since] influential persons and terrorists can force the victim’s heirs to settle rather than pressing charges.8

In 1998, Sharif decided on nuclear tests – in response to those of India – resulting in economic sanctions. In 1999, Sharif was overthrown by General Musharraf. After 9/11, under U S pressure, Musharraf reversed Pakistan’s pro-Taliban policy. An uneasy U S –Pakistan alliance continues. These events provide the backdrop to the novels of Aslam, Aslam Khan, Hamid, Hanif, Shamsie, and Naqvi, among others. Both Aslam and Shamsie published their first novels at the age of twenty-four, before the new millennium, and became part of the glittering generation of rising Pakistani English novelists which emerged between 2000 and 2011. Aslam grew up in Gujranwalla, in a family of writers and active communists which suffered frequent state persecution9 particularly in the 1980s. At fourteen, Aslam migrated with his family to Huddersfield. His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds, reclaims the textures of his Pakistan childhood and explores the spread of religious bigotry in the 1980s and the erosion of minority rights. The main narrative revolves around a lost mailbag and the murder of a corrupt judge in a small Punjab town. The investigating officer, Azhar, refuses to forge an alliance with Mujeeb, the local strong man and politician. Azhar is in love with Elizabeth, a Christian girl; Mujeeb uses this fact to obtain revenge, through rumour and gossip; a mob drags Elizabeth through the streets. Mujeeb is aided by Maulana Dawood, a new type of fire-breathing politicized maulvi, while Maulana Hafeez, the humane, old-fashioned cleric, is marginalized. The complicity of the community in acts of violence runs through Aslam’s novels. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, has to do with an honour killing 8

Muneeza Shamsie, “A Matter of Dishonour,” Index on Censorship (London: Sage, 2002): 194. The links between literature and communism in Pakistan can be traced to the hugely influential anti-imperial, left-wing Progressive Writers Association, set up in 1936 during the British Raj. 9

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in a fictitious all-Asian working-class neighbourhood in Britain. The story of Jugnu, the murdered man, is reconstructed through the recollections and conversations of his brother, the ex-communist Shamas, and his wife, Kaukab. Unlike the easy-going Shamas, Kaukab, a cleric’s daughter, cannot cope with alien racist England. Her only certainties lie in her religion and superstitiousness, which contribute to her alienation from her British-educated children, including Charag, a gifted artist, and her divorced daughter Mah-jabin. Both Maps and Émigré contain moving depictions of conflict between first- and second-generation Britons in which “it is more often the parents’ and grandparents’ memories of the past which define – and seriously constrain – this close-knit Pakistani community-in-exile.”10 Chanda, the murdered woman, had been married to an illegal immigrant who vanished soon after their wedding; he is neither legally missing nor divorced. The hapless Chanda defies convention when she moves in with her lover Jugnu, and is killed for it. In their Pakistani village, her brothers boast of this act of “honour”; in Britain, they are liable to prosecution, but are protected by their community’s silence. Maps is replete with spectacular writing and sumptuous metaphors. This is a deeply pastoral novel tied to the seasons and resonating with birdsong. Jugnu [...] is a lepidopterist and even though he is dead by the time the novel begins, moths float and soar through the story in his place.11 [Aslam also] uses specifically Muslim South Asian myths, art forms and religious stories in order to translate the England in which his characters live [...] the novel is peppered with rich images drawn from Urdu poetry, particularly ghazals.12

Aslam’s next novel, The Wasted Vigil, set in contemporary, war-torn Afghanistan, is filled with vivid descriptions of nature; the references to great works of art and literature reflect Afghanistan’s multicultural heritage including the Graeco-Buddhist sculptures which bear “the features of Apollo” and the Asian “dot on the forehead and the topknotted locks.”13 These cultural riches are contrasted with the violent extremism of Taliban rule, embodied by books nailed to

10

David Waterman, “Modernity and Cultural Identity: Negotiating Modernity in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers,” Pakistaniaat: Journal of Pakistan Studies 2.2 (2005): 19. 11 Charlie Lee–Potter, “Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam,” The Independent on Sunday (27 June 2004): http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/maps-for-lost-loversby-nadeem-aslam-733729.html (accessed October 2011). 12 Chambers, “A Comparative Approach,” 131. 13 Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil (London: Faber & Faber, 2004): 192.

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the ceiling as protest by the Afghan doctor Qatrina during her madness: “A spike driven through the pages of history, a spike through the pages of love, a spike through the sacred.”14 The Wasted Vigil was inspired by Michael Ondaatje’s World War Two novel The English Patient15 and is similarly set in a villa amid a war-torn land – but in this case near the Afghan town of Usha (Teardrop) – and like The English Patient includes a discourse on civilization, history, and the spirit of mankind, and the scars of war. The novel also engages with Ondaatje’s Sri Lanka novel Anil’s Ghost, as well as with Hosseini’s depiction of Taliban rule. In Vigil, the villa belongs to an English doctor, Marcus Caldwell. His wife, Qatrina, has been stoned to death by the Taliban; Zameen (Earth), their only daughter, is dead. Marcus still hopes to find his missing grandson. The villa becomes a microcosm of the world through the interconnecting stories of various people who come there by accident or design. These include Lara, a young Russian in search of her lost brother; David, an American gem-merchant, CI A agent, and Zameen’s one time lover; James Palatine, the son of an American Cold-Warrior; Dunia (World) a devout, but unveiled, Afghan schoolteacher; and Casa, a would-be suicide bomber. Despite Casa’s coldblooded world-view, Aslam skilfully gives him a human face. An Afghan war orphan, Casa grew up in Pakistani seminaries and military camps. An English-speaking Pakistani was so impressed by his courage that he named him Casabianca, after the boy-hero of “The boy stood on the burning deck”16 – an interesting comment on imperialism, language, and the glorification of the child-warrior. Feryal Ali Gauhar, filmmaker, actor, activist, and novelist, makes a strong anti-war statement in No Space for Further Burials, set in Afghanistan. The narrator, an American soldier (with no trace of American idiom) is imprisoned by a nameless Afghan warlord and left forgotten inside a derelict one-time asylum set in an endless, desolate, and nameless landscape. Ali Gauhar’s earlier novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August, is a much finer work propelled by stronger characters and plot and taking greater care to establish authenticity; it was developed from her Urdu screenplay and film Tibbi Galli. Set in Lahore’s famous red-light district, it captures vividly the way fantasy, cruelty, and power-play exist alongside piety. It tells of an honour killing and of two powerless people

14

Aslam, The Wasted Vigil, 5. See Muneeza Shamsie, “Covert Operations in Pakistani Fiction,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 31.2 (2009): 15–25. 16 Felicia Hemans, “Casabianca” (1826), in A Celebration of Women Writers: http://digital.library .upenn.edu/women/hemans/works/hf-burning.html (accessed 11 October 2011). 15

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who fall in love: the beautiful and mute Fatima, the daughter of a prostitute, and Shabbir, a sexually-abused maulvi’s apprentice in the neighbourhood mosque. Pakistan’s involvement with Afghanistan and U S -backed mujahadeen is central to Mohammed Hanif’s political satire A Case of Exploding Mangoes. The novel shares some elements with Salman Rushdie’s Shame, which focuses on General Zia ul-Haq’s early years. The major influence, however, is clearly The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, which tells of the last day of Trujillo, the Dominican tyrant. Mangoes turns on the last ten days of General Zia ul-Haq. The dictator, his senior officers, and the American ambassador were killed in an unexplained airplane explosion (popularly believed to have been caused by a bomb hidden in a case of mangoes). Hanif, a journalist and broadcaster who was (briefly) a Pakistan Air Force (PAF ) officer, poses the question: Who killed Zia? He gives everyone a motive, including the fictitious narrator Ali Shigri, a PAF cadet. Hanif re-creates a cocooned military world, where Zia’s regime replaces recreation activities such as old Hollywood films with Qura’nic Studies, and where Shigri finds himself incarcerated and tortured for a crime he has not committed. Shigri’s fellowcadet and lover Obaid, and their American instructor Lieutenant (Loot) Bannon, a CI A operative, are central to the plot. Shigri’s fellow prisoners include Blind Zainab, a rape victim charged with adultery under Zia’s nefarious laws (a reference to the famous Safia Bibi case).17 The book provides lively and irreverent portraits of those in the corridors of power – General Zia, his wife Begum Zia, Arnold Raphael, the American Ambassador, among others – and a lanky, bearded guest, ‘OBL ’. Hanif’s new novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, is a less cohesive, darker work, but in it he continues to explore power, albeit that exercised by ordinary people – doctors, police inspectors, and jailers – on those at their mercy. Alice Bhatti, a young Christian nurse and daughter of a sweeper, is empowered through education but marginalized by her religion and handicapped by her beauty, which attracts predatory males. Pakistan’s involvement with the mujahadeen and Afghanistan also led to a proliferation of guns and drugs in the country, fuelling urban violence in overcrowded, overpopulated Karachi. Three award-winning novelists, Uzma Aslam Khan, Kamila Shamsie, and Mohsin Hamid, grew up in this period. They were all educated in Pakistan and at U S universities, and divide their time between two or three continents. All three engage in a discourse on the intermingling 17

See Eqbal Ahmad, Between Past and Future: Selected Essays on South Asia, ed. Dohra Ahmad, Iftikhar Ahmad, Zulfikar Ahmad & Zia Mian (Karachi: Oxford U P , 2004): 237.

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and interdependence of cultures and comment on the glaring polarizations of class in Pakistan. Aslam Khan’s first novel, The Story of Noble Rot, alternates between Malika, the wife of a poor carpenter, and the rich Mrs Masood, wife of the insidious Mr Masood. He owns the Karachi carpet factory where Malika’s son works – and Malika is determined to save her husband from penury and her son from the ravages of child labour. Aslam Khan also uses alternating narratives in her subsequent novels Trespassing and The Geometry of God, which develop further the concept that Pakistan’s timeless landscapes and its ancient terrain contain “secrets that can redeem humans or reveal their base, petty and constricted natures.”18 Her second novel, Trespassing, is filled with descriptions of turtles, sea creatures, and sea shells, which act as metaphors for and contrasts to a claustrophobic society and a violent city. The narrative rotates between Dia, a silkfarmer’s daughter, Daanish, the boy she loves, and Salaamat, a displaced young fisherman. Salaamat, his traditional livelihood destroyed by trawlers, finds employment in Karachi’s all-male bus workshops, which are dominated by Pathans. These men have migrated from the north without their families and have links to the city’s underworld and its proliferating drug-and-Kalashnikov culture in the wake of the Afghan war. Geopolitics are pivotal to Aslam Khan’s plot. In the U SA , Daanish, a journalism student, is censured for criticizing the First Gulf War. Trespassing draws parallels between censorship, social taboos, and suppressed family narratives. Daanish and Dia meet at his father’s funeral in Karachi and embark on a clandestine love affair. Flashbacks to an earlier generation reveal that Daanish’s father and Dia’s mother were lovers while students in London: Daanish and Dia are half-brother and -sister. However, Dia’s dynamic mother, Riffat, empowered herself by running a silk farm and becoming a successful entrepreneur: Riffat and Dia are involved “in the reconstructing of the silk-making process and reviving organic dyes”19 – a process linked to the ancient craft of block printing with vegetable dyes, dating from Sindh’s ancient Indus Valley civilization. Aslam Khan delves further back – into prehistory – in her next novel, The Geometry of God, and fictionalizes the discovery of Pakicetus, a rare whale fossil, in northern Pakistan.20 The novel recounts the arrest and trial in the 1980s of seventy-year-

18

Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Deep Topographies in the Fiction of Uzma Aslam Khan,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (2011): 179. 19 Kabir, “Deep Topographies,” 183. 20 See Philip D. Gingerich, “Pakistan: Research on the Origin and Early Evolution of Whales

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old Zahoor, for teaching the theory of evolution. His ideas are anathema to the well-funded extremist Party of Creation; it sends Noman, a gifted mathematician, to spy on Zahoor. However, Noman cannot help but be fascinated by Zahoor’s ideas. The plot alternates between Noman and Zahoor’s granddaughters Amal and Mahwish, and debates religious extremism and the intellectual and mystical dimension of Islam; it plays with metaphoric mystical concepts such as blindness and light, and seeker and guide. Amal, Pakistan’s only woman palaeontologist, has been the guide and protector to the blind Mahwish, but Mahwish has unique intuitions beyond those of Amal. In an interesting twist, the debate between science and religion is central to Passarola Rising by Azhar Abidi, a Pakistani-Australian novelist and one-time engineer. His sparkling and lyrical adventure story, in the tradition of Jules Verne, is set in Europe at the dawn of the Enlightenment. Passarola re-creates an historical figure, the Brazilian Jesuit Father Bartolemeu, who, in Portugal, invented and demonstrated a flying ship, “The Passarola” (The Great Bird). He made aviation history but had to flee the Inquisition. Abidi’s text prolongs the life and adventures of Bartolemeu by some thirty years. He meets Voltaire and Louis V; he participates, from the air, in land and sea battles, and then heads to the Arctic. Abidi’s next novel, Twilight (U S title: The House of Bilquis) tells of the struggle of a Karachi matriarch, Bilquis Begum, to cope with changing times and her son’s migration to Australia. Fratricide – historical, political, and personal – runs through Mohsin Hamid’s accomplished first novel Moth Smoke, which shares with Aslam Khan’s Trespassing and Farooki’s Half Life the plot device of the unravelling of family secrets to reveal that the main protagonists share a common parent – embodying the common heritage of the subcontinent. Moth Smoke is framed by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s execution of Dara Shikoh, his elder brother, who was once the heir apparent. The main narrative tells of Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests, and the disintegrating friendship between the orphaned Dara (Daru) and his best friend Aurangzeb (Ozi) in Lahore. They have grown up together and move in a privileged world of parties and drugs. But Ozi’s corrupt and enormously rich father, a former army officer, bribes his way through life, runs over a man with impunity – and pins a murder on Daru, a banker, who, having offended a rich client, is sacked and slides into poverty. His growing drug addiction and selfdestruction parallel a derailed society, increasingly divorced from reality. Daru also falls in love with Ozi’s wife, Mumtaz. She has a secret life, as a fearless (Cetacea),” http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gingeric/PDGwhales/Whales.htm (accessed 18 September 2011). The article describes Gingerich’s historic discovery of the Pakicetus fossil in Pakistan.

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journalist. Her use of a male pseudonym, Zulfikar Manto (inspired by the Urdu writer Sa’adat Hasan Manto), also subverts a literary narrative in which only men are bold chroniclers of the unfortunate; Mumtaz is the narrator of Daru’s tale, which begins and ends in jail. Amitava Kumar comments: The prison is a place that [... ] can only be described as dead limbo. By putting Daru there, Hamid reminds us of his spiritual mentor, Manto. Manto’s most famous creation, Toba Tek Singh, dies in the no-man’s land between India and Pakistan because, deranged and inconsolable, he does not know where he belongs. Daru’s problem is that he does not even want to belong.21

Issues of belonging are central to Hamid’s next novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which consists of a monologue in which the Princeton-educated narrator Changez talks to an American stranger at a Lahore teashop. The interplay between the two characters is so subtle and ambiguous that it remains debatable whether Changez is telling the truth or not, whether he is a terrorist or not, and whether the American is a CI A agent or not. As Peter Morey says, that is the point of the form. Its one-sidedness actually performs that archetypal novelistic trick of taking us inside the head of the character but, in so doing, refusing the normalizing consolation of a dialogue. 22

In New York, Changez worked for the valuation firm Underwood Samson, and was taught to “focus on the fundamentals”:23 there he does not think of himself as a Pakistani in the U SA , but a member of the company’s team. But the story, it turns out, conveys “the impossibility of maintaining this globalized, post-political identity position as the forces of resurgent nationalism develop.” 24 Instead, Changez “arrives at his disenchanted and partisan position” which proves “an interesting snapshot of the bifurcation of the world after 9/11” and an “example of that world literature [... which brings] together in novelistic form the experiences of the individual when directly confronted by the effects of geopolitics.”25

21

Amitava Kumar, “The Chronicle of the Airconditioned Class,” Frontline 17.15 (22 July–4 August 2000): http://www.hindu.com/fline/fl1715/17150730.htm (accessed 19 September 2011). 22 Peter Morey, “‘The Rules of the Game Have Changed’: Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist and Post 9/11 Fiction,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (2011): 139. 23 Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (New York: Harcourt, 2007): 157 (italics in original). 24 Morey, “‘The Rules of the Game Have Changed’,” 141. 25 “‘ The Rules of the Game Have Changed’,” 145.

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Changez also reverses the traditional colonial narrative:26 Changez vocalizes; the American does not. The American remains nameless; he is interpreted through Changez’ words and thus appropriated. The novel asks: Who is in control here? Where does power lie? In words? Or silence? After the 9/11 attacks, Changez encounters a palpable hostility in New York. His unfulfilled relationship with Erica (her name is made up of the last three syllables of ‘America’) adds to his disenchantment, which is reinforced by a trip to Valparaíso and his identification with the writings of Pablo Neruda (a poet admired in Pakistan and known as a friend of the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz). There is scant mention of religion, though Changez, outraged at the American bombing of Afghanistan (“Pakistan’s neighbor, our friend and fellow Muslim nation besides”27) rushes back to Lahore. The book’s title suggests that “in becoming a possible terrorist leader [in Pakistan] he has changed sides from one fundamentalism to another” and “Hamid cleverly gives the novel a double perspective and a sensational ending.”28 H.M. Naqvi was also educated in Pakistan as well as the West and divides his time between the two. Similar to Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Chuck (Shahzad), the narrator in Naqvi’s debut Home Boy, wins a scholarship from Pakistan to the U SA , works (albeit briefly) in New York’s financial world and considers himself a New Yorker until he is confronted by America’s post9/11 prejudices. But Chuck, unlike Changez, has no delusions of grandeur, nor does he find solace in violence. With his great sense of the absurd, he provides lively insights into multicultural New York and lampoons the Great-PakistaniDream-of-America through witty flashbacks to Ma, his proud, indomitable, and widowed mother in Pakistan. Chuck dares not tell her that he has lost his prestigious job and is now a cab driver. He also finds that he and his two friends, Jimbo (Jamshed Khan) and AC (Ali Chaudhuri) are attacked by thugs as possible terrorists. After various misadventures, they decide to visit their mysterious acquaintance the Shaman (Shah Mohammed) in Connecticut, but Shaman has disappeared. They find themselves interrogated and incarcerated by the F BI : later it transpires that Shaman was among the 9/11 victims. The novel also explores the generation gap between the American-born Jimbo and his father, Old Man Khan. As Jimbo and Chuck take stock of their lives and AC, a perpetual

26

See Muneeza Shamsie, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” The Literary Encyclopedia (21 May 2009): http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23135 (accessed 11 October 2011). 27 Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 60. 28 Bruce King, “The Image of the U S in Three Pakistani Novels,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8.3 (1 September 2007): 685.

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student, is found to be in possession of cocaine, Chuck makes a choice: he returns to home to Karachi. Pakistan’s engagement with the U SA and, indeed, the latter’s shaping of global history since World War Two is the subject of Kamila Shamsie’s fifth novel, Burnt Shadows. Maya Jaggi says of it: The huge ambition of Kamila Shamsie’s fifth novel is announced in the prologue. As an unnamed captive is unshackled and stripped naked in readiness for the anonymity of an orange jumpsuit, he wonders: “How did it come to this?” The vastness of the question as applied to a prisoner in Guantánamo is a challenge to which this epic yet skilfully controlled novel rises in oblique and unexpected ways.29

Shamsie’s novel tells of migration, changing identities, and the friendship between two families, the Weiss Burtons and the Kanaka Ashrafs, and centres on the Japanese-born Hiroko Kanaka. In 1945, during the bombing of Nagasaki, her German-born fiancé Konrad Weiss is killed, but she survives. In New Delhi, she is befriended by his sister Elizabeth, the wife of a colonial official, James Burton; their Urdu teacher Sajjad Ashraf and Hiroko fall in love and marry. The whirlwind of Partition sweeps the Ashrafs to Pakistan. Their only son, Raza, grows up in Karachi but, conscious of his mixed heritage, feels ‘different’ from his classmates. He is befriended by Harry Burton (the son of Elizabeth and James), now an American diplomat posted to Pakistan. Harry is also a CI A functionary, and he recruits Raza, a gifted linguist, after Raza’s father Sajjad is shot dead – mistaken for a spy. The world of Raza and Hiroko collapses with Sajjad’s killing. Hiroko moves to New York at the invitation of her good friend, Harry’s mother Elizabeth. But in distant Afghanistan, Raza finds himself erroneously accused by Harry’s American superiors of being an accomplice in Harry’s murder. The novel is different from Shamsie’s first four novels, which are set in Karachi. As Bruce King says, “each of [Shamsie’s] five novels is about how history affects several generations of a family.”30 Her first novel, In The City By the Sea (1998), which tells of the struggle between military rule and democracy in a fictitious town similar to Karachi, is filtered through the eleven-year-old Hassan. His imaginary games of valour and heroism as Sir Huss, a knight (thus indigenizing and appropriating English lore) provide a parallel universe to the battle for freedom and justice waged by his politician uncle, Salman Mamoo, who has 29

Maya Jaggi, “When Worlds Collide,” The Guardian (7 March 2009), http://www.guardian.co .uk/books/2009/mar/07/burnt-shadows-kamila-shamsie-review (accessed 11 October 2011). 30 Bruce King, “Kamila Shamsie’s Novels of History, Exile and Desire,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (2011): 148.

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been incarcerated by the military regime, leading to riots, urban violence, and curfew. The novel also incorporates the Widow, a woman who fights another relentless battle – to protect the inheritance right of all widowed women from avaricious brothers-in-law. Shamsie’s fourth novel, Broken Verses, builds on the street protests against Zia’s notorious laws of the legendary Women’s Action Forum.31 It does so through the narrator Aasmani and her memories of her famous and fearless mother Samina, a fiery activist. But Aasmani has been unable to cope with Samina’s disappearance thirteen years earlier; prior to this, Samina’s lover, The Poet, a national hero was brutally and inexplicably murdered. Suddenly, Aasmani starts receiving letters suggesting The Poet is still alive. Aasmani compares the jaded and complacent present with the heroic past and the egalitarian battles Samina and the Poet fought against tyranny. The novel is rich with metaphor, including the Laila Majnoon myth, the subject of a famous poem by The Poet. This character is inspired by the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose English translators include Shamsie’s creative-writing professor Agha Shahid Ali, an English-language poet whose “surprising range,” Bruce King suggests, is echoed in Shamsie’s “complexity, art and ease in bringing together various literary traditions.”32 Shamsie’s wordplay, particularly in her early novels, reflects Rushdie’s influence, while her incorporation of Urdu literature art and culture in Salt and Saffron and subsequent work has affinities with Ahmed Ali, Nadeem Aslam, and Aamer Hussein – as well as with the Indian writer Attia Hosain, her great-aunt. 33 Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron also has links with Sunlight on a Broken Column, Hosain’s Partition novel. In Salt and Saffron, the narrator Aliya, daughter of urban Karachi professionals, fashions a collage of tales from across the centuries to tell of the prePartition past of her erstwhile princely family, the Dard-e-Dils (‘aching heart’). Family misunderstandings and political differences at the approach of independence snowball into a violent family quarrel, which also reflects the relationship between India and Pakistan. Aliya’s grandfather – one of triplets – moves to Pakistan, his brother Sulaiman remains in India, and the third, the rebellious Taimur, had vanished long ago. Shamsie draws parallels between the national

31

See Muneeza Shamsie, “Introduction” to And The World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 11. 32 King, “Images of the U S ,” 687. 33 See Muneeza Shamsie, “Sunlight and Salt: The Literary Landscapes of a Divided Family,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.1 (March 2009): 135–53.

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boundaries created by Partition with Karachi’s stratifications by class. Aliya, a U S college graduate, finds herself deeply attracted to Khaleel, a PakistaniAmerican. But he comes from “the wrong side of the tracks” in Karachi. Aliya is haunted by the memory of her much-loved cousin, the silent Mariam Apa – daughter of the elusive and silent Taimur – who eloped with Masood the cook and was never mentioned again by Dadi, Aliya’s aristocratic grandmother. Aliya’s quest for answers and the nuances of silence yield a witty matriarchal interpretation of history in which the unrecorded, subversive role of princesses, maidservants, midwives – and switched babies – reveals a tale of great love, grand battles, and undying sorrow. Shamsie’s third novel, Kartography, prises the lid off another ‘forgotten’ episode in contemporary Pakistan’s national narrative – the 1971 loss of East Pakistan (which became an independent Bangladesh). Shamsie links that fateful year with Karachi’s ethnic riots of the 1990s through the story of the narrator Raheen and her best friend Karim, who grow up in Karachi together, almost as twins. Their parents are close friends, but long before, in 1971, Raheen’s father had broken off his engagement to Karim’s Bengali mother, Aunty Maheen. Their tale becomes an intertwining of the political and personal, reconstructed through flashbacks. Raheen’s refusal to accept that Karim, who is half-Bengali, might have any identity different from hers “also repositions him within [Pakistan’s] post-Partition narratives of nation, writing over the events of 1971.” 34 Amid the urban violence of the 1990s, which accentuated divisions between Muhajir, Sindhis, Pathans, and Punjabis and between the feudal and urban, Karim’s parents migrate. Karim tries to reclaim Karachi by mapping it. His hand-drawn map offers [an] attempt to introduce exile as a constitutive experience of the post-1971 identity. It is a representation of the cityspace as a site of memory.35

Raheen, who remains in Karachi, insists on restricting herself to the small privileged space that she inhabits, but ultimately Raheen and Karim fall in love and “in the latter stages of Kartography, Karachi emerges as a conflicted but potentially productive site for a process of reconciliation structured by difference.”36 In 1947, Pakistan consisted of East and West Pakistan, divided by a thousand miles of hostile India. The 1970 election revealed a country sharply divided along ethnic lines, with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in East Pakistan receiving the 34

Caroline Herbert, “Lyric Maps and the Legacies of 1971 in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (2011): 164. 35 Herbert, “Lyric Maps,” 165. 36 “Lyric Maps,” 171.

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overall majority vote, since the province constituted 54% of the country’s population. The army (commanded by West Pakistanis) embarked on a brutal military action in East Pakistan to thwart the election results: East Pakistan broke away as Bangladesh. This traumatic event is seldom mentioned in Pakistan, leading to what Cara Cilano calls “a narrative vacuum [...] at a national level”37 and, with notable exceptions, a dearth of ‘1971 literature’ in Pakistan, as Cilano points out. Sorayya Y. Khan’s first novel, Noor, the only Pakistani English novel to depict graphically the 1971 carnage in East Pakistan, draws on the popular subcontinental myth that the handicapped have clairvoyant powers. The novel alternates between peaceful contemporary Islamabad and the turmoil of 1971 in East Pakistan. Ali, an army officer, brings home to Islamabad an orphaned Bengali child, Sajjida. She is brought up by him and his mother Naanijan, and marries, but her third child, Noor, is mentally disadvantaged. Noor creates uncanny dream-paintings which unlock Ali and Sajjida’s buried memories of 1971. Cara Cilano points out that Ali’s sojourn in East Pakistan lasts nine months – the length of a woman’s gestation – and that on his return to Islamabad, he takes a bath so hot that the rising steam scalds his genitals. De-sexed, Ali’s “paternal body” becomes “a metaphor for the violence carried out in the nation’s name.”38 Gradually it transpires that Ali’s stories and Sajjida’s are more intertwined than they had imagined: the family that Ali had shot, on the edge of a pit in East Pakistan, was hers. Interestingly, in the novels of women writers such as Khan, Farooki, and Shamsie, confrontations with an unpalatable truth open up possibilities of atonement and forgiveness. Khan, the daughter of a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother, also writes extensively of interconnectedness. Her next novel, Five Queen’s Road, links experiences of Partition to Europe in World War Two, through the inhabitants of a house in Lahore. Its owner, Dina Lal, a Hindu businessman, insists on remaining there while other Hindus flee across the borders to India amid the Partition riots. He rents half his house to the lawyer Amir Shah, a Muslim migrant fleeing from Amritsar. In time, Amir Shah’s son Javaid meets and marries Irene, a Dutch-American woman who had once lived in wartorn Holland. The novel moves in and out of time to tell of Amir Shah’s quarrel with Dina Lal, the changing face of the neighbourhood, and Irene’s adjustment to Lahore. 37

Cara Cilano, National Identities in Pakistan: The 1971 War in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2011): 2. 38 Cilano, National Identities, 56.

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Roopa Farooki, the daughter of a Bengali mother and Punjabi father (N.A Farooki, an early Pakistani English novelist) grew up in Britain; her protagonists are usually Bengali, and glide effortlessly across South Asia’s national boundaries. In her first novel, Bitter Sweet, Ricky, a wealthy Calcutta businessman, is trapped in a marriage to the under-age Henna, in Dhaka. Their daughter Kiran elopes with her dashing Lahore cousin to London, where family secrets are discovered, including her parents’ double life and her father’s English wife and their family. Farooki’s second novel, Corner Shop, revolves around a half-French, half-Bangladeshi family; her third, The Way Things Look To Me, alternates between three siblings, Yasmin, Asif, and Lila Murphy. Their Irish father died long ago, but the sudden demise of their British Asian mother leaves the teenage Yasmin particularly vulnerable, because she suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. The Cambridge-educated Asif tries to look after her and manage a full-time career, while the beautiful Lila struggles with bipolar disorder – as indeed does Roony (Aruna), the main protagonist in Farooki’s fourth novel, Half Life, which is set in contemporary Britain and the South Asian diaspora in the Far East. Roony, a Singapore academic in Britain, walks out on Patrick, her English husband, and flies off to Singapore to rejoin Jazz, her childhood friend and erstwhile lover. Roony is researching the Bengali poet Hari Hassan, who turns out to be Jazz’s estranged father. She discovers a letter addressed to “My brother enemy,”39 which Hari wrote to his old friend Anwar, a Punjabi military officer, in 1971. Anwar, it transpires, has played an important role in Hari’s life and remains a lifelong friend. Hari’s reflections take him back to his life in pre-Partition Calcutta and then to Chittagong and to Nazneen, the young woman he loved in World War Two, who died giving birth to their illegitimate child. Years later, Zohra, the woman he marries, is already pregnant with Jazz, and thus gives him the child he had longed for. Farooki’s clever use of indirection speaks volumes about the intertwined family histories of Hari and Anwar, and those of their two nations. One of the most important developments in recent Pakistani English fiction is the increasing number of books that end a virtual national and literary amnesia to comment on the 1971 conflict. These novels include Without Dreams by Shahbano Bilgrami, Invitation by Shahryar Fazli, Bengal Raag by the twin sisters Ghazala Hameed and Durdana Soomro, and The End of Innocence by Moni Mohsin. Mohsin, who grew up in Lahore and now lives in Britain, reclaims the rural Punjab of her childhood in Innocence, which centres on the daughter of an 39

Roopa Farooki, Half Life (London: Macmillan, 2010): 11.

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aristocratic landowner, the eight-year-old Laila, and her friendship with the fifteen-year-old Rani, her maidservant’s daughter. Rani’s pursuit of a romantic dream leads to a love affair and an unwanted pregnancy. Laila is unwittingly caught up in a chain of events which culminate in Rani’s murder by her vicious stepfather. Mohsin has also worked as journalist and editor for the weekly Friday Times in Lahore, for which, from January 2000 to December 2008, she wrote a witty and popular weekly column, “The Diary of a Social Butterfly,” which was developed into a novel of the same name. Her novel/column was particularly remarkable for Butterfly’s wonderfully rich hybrid language, a lively combination of inaccurate English and indigenous Punjabi and Urdu terms which, unknown to Butterfly herself, are filled with double entendres. Butterfly, a canny, upwardly mobile, self-involved Lahore socialite, spreads gossip about people with names like Floozie and Flopsy. She pursues her social whirl with vigour, and regards Janoo, her Oxford-educated landlord husband, and his various worthy occupations as “very bore.”40 World events seldom concern her, and are summed up in chapter headings such as “January 2003: U S sends troops to Gulf: Butterfly bemoans the lack of good New Year parties.”41 Mohsin’s third novel, Tender Hooks, continues the life and times of Butterfly. Social satire has been pivotal to Pakistani English literature across the decades. In Shandana Minhas’s Tunnel Vision, the main protagonist looks back upon her life and her dysfunctional family while hovering between life and death after a car accident. In Beautiful from This Angle, Maha Khan Phillips lampoons both the Western media and stereotyped images of Pakistan, particularly Muslim women. Her protagonist Amynah, a privileged single socialite, writes a racy newspaper column about her ditzy and glitzy life of parties, sex, drugs, and drink. She is also working on an utterly false memoir, “The Oppressed Muslim Woman’s Story,” designed for Western audiences. While her friend Monte is happily using actors for his popular reality show “Who Wants to Be a Terrorist?” for a foreign TV channel, a real al-Qaida terrorist is caught in the sleepy village on the family lands of her friend Henna in Southern Punjab, and nothing is the same again. The bilingual translator and novelist Musharraf Ali Farooqi made his debut with his rumbustious, overcrowded first novel Passion in the Time of Termites, which tells of the octagenarian Salar Jang’s obsession with a corpulent film-star in the decaying Purana Shehr (Old City). His second novel, The Story of a Widow, is a quiet, sophisticated, controlled, and witty tale which depicts the dilemmas 40 41

Moni Mohsin, Diary of a Social Butterfly (2008; Lahore: Vanguard, 2009): viii. Mohsin, Diary of a Social Butterfly, 67.

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of the widowed Mona. She defies the laws of propriety and decorum to marry the flamboyant and sensuous Salaamat Ali. A muddled sense of guilt prompts her to keep on the wall a photograph of her late husband, the bullying, parsimonious Akbar Ahmed. The photograph develops a life of its own. The growing international interest in Pakistani English literature has also led to the publication of The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmed, a seventy-eightyear-old retired bureaucrat whose unpublished manuscript received little attention for thirty-eight years! Now showered with critical acclaim, it draws on Ahmed’s knowledge of the remote regions areas to which he was posted. Kamila Shamsie observes: Is this a novel or a collection of short stories? The question doesn’t really matter in the reading of it. The child born in the first chapter/story appears, often in the most tangential fashion, in all the subsequent sections, except one. A third of the way through the book he is given a name: Tor Baz or Black Falcon.42

Ahmed’s wonderfully lucid writing and his rare, moving, and unusual portrait of tribal life take the reader from the barren landscapes of Baluchistan to the verdant valleys of Swat. He tells of ancient laws and timeless customs, a great and tragic love story – that of Tor Baz’s parents – amid glimpses of remote military outposts, rival tribes, and the slow intrusion of modernity and government. Written prior to the advent of the Taliban, the book “moves far beyond the Western media’s stereotypical depiction of the tribal areas and lays bare the nature of a place that is now a focal point of U S and European foreign policy.”43 This essay could possibly be more comprehensive,44 but it is evident from the novelists discussed here that within a decade, from being a genre with a handful of critically acclaimed practitioners, the Pakistani English novel has developed and diversified. These new writers not only reveal extraordinary talent but also engage in a discourse which both looks unflinchingly at the problems of a troubled land and celebrates its cultural riches.

42

Kamila Shamsie, “The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmed: Review,” The Guardian (14 August 14 2011): http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/14/wandering-falcon-jamil-ahmad-review (accessed 12 October 2011). 43 Alex Rodriguez, “Pakistan’s Unlikely Storyteller of the Swat Valley,” Los Angeles Times (26 September 2011): http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/26/world/la-fg-pakistan-author-20110926 (accessed 11 October 2011). 44 For a more detailed discussion, see Muneeza Shamsie, Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani English Literature (Karachi: Oxford U P , forthcoming 2016).

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W O R K S C I TE D Abidi, Azhar. Passarola Rising (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006). ——.Twilight (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2008). Ahmad, Eqbal. Between Past and Future: Selected Essays on South Asia, ed. Dohra Ahmad, Iftikhar Ahmad, Zulfikar Ahmad & Zia Mian (Karachi: Oxford U P , 2004). ——.The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmed, ed. Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, Yogesh Chandrani & Naom Chomsky (Karachi: Oxford U P , 2006). Ali, Agha Shahid. Veiled Suite: Collected Poems of Agha Shahid Ali (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009). Ali, Ahmed. Twilight in Delhi (London: Hogarth, 1940). Aslam, Nadeem. “Laila in the Wilderness,” Granta 112 (November 2010): 9–53. ——.Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber & Faber, 2004). ——.Season of the Rainbirds (London: Faber & Faber, 1993). ——.The Wasted Vigil (London: Faber & Faber, 2008). Bilgrami, Shahbano. Without Dreams (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2007). Chambers, Claire. “A Comparative Approach to Pakistani Fiction in English,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (May 2011): 122–34. Cilano, Cara. National Identities in Pakistan: The 1971 War in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2011). Faiz, Ahmed. The Rebel’s Silhouette, tr. Agha Shahid Ali (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1997). Farooki, Roopa. Bitter Sweet (London: Macmillan, 2008). ——.Corner Shop (London: Pan, 2009). ——.Half Life (London: Macmillan, 2011). ——.The Way Things Look to Me (London: Pan, 2010). Farooqi, Musharraf Ali. Passion in the Time of Termites (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2001). ——.The Story of a Widow (Toronto: Random House, 2008). Fazli, Shahryar. Invitation (Chennai: Tranquebar, 2011). Gauhar, Feryal. No Space for Further Burials (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2007). ——.The Scent of Wet Earth in August (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2002). Gingerich, Philip D. “Research on the Origin and Early Evolution of Whales (Cetacea),” http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gingeric/PDGwhales/Whales.htm (accessed 18 September 2011). Gurnah, Abdulrazak. By The Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). ——.Paradise (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). Hameed, Ghazala, & Durdana Soomro. Bengal Raag (Dhaka: Writers Ink, 2006). Hamid, Mohsin. Moth Smoke (2000; London: Penguin, 2011). ——.The Reluctant Fundamentalist (New York: Harcourt, 2007). Hanif, Mohammed. A Case of Exploding Mangoes (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008). Hemans, Felicia. “Casabianca” (1826), in A Celebration of Women Writers, http://digital .library.upenn.edu/women/hemans/works/hf-burning.html (accessed 11 October 2011). Herbert, Caroline. “Lyric Maps and the Legacies of 1971 in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (May 2011): 159–72.

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Hosain, Attia. Sunlight on a Broken Column (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961). Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (New York: Riverhead, 2003). ——.A Thousand Splendid Suns (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). Hussein, Aamer. The Cloud Messenger (London: Telegram, 2011). ——. “The Lost Cantos of a Silken Tiger,” in Hussein, This Other Salt (London: Saqi, 2005): 79–102. Hussein, Abdullah. Émigré Journeys (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000) Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Deep Topographies in the Fiction of Uzma Aslam Khan,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (May 2011): 173–85. Khan, Sorayya Y. Five Queen’s Road (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2008). ——.Noor (Lahore: Alhamra, 2003). Khan, Uzma Aslam. The Geometry of God (Northampton MA : Clockroot, 2009). ——.The Story of Noble Rot (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2001). ——.Trespassing (London: HarperPerennial, 2003). Khan Phillips, Maha. Beautiful From This Angle (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2010). King, Bruce. “The Image of the U S in Three Pakistani Novels,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8.3 (1 September 2007): 683–88. ——. “Kamila Shamsie’s Novels of History, Exile and Desire,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (May 2011): 147–58. Kovesi, Simon. “Joseph’s Box by Suhail Saadi: Review,” The Independent (11 September 2009), http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/josephsbox-by-suhayl-saadi-1784898.html (accessed 11 October 2011). Kumar, Amitava. “The Chronicle of the Airconditioned Class,” Frontline 17.15 (22 July–4 August 2000): http://www.hindu.com/fline/fl1715/17150730.htm (accessed 19 September 2011). Kureishi, Hanif. Something To Tell You (London: Faber & Faber, 2010). Lee–Potter, Charlie. “Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam,” The Independent (27 June 2004), http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent ertainment/books/reviews/maps-forlost-lovers-by-nadeem- aslam-733729.html (accessed 3 October 2011). Minhas, Shandana. Tunnel Vision (New Delhi: Roli, 2007). Mohsin, Moni. Diary of a Social Butterfly (2008; Lahore: Vanguard, 2009). ——.The End of Innocence (London: Fig Tree, 2006). ——.Tender Hooks (New Delhi: Random House, 2011). Morey, Peter. “‘The Rules of the Game Have Changed’: Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist and Post 9/11 Fiction,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (May 2011): 135– 46. Naqvi, H.M. Home Boy (New York: Crown, 2009). Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). ——.The English Patient (Westminster MD : McClelland & Stewart, 1992). Pamuk, Orhan. My Name is Red, tr. Erdag M. Goknar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). Prasad, Udayan, dir. Brothers In Trouble, screenplay by Robert Buckler (BBC Films 1995; 102 min.).

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Rodriguez, Alex. “Pakistan’s Unlikely Storyteller of the Swat Valley,” Los Angeles Times (26 September 2011), http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/26/world/la-fg-pakistanauthor-20110926 (accessed 11 October 2013). Rushdie, Salman. Shame (London: Picador, 1983). Saadi, Suhayl. Joseph’s Box (Lewis: Two Ravens, 2009). ——.Psychoraag (Edinburgh: Black and White, 2004). Shamsie, Kamila. Broken Verses (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). ——.Burnt Shadows (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). ——.In The City By The Sea (London: Granta, 1998). ——.Kartography (London: Bloomsbury, 2002). ——.“The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmed: Review,” The Guardian (14 August 2011), http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/14/wandering-falcon-jamil-ahmad-re view (accessed 12 October 2011). Shamsie, Muneeza. “Benim Adim Kirmizi [My Name is Red]” in The Literary Encyclopedia (23 February 2006), http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16880 (accessed 11 October 2011). ——. “Covert Operations in Pakistani Fiction,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 31.2 (2009): 15–25. ——.Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani English Literature (Karachi: Oxford U P , forthcoming 2016). ——. “A Matter of Dishonour,” Index on Censorship 31.4 (2002): 192–95. ——. “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” The Literary Encyclopedia (21 May 2009), http: //www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23135 (accessed 11 October 2011). ——. “Sunlight and Salt: The Literary Landscapes of a Divided Family,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.1 (March 2009) 135–53. ——, ed. And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women (New York: Feminist Press, 2008). ——, ed. Beyond Geography: Literature, Politics and Violence in Pakistan (special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2, May 2011). Suleri, Sara. Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2003). Vargas Llosa, Mario, The Feast of the Goat, tr. Edith Grossman (La fiesta del chivo, 2000; New York: Picador, 2001). Waterman, David. “Modernity and Cultural Identity: Negotiating Modernity in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers,” Pakistaniaat: Journal of Pakistan Studies 2.2 (2010): 18– 35.

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N EW Z EALA ND A ND T HE S OUT H P A CIFI C

Fantasy, Myth, and the Pacific World Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela J E AN –P I E RR E D UR IX

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S O N S F O R T H E R E T U R N H O M E ( 197 3 ), his first novel, Albert Wendt has written fictional sagas such as Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), a chronicle which traces the contradictions of village life in Samoa, where modern individualistic values conflict with the fa’a-Samoa.1 Together with Pouliuli (1977), this work could be called a ‘village novel’, a sub-genre named after the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Although Wendt’s early books reveal his interest in Samoan culture and values, he is neither an unconditional admirer of the fa’a-Samoa nor an unquestioning ancestor-worshipper. The study of existentialism in his student years seems to have had a major impact on him. His conception of narration, with its frequently conflicting voices, is reminiscent of William Faulkner’s experiments. Albert Wendt’s most recent fiction, particularly since Black Rainbow (1992), an allegorical thriller situated in a dystopian version of Auckland, contains a significant proportion of fantasy. Wendt has published several collections of poetry, whose themes range from the personal to the allegorical.2 In the last few years, he has also turned to drama, with the production of his play The Songmaker’s Chair, and to painting large pictures in acrylic on canvas, some of which have been exhibited in Honolulu,3 Auckland,4 and Wellington. A hybrid literary creation, The Adventures of Vela (2009) combines fiction with poetry, oral storytelling with metafiction, myths with the mundane. The

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Traditional Samoan customs. See his emblematic collection entitled Inside Us the Dead (1976). 3 In September 2007, Albert Wendt had his first exhibition of paintings, at the Louis Pohl Gallery in Honolulu. 4 McCarthy Art Gallery, Auckland, December 2008. He also shared an exhibition with Momoe von Rieche in the same gallery in March 2009. 2

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verse is organized following a visual logic on the page. With punctuation reduced to a minimum, enlarged spacing between words stands for commas. The capitalization of the first letter replaces the use of full stops to indicate the start of a new sentence. The succession of such ‘sentences’ is meant to be read aloud and even, at times, declaimed, particularly in the mythic episodes. Writing a novel in verse represents a challenge both for the author and for potential readers, who may be reluctant to embark on 270-odd pages of poetry. Yet The Adventures of Vela eventually appears as a fascinating linguistic tour de force that brings together conversation and elevated style, bawdiness and myth. In most of the novel, Albert Wendt writes in a type of narrative free verse designed to make the story accessible to the ordinary reader and not only, as the writer admitted with tongue in cheek in a recent TV interview, to his “academic friends.”5 The Adventures of Vela was in the making for nearly forty years.6 Wendt usually works on three or four different manuscripts at the same time and the composition is frequently interrupted by long periods of other artistic activities. A single work may start as a short story or a poem, which eventually forms part of a wider framework. Here, a reader familiar with his works will recognize sections that have appeared as individual poems elsewhere and only recently coalesced into the present work.7 In this novel, Albert Wendt engages in dialogue not only with his readers but also with canonical authors such as Albert Camus, Homer, W.B. Yeats, and the esteemed New Zealand poet James K. Baxter, whom Wendt knew when he was a student in Wellington. Inter– textual echoes form an integral part of the process of creation for a writer who also readily acknowledges his kinship with contemporary Mǒori and South Pacific artists such as the poet Hone Tuwhare and Epeli Hau’ofa, two close friends of Wendt’s who died very recently and to whose memory he dedicated the present novel.8

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“Good Morning,” Television New Zealand (One), 21 July 2009, 6.32 a.m. On the last page of the novel, the author mentions the places where The Adventures of Vela was written: “Samoa – Fiji – Aotearoa/New Zealand – Hawaii –Aotearoa/New Zealand.” This suggests that the novel was started in the second half of the 1960s, when Wendt returned to Samoa to finish his degree, and completed at the end of 2008 after he returned from teaching for four years at the University of Hawai‘i. 7 Such is the case with the sections entitled “The Mountains of Ta’u” (41), “The Contest” (23), and “Nei” (123), which were first included in a collection of poetry entitled Photographs under a heading which already specified that they were to be part of a future piece provisionally entitled “The Adventures of Vela.” 8 Hone Tuwhare died in January 2008 and Epeli Hau’ofa in January 2009. 6

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Besides these tributes to fellow writers, Wendt does not hesitate to introduce a personal note into what is basically a piece of imagination: the main speaking voice in The Adventures of Vela is known as Alapati, the author’s Samoan name, and reference is made to the painful break-up of his marriage, as well as to his three children, who appear under their real names. Here, as in Black Rainbow, Wendt mixes the most personal material with the wildest forms of fantasy. In the first chapter, Alapati/the protagonist, lies in a hospital bed suffering from a stomach ulcer, a condition that has affected Wendt himself in the past. Yet the story veers towards pure fiction with his meeting with Vela, who shares a ward with Alapati and later chooses him as his chronicler. The novel is divided into four books, with an alternation between sections focused on Vela (Books One and Three) and the rest, which centres on Nafanua, the Samoan goddess of war. Vela, an anti-hero born in very modest circumstances, acquired his name – which means ‘cooked’ in Samoan – “because he looked red and hot.”9 Growing into a lustful adolescent, he develops a special fondness for the “kinky stench of pig,” and then for Mulialofa,10 a bush doctor who cures his father from having to “carry / his filariasis-bloated balls around in a sling” (7). The stage is set for a tall tale with Rabelaisian sexual undertones. Alopese, a formidable “half-atua11 half-tagata,”12 challenges Mulialofa in a poetry competition from which Alopese emerges as the winner, demanding nothing less than the bones of his rival as a prize. Vela subsequently takes his revenge by beating him at his own game and ‘only’ claiming his opponent’s voice – and therefore his mana13 – as his reward. From this point on, Vela’s reputation spreads and he becomes the supreme sovereign’s historian and chronicler, which, unfortunately for him, forces him – despite his craving for peace – to sing the praises of his patron’s heroic feats on the battlefield. He eventually falls into the hands of Nafanua. Nafanua’s father is Saveasi’uleo, an atua with the tail of a conger-eel who reigns over Pulotu, the underworld. Saveasi’uleo brings up his daughter as 9

The Adventures of Vela (Wellington: Huia, 2009): 11. All further references are included in the text. 10 Note the bawdy connotations of the name, which, in Samoan, means literally, ‘love from the rear’ and which is freely interpreted by the narrator as “Loving-arse or Arse-for-Loving/or the ArseEnd-of-Love” (18). Cf. also the title of Epeli Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends (Auckland: Penguin, 1987). 11 ‘god’ in Samoan. 12 ‘human being’ in Samoan. 13 In Polynesian societies, mana is a highly valued supernatural force related to fame and prestige. It can be attached to an individual, community, object or particular place.

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though she were a man and has her learn to master all the arts of fighting and leading soldiers into war. Nafanua’s enormous sexual appetite cannot be satiated until she meets Tagatalua,14 a hermaphroditic creature for whom she seeks the privilege of immortality from her reluctant father. Her maternal instinct is aroused by the discovery of a helpless “albino” (in actual fact, a white sailor) who is found unconscious on the beach and whom she nurses back to life. Because they ignore the question of where he comes from, Nafanua’s entourage call him Maifea?15 and he becomes Nafanua’s protégé until he falls a helpless victim to the rivalry between Nafanua and Tagaloa, the supreme god. In Book Three, we follow Vela’s various travels through strange lands, first that of the Tagata Nei,16 who live only in the present, then through Olfact, a place where the sense of smell is considered the supreme mode of perception. The Book closes with Alapati’s own poem, “Nightflight,” about his return trip from China. After mysteriously disappearing for a long time, Vela suddenly knocks on Alapati’s door in Auckland and takes him to Samoa to meet Nafanua on the night of the next full moon. Book Four brings the story of Vela and Alapati’s relationship with Nafanua to a sort of apotheosis. Vela takes Alapati to Falealupo at the western tip of the island of Savai’i, the place where the souls of the dead are supposed to start on their journey to the underworld, following “the lava tunnel down into the sea and Pulotu” (243).17 There they meet Father Macdonald, an unconventional Christian priest who eventually admits that he has fallen under the charm of Nafanua, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Father Hatherly, “who’s drowned at the edge of the headland behind the church” (235) more or less at the same place as Maifea? was washed ashore by the waves. The cult of Nafanua gradually went underground after the conversion of the local people to the new religion brought by the Christian missionaries. Wendt implies that the ancient goddess paradoxically re-appeared in a new guise through the person of a recent Roman Catholic archbishop of Samoa who was a descendant of Nafanua’s old priests. 18 Father Macdonald proves unconventional when he declares to his visitors: “in the 14

The name is aptly chosen, since, in Samoan, it means, according to the narrator, “TwoPeople-in-One” (65). 15 In Samoan, the name means ‘from where?’, hence the unusual question mark that always follows his name. 16 In Samoan, the name means ‘people of the present time’. 17 A similar place exists for the Mǒori at Cape Reinga, the northernmost point of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. 18 This fictional character echoes a real figure, Cardinal Pio Taofinu’u, who was born in Falealupo and died in 2006.

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ironical run of history Her grandson is now boss of / the arrogant church that outlawed Her into the Christian darkness” (236). Father Macdonald, who is obsessed with the figure of Nafanua, also adds that his church was built exactly where the first European sailor landed in the eighteenth century. The Adventures of Vela brings together heterogeneous elements in which fantasy and myth play a major part. Though Nafanua figures prominently, the novel does not simplistically express a nostalgic longing for an idealized preChristian past. Instead, the evocation of illustrious Samoan figures and of alternative attitudes to what the anthropologists call ‘myths’ reveals the writer’s complex reaction to ideologically oriented conceptions of the fa’a-Samoa. As the title suggests, the novel is made up of many picaresque adventures embarked on by the eponymous hero. The plot follows the tumultuous existence of an often scandalous figure with inexhaustible and sometimes unconventional sexual urges. Some of the more futuristic episodes smack of science fiction. When new characters are introduced, Wendt generally retraces their genealogy or evokes a myth of origin, an approach which might be interpreted as a kind of homage paid to the oral culture of Samoa. Yet Wendt is not a blind adorer of tradition and he does not hesitate to parody or sometimes mock it when it becomes a pretext to humour tourists or to mask the wrongdoings of the people in power. At one point, the protagonist, who has sailed out on a fishing expedition, is carried away by a storm and, as in Gulliver’s Travels, lands in a strange land which he calls [.. .] Nei because its atua Couldn’t recall their origin or one step Beyond the moment (123)

The name of the place fits its inhabitants perfectly, since, in Samoan, “nei” means ‘now’, ‘the present time’. Ironically, in a story told by several chroniclers whose narratives are embedded in one another, the Tagata Nei have no need for any historian. Living in an eternal present, past and future do not exist for them. These people revere the number ten to such an extent that their year is divided up into ten months, each made up of ten weeks, each week counting ten days, and their social life leads them to always live in groups of ten. Their social exchanges appear to be based on a sort of musical humming which expresses their perfect mutual understanding. When a member of a group of ten acquires new learning, “the transfer to everyone is instant” (132). Their world is based on the fitting-together of various concentric circles which constitute a perfect mathematical harmony. Theirs is a model, utopian, environmentally friendly society.

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The Tagata Nei are ruled by obsessive rituals and an unchanging organization. Their year is composed of five seasons: Planting, Building, Harvesting, Mating, Music. Unlike in the world of the atua, death is not final among the Tagata Nei, since the celebration of an appropriate ceremony can bring the deceased back to life. The abundant food which the Tagata-Nei enjoy also has sexual connotations for Vela, who feasts on clams which are “magic for [his] central muscle / and now sorely missed in [his] flaccid aging” (136). The Tagata-Nei make love only during the mating season and, at that time of the year, they indulge in all sorts of unimaginable orgies. For Vela, a Samoan used to respecting a strict taboo on public gestures of a sexual nature, this revelation is a welcome release from an oppressive norm. Yet, when he first arrives in their world, he is shocked by their habit of walking around stark-naked and wearing only the black decorations painted on their bodies. His reaction echoes the prejudices of the first European explorers when he remarks: “To the civilised like us black is the taint of / inferiors” (127). Initially, Vela, who comes from a prudish background, has great difficulty in controlling an erection when faced with all these bare bodies. As he says, betraying his prejudices, “only savages went naked” (126). He is very surprised when, as soon as the mating season is over, the Tagata Nei revert to life without sexuality until the next appropriate season. Though fascinated by what happens during the mating season, Vela is shocked by so much promiscuity and by the systematic practice of abortion which follows indiscriminate copulation. The lecher turns missionary and undertakes to convert them to “civilised” (that is, Samoan) ways. Wendt’s humorous treatment of this episode suggests a parallel between Vela’s attitude and the ideology of the ‘white man’s burden’ which justified imperialism. Like the first white missionaries, Vela teaches the Tagata Nei how to exist as individuals in a society based on communal sharing and responsibility. He also tells them that they each have a separate identity and name instead of just being a number in a cluster of ten. He introduces “the civilised concept of chiefs and commoners / divinely appointed or earned through heroic action” (144) into a classless society. He tries to abolish the “brainlinking” that ensures that communication with one is instantly transmitted to the others. This kind of communion threatens his hegemonic aspirations, because “power is knowledge / kept secret from others” (145). The Tagata Nei’s system of thinking is “self-healing self-renewing / a marvel of total environmental and biological engineering / though it denied freewill and wisdom acquired / through aging and suffering” (148). Yet Vela cannot help trying to seize power over their institutions in order to re-create his own version of a perfect society envisaged

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on the Samoan model. Ironically, through this evocation of a re-engineered culture, Albert Wendt implicitly criticizes some of the excesses of Samoan society: his insistence on a divinely sanctioned class system can be considered as implicit criticism of what many people associate with the Samoan way. Vela creates a caste of trusted lieutenants who all vie for his unique favours, and he enjoys the status of supreme chief. At the end of his process of social reconditioning, Vela appears like Tagaloa, the supreme Samoan godhead – or like the Christian God of Genesis – and is ready to rest. This desire to control everything goes to his head. He even imposes his homeland’s music on the Tagata Nei in return for their teaching him their own. The ‘missionary’ has to admit that his preference for his own sense of harmony probably comes from the fact that their own was “too complex for [his] mastery” (153). The civilizer implicitly recognizes that the “savages” are actually more sophisticated than he is. His close circle of chiefs admire his efforts at inventing songs but he then becomes ashamed of his paltry creation and realizes that they were just flattering him. He replaces their mating season by acts of sadomasochism, which are far more damaging than their traditional temporary orgies. Eventually this triggers a pattern of general conflict which ruins the harmony that existed in the society. Vela, in cowardly fashion, escapes from this world, which he has largely attempted to destroy. This nightmarish conclusion pushes to its limit the logic of the missionaries’ desire to control a territory by re-programming its institutions to suit their conceptions of civilization. Far from being a mere fantasy, the world of the Tagata Nei could well be interpreted as an allegory of what happens when a powerful culture seeks to impose its own logic on another. Retrospectively, Vela condemns his own behaviour, making a passing remark which might illustrate the author’s judgment on European colonization in the South Pacific: Recalling their conversion with hindsight’s wisdom is to judge it an unforgivable crime of my sightless arrogance (140)

Albert Wendt’s imaginary worlds may be distanced illustrations of contemporary problems or, at times, the projection of wild, frequently transgressive sexual fantasies. Chapter Twelve, entitled “Uiga-o-Vae,”19 is an odd assortment of drawings of different shapes of feet, all supposed to be an indication of their owners’ personality, at least if one believes Mulialofa, the traditional doctor who became Vela’s lover. This chapter is just one of the frequent digressions that characterize

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Samoan for ‘leg/foot’.

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a mode of storytelling obviously inspired by the oral tradition. Chapter Fifteen, “Olfact,” is all about Vela’s encounter with a civilization where smell is the main sense of perception. In that world, “Best smeller is best leader” and you are encouraged to “follow your nostrils” (159). All Olfactors must “smell [their] way to wisdom” (160). Children are not submitted to I Q tests but to SQ “Scent Quotient” (161) tests. This section is not devoid of metafictional preoccupations: Vela comments on the way the “Smellocracy” of these people selects their artists: the most successful ones are those who can best master inhaling, exhaling, “mouth throat / chest belly head and netherend as / extension or accompanying instruments” (167). The description veers towards parodic delirium when Vela evokes the forms that best please the Olfactors: My love is like the malodorous scents of red meat melting in the breeze ... Smell me darling wrap your fertile BO around me (167)

Those who transgress the taboos of Olfactors can even be sentenced to exile on the island of Manutevolo, an Olfactors’ version of Devil’s Island, 20 with its pervading sulphurous stench. The society is under the supreme authority of Manogitupusili: the name literally means ‘supreme king of smell’. Re-education of deviant members is taken care of by “Olfactorologists Olfactoriasists Olfac- / torpractors…” (176). Readers familiar with Wendt’s works will be reminded of a short story titled “I Will Be Our Saviour from the Bad Smell,”21 in which Samoan villagers suddenly become aware of a pervasive odour that they eventually take to be their own unique smell. The narrator, missionarylike, has dedicated his life to trying to eradicate it. Uiga-o-Vae simply pursues further the rich possibilities of exploring an aspect of human existence so closely associated with what is considered acceptable or objectionable. In the chapter entitled “Nei,” Vela comments on the stench of decaying food emanating from the offerings made by the Tagata Nei to their gods and remarks that he appears to be the only one who objects to this smell, thus “reconfirming [his] belief that we smell what we believe” (137). Vela’s opinion may well serve to question ready-made judgments concerning what is sweet or foul-smelling, an area of feeling closely linked with sexual taboos as well as social and religious interdictions. Vela’s adventures eventually bring him into contact with Nafanua and the world of the gods. Alapati raises the question of immortality in relation to atua, 20 21

‘Tevolo’ means ‘devil’ in Samoan. In The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man (New York: Viking, 1986).

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for whom it can be a blessing but also a burden. When Nafanua finally finds a lover who will give her a complete orgasm and she decides to stay with Tagatalua forever, she has to beg her father to grant Tagatalua immortality. When she counters him by arguing that there are creatures such as Maui who are half-atua and half-human, he replies that “they die because of their human half” (75). Nafanua, herself raised as a man, fell in love with Tagatalua because she thought the creature was a woman, until she discovered her/his hermaphroditic nature. This characteristic allows her more variety in her erotic experience but her father cannot help commenting unfavourably on Tagatalua’s marginality. When her father finally relents and agrees to grant immortality to Tagatalua, he imposes a restriction: “Tagatalua shall live forever and growing” (78). This initial riddle becomes clearer when, after spending many years with Tagatalua, Nafanua discovers that he/she is growing old and wrinkled and that his/her body continues to age, to such an extent that, even though he/she is immortal, Nafanua eventually finds Tagatalua repulsive and parts company with him/her. The main advantage of an atua such as Tagatalua is that he can choose the age at which he prefers to remain, and from that point on he never ages and always looks forty: this saves him from the inconveniences of both youth and old age. Nafanua deeply regrets her immortality at times, particularly when the objects of her affection are mortals: Though we hide it from ourselves She says old atua wish to die after enduring a stretch of eternity during which they witness nothing else is permanent or fixed (even art) and death is protection against the recurring loss especially of loved ones (99)

Paradoxically, if one believes what she says, mortals have an advantage, in that their limited life-span protects them from having to recover from the disappearance of too many human beings close to them. This, of course, presupposes that atua need mortals as objects for their affection, which is obviously the case in the universe evoked by Vela. The incompleteness of creatures on their own without any contact with others applies to atua as well as to mortals. Nafanua needs Vela to “feed Her vanity” (96), but the artist, too, is seeking special status when he starts chronicling the existence of an atua. Such is the case with Vela, who remarks parenthetically: Unconsciously artists seek immortality through their art I’m also scared of dying and Nafanua for

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a price can save me from that (97)

Immortality can also involve the perpetuation of curses, especially for atua who have a parent who is both human and beast – for example, Nafanua’s father, who has the tail of an eel. When Nafanua eventually produces an heir, she is appalled to discover that he has the same tail as her father and she promptly abandons him in the waves, telling everybody afterwards that she had an aborted child. Although the story of Nafanua belongs to the world of myth, it is strongly related to major historical events such as the advent of colonization and the conversion of Samoan people to Christianity. When he first arrives as a slave in Nafanua’s temple, Vela is awed by the environment and the atmosphere that reigns in this sacred shrine located in the depths of a lava tunnel. Looking at Auva’a, the oldest of Nafanua’s taulaaitu,22 [he] read but refused to believe the arrival of the Papalagi Aitu and their atua bursting from the prodigious sky wielding their firesticks and Book (49)

The vocabulary used, the mention of aitu or spirits and atua, the manner of referring to the firearms and the Bible brought by the European travellers – all this corresponds to the vision a Polynesian might have had before contact. Albert Wendt cannot be considered merely as a postcolonial writer who recuperates ready-made mythical or traditional elements from a tribal past. His attitude to art is much more sophisticated and reveals the influence of postmodernism. Reading Vela’s assertion at the beginning of the chapter entitled “The Contest,” one suspects that the character betrays the writer’s feelings when Vela declares: We are the remembered cord That stretches across the abyss Of all that we’ve forgotten We don’t inherit the past But a creation of our remembering (23)

What constitutes a culture is not a collection of frozen data which can be passed on to the succeeding generations. We strive to recover elements from a time

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Samoan for spirit medium.

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from which we are radically cut off but which we re-create through our imagination while pretending to be faithful to a never-changing tradition. The narrative, with its chronicler (Alapati) reporting on the life of another chronicler (Vela), himself reporting on the existence of the goddess Nafanua, consists of embedded stories which encourage readers to consider each strand of the novel at some distance. The narrator admits that, as with oral stories, the development will be neither logical nor linear; instead, it will include many twists and turns: In my telling there’ll be many asides – my style wanders but I promise they’ll all tie up finally to our songmaker (13)

Strikingly, this story about atua includes narratorial comments which reveal a self-conscious writer. The first-person narrator (Alapati) speaks in his own name at the beginning of Chapter Eleven entitled “(((A Breather)))” to say that Vela’s existence must not be omitted after this long section about Nafanua: chronicles usually omit the lives of their chroniclers but as you know the chronicler is the chronicle the teller is the tale (85)

This remark echoes Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that “the medium is the message.” The basic structure of the novel is obviously inspired by oral storytelling, a form which frequently takes on an epic dimension: the story is not meant merely to amuse but also to teach the younger generations about the origins of their society and values. Generally, such tales idealize a consecrated version of the past and sing the (sometimes exaggerated) praises of its heroes. Here, when the novel evokes the origins of Vela, it pretends to adhere to tradition and to link the protagonist with the most highly respected figures of Polynesian culture, in this particular case Maui, the youngest child of his parents, who performed such feats as fishing the islands of Aotearoa New Zealand from the ocean, snaring the sun in his net, and challenging the death-goddess, Hine-nui-te-Po, by penetrating her vagina head-first while she was asleep, in the hope of gaining immortality. However, the formidable goddess woke up and crushed Maui to death between her powerful thighs. Each of these references is interpreted negatively, with the result that Vela’s fate is described in mock-heroic ways which mix Polynesian and Christian references in a hodgepodge with comic undertones: Runt to complete the litter of six brothers and five sisters (remember Christ had twelve disciples) but unlike Maui Ti’iti’iatalaga

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and our other superheroes he wasn’t born of a randy atua and delighted accepting mortal: his ringwormed father had to carry his filariasis-bloated balls around in a sling his brother bred heirs in obstinate silence and was always hungry for pork… … Unlike our ancestral demigods he was to be no ingenious faitogafiti no lusty adventurer no reckless stealer of fire ‘oso and ava no expert fisher-up of islands… … no plaiter of magical snares no snarer and beater-up of arrogant La no suicidal challenger of death Goddesses (7)

Maui’s epic feats are almost reduced to the circus performances of a trickster23 or to the daring exploits of a beachcomber eager to conquer lascivious South Sea maidens. The least that can be said of the narrator’s attitude towards Maui is that it shows little respect for the almost sacred status of such a hero. Chapter Two of the novel echoes some of the conventions of traditional Polynesian epics, and starts with a tale of origins concerning the conception and birth of Vela. Yet his own coming into this world is anything but heroic: his father’s grotesquely enlarged testes and his mother’s silent acceptance of marital sex do not really constitute a solid basis for a glorious future for a child conceived too quickly in the sort of place where unlawful couples go for a quick cuddling session: “They’d squeezed him in one rainy afternoon in their taro patch / In between weeding and planting – too quick a squeeze they hadn’t enjoyed it” (7). After such inauspicious beginnings, the novel continues abruptly with a recitation of the consecrated Samoan genesis: In the beginning there was only Tagaloaalagi Living in the Vanimonimo Only He No Sky no Land Only He in the Vanimonimo He created Everything (8)

This traditional text is a word-for-word translation of the Samoan myth used as the opening for Wendt’s play The Songmaker’s Chair. The highly poetic retelling of this sacred text contrasts with the mock-heroic story of Vela’s conception. There follows an evocation of the circumstances of his birth when the Lulu, the 23

In Samoan, faitogafiti means ‘a cunning person’.

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owl goddess of his family (and also that of Albert Wendt), perched on the rafters of the house and informed him immediately that “Death is a song”: To hear it early is to decipher all paths to all songs Each song wellcaught wellshaped wellsung illuminates the ocean path that dances from the Fafa at Falealupo World’s End and the agaga begin their shuffle To Pulotu estate of Saveasi’uleo half-man half-congereel, who… … retreated to Pulotu to await the promised fulfilment of his genealogy in Nafanua his daughter … Atua undefeated uniter of our islands last to relent to the Albino aitu with their magic Book and preaching stick (9)

The newborn Vela is taught at an early age about the relationship between art and the knowledge of death. The craft of the storyteller may be a way of giving meaning to the inevitable end of all mortal beings. Here this acknowledgement is associated with the Samoan belief that, at Falealupo, the village at the northwest tip of the island of Savai’i, the souls of the dead begin their journey to the underworld where the last volcanic rocks off the headland plunge into the ocean. From this reminder, the narrative moves on to the evocation of Saveasi’uleo, the Samoan god of the underworld, who is half-human and half-fish in shape and who fathered Nafanua, the goddess of war who federated the different chiefdoms of Samoa and resisted the missionary expansion as long as possible. The link is made between the puny child and the goddess, the evocation of whom occupies much of the second half of the novel. The alternation of mock-heroic passages and highly poetic mythic evocations is characteristic of a novel in which the gods appear all-too-human at times in their failings and in which mortals, at least those gifted in storytelling, can weave imaginative structures that bridge the gaps between the different elements of creation and illuminate a world obsessed with its own destruction. The Lulu wisely concludes that “all his life [Vela will] want to swim back up / his mother’s sacred passage” (11), no doubt a combination of the Oedipus complex and a reference to Maui’s fatal attempt to penetrate Hine-nui-te-Po. Vela’s fate illustrates Albert Wendt’s conception of the artist, who lives with the certainty of his own eventual destruction and who strives to weave stories to offset the absurd darkness at the end. Another metaphor aptly illustrates Wendt’s conception of the artist’s journey through life: evoking the conditions

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surrounding Vela’s birth, Alapati remarks: “Our songmaker started in the Lulu’s gazing / and like us had to pace the lava channel / until he was agaga in Tagaloa’s reflection” (9). Life is a long progression through darkness until one becomes a soul (agaga in Samoan) travelling to the underworld. The central section of this novel chronicles the life of Nafanua in the face of rampant westernization. She was a ruling goddess for three hundred years until the missionaries arrived and gradually replaced her by the Christian God. According to Wendt in his Television New Zealand interview, her status in Samoa was largely due to the charisma of her two ruling priests, one, Auva’a, who had considerable spiritual prestige, the other, Tupa’i, who was a very able general. Wendt’s comments reflect his belief that the gods’ prestige is largely due to that of the human beings dedicated to their worship. As Auva’a remarks to Vela, “remember taulaaitu make atua through / dedicated proselytising and conquest” (54). Vela later on suggests that Nafanua is as dependent on him as he is on her: […] She feeds my gift with mystery after mystery… In turn I feed Her vanity – without me She won’t be remembered – at least not The magnificence She wants to be (96)

If human beings did not exist, then, one is tempted to conclude, gods would not exist, either. This somewhat subverts the Christian notion of a God who existed before everything and everybody on earth and who was responsible for the Creation. In terms of prosody, the section dedicated to Nafanua differs from the others by being mostly written in sestets, whereas comments on her chronicles are generally organized in quintets. The form of the stanzas serves as a reminder of who is speaking in a novel where the narration shifts almost imperceptibly from one voice to another. The story follows fairly closely the details handed down in Samoan mythology. However, Wendt’s presentation, which, he admits, is largely fictional, bears witness to the author’s ambivalent attitude towards traditional deities. Commenting on her own sexual choice of Tagalua, Nafanua concludes with a remark that echoes C.G. Jung’s argument about human beings’ latent bisexuality: All things are Female and Male together That’s our nature but we’ve split It to let man enslave all Else in the Scheme

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Through my love of Tagatalua I rediscovered The natural order of our selves (67)

Other ironical remarks inspired by psychoanalysis and modern anthropology introduce a lighter note to Nafanua’s re-telling of her genealogy, which, on the surface, follows a traditional pattern. Yet her family does not respect social interdictions. As she says, My father Saveasi’uleo was my uncle Tilafaiga my mother was his brother’s daughter No incest taboos for atua only mortals Must keep blood apart or degenerate insanely (52)

Far from being limited to the ethereal style of divinities, Nafanua uses the speech of modern human beings. This might appear to be a way of debunking ancient religion, were it not for Wendt’s obvious respect for the values inherent in the pre-Christian religion. Wendt’s slightly irreverent attitude reminds the reader of the tone adopted by other writers from the Pacific such as Patricia Grace24 or Hone Tuwhare.25 Being immortal in Pulotu, Nafanua can enjoy the warrior’s pleasure of killing other atua who will inevitably be reborn, thus rendering the whole process playful and slightly absurd: And in Pulotu there was no shortage Of any variety of man and all being spirit Could be killed and rekilled to rise again (52)

In a parenthetical remark, the narrator comments on the limits of an immortality that turns the atua into less admirable creatures than one might imagine: (Is it that we feed rapaciously on death when we can’t love or know the gift of birth? […] Is Atuahood the supreme vice that corrupts supremely because we can’t self-destruct?) (53)

We suspect that this judgment also indirectly bears on human beings’ propensity for destroying other lives and on being sometimes forced to commit suicide when the absurdity of their existence becomes too much to bear. Thus, what ap24

See “Sun’s Marbles” in Patricia Grace, The Sky People: 9–16. See also the examination of this story in Jean–Pierre Durix, “Myth in Patricia Grace’s ‘Sun’s Marbles’,” in Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writings in Context, ed. Marta Dvorak & W.H. New (Montreal, Kingston, Ontario & Ithaca N Y : McGill–Queen’s U P , 2007): 202–13. 25 See “Papa-tu-a-Nuku (Earth Mother),” in Hone Tuwhare, Mihi: Collected Poems (Auckland: Penguin, 1987): 24.

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pears to be a flight of fantasy into the world of myth also proves to be an indirect comment on ordinary human beings. The gods are far from perfect in terms of morality. They are sometimes presented as the leaders of rival gangs who fear the wrath of Tagaloa, the supreme godfather and creator. Nafanua even talks at one point of trying “to defeat Tagaloa and His Gang” (106), thus reducing the heavens to a place of confrontation for rival mafias. The language used by the author to comment on Nafanua and the other gods is often colloquial and contemporary, which contrasts somewhat with the elevated status expected of gods. It is as if the author were trying to show that the old atua are not radically different from human beings today; they can be manipulated through blackmail, a trick Nafanua envisages using against Tagaloa to avenge the attempt on Maifea?’s life. She reports: [I] sent a message to [the assassin’s] Boss to lay off or I’d divulge to all the atua He wasn’t as All-Knowing as He’d made us believe (105)

Vela’s retelling of how Tagaloa reacted on discovering Maifea?’s presence on the island may serve as the writer’s indirect comment on the advantages and drawbacks for Samoan society of being exposed to another stronger and technologically superior civilization. Through Tagaloa’s all-seeing powers, the author highlights the temptation for an isolated society to acquire new technologies from elsewhere, coupled with the fear that their organization will not resist the imposition of more powerful people. Tagaloa is tempted to keep that threat at bay by ordering Maifea?’s execution because he fears that the arrival of the “albinos” will lead to the end of his supremacy as ruler of his world. He suspects that another atua, much stronger technologically than himself, might take over his realm and reduce him to second-rate status, a suspicion which, in historical terms, proved to be justified, in view of the massive conversion of Polynesians to various Christian denominations. Tagaloa eventually admits to himself and only to Nafanua that he is not able to penetrate the secret of Maifea?’s silence, and he asks Nafanua to keep this secret for fear that spreading the news might lead to his losing his status as chief atua. Religion has to do with power, and Tagaloa himself realizes this. He likes Nafanua, even when she resists him, because he admires her fighting temperament. When other atua come to consult him, whining about their problems, he retorts: “Be like Nafa go out / and build your own religions and empires” (109). From the point of view of Vela, religions are involved in the same powergame as other human institutions. That is why, when Maifea? suddenly emerges

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into their world, Auva’a carries him to their temple, arguing that the creature is merely human but an albino, thus explaining its strange appearance. Vela explains: Religions to be believed must be able to explain all the new phenomena to ease their adherents’ fears (100)

According to this explanation, the main aim of faith is to account for the unaccountable in a credible manner. The question is not whether religions are valid in the absolute but how far they give solace to their followers. The atua’s desire to be the most powerful of all feeds their thirst for appropriating exclusively for themselves the technological advantages gained from the outside world. Contemplating Maifea?, Nafanua decides that It was from a world with technology magic and mana probably beyond even Tagaloaalagi’s No one else but us must have its secrets

In actual fact, it was through such an attitude that the white colonizers were able to insinuate themselves into the very heart of Samoan civilization, particularly once the first Polynesian chiefs realized that mastery of the written word was an advantage if they learned the art from the Papalagi. In this particular case, Nafanua’s hopes remain unfulfilled when she discovers that Maifea? has no secrets to pass on, “bringing only his perpetual smile / and a child’s unconditional love” (102). Perhaps this unusual form of love in a world where greed, lust, and passion prevail is the greatest gift of all that Nafanua could ever have hoped for. Yet her followers remain impervious to this priceless blessing. Maifea? proves just the opposite of what is normally expected of a worthy Samoan man: Being a fitness freak I tried civilizing him on that but instead of swimming he sank instead of running up mountains after me he rolled back instead of mastering the weapons he almost suicided on them instead of ferocity he smiled back (103)

One is tempted to interpret Maifea? as the embodiment of what the author himself would like to be, in seeking to resist the excessively masculine, warlike, and aggressive qualities that he was taught were those of a true Samoan male.

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Baby Vela’s first cry after coming into this world is interpreted as “Va-Va-VaVa-aaa” (10) by the narrator, who proceeds to comment on what is, according to him, a central Samoan notion. The same sound emerges from Maifea?’s mouth when he comes round from his coma after being stranded on the beach. The Va might be interpreted simplistically, using an existentialist frame of reference, as a vacuum, as the absurd. Yet the narrator insists on the creative aspect of this gap, which must be considered as “the Space between all things / like the birthfluid holding all in the Unity-that-is-All / Va the relationships that must be nursed and nurtured” (10). Perhaps this rediscovery of the importance of the Va is a way of attributing a positive value to a notion which might otherwise be terribly destructive. And this happens through a reinterpretation of Samoan mythology and traditional concepts. This is a new development in Wendt’s work, particularly when one compares The Adventures of Vela with the tragic absurdity that overcomes the protagonist of Pouliuli. In most colonized societies, the only valid attitude towards the inexorable fate of human beings is that of the trickster, a figure closely associated with Nafanua. Her faithful companions are flying foxes, animals emblematic of resourcefulness, rebellion, and unconventional living in most of Albert Wendt’s works. The title of his novella Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree26 refers to the trickster–protagonist who defies all traditional figures of authority, searching for personal freedom at the cost of living upside-down, like the fruit-bat hanging from a tree with its feet up and its head down. In The Adventures of Vela, the eponymous hero is said to have a very strong, recognizable flying-fox smell. When Nafanua appears in the final chapters of the novel, she is preceded by flying-foxes who indicate to Vela and Alapati that they have come to the right place to meet her. Alapati first catches sight of the atua in the form of a stinking old skeletal hag who later on turns into a hauntingly beautiful woman. So it seems that strong unforgettable experiences tend to be linked with powerful smells in this olfactory novel, as if to contradict the received idea that a welleducated person should have no body odour or should try to mask it by frequent bathing and artificial scent. The “final revelations” are preceded by the appearance of the full moon in Nafanua’s sacred cave. Yet this phenomenon is not merely the waxing of a celestial body; it appears as a form of birth, as a version of genesis. The moon is said to be “labouring across the dome” and Nafanua remarks: “we are in the Moon’s amniotic tide cauled / for birth and truth” (253). Nafanua, the hag, had 26

The novella has given its title to the collection of stories published by Longman Paul in 1974, and was later included as part of Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979).

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said “we need ta waid for / da prodigious Moon ta shove da future out of her promiscuous passage!” (252). More respectfully, at the end of this scene of revelation, the narrator notices that “in the Moon’s golden passage was born / a film” (253). Wendt deliberately provokes reactions of surprise in the reader who may think that, because myths play a major part, the novel cannot contain elements of modernity. The last chapter, entitled “The Final Revelations,” opens out onto an audiovisual display concerning Nafanua and retracing the arrival on the islands of the first Papalagi, who announced that they were fulfilling a prophecy made by Nafanua’s granddaughter and bringing the true god with them. Despite Nafanua’s determined resistance, she could not prevent the massive conversion of the people to the new religion. In the end, she decided that the best she could do was to infiltrate the religion from within and have one of her priests’ descendants become the prelate of the Roman Church. Fiction thus overlaps with reality. Yet Albert Wendt constantly remarks on the angle from which the scene is shot and never allows the reader to forget that this is merely a film, thus forcing her/him to reflect on the relative truth-value of each of these sequences. At the end of the scene, Nafanua gathers her old priest Auva’a and Vela to her side and they all ascend to the realm of Tagaloaalagi in a sort of humorous pagan version of the Holy Trinity. The last twist in the story is the final stanza of the novel, entitled “The Resurrection.” Where one might have expected yet another supernatural apparition, the said “resurrection” is a literary one: the dead have come back to life, but in the form of Alapati’s chronicle, which has been accepted for publication. Fantasy and metaphysics all lead to a final humorous metaphysical statement about all these characters undergoing a form of “resurrection grander even than that of Jesus” (276). Albert Wendt delights in creating different versions of parallel worlds, which share features with life and civilization as we know them but differ in one significant aspect, which is pushed to an extreme. Besides the comic effect produced by such literary tours de force, the almost grotesque reality created by focusing on one feature (e.g., smelling, living in the present) prompts readers to reflect on what they take for granted and helps them view their own certainties with a measure of distance. In The Adventures of Vela, the author places these parallel worlds on a similar level to the imaginary re-creation of the goddess Nafanua. Wendt’s purpose is not that of a zealot trying to convert his readers to the ancient religion. The old atua become actors playing their part in a work presenting parallel modes of existence slightly askew to everyday reality. The political dimension of denouncing the way a native form of capitalist Christian

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religion has taken over after the missionaries landed in the Pacific is certainly not absent from his preoccupations. Still, this does not lead him to excessive nostalgia for some sort of Edenic past which never existed.

W O R K S C I TE D Durix, Jean–Pierre. “Myth in Patricia Grace’s ‘Sun’s Marbles’,” in Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writings in Context, ed. Marta Dvorak & W.H. New (Montreal, Kingston, Ontario, & Ithaca N Y : McGill–Queen’s U P , 2007). Grace, Patricia.The Sky People (Auckland: Penguin, 1994). Hau’ofa, Epeli. Kisses in the Nederends (Auckland: Penguin, 1987). Tuwhare, Hone. Mihi: Collected Poems (Auckland: Penguin, 1987). Wendt, Albert. The Adventures of Vela (Wellington: Huia, 2009). ——.The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man (New York: Viking, 1986). ——.Black Rainbow (Auckland: Penguin, 1992). ——.Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1974). ——. “Good Morning,” interview with Albert Wendt, Television New Zealand (One), 21 July 2009. ——.Inside Us the Dead: Poems 1961–1974 (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1976). ——.Leaves of the Banyan Tree (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1979). ——.Photographs (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1995). ——.Pouliuli (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1977). ——.The Songmaker’s Chair (Wellington: Huia, 2004). ——.Sons for the Return Home (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1973).

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Read Instructions and Shake Carefully Before Use Fragmented Wholes in Narratives by Bill Manhire and Gregory O’Brien G OR D ON C OL L I E R

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H E T W O W O R K S O F N E W Z E A L A N D F I C T I O N that I want to concentrate on here are Bill Manhire’s The Brain of Katherine Mansfield, published in 1988, and Gregory O’Brien’s Diesel Mystic, published in 1989. From my descriptive-analytical observations I shall be drawing some implications that might serve to throw a conceptual net around other narratives with similar creative preoccupations. Something like the following notion is at the back of my mind. If modernist techniques work with and against the grain of narrative traditionalism, and postmodernism works through, underneath, and beyond both, is there perhaps yet another alternative? If the postmodern, like modernism, tends to internationalize the local, while the gritty realism developed out of early modernism tends to exalt the local, are there perhaps other narrative ways of celebrating the homegrown without succumbing to parochialism? My two chosen texts are test-cases. For an international reading public, they may appear comparatively slight in stature. There is a hint of the playful, the throwaway, the modestly if slyly inconspicuous. A bit like the kiwi, retiring nocturnal emblem of that most distant of English-speaking countries from the erstwhile centre of Europe. But, first, I would like to haul back a bit to take a long run-up to Manhire’s book, placing it, perhaps unexpectedly, in the context of his poetry, from which a brief example:

The Pickpocket We get on well together. We vie with each other in politeness, promising no special treatment. We contradict ourselves constantly.

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Look at those people. She leads him round by the nose, they are always bickering. He is nurturing a viper in his bosom: she must have applied for the post. But, what a day! The favourite lost by a neck. We lost everything but the clothes we stood up in! I wish you good fortune with all my heart.1

On the level of individual phrases, everything here makes sense. Each four-line section, too, makes for a kind of coherence. Affective relationships are established, both personal and external. A situation is implied here, a social occasion there, and the poem closes with an expression of emotion. But we have somehow been forewarned that these relationships thrive on contradiction: underneath the smug surface, the interlocutor’s assertions ring hollow, because they are the camouflage of borrowed assumptions. In part, what fascinates Manhire is the tenuousness of all relationship and causality. Trace through the text and you can assemble the blazon-like lineaments of a body: nose, bosom, neck, heart. But this patterning is the illusory patterning of art. What Manhire has actually done is to take phrases from a book of idioms almost at random and see what order can be imposed on them.2 So the poet, rifling the idioms book, is a pickpocket, in a kind of weird realism. On the surface, the poem syntagmatically resembles one of John Ashbery’s, except that Ashbery creates simulacra of ‘real’ phrasing. But both poets are intimating somehow convincing ‘contexts’ – only, Ashbery constantly shifts perspective and scene radically, whereas “The Pickpocket” is much more ‘coherent’: we can even infer that the observer and supposer in the middle stanza is commenting on the ‘we’-people in the first. Except for the horse races, there is nothing in the poem that one would wish to construe as a signifier of national identity or locality. The poem reveals no cultural markers of any complexity, not even on the level of the international battle of the sexes. It refrains from philosophical scrutiny. Its professed psychological mode self-deconstructs. Let us turn to another, even briefer poem by Manhire: 1

Bill Manhire, “The Pickpocket,” in how to take off your clothes at the picnic (Wellington: Wai-teAta Press, 1977): 42. 2 I was witness to the inceptive moment of this process as Bill perused an idioms book in my possession while staying with us in Germany. He also makes reference to this procedure as applied to his poem “The Cinema” – see Manhire, “Breaking the Line: A View of American and New Zealand Poetry,” Islands 38 (December 1987): 152, repr. in Manhire, Doubtful Sounds: Essays and Interviews (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2000): 82.

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Wingatui Sit in the car with the headlights off. Look out there now where the yellow moon floats silks across the birdcage. You might have touched that sky you lost. You might have split that azure violin in two.3

I first encountered this poem in the Times Literary Supplement,4 and underwent a heart-leap of recognition and a buzz of discordance at the same time: as basically a South Otago boy like Manhire, I knew that Wingatui was a racecourse (part of Mosgiel, just south of Dunedin, and the counterpart to the trotting course at Forbury Park in south Dunedin), and, having been there with my ‘form’-mad parents, knew where it was. And because of this charged cultural marker, I could then pick up on the references to silks or the coloured cap and blouse of a jockey and to the birdcage or enclosed paddock used to saddle and display horses before a race. What, however, would the typical reader of the TL S , or any British reader, make of the detail of this poem, without the benefit of knowing the significance of Wingatui, or being able to infer little more than that this is the name of the “there” where, in those strange opening vocatives “Sit” and “Look” (as though the scene were a mode d’emploi), the actor of the poem sits in a car brooding at night about lost opportunities (perhaps bets which, if won, might have brought ‘pie in the sky’)? The lunar image is meteorological, the silks standing also for wisps of cloud drifting across the face of the moon (this will be the ‘night gallops’ or ‘night trots’). Without knowledge of Wingatui (consulting a good gazetteer would maybe have helped, though, in that pre-Google time), and even with a British or North American racegoer’s command of terminology, such an image is bound to seem extravagantly obscure rather than a logical and economical association – but perhaps also sparking resonances of moonstruck lovers sitting in a parked car. And so it has been seen: as obscure. The poem was castigated for pretentious surrealism in the New Statesman and in the Pseuds’ Corner section of the satirical rag Private Eye, and has fed debate to this day, as well as being taken up by Ian Wedde as a challenging instance of postcolonial cultural translation.5

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Bill Manhire, “Wingatui” (poem 1 of “Two Landscapes”), in Good Looks (Auckland: Auckland

U P /Oxford U P , 1982): 15. 4

Bill Manhire, “Wingatui,” Times Literary Supplement (12 March 1982): 277. Ian Wedde, “Introduction” to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, ed. Ian Wedde & Harvey McQueen (Auckland: Penguin, 1985): 25–26. 5

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Bill Manhire’s poetry has, right from its beginnings in the 1960s, possessed an especial, resilient sprezzatura; it can strike one as a kind of magical realism, glimpsed in flashes, or the verbal equivalent of a particularly careful technique of semi-abstract painting incorporating objets trouvés, immensely respectful of the minutest materials used, of the lightest-applied brush-stroke, of the most delicate and evanescent depiction of equivalents for emotion, mood, and relation. Manhire is the finest craftsman working in New Zealand poetry today, his meticulousness deriving from his eschewal of all forms that might require of him the grand gesture. His tone is one of restrained humour or subdued irony, the product in part of his artist’s keen awareness of the way in which he handles his materials. It is not an urbane cultural suavity but, rather, perhaps, that brand of capable reserve that is quintessentially New Zealand. The latencies of his poetic voice were nourished early on by techniques developed in part from Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic poetry (a domain in which many New Zealand scholars excel), the ‘deep image’ poetry of Robert Bly, the oblique narrative song of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, and the finely patterned, introverted colorations of Robert Creeley. In stressing that his voice is now entirely his own, I should point out that his allusive, selective lyricism has gradually been ceding ground to a more open and inclusive narrativity. Indeed, it has been entirely a matter of his learning to walk with absolute surefootedness on a particular kind of verbal terrain before venturing to traverse another sort of ground. Like few other New Zealand writers I know, Manhire has been progressively shifting his focus of generic competence. And not only that: with quiet and unassuming publicistic skill, he has done much to foster the status of literature in New Zealand, including the international patronage secured for his incredibly successful creative-writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington6 and the equally fruitful writing programmes in schools. He started with the slightest of pure lyric utterances, often as compacted as the early poetry of Michael Ondaatje, then built up towards longer yet still highly indirect structures before, in the late 1970s, stretching cardiographs of emotional change on the canvas of pseudo-narrative as in the poems titled “The Afterlife” and “An Outline.”7 Next, in the early 1980s, came poems like “A Scottish Bride,”8 where the récit reconstructs, in the most magically sensuous images, the real internal and colonial history of one of Manhire’s forebears. The key 6

For an informative account of its genesis and progress in its earlier stages, see Bill Manhire, “From Saga Seminar to Writers’ Workshop: Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington,” Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 6.1 (April 2002): online. 7 In Good Looks, 49–51, 67–68. 8 In Zoetropes: Poems 1972–82 (1984; Manchester: Carcanet, 1985): 73.

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collection Zoetropes of 1984 closes with that quintessential, episodic New Zealand poetic narrative, the airline journal, as captured in the poem “Breakfast.”9 Shuttling between compaction and expansion, however, lyricism and narrative, it is the title poem of the collection that can serve for all time as the definitive behavioural statement of New Zealand identity, particularly for those countless New Zealanders who have had occasion to leave their homeland for good or ill, for a while or forever: Zoetropes A starting. Words which begin with Z alarm the heart: the eye cuts down at once then drifts across the page to other disappointments. * Zenana: the women’s apartment in Indian or Persian houses. Zero is nought, nothing, nil – the quiet starting point of any scale of measurement. * The land itself is only smoke at anchor, drifting above Antarctica’s white flower, tied by a thin red line (5000 miles) to Valparaíso. London 29.4.81

The central conceit of the poem is every out-of-country New Zealander’s geopolitical consciousness of, or self-consciousness about, his or her place in the world or on the map. We are alerted by typography to every possible mention of New Zealand in the international press. Hence the pun in the first two words, where the letter A is where we start the alphabet and Z, like New Zealand, is at the tail-end of the inhabited world; and we do start, or get a jolt of self-confirming recognition or anticipation, at the gestalt of the capital letter Z on the page. After the disappointing absence of “Zealand,” the search is transmuted into the desultory scrutiny of later words in a compartmentalized alphabetical 9

In Zoetropes, 78–79.

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list such as in an encyclopedia. New Zealand is set apart, like the women in a zenana; New Zealanders count for nothing, like zero (this might still have held true in the early 1980s, but it surely doesn’t any longer, save in our most inward selves). The notion of a scale of measurement is then taken up in the last five lines, where a third kind of textual representation, the scaled map, constitutes our distanced, bird’s-eye view of ourselves. Here is the incontrovertible statement of identity; yet, even here, Manhire’s magical transformation of the Land of the Long White Cloud into the drifting funnel-smoke of an old-time oceangoing steamer hints at the instability of even such a fixing – as though the country, like its inhabitants, could at any moment weigh anchor for some destination elsewhere. I love this poem: it is accessible in all of its intercalated, finely judged detail, its hair-trigger lineation. It is a poem with philosophical ramifications; it is a poem about personal and collective psychology; it is a poem which draws modestly on a wide range of cultural referents for its effect; it is humorous, witty, poignant, and grave. And it is one of those artefacts that has not cut itself off from the pragmatic world, as can be seen from the “thin red line” on a real National Geographic map. Geography, whether of the heart or of the land, is a central axis or even canvas on which Manhire traces his magic. It might take the form of an enchanting memory-chronicle of boyhood, casting up interlinked fragments of Kipling, Boy Scouts, and Billy Graham’s visit to New Zealand in An Amazing Week in New Zealand (1993) There is a fascination with “Antarctica’s white flower” (“Zoetropes”), which ultimately links up with his affection for Iceland, its spirit-peopled volcanic ruggedness and Kiwi-pragmatic, creative citizens. He has edited a rich anthology of writings on the Far South, The Wide White Page (2004), and his poetry, imagistic yet with an evanescent backbone of narrative, dwells on Antarctica, whether as his archival reflections on historic polar expeditions in Hoosh (1995) or as his “Antarctic Field Notes,” a major sequence published in what to call your child (1999), which records his own sojourn there around the time of his term as Te Mata Estate’s Poet Laureate. Needless to say, here Manhire is freed from the onomastic fixings of place; but elsewhere he releases himself into the quiet exhilarations of place-names, usually to undercut confidence in their fixity and stability, or to allow their bouquet of memory to exhale from his genie’s flask. To conclude the charting of Bill Manhire’s progression through the genres: through the 1980s, the activity of the poet was increasingly displaced by that of the writer of short fiction. Characteristically, the first stories were poetically allusive, but gained increasingly in narrative vigour, and always with immersion in the tokens of New Zealand popular culture.

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ጓ The Brain of Katherine Mansfield could be termed a novella, although it hardly conforms to the requirements of this sub-genre save in its length of about thirtythree full pages of text. Physically, the book consists of some sixty pages of words and pictures. It is thus a very short book. It much resembles a child’s adventure story, and such shortish texts are just as likely to be called novels. This novel can take the reader as brief a time to ‘read’ as ten minutes, or as long a time as four hours, depending on one’s psychological and ethical make-up or reading-habits. The book’s title perhaps confirms the reader’s assumption that the theme will definitely be High Culture. What writer could be more representative of New Zealand than Katherine Mansfield? And this will surely be a story about Geist or mind in its most substantial form, published at just the right time to make it of celebratory relevance to the Mansfield Centenary. Will Manhire be revealing the fascinating secrets of Miss Mansfield’s innermost mental life? Or will this – a gruesome thought – be a lesson in advanced anatomy, an exercise in dissection performed in the horror-clinic of a Doctor Frankenstein? Or are there perhaps postmodernist reverberations, too? Recall, for instance, that deflationary essay by Roland Barthes on “The Brain of Einstein.” So much for the book’s physical dimensions and title. The reader is invited to further speculation about the orientation of the novel by the person who created its excellent drawings, the poet, artist, and fiction-writer Gregory O’Brien. O’Brien provides a map of New Zealand at the beginning of the book, to show the reader where he will be going in the story. All that we can see of the North Island, above a set of Scottish bagpipes which floats like a whale in the waters of Cook Strait dividing the two main islands, is the unadorned lowest tip, with the caption “Regions Unbeknownst.” The North Island, then, as far as the story is concerned, is pretty well Terra Incognita Neoselandensis. This, it is suggested, will be an adventure story about, and perhaps a travel guide to, the South Island with all its many places of interest, glamour, mystery, natural beauties, excitement, culture. Let us now enter the labyrinth of The Brain of Katherine Mansfield. First of all, how is the novel constructed, and on what model? Upon opening the unpaginated book at Chapter 1, the reader is pulled up short by being addressed as “You” – an example, then, of the rare vocative narrative. The reader is thereby condemned to take an active part, albeit somewhat circumscribed by having a personality-profile imposed on him: You are just an ordinary New Zealander. You have strength, intelligence and luck, though you are not particularly good at languages. Your family and friends like you, and there is one special friend who really thinks you’re swell. Yours is a well-rounded personality; your horoscope is usually good; your

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school report says ‘Satisfactory’. But somehow you are restless. Your life is 10 missing challenge and excitement. You want to make things happen.

This reader profile is linked to an injunction at the foot of the page: “Go to 2.” I, the reader, now understand the reference to the school report – I am actually a schoolboy, who encounters an old man on the way home from school. This man says that the boy’s life-story, which is told in his leather-bound book, ceases when he enters his parents’ house. The continuation and outcome of the story will depend on the boy himself. To help him in his adventures, he must choose one of three magic weapons after accompanying the old man to his home in a distant suburb. This requires proceeding to Chapter 5. The alternative, of going home, is a move to Chapter 11. So there is a branching of the ways. It looks like a game-book for children. On the verbal level, it could be a kind of board-game involving mental decisions instead of dice. Perhaps it is a primitive version of the double, quasi-random plot-choices built into the novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) by the Argentinian Julio Cortázar, or in the same writer’s subsequent novel – derived from an idea in Chapter 62 of Rayuela – 62: Modelo para armar (62: A Model Kit). Supposing that you ignored the comment that “your life is missing challenge and excitement,” or you were too lazy to quit your sheltered parental home, or you’re obviously intending to go with the old man but want to cheat by taking a peek at Chapter 11 before you do so. In this chapter, you are bawled out by the narrator as a fool and a miserable worm. You find your parents and your little dog Shane slaughtered, and an axe-murderer is lurking behind the bathroom door. “Close the book.” Have you learned your lesson? Let’s go to 5 instead. There, in the dimly lit front room of the old man’s house, the radio is broadcasting a commentary from the night trots at Forbury Park in south Dunedin. Faintly glowing on a sideboard are three magic objects. Object One: the Pounamu Decoder, called after the ǒori word for greenstone, nephrite, or jade, and incidentally, but appositely in the present context, part of the Mǒori name for the South Island: Te Wai Pounamu. This translates the language of any living creature. In the story “Fire on Greenstone” in the book Pounamu Pounamu by Witi Ihimaera, a Mǒori boy holds a piece of greenstone against the light. Its soft glow floods over him and he can hear the green waters of his origins. For Ihimaera, pounamu is the magical access to the world of stories. For Manhire, the stone possesses an even more elementary function. Object Two: an orange thermos flask. A drink from it will 10

Bill Manhire, The Brain of Katherine Mansfield, ill. Gregory O’Brien (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1988). The non-justified right margin runs throughout the text, which, as indicated, is unpaginated. These gestures of resistance to classical text-layout cohere with the hybrid deixis of the book.

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transport you from a place of danger, à la Spaceship Enterprise. Object Three: a Swiss Army knife forged by gnomes, which destroys any attacker. Well, almost any – a note states that the knife is “ineffective against the bowmen of the emperor or the Dark Lord of Kwesta-kaa.” (Actually, the knife doesn’t always work otherwise, either – in Chapter 29, the hero gets into trouble when the toothpick opens instead of the blade, and in Chapter 32, use of the bottle-opener leads to his death.) This all seems to be a reference to popular computer-games like Dungeons and Dragons. The bowmen turn up repeatedly later on, as silent, emblematic props. It gradually becomes clear that the structure of the plot or plots resembles the functions of binary logic. Indeed, after a few runs through the book, one might claim that there are traces here of what are commonly termed expert systems. Further characteristics of the computer revolution are in evidence, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetic simulation. But if there has been a hint of intertextual play with the narratives of Witi Ihimaera as well, then there could also be a passing allusion to the Raratongan, New Zealandbased poet Alistair Campbell in the “Dark Lord of Kwesta-kaa” – Campbell having written a poetic sequence about his mother’s ancestral peoples titled The Dark Lord of Savaiki. With the obligatory move to Chapter 6, where the old man reads from his book, there is a subtly altered, less dynamic description of the reader’s character. Here, he is a stamp collector and “reasonably good at sport,” but “not born for routine pleasures.” The solution is “to see something of your country.” For the first time, the alternative destinations – a flight to Christchurch or to Invercargill – constitute a real test of cultural psychology, even for adult readers. Most New Zealanders expecting “challenge and excitement” would take the via negativa and opt for Christchurch as the lesser of two evils (sadly, the recent perturbations on the Rim of Fire have made what remains of the city less attractive). Invercargill, in the untutored mind, is a grim, damp, windswept Celtic outpost, the southernmost city in the world after Punta Arenas. So off to Christchurch and Chapter 4! But the plane explodes over the city centre, and the reader is enjoined to close the book. Manhire offers us posthumous consolation – the catastrophe will hit the world headlines like the Erebus disaster of 1979, when a New Zealand Airlines plane full of international tourists crashed into a mountain in the Antarctic. What we glimpse here is one of the leitmotifs of the novel – the anxious quest of a small nation for worldwide recognition. The only way of escaping this fate is to drink from the orange thermos. If one can honourably make use of this weapon on the basis of one’s original selection, one merely ends up where the true connoisseur lands in Chapter 5 anyway, which is at the rainy airport of Invercargill. Despite the cold, says the narrator

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ironically, “you can be assured of a genuine southern welcome.” Here we have a specimen of the sociolect of the tourist trade, which pervades the novel, reaching a higher level of rhetorical intensity after the obligatory jump to Chapter 18, where we “are free to sightsee” at our leisure. The range of Invercargill’s sights – beach, rosegarden, museum – is somewhat limited. Pride of place is taken by the statue of Minerva, Roman goddess of Wisdom and, indeed, reigning goddess of the city of Rome itself. In O’Brien’s accompanying illustration, she bears a strong resemblance to Katherine Mansfield. In anticipation of “the ordeals which lie ahead,” the reader–player whispers a prayer to the goddess. Are these “ordeals” the tourist attractions? Or those of our further adventures? In the obligatory move to Chapter 7, a helicopter takes the reader “on a magic carpet ride across the fiords and mountains of New Zealand’s southern wonderland." The rhetoric of the tourist-guide commentary lapses here into weary routine: “Yes, flight of a lifetime. Rugged splendour. Mitre Peak. Wild blue yonder. Sutherland Falls.” As could be expected, the impending catastrophe of a helicopter crash must be averted by making one of three choices. Because the story-lines proliferate from here on, we must abandon linear exegesis for a different approach. First, a few statistics. There are fifty chapters altogether, with a maximum of eighteen Go-To commands that generate discrete consequences. I have already mentioned the shortest, most fatal path, entailing only two moves. There are eight paths or narrative strands where the inceptive choice produces a very bad outcome, and only four that terminate more positively. Apart from this, there are linear variants, about twenty-five in all, in which the reader flounders around for a while before getting back onto one of the main paths. If the reader explores all possibilities resolutely, it can take hours to get through (or around) the book. Only by experiencing the full impact of uncertainty, hesitation, failure, and qualified success can one savour the ironic, serious, poetic, prosaic, fantastic and realistic, simple and complex interweavings of the literary game. The geographical and cultural ‘reality’ of the action cannot be denied. The places selected are familiar in their serene provinciality to anyone who has grown up in the region south or west of Dunedin – Mosgiel, Forbury, Wingatui, Milton, Balclutha, Owaka, Invercargill, Oreti, the Pomahaka river, Central Otago; in the alpine and Fiordland regions: Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri, the Franz Josef Glacier, Mitre Peak, and Sutherland Falls. The Mǒori recur as a cultural icon. Apart from the name given to the old man, Wairarapa (familiar to New Zealanders as a standard measuring station on the radio weather report), and literary allusions to Ihimaera, Campbell, and Keri Hulme, there are the Howard Morrison Quartet, tattooed warriors, haka parties, and the last Moriori

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(this, the predecessor of the Mǒori, being an allusion to the research of the popular ethnographer and cultural historian Michael King). The ubiquitous means of transport in the novel are the aeroplane and the helicopter (emblem of modern backwoods tourism) and the sheep-truck (emblem of the legendary pastoral economy of the South). The narrative mode involves all kinds of voyages of discovery, reducible to the human instinct for forward movement. This can include Germanic-Scandinavian sagas, which Manhire studied as a postgraduate student, and which present encounters with gnomes and elves – as do both this novel and the variant of Dungeons and Dragons called Tunnels and Trolls. It can include roadmovie-type sequences, in which the reader–player walks or hitchhikes across his homeland. The latter may be the earthly terrain of South Otago or the perils of the southern rainforest. Or they may sidestep into the realm of Space Invaders, where the reader is captured by extraterrestrials. Or a sequence may take place in the mind, with the reader–player constantly losing consciousness and waking up somewhere else. Finally, the journey and the way are those of life, from childhood to old age. It is at this nexus that Manhire exploits the primeval experiential contrast between the insouciant boy and the mythic, wise old man. Forward motion is connected with determination and determinism (after all, although the reader is the chief agent, what he can do is strictly controlled in advance). Paths of communication open up, and communication succeeds or founders. Hence the novel’s emphasis on language and comprehension. Linguistic differences have to be bridged – hence the Pounamu Decoder and the manifold attempts by the reader–player to translate the uncomprehended. The protagonist can himself be ‘translated’ – hence the magic potion in the orange thermos. Possession of the spiritual may be preferred to physical possession – hence the generically determined appearance of the extraterrestrial, who shapes the reader’s perception of narrative event by thought implantation, or of a megalomanic scientist specializing in brain-transplants. The Pounamu Decoder, however, reveals the extraterrestrial’s language to be that of the small-print disclaimer on the reverse of a tourist-company ticket. On one occasion, the narrator is puzzled by the old man speaking in Mǒori: “Why does he go on like this? Has he been radicalised or something?” Manhire is alluding here to the communicative value of the native tongue in an age of ǎoritanga where solidarity with Mǒori aspirations to political sovereignty is expected of the Pǒkehǒ. But the Decoder’s translation exposes the speech as empty sententiousness. The boy-protagonist is held prisoner by a nymphomaniac called Rebecca, who in O’Brien’s accompanying drawing looks very much like

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Katherine Mansfield. She seeks communication through sexual intercourse. Her desire is to be “transported” into the ecstasy of another place. This explains why she cultivates hallucinogenic mushrooms on the goldfields – that is, its historic remnants – of Central Otago (this area is popularly known to thrill-seekers for its liberty caps or Psilocybe semilanceata). Rebecca is emblematic of the americanization of New Zealand. She wants to buy a computer to do her home-science accounts; her voice sounds like that of a computerized robot; her speech, once translated, consists of vacuous Californian psychobabble (the 1860s goldfields link up invisibly with the Californian Gold Rush of the early 1850s). The music her son plays is a textually cryptic brand of country & western, so typical of rural New Zealand. Willingness to communicate can pay dividends. A boy who hitchhikes to Owaka on a sheep-truck lights a cigarette without asking first, and is promptly thrown from the moving vehicle by the driver. In another strand, a boy who does request permission to smoke is told by the driver that the cab of the truck is a no-smoking zone. But the boy is nevertheless rewarded with a twenty-dollar bill for his polite communicativeness and submission to the super-ego. I said earlier that none of the four ‘positive’ endings is really positive. In one such ending, the boy is in the clutches of Herr Schneidermann, an ex-Nazi brain-surgeon. Dr Mengele is, so to speak, ‘alive and well’ in the New Zealand bush. In O’Brien’s illustration, Schneidermann bears a strong resemblance to Karl Stead, the scalpel-wielding autocrat of New Zealand criticism and letters. In the bowels of his subterranean laboratory, a gray spongy substance is preserved in jars. This collection of historic brains ranges from Captain Cook and the ǒori chief Te Rauparaha to the All Black rugby player Colin Meads, all safe icons of New Zealand identity. O’Brien’s accompanying but divergent illustration shows the pickled brains of women named Catherine. There is the normal brain of Catherine Deneuve (about whom O’Brien has written stories), the large brain of Catherine the Great, the tiny brain of Catherine Cookson, who writes popular romances, and the brain of Katherine Mansfield, which consists of black jelly-beans. A national monument has been reduced to a consumer artefact, the black liquorice variety being traditionally the most coveted by New Zealand children in any assortment of jelly-beans. Perhaps her brain is made of such well-rounded fragments because she wrote short stories. Be that as it may – the boy cannot prevail against the Nazi villain, who removes his brain with his very own Swiss Army knife. In a parallel situation elsewhere, the boy must undergo a brain transplant while the surgeon munches on jelly-beans. No wonder he regains consciousness at home only to be found sporting a little moustache and speaking with a German accent. This boy plays the violin, and his goal

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in life is to become a politician. The old man, who turns up to express his regret at this turn of events, is spurned cold-heartedly. This is, then, not a happy ending, but a hint of dark times to come. If one casts one’s mind back over earlier, somewhat cryptic references, a secret, socially critical story can be found lurking beneath the surface of whimsy and deadpan humour. Like the brain of Katherine Mansfield, this story consists of mere fragments, albeit well-rounded ones, which have to be teased out of the various narrative strands. Once upon a time, in the Labour government of David Lange, there was a Minister of Finance called Roger Douglas, a shortish man with a little moustache, who believed that his policies of free-market monetarist deregulation could provide the surgical means to heal the New Zealand economy. His disciples and favourites were technocrats and hard-hearted, nouveau-riche yuppies. The boy who wins at all the sideshow galleries at the Owaka Rodeo, and can guess how many black jelly-beans are in a jar, is the calculating, successful prototype of these yuppies. It is he who makes money from his philosophy of virtuous rectitude and who, at the close of his story, basks in memories of the leisure-time luxury of whitewater canoeing and croissants at Milford Sound. Apart from this, he has a very useful acquaintanceship with someone called Douglas the Elf. We know from another story-line that the opinion of Douglas the Elf is crucial in determining whether a certain white powder is harmless or deadly. Douglas thinks this powder is the chief ingredient of a powerful magic potion. In fact, it turns out to be deadly cyanide, used in the bush to kill opossums. That the opinion of Douglas the Elf ultimately determines the right or wrong path through the bush is a sardonic echo of Roger Douglas’s economic manifesto entitled There’s Got to Be a Better Way! In the spacecraft, the boy unsuccessfully attacks the white-gowned extraterrestrial with the Swiss Army knife, and is dispatched to the dark realms of outer space. Gregory O’Brien’s illustration for this scene looks like the crosssection of a tree, with the word “malady" repeatedly inscribed across it. This is an intertextual allusion to the black paintings of Ralph Hotere, who borrowed the play on the word “malady" (involving ‘melody’ and ‘my lady’) from a poem by Manhire and integrated it into his paintings (the poet makes enlightening observations on this, in a conversation with Gregory O’Brien). The malady or sickness in the novel has politico-economic origins. The notion that the boy is in a spacecraft, whispers the narrator, has merely been planted in his brain. In fact, he is in the government building in Wellington, whose nickname ‘The Beehive’ derives from its shape. So O’Brien’s whorled design is really this Beehive. The white-gowned extraterrestrial, the white-gowned brain-surgeon, and the dan-

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gerous white powder all belong together. Names can be decoded. Douglas the Elf is Roger Douglas and also Roger the Gnome, though the latter name, like the Beehive, doesn’t occur in the text. The Swiss Army knife can kill neither the extraterrestrial nor the Nazi doctor, because it was fashioned long ago by gnomes. The financial experts of Switzerland are called the gnomes of Zurich. The economic philosophy of Roger Douglas was called ‘Rogernomics’, whence we can derive ‘Roger-Gnomics’. And indeed: the extraterrestrial, like the monetarist, speaks a strange or ‘gnomic’ language. The condition of New Zealand, especially in the impoverished South, can be attributed to the brutally inscrutable, disease-fostering economic policies of Douglas the Elf or Roger the Gnome. Manhire has great affection for the shy quiddity of the South, with its sheeptrucks, rodeos, and marching girls. Equally warmhearted is the laughter which the brilliance of his narrative presentation stirs in the reader. But Manhire has himself acknowledged that he likes “to move freely between dark drama and banal comedy,”11 just as this novel confirms the tendency of his artistic practice as bricoleur: “the work of art is composed out of used and second-hand items, yet the finished piece is ‘new’ and ‘original’, however old and derivative its parts.”12 The Brain of Katherine Mansfield encompasses the bric-à-brac of culture high, low, and middlebrow, and both confirms and questions the validity of these fragments in composing any sort of New Zealand identity. If this is the side of “banal comedy,” there is also the side of “dark drama” in the sickness which, as in myth and fairy-tale, lies like a curse on the land. In a society of doit-yourself resourcefulness like New Zealand, however, pragmatic laughter is likely to render such dangers more inconspicuous than they actually are. For this masterly narrative, so deft and unassuming and clear on the surface but with yet-to-be-unravelled complexities of implication underneath, Manhire deserves the highest acclaim.

ጓ It would be impossible to summarize Gregory O’Brien’s novel Diesel Mystic13 by indicating, as was possible with Manhire, representative patterns and mechanisms of linear narrative, or to locate skeins of deeper significance beneath a 11

Manhire quotes these words from a 1986 review of the film Utu in the Times Literary Supplement characterizing New Zealand and Australian film and temperament; see Manhire, “Breaking the Line: A View of American and New Zealand Poetry,” 152, repr. in Doubtful Sounds, 82. 12 “Breaking the Line,” 152, repr. in Doubtful Sounds, 82. 13 Gregory O’Brien, Diesel Mystic (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1989). The reader will, I hope, forgive me for not providing page references for quotations, incidents, metaphors etc. mentioned in the following, as the multitude of them would irritatingly swamp the running text.

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comparatively simple surface. O’Brien’s narrative is non-linear, though expressive of emotional movement. Difficulties of signification are present as persistent eddies upon the surface-currents of the novel. O’Brien’s illustrations for Manhire’s book constitute an integrated, even supplementary commentary on the verbal action, and I am sure that this level of consensus between text and image is deliberate.14 In O’Brien’s own novel, the author’s illustrations have a new, more lyrically sombre texture, and tend to tell a composite story of their own. What the novels have in common externally is the fact that they are composed of narrative fragments which depend for their full resolution on their association with other, non-contiguous fragments. Internally, the two novels are impelled by the narrative vector of the quest. If the quest in Manhire’s book is a syncretism of the pre-medieval with Nintendo games and tourist itineraries, then the quest in O’Brien’s book is a calquing of romantic surrealism with the allegorical dream-vision of the High Middle Ages. Both novels have a marked regional bias: Otago and Southland in Manhire’s; a brief stretch of road, river, and estuary northwest of Auckland in O’Brien’s. Manhire’s discursive style has its feet planted firmly on the ground, no matter how free-floating the events or parodic the mediation. O’Brien’s style, too, is marvellously consistent and measured in its discursive manner, but it floats half an inch above the ground. This is perhaps consistent with his allegiance to poetic modes; Diesel Mystic is his sole foray into fictional prose narrative. But even in his enormously flexible poetry he is hardly ever far away from the story beyond the scene, as even in this more lyrical section 10 from the sequence “Old Man South Road”: Next to a mountain of charcoal in Hokitika my cousins keep more canaries than the rest of the world. Some they sell in boxes to people from cities to pay for their midday meals 14

O’Brien, it should be pointed out, reveals the artist’s attachment to combining drawings and text elsewhere, as in his gently surrealistic poetry collection Location of the Least Person (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1987). In his graphic style, O’Brien resembles, in this regard, the Scottish fictionalist– artist Alasdair Gray, who also illustrates his own books exuberantly with somewhat hallucinogenic line drawings. In fact, there is arguably an affinity between O’Brien’s and Gray’s attitudes vis-à-vis the mythicizing of women: cf., for example, Gavin Miller, “The Cult of the White Goddess in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark,” Studies in Scottish Literature 33.4 (2004): 291–307.

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and Latin Masses. They look for their street, their town in atlases of the world.15

There are both ‘Wingatui’ and ‘Zoetropes’ moments here, as well as elements that may be ‘facts in the real world’ but which come across as the calmly incongruous overreachings of magical realism (that mountain, those canaries, the intriguing specificity of meals and Masses). As will be shown, these modalities are also encountered in Diesel Mystic, and then some. Within an achieved mysticism of consistency, O’Brien deploys a considerable variety of narrative textures in Diesel Mystic. The novel is made up of an introduction and three parts, whose titles fix the framework of ubiquitous watersymbolism: “1. Places a River Might Go”; “2. Sources Of An Ocean”; “3. Emptying the Vessel.” Each part closes with a section of a love-poem called “White Bird,” in which the lyrical titles of paintings figure. Each main part contains between 30 and 42 chapters ranging in length from two lines to eight pages (these two, in the middle of Part 2, happen to be adjacent to one another). There is a poem a third of the way through Part 1, in the manner of William Carlos Williams. Part 2 includes a poem in the form of a list, a poem set out in the author’s own calligraphy and dedicated to Mark Williams, a further such poem framed within a picture, and a lyric poem next to a four-line koan. Part 3 includes a list-poem, a koan, and two prose-poems on the same theme. Apart from these clear stylistic and generic markings, the novel as a whole aspires to a poetic mode of exploration, with some notable exceptions bringing it back down to earth. In the more varied Part 2, there are spoof saints’ lives done in a different typeface, and a diagrammatic gloss on a preceding anecdote. There is a cryptic folktale about a quest involving a shamanistic earth-mother, in a ritualized style resembling Haida or Inuit myth. There are scattered instances of chapters composed explicitly as dream-narratives, and others which are for the most part relaxed, vernacular realism. Without this variety, the reader would be unable to stay the course of poetic intensity. Nor, for that matter, would O’Brien be able to fulfil his complex artistic intention. What, then, is his intention? O’Brien’s introduction indicates that the ensuing narrative has biographically factual origins. The author mentions that he worked in Dargaville as a journalist when he was seventeen, and the first-person narrator of the novel is also seventeen. But the narratorial perspective precludes 15

In Location of the Least Person, 13.

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any assumption that the acting protagonist is a journalist. A journalist does disappear at one stage from the narrative in search of gripping headlines about a policeman that will save him his job on a newspaper, and both journalist and policeman are washed up by a flood, alive, at the end of the book. The implication is that both the reportorial instinct and the urge to police via reason must be abrogated by means of a disappearing act. The novel, then, is recounted from within this absence, or this release into the floodwaters of poetic memory. There are ‘true’ characters in a ‘real’ place – a stretch of land along the Northern Wairoa River between Dargaville and Ruawai. But the introduction itself pitches over into an inward, poetic mode of seeing. Of central importance are the author’s observations about the woman who features as the chief pole of attraction for the narrator. She is associated by O’Brien, in a tone of self-protective irony, with the perhaps outmoded notion of the poet’s Muse, then with the alluring, difficult, essentially female realm of language. In terms of the poetic texture of the novel, she is the eternally shape-changing Matrix of creativity, associated with the four elements and with water in particular (she is variously called Esther and Essie, which links with the fecund tidal estuary of the Wairoa River). The act of creation also having as its spark the male principle, and artistic realization having to do with the desire for knowledge, it is logical that this novel should turn out to be writing an erotics of art, tracing the arc of the narrator’s longing imagination from earliest childhood. The ubiquitous icon of the male principle of potency and death is the bull’s head embossed on the side of an aluminium container (see below). As in much dream-logic, the quest is autotelic and self-sufficient. The teleology of consummation, of reaching the end of the road, is but a constantly veiled and deferred prospect. The basic kinetic and spatial scheme of Diesel Mystic involves the narrator’s engagement in a task which has about as much apparent point as that of K the surveyor in Kafka’s The Castle. He must drive in his car back and forth along the 30-kilometre stretch between Dargaville and Ruawai carrying an aluminium container. His colossally rich absentee employer plans to buy up Dargaville and dump it in the Wairoa River. The container is part of the narrator’s job, but he is incurious about its contents and about his task, which has no pragmatic outcome apart from the driving itself. From the Introduction, we guess that the container itself encodes the protagonist’s destination, and we find that it is not just a casual but also a causal presence or absence throughout the narrative. The virtues of such an iterative journey for a story of experiential exploration are clear enough. The traveller, a bead strung on the looped necklace of the route he takes, can observe and encounter whatever lies within his purview. On one level, this is the geographical district itself, with its towns, inhabitants, rituals,

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legends, farming landscape, the elemental presence of river, flood, estuary, tides, mangrove swamps, and the lakes of the North Head sand-spit. On another plane which intersects with this, the road is the setting for a kind of oneiric roadmovie, where the act of picking up a woman standing on the wayside generates communication, comment, incident, and reverie, and can be submitted to a great variety of takes by the dream-camera of the author’s powers of invention. A metatextual hint at the nature of both the emotional journey and the narrative structure can be found in two chapters titled, with an echo of the metafictionist John Barth, “End of the Road,” which are located almost equidistantly from the beginning and the end of the novel. In the first, it is suggested that the road continues on past the sign announcing “End of the road.” In the second, the highway contradicts the sign more forcefully, spilling out in all directions, “its surface covering each imaginable journey. The ends of the road are the splayed ends of a length of rope." This proliferation of interwoven incident explains why it traduces the novel to even attempt a linear or synthesizing exposition. At the back of it all is a version of Boy Meets Experienced Older Woman, they court each other, settle down, and have kids, but it turns out that he has never really possessed her and is left with a cosmic sense of loss. This hypothetical scheme is presented as shards and fragments of desire, with a continual withdrawal from the brink of commitment. There are, however, faint traces of a tonal progression through the novel’s three parts – in the beginning, laconic, occasionally humorous reportage; in the middle, lyricism, a greater emphasis on psychological causation, ritualized emotion, and the exploration of romanticerotic motifs and allegorical tableaux; towards the close, a muted sense of sadness, grief, poignant memory, and loss. By the end, then, the vessel has been emptied. In a review of the novel, Damien Wilkins has suggested that O’Brien is writing “gliding patterns of intimacy and regional history” and is chiefly indebted to “the shaggy dog tradition” and to “frivolous” and “weightless” applications of surrealism.16 There is something in these categories, but I found the novel in no way frivolous and weightless, and any threat of local history is swiftly dehistoricized into myth and contradiction. An extensive catalogue of effects can be compiled that one could term ‘surreal’, but I think the stronger roots of O’Brien’s poetic narrative lie in different but equally fertile soil – namely, in that central precursor and contemporary shaper of narrative postmodernism called magical realism. It is this last category, rather than the dream-stimulated mode of sur-

16

Damien Wilkins, “Northland Panels,” N Z Listener (2 September 1989): 48.

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realism, that permits us to find in Diesel Mystic analogues to Kafka, Flann O’Brien, and Latin American narrative modes. Some examples of surrealistic technique would be the following. There are obdurately physical objects that assume the force of undecodable symbols by the mere fact of their iterated appearance in the narrative – one such presence is a boat burning on the river. A wedding dress seems to soak up the ocean and will not dry. A man puts on a raincoat and feels wet, because it is only raining inside the coat. Words that do not rhyme are tipped into a bucket and fed to pigs. Leaves in an orchard are bound into books by notable writers. This, of course, is semantic surrealism, as when hyperbole is taken at face value and the narrator is literally “reduced to tears” in a vision of his grieving beloved, or when he “drops off” a friendly hitchhiker by pushing him out of his speeding car, or when a boy on stilts is literally “cut down to size,” or when the woman-as-Muse takes the narrator’s breath away, “wrapped in a handkerchief.” As in the early films of Buñuel and Cocteau, logical expectations are undercut, as when Dargaville sports a runaway train on a circular track, or an upside-down cathedral, or when rainmakers shoot holes in a shoebox containing cumulus cloud, or when grapes in a vineyard are pulped by a man firing a shot-gun. Telephones and cameras can “yawn” with the boredom of their effort; “unemployed” fenceposts stand in line outside the labour office. The force of normal animistic metaphor can tip the scene over into the surreal – a river “averts” its face from the town, a cannon tipped into the river “evades” and “eludes” search parties and “fears” enlistment in the new War that threatens beyond the horizon. “The pylons stand nervously in the water, the legs of their trousers rolled up.” “His words are only a footbridge across a turbulent stream for his heart to leap off.” Such lines, incidentally, would not be unusual in the Latin American modernismo poetry of the 1920s, with its renewal and transformation of the baroque excesses of Gongorism. The War that is adverted to comes in the form of a semantic back-formation from the term ‘trench warfare’ – a farmer is digging a trench which suddenly fills up with fighting soldiers. This is the surreal unravelling of language that is typical of dream-work, and dream and reverie account not only for the occurrence of narrative visions, but also for linguistically and logically based phenomena, especially those relating to recursiveness and secondary representation. Old women knit a green field at a wedding; a woman knits a blue jumper with clouds on it, directly from the backs of sheep: an aeroplane trails a banner in the sky, while a woman knits the same plane and banner on a pullover. A staircase ascends a staircase. The narrator and the woman repeatedly swim in a cosmic ocean – she tells him to imagine a lake in the ocean and a puddle in the lake. Elsewhere, she “imagines a river and inside that river flows a smaller river. And

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inside that river, again, a narrow stream.” The truth of dream-logic accounts for such repeated near-paradoxes and contradictions as “I recognize her immediately as someone I have never laid eyes on before,” or “The woman was twice my age and she was three times my age.” It accounts for patterns of imagery relating to reflections and mirror-images. It helps explain why cars in a junkyard keep changing their position – a married bishop wearing a Mark I II Zephyr is changing the arrangement by moving chinese checkers on a board; in his hand he holds a Matchbox Toy Mark I II Zephyr “with a tiny replica of a bishop in the driver’s seat.” This is a small selection. They are all details that can be speculatively shuffled by the reader into larger but still inconclusive patterns. In the middle ground there are obsessively varied phrases – “the whites of her eyes sailing past” is one such phrase – and recurrent memory-images: as, for example, of the narrator as a boy on twelve-foot stilts, either sleeping or declining into sleep, either in a field or standing in a river. There are manifold variations on the theme of human rubbish, junk, detritus, and on the destructive ingenuity of children, and on the bric-à-brac physicality of the Catholic religion. These phenomena, which in themselves do not undergo surrealistic shifts or dream-transformations, I would categorize as magical realism, as in Gabriel García Márquez or David Ireland, or in some of the paintings of Chagall. An old man tells of a beautiful woman who feeds from the tree growing inside her, and grows thinner or glossier according to the season. There is a ghost story involving a levitating phantom bride. A man carrying a sign with the word “STOP ” is able to slow down time. Traditions of folk-realism and magical realism converge, as in tall stories about farmers’ bar-room rivalry. The tall tale, magical realism, and the Fitzcarraldo effect combine in the story of the first-ever performance of the ballet Swan Lake on a pontoon stage in the Wairoa River. There are over-the-top social constellations, such as a community of bikers, all of whom have mailorder Filipino brides on the pillion-seat, all in black Harley-Davidson singlets. And there are ingenious Borgesian notions bearing on the narrative, such as the tracker dog that can only trace where a person has been but not where he’s heading – even to the point of tracing his life-history back to his place of birth. There are mystical diesel mechanics who have studied flamenco guitar in Spain, whisky marmalade priests borrowed from Graham Greene, grandmothers who are younger than their lesbian-lover granddaughters, arm-wrestling brides, mailorder ventriloquists, an escape artist who specializes in wriggling out of difficult social situations like shotgun weddings and who escapes from a reporter by fleeing through a Constable landscape on the wall. There is even, as in Manhire’s novel, a satire on Reaganomics, “The chancellor of the hole in the road.”

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ጓ Although these are all fragments, they do cohere in constellations shaped by the writer’s artistic invention and the reader’s willingness to submit to his vision. Both of these novellas/novels have their quiet and easy side, and both intimate that the narrated world, and the narration of this world, can be more complex than meets the eye. This strikes me as a perfectly sane response on the part of writers in an island nation where small can be beautiful. To cast a penetrable net of coherences over the inescapably fragmentary is the least quixotic of ventures, and often much more exciting aesthetically than painting one large wellmade canvas. Manhire sees this, and acts accordingly in a later work of fiction, the story-collection called The New Land: A Picture Book, which, coming to terms resoundingly and quietly with the myths of New Zealand history, contains no pictures. Manhire here goes one better than Frank Moorhouse and Alice Munro with their discontinuously interconnected narratives, by adding an hilariously heterogeneous index to the book, an act of categorial subversion which indeed brings all of his jelly beans together into one brain. In Anne Kennedy’s novel of 1988, 100 Traditional Smiles, 133 fragments of absence and presence, of displaced objects and misplaced persons, are held together by the sheer energy of polysemous metaphor, including the literal and figurative implications of knitting patterns. Patrick Evans’s novel Making It of 1989 may well be the apotheosis (for the 1980s at least) of this new venture of employing extremes of structural sleight-of-hand in order to allow the fictive world to articulate its significance through its fissures, fractures, and fragments. Our town, our region, our country, our dreams, our sex lives...: Manhire and Kennedy, O’Brien and Evans portray these in glancing facets. New Zealand is always a ‘real’ if not realistic presence here, at least to New Zealand readers. To this extent and in their individual ways, such writers are contributing to the slow and sadly affectionate leavetaking from the tradition of realism established by Sherwood Anderson and adopted, adapted, assimilated, transformed, and transcended by Frank Sargeson over half a century ago. W O R K S C I TE D Campbell, Alistair. The Dark Lord of Savaiki (Pukuera Bay: Te Kotare Press, 1980), repr. in The Dark Lord of Savaiki: Collected Poems (Christchurch: Hazard Press, 2005). Douglas, Roger. There’s Got to Be a Better Way!: A Practical A B C to Solving New Zealand’s Major Problems (London: Fourth Estate, 1980); summarized in Roger Douglas, with Louise Callan, Toward Prosperity (Auckland: David Bateman, 1987): 11–20. Evans, Patrick. Making It (London: Sceptre, 1989).

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Ihimaera, Witi. Pounamu Pounamu (Auckland: Heinemann, 1972). Kennedy, Anne. 100 Traditional Smiles (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1988). Manhire, Bill. An Amazing Week in New Zealand (Wellington: Just As I Am Press, Christmas 1993). ——. “Antarctic Field Notes,” in Manhire, what to call your child (Auckland: Random House/Godwit Book, 1999): 31–57. ——.The Brain of Katherine Mansfield, ill. Gregory O’Brien (Auckland: Auckland U P, 1988). ——. “Breaking the Line: A View of American and New Zealand Poetry,” Islands 38 (December 1987): 142-54, repr. in Manhire, Doubtful Sounds: Essays and Interviews (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2000): 69–84. ——. “From Saga Seminar to Writers’ Workshop: Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington,” Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 6.1 (April 2002): online. ——.Good Looks (Auckland: Auckland U P /Oxford U P , 1982). ——.Hoosh (Wellington: Anxious Husky Press, Christmas 1995). ——.how to take off your clothes at the picnic (Wellington: Wai-te-Ata Press, 1977). ——.Malady (Dunedin: Amphedesma Press, 1970). ——.The New Land: A Picture Book (Wellington: Heinemann Reid, 1990). ——. “Wingatui,” Times Literary Supplement (12 March 1982): 277. ——.Zoetropes: Poems 1972–82 (1984; Manchester: Carcanet, 1985). ——, ed. The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2004). Miller, Gavin. “The Cult of the White Goddess in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark,” Studies in Scottish Literature 33.4 (2004): 291–307. O’Brien, Gregory. Diesel Mystic (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1989). ——.Location of the Least Person (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1987). ——. “Some Paintings I Am Frequently Asked About: Talking with Bill Manhire about Ralph Hotere” (1995), Landfall 191 (Autumn 1996): 21–33. Repr. in Manhire, Doubtful Sounds: Essays and Interviews (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2000): 57–65. Wedde, Ian. “Introduction” to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, ed. Ian Wedde & Harvey McQueen (Auckland: Penguin, 1985): 23–52. Wilkins, Damien. “Northland Panels,” N Z Listener (2 September 1989): 48–49.

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“The Biggest Adventure”1 Indigenous People and White Men’s Wars G E OFFR E Y V. D AVIS

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Know that you go to a place that will change you for ever2

S

I W A S S T A Y I N G WI T H F R I E N D S in Nice in the South of France. One Sunday my hosts took me to the cinema. When we arrived there – just before eleven o’clock in the morning – there was already a long queue waiting to buy tickets. I was somewhat surprised, since it was so early on a Sunday morning, but by the time we came out I understood why the film we had just seen had caused such a stir in France and was so highly regarded by critics and public alike.3 Made by the director Rachid Bouchareb and filmed in France and Morocco, it was called simply Indigènes – or The Indigenous – and focused on the story of the North African colonial troops who had fought on the side of the French in the Second World War from 1943 to 1945. The film traced the story of four soldiers from their recruitment in Algeria in 1943, through their participation in the campaigns in Italy and Provence, their progress up the Vallée du Rhône and on to the Vosges in 1944, to the heroic deaths of all but one of them in the battle to liberate Alsace. It concluded with a moving scene in which, sixty years later, the sole survivor, now an old man, searches for the graves of his erstwhile comrades in an Alsatian military ceme-

1

OM E YEAR S AGO

The phrase is taken from Patricia Grace’s Tu (Auckland: Penguin, 2004): 34, where it is used to describe Tu’s feelings as he sets off to the war as a member of the Maori Battalion. — An earlier version of this article was published in Summerhill 18.2 (Winter 2012), the magazine of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, based in Simla. 2 Aunt Niska in Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005): 293. Further page references are in the main text. 3 The film won the award for best actor at the Cannes film festival in 2006 and was nominated for an Oscar in 2007.

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tery, pays his respects to their memory, and then returns to his solitary room in the immigrant hostel which is now his home in France. While documenting the North African soldiers’ code of honour, their strong religious faith, their sense of solidarity, their heroism in battle, and the ultimate sacrifice they make for France, the film also recorded the discrimination to which they were constantly subjected: the many ways they were denied equal rights in an army they had regarded as a rare bastion of equality; the refusal to serve them equal rations in the mess, for instance, or the consistency with which they are overlooked for promotion. The film frequently emphasized their loyalty to France: the insistence of one of them in signing on in spite of his mother’s remonstrations that his grandfather had never returned from the First World War; the reminder that the family of another of them had been killed by French colonists in Algeria; the scene where a group of Muslim soldiers sing the Marseillaise in an emotional assertion of their rights as French citizens; and their conviction, as they embark on the mission which is to be their last, that “on sera les premiers français en Alsace – c’est notre devoir” (we will be the first French into Alsace – that’s our duty). The film exposed the hypocrisy of the patriotic rhetoric of high-ranking French officers who grandly assure them that “la France est fière de vous” (France is proud of you) while remaining blind to the fact that all their talk of “égalité” and “fraternité” is undermined by the North Africans’ lack of prospects both during and after the war. This was particularly underscored in a powerful scene in which one of the more radical North Africans lambasts such official hypocrisy by ironically quoting the words of General de Gaulle in calling for the very equality they are consistently being denied. Indigènes is one of those relatively few war films in which a politically committed director and his actors sought to make an important political point by highlighting the connection between the historical events described and present-day social injustice.4 Such injustice resides in the lack of recognition accorded indigenous people who fought in their thousands (130,000) in the French army to liberate ‘la mère patrie’ (the mother country). This theme is first addressed in a scene where the colonel who dispatches the North African soldiers on the dangerous mission to Alsace which will lead to the deaths of three of them assures them – on his word of honour – that all they have done for France during the war will be recognized. This is, of course, the expectation 4

As Alec Hargreaves points out in his article “Indigènes: A Sign of the Times,” the film may also be read with reference to the situation of North African immigrants in France today, a reading encouraged by the fact that – as was well known to French cinema audiences – the director and the actors involved in making the film are themselves North Africans living in France. See Research in African Literatures 38.4 (Winter 2007): 204–16.

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of the men themselves. But as a text superimposed over a shot of a Muslim military cemetery at the end of the film makes clear, full recognition was not accorded them. After the war the colonial troops who had survived were paid a pension which was paltry when compared with that received by French exservicemen. Even though the French Conseil d’État had finally ruled in 2001 that this disparity, in effect since 1959, should be redressed, the ruling had subsequently been ignored by successive governments. It was, as Alec Hargreaves reports, only after President Chirac saw the film that action was finally taken.5 Indigènes makes a strong political statement and articulates a convincing call for justice, which its success at the Cannes Film Festival and subsequently with the French public amply recognized. Although it was a French film, the story it has to tell has many parallels in the history of indigenous people fighting alongside the British in that same war. Only recently, in September 2008, were we reminded that there were cases in Britain, too, where the question of recognition and compensation had remained unresolved – for instance, when the press carried photographs of two aged, highly decorated Nepalese Gurkhas, Laxman Gurung and Rahadur Pun, clutching Union Jacks and sitting on either side of a photograph of the Queen outside the Old Bailey in London awaiting the High Court’s judgment on their hitherto unacknowledged right to retire in Britain and to receive a British pension.6

ጓ Although I have long been acquainted with the writings of those English authors who participated in the First World War – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and others – I have only recently become aware of the work of authors from Commonwealth countries, who, while most did not themselves take part in the First or Second World Wars, have nevertheless sought in their work to re-evaluate the impact on their own societies of those wars, in which so many of their countrymen had fought. From the former settler colonies of Australia and Canada, in particular, have come a number of texts by major writers which have addressed their country’s participation in European wars on the side of the mother country from which their ancestors had once emigrated. The Australian David Malouf, for example, has in his novels Fly Away, Peter (1982) and The Great World (1990), sought to depict his country’s involvement in both world wars, motivated as he was not so much by a desire to describe the events of the wars themselves as to define Australia’s particular ex5 6

Hargreaves, “Indigènes: A Sign of the Times,” 204. The case was decided in their favour.

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perience of them. Malouf’s concern was not only to investigate the impact of the wars – socially and psychologically – on ordinary Australians, both those who were combatants and those who remained at home, but also primarily to seek to understand how Australia had itself been transformed by its participation in the wars in Europe and Asia and what that meant later for his own non-combatant generation. And then there is the Canadian Timothy Findley, author of a celebrated novel entitled The Wars (1977), equally concerned to ascertain the impact of the war on his country, impugning the responsibility of the older generation for sending the younger one to war, and exploring the complex moral issues thrown up by the brutalization of men in war. Findley’s novel is a historiographic metafiction which plays with the possibilities of postmodern narration while not eschewing the harrowing realism of its subject. It is a novel, however, which has in common with Malouf’s works that it is by a white male author and explores the fates of white male protagonists. Rarely indeed has the participation of indigenous combatants in war found expression – Kip in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is one example, as is Jules Tonnerre in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners – but examples such as these are few and far between. To find accounts of such experience we have to turn to the writings of indigenous authors themselves. Among the earliest examples is the diary Sol Plaatje kept of his experiences in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. Later to become first secretary of the African National Congress and a noted author and translator, Plaatje observed the war in his capacity as interpreter at Mafeking. Another major early text is Mulk Raj Anand’s 1940 novel of the First World War, Across the Black Waters, which he wrote while himself taking part in the Spanish Civil War. That the theme has lost nothing of its interest for postcolonial writers is clear from a number of much more recent publications, works such as the Nigerian author Biyi Bandele’s novel Burma Boy (2007), which tells the story of the West Africans who fought with the Chindits against the Japanese in 1944. In the present article I shall, however, be focusing on the New Zealand Mǒori author Patricia Grace’s novel Tu (2004), the first novel to concern itself with the history of the legendary Maori Battalion in Italy during World War Two, and the Ojibway Canadian author Joseph Boyden’s bestseller Three Day Road (2005), the first novel to relate First-Nations experience in World War One and a book that has already

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come to be regarded by critics as a “milestone in North American fiction,” and as a “Canadian classic.”7

ጓ New Zealand, as a Dominion of the British Empire since 1907, had participated in the First World War alongside Great Britain. Together with the Australians, its troops had formed part of the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli. During the war the country had sustained almost 60,000 casualties (of whom over 16,000 had been killed), a number regarded as higher per capita than that for any other nation involved in the war. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, New Zealand again followed suit, although this time it issued its declaration of war independently. The country’s unconditional loyalty to Britain was expressed in a much-quoted statement by the then Labour Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage: both with gratitude for the past and with confidence in the future, we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand.8

During the course of the war when conscription was in force, some 306,000 men were called up.9 New Zealand forces saw action in the catastrophic campaigns in Greece and Crete in 1941 – they suffered heavy casualties on Crete, with 661 killed and 1,943 captured – and they also fought against the Germans in North Africa the same year, where the number killed was even higher (900) and some 1,900 were taken prisoner. When, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the focus of the war moved to the Pacific, it was decided rather controversially that New Zealand forces would not be redeployed nearer home, as were their Australian counterparts, but would remain on in Europe, while the defence of their own country would be entrusted to the Americans. Thus, from 1943 to 1945, New Zealand troops took part in the Italian campaign, which saw them involved particularly in the murderous battle at Cassino in 1944,10 and 7

Ellen Bielawski, introducing Boyden, From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans: A Mixed Blood Highway (Henry Kreisel Lecture Series 1; Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest/Canadian Literature Centre, 2008): 3, and Donna Coates in her review “On the Warpath,” Canadian Literature 195 (Winter 2007): 122, for example. 8 Quoted from Keith Jackson & Alan McRobie, Historical Dictionary of New Zealand (Auckland: Longman, 1996): 259. 9 Figures from Alison Parr, Home: Civilian New Zealanders Remember the Second World War (Auckland: Penguin, 2010): 17. 10 A Fair Sort of Battering: New Zealanders Remember the Italian Campaign, ed. Megan Hutching (Auckland: HarperCollins in association with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2004) pro-

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subsequently moving up through the Italian peninsular to Trieste, which they entered at war’s end. The Italian campaign proved very costly for New Zealand, since their forces suffered 9,000 casualties, of which 2,003 were deaths.11 By the end of the Second World War the country had suffered 36,038 casualties overall, of whom 11, 625 had been killed and 24,413 wounded.12 As part of the New Zealand war effort, Mǒori played a significant role. In spite of the fact that not all of them had been in favour of the idea of fighting overseas on the side of the British during the First World War, a volunteer Maori Pioneer Battalion had been formed in 1916 and had served in Egypt. This proved to be the forerunner of the Maori Battalion which would be established at the beginning of the Second World War. Of the 16,000 Mǒori (out of a population of only 90,000) who served in various capacities during the war, some 3,600 volunteered for the Maori Battalion, which fought in North Africa and Italy. During the battle for Cassino it fell to them to lead the attack on the railway station. In Italy, the battalion suffered heavy losses, with 649 killed, 1,700 wounded and more than 150 taken prisoner.13 It is worth quoting what Patricia Grace has to say about the motivations of those who joined the Maori Battalion, since this will be a basic theme of her novel Tu: this new battalion was the hope of the people. It was the means by which the people and culture would achieve recognition and equality – their salvation in a way – so no matter what his immediate reason might be for going off to war, resting on the shoulders of the Maori soldier was the mana of his family, his iwi and his race. His first duty was not to king and country but to the people at home.14

On their return home after serving in the First World War, Mǒori had suffered discrimination, in that, unlike their Pakeha counterparts, they had not been granted any rehabilitation assistance. After the Second World War, however,

vides absorbing and moving personal testimonies from thirteen New Zealanders, one of whom is ǒori, who took part in the Italian campaign. This well-illustrated volume is a fine example of the power of oral history. Cf. also the Mǒori poet Robert Sullivan’s imaginative recuperation of his ancestor’s participation in these events: Cassino: City of Martyrs/Città Martire (Wellington, Huia: 2010), a poetry collection dedicated by the author “with arohanui [great love] to my grandfather Massey Turi Sullivan, our family and to everyone whose life has been changed by war.” 11 Figures from A Fair Sort of Battering, ed. Hutching, 43. 12 Figures from Jackson & McRobie, Historical Dictionary of New Zealand, 259. 13 Figures from Alison Parr, Home: Civilian New Zealanders Remember the Second World War, 15. See also pp. 263–64 on the Battalion’s return to New Zealand. 14 Patricia Grace, Ned & Katina: A true love story (Auckland: Penguin, 2009): 42.

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they were accorded equal treatment.15 As M.P.K. Sorrenson comments from a Pakeha perspective, This time Maori ex-servicemen were treated with the same generosity as their Pakeha comrades, and many, through trade training, higher education or loans to buy farms or businesses got a good start.16

This is a view which Grace’s novel Tu would seem to dispute.

ጓ Canada’s contribution to the imperial forces in World War One was also very high in terms of the number of men who enlisted. Out of a population of ten million, approximately 600,000 signed on and of those 60,000 died. The number of First-Nations soldiers who joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force has been estimated at about 3,500-4,000, which is about 35 percent of those who were in the eligible age-group at the time.17 Although the statistics are unreliable,18 it has been estimated that over three hundred of them were killed. James Dempsey identifies three reasons why so many First-Nations men volunteered for war service: their loyalty to the British crown (with whom, during the nineteenth century, the Native peoples had concluded treaties) rather than to Ottawa; the persistence of the warrior ethic, which had been the basis of male concepts of honour in pre-colonial times but had been undermined by Europeans; and the opportunity enlisting offered to young males of escaping the boredom of an enforced existence in residential schools or on reserves.19 Although, as in New Zealand, there was an initial reluctance on the part of the military authorities to accept Native recruits, this vanished when Canadian losses increased, particularly after the Battle of the Somme.20 The advantages it was thought might proceed from recruiting Natives were outlined in a revealing letter to the Minister of Militia and Defence, which Dempsey quotes:

15

See Jackson & McRobie, Historical Dictionary of New Zealand, 260. M.P.K. Sorrenson, “Modern Mǒori: The Young Mǒori Party to Mana Motuhake,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, ed. Keith Sinclair (Auckland: Oxford U P , rev. ed. 1996): 338. 17 See L. James Dempsey, Warriors of the King: Prairie Indians in World War I (Regina, Saskatchewan: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina, 1999): 17; and Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford U P , 3rd ed. 2002): 307. Dempsey is himself a Blackfoot scholar. 18 One reason for this is that Inuit and Métis were not always counted. 19 Dempsey, Warriors of the King, 1–16, 46. 20 Warriors of the King, 22. 16

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They are excellent shots, scouts and fine travellers, live in the open air with or without tents. They have scrapped with nature all their lives and are surely fitted for the greatest scrap of all times.21

And indeed, as the careers of Henry Norwest and Francis Pegahmagabow would later amply demonstrate, they did prove very effective snipers. Several commentators have emphasized the fact that – like the Mǒori in New Zealand and North Africans in Indigènes – First-Nations soldiers met with unequal treatment after the war. The hopes of returned soldiers that they would be accorded social equality were disappointed, as they found themselves still “subject to the provisions of the Indian Act and [...] in the same position as they were before enlisting.”22 Nor did they experience any economic improvement. Dickason points out that “as veterans [...] Amerindians soon discovered that they were not getting the same benefits as non-Amerindians.”23 Boyden confesses himself “shocked and amazed” that First-Nations soldiers were not awarded the pensions others received: Native soldiers didn’t get any compensation whatsoever. They were made a lot of promises, too, huge promises of land, of the vote, for freedom, and those promises all disappeared immediately on their return home.24

In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Dempsey ends his study with the bitter remark: “It appeared that Indian soldiers were good enough to fight and die for Canada but they were not ‘civilized’ enough to have the rights of Canadian citizens.”25

ጓ In the informative “Author’s notes” to Tu, Patricia Grace relates how the novel came to be written. She records how her father went to join the Maori Battalion reinforcements in Italy in 1944 and how he kept a notebook of his journey. As is

21

Warriors of the King, 22. Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 307; see also Uwe Zagratzki, “Fighting on Three Fronts – First Nations Soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1918,” in Krieg und Literatur/War and Literature 9 (2003): 108. 23 Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 307. 24 “Pushing out the Poison: Joseph Boyden. Interview with Herb Wylie,” in Herb Wylie, Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U P , 2007): 222. 25 Dempsey, Warriors of the King, 81. 22

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apparent from her remarks, his notes are remarkable for what they do not say about the war itself. His notes begin with the words “Left Papakura by train,”26 and cover only the journey by sea and train until reaching camp in El Maadi, where preparations began for the campaigns in Italy. He took up his pen again on 13 December 1945, after the war had ended and when he was about to leave a rest camp in Florence: “So after many months of varied experiences I take off again.…” His diary is just twenty-five pages in all (284). In common with many, if not most, of those who took part in the war, her father displayed a great reluctance ever to talk about what he had experienced. Grace remembers hearing as a child the songs her father and uncles sang and the new languages they had learnt overseas and she recalls how he spoke warmly of Italy and of the people there, but she recognizes that the men “returning from war [had come] home with a silence also,” that “they had their ghosts” and that they never spoke about “the action of the war itself” (284). It was only when she read his notebook long after his death that she became curious about the motivations of the men of her father’s generation who volunteered to go to war. Tu is the product of that curiosity. It is a novel with considerable significance in the literary history of New Zealand, since, as Janet Wilson has pointed out, “it marks out the twentieth-century wars of empire as a subject for Maori fiction for the first time.”27 For Grace, writing the novel was itself a voyage of discovery: I can say now I have been on a journey too, especially as far as understanding more about the overseas war experience of the soldiers is concerned. It was an engrossing and illuminating journey on the one hand, on the other, one that was both sad and horrifying. (284)28

That journey involved a great deal of historical research, using the memoirs of other members of the Maori Battalion, as well as letters, photographs, memorabilia of all kinds, contemporary newspaper clippings and the archival resources of major New Zealand libraries. Through Radio New Zealand, Grace also gained access to recordings of the Mǒori songs that had been sung at concert parties.29 26

The phrase “Left Papakura by train” is used as the title of the first part of the novel and in the first line of Tu’s diary (Tu, 15, 16). Further page references are in the main text. 27 Janet Wilson, “The Maori at War and Strategic Survival: Tu by Patricia Grace,” Hecate 34.1 (May 2008): 73. 28 See, too, the interview Patricia Grace gave Ulla Ratheiser, which is included in the latter’s University of Innsbruck dissertation, “Agents of Change: Childhood and Child Characters in Patricia Grace’s Novels” (2008). 29 Those interested may be referred to the two- C D set Ake, Ake, Kia Kaha E! Songs of the New Zealand 28 (Mǎori) Battalion produced by the National Library of New Zealand (A C D 206), which

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When she began writing Tu in 2002, Grace could not have known that the journey of which she speaks would turn out to be very much longer than she had originally thought. In 2007 it would take her to Crete to research the unusual family history of a wounded Mǒori soldier who had married a Cretan woman he had met while being sheltered on the island by her family; eventually he had brought her back to New Zealand. Approached by their sons with the request that she write the story of their parents, Grace “realised that this was a story that needed to be told” and embarked on the task of writing the biography, Ned & Katina. A true love story, “for the first time [...] a story I did not own,”30 as she puts it.

ጓ It is interesting, when reading some of the texts that Joseph Boyden goes into in his own biography – the 2008 Henry Kreisel Lecture, for example, or the interview contained in the Penguin Reading Guide – to note the elements in his family background and the aspects of his own experience that seem to have contributed to the genesis of his novel Three Day Road. Among the familial elements are his father’s distinguished service as a highly decorated medical officer in World War Two and his Uncle Erl’s wholly contrasting pursuit of a traditional Ojibway way of life. Relevant aspects of Boyden’s personal experience include his familiarity with Northern Ontario through having lived and worked in the James Bay area and the long periods he spent with remote communities on reserves,31 not to mention the many canoeing trips he undertook – for instance, on occasions when he and his son “need[ed] to reconnect.”32

ጓ Before proceeding further, I should perhaps briefly summarize both novels. Tu covers the period from June 1943 to March 1946. It tells the story of three ǒori brothers – Pita, Rangi, and Tu – who, undeterred by the fate of their father, who was gassed and wounded in World War One, enlist in the Maori Battalion in World War Two and take part in the Italian campaign from 1943 to 1945. The novel begins with Tu’s departure by sea from Wellington, follows his progress to Suez and thence to Italy, describes his longing to see action, his first contains original 1940–43 recordings made at Papakura Military Camp, New Zealand, at Maadi Camp, Egypt, in North Africa, and at Taranto in Southern Italy. 30 Grace, Ned & Katina, 10, 11. 31 Boyden, From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans, 22–23. 32 From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans, 17.

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experience of killing an enemy in combat, and his feelings of pride as a member of the Maori Battalion who has risen to the challenge of war and not been found wanting. Throughout the novel there is an emphasis on Tu as standing in a warrior tradition: he feels he has a right to belong to the battalion, since his very name, which evokes the Mǒori god of warfare Tumatauenga, had been bestowed on him to honour his father, who had fought in the First World War as a member of the Pioneer Battalion, known in Mǒori as Te Hokowhitu-a-Tu (34– 35). As a “backhome boy” from New Zealand, Tu is excited at being involved in events of such global import and with his strong sense of duty is reluctant to return home before the task is completed. He participates in the arduous battle for the strategic town of Cassino, “one of the most relentless and unrewarding ventures in which the New Zealand Division was involved,”33 learns of the death of his brother Pita, and hears Rangi’s confession of his affair with the Pakeha woman back home who had once been the hesitant Pita’s “dream girl.” Subsequently, Rangi injures Tu with the intention of getting him invalided out of the war. Tu returns to New Zealand, where he chooses to live a solitary existence at the place under Mt Taranaki that had been his childhood home. All of this is told by Tu himself in the first person. His account is, however, interwoven with a third-person narrative which essentially takes the form of a chronicle unfolding the family history up to the time when he enlists. This narrative of memory includes Tu’s educational prowess and the hopes the family places in him, which lead them to oppose his enlisting; his childhood memories of his father, a veteran of the First World War, whose war wounds and resulting mental instability had contributed to his early death at the age of thirty-nine; the family’s move from a rural community to the urban environment of Wellington and the difficulties they face in assimilating to white society, a process rendered tolerable only by their membership in a Mǒori cultural club, which provides “a home away from home” (41) and enables them to hold on to their traditions, “the songs and dances and arts of the Maori” (42); the story of Pita’s relationship with Jess, a narrative of interracial love frustrated by social convention; and, finally, the mystery surrounding the births of the children Rimini and Benedict, to whom, in letters which frame the narrative, Tu addresses his account of his wartime experiences. (Their names evoke the Italian campaign, Benedict being the saint after whom the monastery of Monte Cassino, destroyed in the war, was named). Much of the impact of the novel depends on the interplay between the narrative strands along which it is structured, on the relationship of past and present, both in the history of Tu’s family and in the 33

Janet Wilson, “The Maori at War and Strategic Survival,” 74.

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political history linking the First and Second World Wars, and on the sense of the strong Mǒori culture and the life back home which the soldiers have left behind.

ጓ Joseph Boyden’s novel Three Day Road similarly demonstrates how oral narrative may be integrated into a written text. Furthermore, it illustrates how, in the manner described by Jo-Ann Episkenew, indigenous storytelling may be used as a means of healing historical trauma, in this case the trauma of war. (As will become clear in the course of this essay, her argument, although primarily oriented to the literary representation of social history in Canada, applies equally well to New Zealand.) Episkenew first offers a damning political analysis of the impact of colonialism on indigenous people, dismissing white superiority as a foundational myth of Canadian settler society which has had traumatic effects on the health and well-being of indigenous people and has inflicted a “soul wound” on them.34 The pressure to acculturate to settler society exerted over centuries on indigenous people has resulted in what she terms “postcolonial stress disorder” (78) and has brought about social abuses such as poverty, alcoholism, and violence. It must be the task of indigenous literature, in Episkenew’s view, to challenge the “master narrative” of white settlerdom in Canada by articulating a “counterstory” which will redress the falsities of an imposed history from a Native perspective. Indigenous literature for her is, thus, a form of counter-discourse. Stories and indigenous literature in general have “healing power” (76). Indigenous people have believed in the healing power of language and stories since time immemorial and today’s Indigenous writes continue to apply this belief to the creation of works of literature and theatre in English. (80)

When indigenous people articulate their own narrative of their own history, the effect is therapeutic and transformative. It brings people out of their isolation by establishing a commonality of experience and providing people with the means to engage with historical trauma.

34

See Jo–Ann Episkenew, “Contemporary Indigenous Literatures in Canada: Healing from Historical Trauma,” in Indigeneity: Culture and Representation, ed. Ganesh Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis & K.K. Chakravarty (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009): 77–78. Further page references are in the main text. See also her book Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing (Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P , 2009).

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Much of what Episkenew has to say resonates throughout Three Day Road. The novel, which has bilingual chapter titles in Cree and English, is structured around two parallel, alternating narratives told by two Native voices. The first narrative, that of Xavier, tells of two Cree, Xavier himself and Elijah, friends from childhood, who volunteer to serve in World War One and fight with the Canadian forces in the major campaigns on the Somme, at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. The second narrative, that of Xavier’s Aunt Niska, tells of how, after the war, she transports him wounded and with his supply of morphine running out, by canoe back towards his home country in Northern Ontario where, the reader assumes, he has come to die. Xavier’s account of his experiences takes the form of the memories which run through his mind as he lies for three days in Aunt Niska’s canoe. He relives the trench warfare in Flanders in all its terrible reality, sparing the reader none of the horrors of war. He remembers how, as accomplished hunters and marksmen, he and Elijah were deployed as snipers, using the skills acquired in the Canadian bush to survive in no-man’s-land. He records his own growing revulsion at the large number of kills they were notching up, while Elijah, increasingly dependent on drugs, came to love the act of killing and indulged in ever greater brutality, even to the extent of murdering two of his fellow soldiers. Elijah’s moral decline led to a final struggle and to his death at the hands of Xavier, after which Xavier himself lost a leg in a shelling. Throughout the novel this narrative is counterpointed by that of Aunt Niska, a Native diviner who still lives in the bush, following the traditional way of life. We learn how, during Xavier’s youth and in resistance to what was being drummed into him at a Catholic residential school, she had taught him Native knowledge. It is upon such knowledge that she now has to rely in attempting to save his life by bringing him back spiritually into the world he had left behind when he went off to the war. Not fully understanding what he has gone through and knowing nothing of the place where his suffering was inflicted, she decides to try to heal him by telling him stories. By the end of the novel, after a ritual of healing, Xavier is restored and can return to his people. Interpolated between the episodes Xavier recalls from the war, Aunt Niska’s stories are intended to restore him. Since the traumatized Xavier cannot yet speak to her, she decides to speak to him, in the belief that “maybe some of the poison that courses through him might be released in this way” (88). When he initially cannot take food, she resolves to “feed him with my story instead” (130). So she tells him stories of the history of the Cree, of her own childhood growing up in the traditional manner, of her being forcibly taken away to residential school, of the abuse she suffered there until her mother helped her escape “back

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into the time of our ancestors” (95), and of how she had later been raped by a French Canadian (171). She tells him, too, of how, when Xavier in his turn had been forced to attend residential school, she had stolen him back from the nuns so that he could be raised “in the old ways” (216), of their subsequent nomadic life together, which she recalls as “the happiest [months] in [her] life” when they were “trapping and hunting in the bush” (219), and of how, when he announced to her that he and Elijah had “decided to paddle to a town where we can join their army” (203), she had built a matatosowin (sweat lodge), prayed to Gitchi Manitou, and tied medicine bundles around their necks for protection, warning them: “Know that you go to a place that will change you forever” (293).

ጓ The history of First-Nations involvement in World War One has largely been neglected. It has received only scant mention in military histories and, as Donna Coates reminded us in her review of Boyden’s novel, “to date, no other writer has examined Aboriginal participation in the Great War in fiction.”35 Three Day Road thus amounts to what Gordon Bölling has described as “an attempt to destabilize Eurocentric accounts of Canada’s past.”36 Although Boyden may not have seen his novel in quite those terms, it is clear that the book does represent something new in Canadian writing, insofar as it sets out to tell the FirstNations story of the war from a First-Nations perspective.37 We know, too, of his concern about misrepresentations of First-Nations people in the North American media from his scathing remarks about films such as Dancing with Wolves,38 and we can thus read the novel as an honest attempt to offer an authentic representation of Native people. It is evident from his own account in the Reading Guide that the original idea for Three Day Road lay in Boyden’s own family history and particularly in the contrasting lives of his father and his uncle. With this he wished to combine the myth of Francis Pegahmagabow, the much-decorated, First World War Ojibway

35

Donna Coates, “On the Warpath,” Canadian Literature 195 (Winter 2007): 122. See also Ellen Bielawski’s introduction to Boyden’s Kreisel lecture, From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans, where she describes Boyden as “the first to tell the whole Canadian story, the one that includes Aboriginal people” (3). 36 Gordon Bölling, “‘A Part of Our History that So Few Know About’: Native Involvement in Canada’s Great War – Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road,” in Inventing Canada – Inventer le Canada, ed. Klaus–Dieter Ertler & Martin Löschnigg (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008): 253–67. 37 This is not to imply that other Native writers, Tomson Highway, for instance, have not written of other aspects of First-Nations history in fiction. 38 Boyden, From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans, 28.

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sniper and scout, whom he describes in the “Acknowledgments” to the novel as “one of Canada’s most important heroes” (383).39 This concept provided him with the interplay of modern war history and traditional Native life that is at the core of the work. To situate his fictional narrative of the war in an authentic historical context, he decided to place his protagonists, Xavier and Elijah, with the Second Canadian Division, which was involved in some of the worst battles of the war. This also has the effect of writing the First Nations into the general Canadian story. Among the interesting facets of Three Day Road is its structure. Thus, as Keith Batarbee has pointed out, it makes use of the motif of journey in the form of the two young men’s journey from the bush to the recruitment station and to their various destinations on the Western front; the literal ‘threeday road’ of Niska and Xavier’s canoe journey back home; and the mythical three-day road used by the Cree as a metaphor for the transition from life to death.40

The canoe journey with Aunt Niska is, in fact, a reversal of the original trip to enlist. A further remarkable feature of the novel is the storytelling technique Boyden adopts. Since he wanted to avoid having his storytellers address the reader directly, he structured the narrative so that the protagonists would tell their stories to one another. Thus, “Niska and Elijah tell their stories to Xavier, and Xavier tells his own stories to himself.”41 Batarbee has even calculated that Aunt Niska has twenty-five percent of the narrative and Xavier seventy-five percent. 42 Not only does Boyden integrate traditional oral narrative into the novel, he also departs from the strict linear chronology that he had adhered to in the first draft of the story. His dissatisfaction with that draft had lain in the fact that he felt he was inappropriately “applying a Western style of storytelling to an aboriginal story.”43 So he chose a more circular mode of narration which would take account of the Cree notion that life proceeds in cycles, and would re-enact the 39

See also Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 307. There are two references to Pegahmagabow in the text (24, 203). 40 Keith Batarbee, “Imaginative Outreach: Two Fictional Representations of Native–White Contact: Armin Wiebe’s Tatsea and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road,” in At Home in the World: Essays and Poems in Honour of Britta Olinder, ed. Chloé Avril & Ronald Paul (Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis/ Gothenburg Studies in English 94; Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 2008): 18. 41 “An Interview with Joseph Boyden,” in Penguin Reading Guides: Three Day Road, http://www .penguin.com/read/book-clubs/three-day-road/9781101078174 (accessed 26 August 2015). 42 Batarbee, “Imaginative Outreach,” 17. 43 “An Interview with Joseph Boyden.”

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Cree manner of storytelling. Thus, the novel with its twin narrative strands now begins near the end of the story, when the war is already over and Xavier is back in Canada, and goes back over earlier events until it reaches the present. It thus takes Xavier – and the reader – full circle.

ጓ Tu and Three Day Road have much in common. Both novels employ a dual focus: they describe in detail the lives of indigenous communities – the Mǒori and the Cree – both in their home environments and through the experience of the men who go overseas to war. People like the Cree, who led the nomadic lives of hunters in Northern Canada, effectively became nomads abroad when, at the behest of their colonial masters, they enlisted to fight in wars they barely understood in places they had never heard of. There are many questions which arise from these texts, not least the comparable experiences of indigenous people from different parts of the British Empire they address. One central question worth investigating – especially in view of the fact that so many indigenous people were not conscripted but actually volunteered, and in such large numbers, for both world wars – is that foregrounded by Patricia Grace in Tu: “Why did they go to war? Why did they commit themselves to a war so totally? What was their cause?” (283). In describing their motivations in writing these novels, both authors acknowledge the curiosity engendered by their own fathers’ having taken part in World War Two. Similarly, both make obeisance to the example of their forebears who so readily volunteered for military service: Patricia Grace celebrates the achievements of the Maori Battalion; Joseph Boyden speaks of his desire “to honour the Native soldiers who fought in the Great War.”44 Both authors seek to establish the particular contribution of their own communities to the wars, to gain an insight into the minds and motivations of those who served and to ascertain the nature of the psychological and social transformations that participation in the world wars brought about. Both novels offer compelling studies of the psychology of the indigenous combatant, analysing both those who fell victim to the brutalization of war (Rangi and Elijah) and those who confront their moral conflict and thus survive (Tu and Xavier). Both novelists seek to preserve indigenous identity amid the horrors of war by integrating elements of indigenous culture in their narratives. Language in particular plays an important role here. In Tu, Mǒori terms are used throughout; 44

Joseph Boyden, “Acknowledgements,” in Boyden, Three Day Road (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2006): 384.

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in Three Day Road, Xavier and Elijah communicate with one another largely in Cree and regard English as a language which is “better for lies” (51). In Tu, where Grace places the famous “Maori Battalion Marching Song” as an epigraph to the novel (7), the music and performances of the Mǒori concert parties and of the Maori Battalion soldiers contribute to the construction and retention of their identity. Both novelists structure their texts as parallel narratives, which has the effect of depicting the indigenous world of peace as one of security and the white world of war as one of madness. In Tu, the emphasis on family and community provides a real contrast to the scenes of war; in Three Day Road, the traditional world that Aunt Niska inhabits and draws Xavier back into is a place of healing. Both novels foreground the mode of their narration. Tu’s narrative is based on his diary, what he calls his “mixture of thoughts, ideas, observations and memories” (23). During the war he fills notebooks with jottings and after it is over he resolves to try to understand his experience by continuing to write about it. Writing becomes a therapeutic process for him; it will, he feels, enable him to establish the truth. It is thus what, on the last page of the novel, he resolves to do “from now on” (282). In Three Day Road, Boyden uses traditional oral narrative to tell Aunt Niska’s story and – as I mentioned above – this process of storytelling becomes a healing process, too. Both novelists portray protagonists who seem aware that participation in the war is unlikely to improve their positions in society when they finally return home – and here again one is reminded of Indigènes. This is particularly important in Tu, where Grace, on the one hand, evokes the Mǒori hope for postwar racial equality (156) and, on the other, portrays characters such as Pita, who senses that even in a free world he would not be able to marry Jess (119). Both authors address the moral and political conflicts inherent in indigenous participation in the wars they describe. Boyden stresses the moral conflict inherent in the Crees’ activity as snipers; what Xavier describes is the realization that “all men are really fighting on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy” (326). It is, however, Patricia Grace who in Tu more comprehensively addresses issues arising from indigenous participation in European wars and provides a spectrum of opinion on such questions. She sketches the brothers’ motivations in enlisting – Tu’s desire, for instance, “to escape from boredom and boyhood,” to see the world “outside the school gates, away from my family, from my mountain” (25), to embark on what he thinks will prove “the biggest adventure” (34) of his life. She shows how, through most of the war, he remains excited at being a member of the Maori Battalion and at being part of such events. Grace refers the reader to those dissenting voices, few

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in number, which had been heard when the Maori Battalion was first formed. “It’s not our war, some would say. We’ve already given men to one war on the other side of the world. That’s enough” (89). Accordingly, she gives particular prominence to the well-known Mǒori activist Te Puea Herangi, who had stood firm in refusing to allow her people to go away to fight for God, King and Country. They had their own god, she said. They had their own king. They had their own country too, but much of their country had been stolen. Why should they want to fight for the people who had stolen their country? (142)

And towards the end of the novel, when Tu has been back in New Zealand for some years, she records his reflections on his own participation in the World War and his speculations on why others had enlisted. Although he is particularly proud of belonging to his battalion, which he comes to regard as his “home place,” he is aware that others were sometimes driven to join up by issues such as poverty: Some joined for a coat and a pair of boots, for food, army pay, and so as not to be another mouth to feed at a time when there was no work, no money for them. (259)

Having joined up as a young man with little understanding of the war, Tu devotes himself after the war to studying its causes and to communicating what he has learnt to the younger generation represented by Rimini and Benedict. He dismisses such arguments as that the Mǒori would “be deemed equal” if they fought the “white man’s war” or that war was part of the Mǒori inheritance. What he has come to believe is that “It had nothing to do with God and King, and we were too far away for it to really be about our country” (278). What it did have to do with was the freedom and citizenship of the Mǒori people themselves. And if that was the case, then the price had been too high, for, as he concludes, “We took full part in a war but haven’t yet been able to take full part in peace” (279). And it is this thought that leads him – and, indeed, Patricia Grace herself – to a final plea to the younger generation, to which Joseph Boyden would surely also subscribe: “I ask you not to follow in our footsteps, your fathers’ and mine” (281).

W O R K S C I TE D Anand, Mulk Raj. Across the Black Waters (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940). Bandele, Biyi. Burma Boy (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007).

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Batarbee, Keith. “Imaginative Outreach: Two Fictional Representations of Native–White Contact: Armin Wiebe’s Tatsea and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road,” in At Home in the World: Essays and Poems in Honour of Britta Olinder, ed. Chloé Avril & Ronald Paul (Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis/Gothenburg Studies in English 94; Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 2008): 13–22. Bölling, Gordon. “ ‘A Part of Our History that So Few Know About’: Native Involvement in Canada’s Great War – Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road,” in Inventing Canada – Inventer le Canada, ed. Klaus-Dieter Ertler & Martin Löschnigg (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008): 253–67. Bouchareb, Rachid, dir. Indigènes (Algeria | France | Morocco | Belgium, 2006; 128 min.). Boyden, Joseph. From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans: A Mixed Blood Highway, intro. Ellen Bielawski (Henry Kreisel Lecture Series 1; Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest/Canadian Literature Centre, 2008). ——. “An Interview with Joseph Boyden,” in Penguin Reading Guides: Three Day Road, http://www .penguin.com/read/book-clubs/three-day-road/9781101078174 (accessed 26 August 2015). ——. “Pushing out the Poison: Joseph Boyden,” interview with Herb Wylie, in Herb Wylie, Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U P , 2007): 219–40. ——.Three Day Road (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005). ——.Three Day Road (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2006). Coates, Donna. “On the Warpath,” Canadian Literature 195 (Winter 2007): 122–23. Della Valle, Paola. “The Wider Family: Patricia Grace Interviewed by Paola Della Valle,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42.1 (March 2007): 131–41. Dempsey, L. James. Warriors of the King: Prairie Indians in World War I (Regina, Saskatchewan: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina, 1999). Dickason, Olive Patricia. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford U P , 3rd ed. 2002). Episkenew, Jo–Ann. “Contemporary Indigenous Literatures in Canada: Healing from Historical Trauma,” in Indigeneity: Culture and Representation, ed. Ganesh Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis & K.K. Chakravarty (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009): 75–86. ——.Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing (Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2009). Findley, Timothy. The Wars (Toronto: Clark Irwin, 1977). Grace, Patricia. Ned & Katina: A true love story (Auckland: Penguin, 2009). ——.Tu (Auckland: Penguin, 2004). Hargreaves, Alec. “Indigènes: A Sign of the Times,” Research in African Literatures 38.4 (Winter 2007): 204–16. Hutching, Megan, ed. A Fair Sort of Battering: New Zealanders Remember the Italian Campaign (Auckland: HarperCollins in association with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2004).

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Jackson, Keith, & Alan McRobie. Historical Dictionary of New Zealand (Auckland: Longman, 1996). Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974). Malouf, David. Fly Away, Peter (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982). ——.The Great World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990). McKinnon, Malcolm. “New Zealand in the World (1914–1951),” in The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, ed. Keith Sinclair (Auckland: Oxford U P , rev. ed. 1996): 237– 66. McLean, Gavin, Ian McGibbon & Kynian Gentry, ed. The Penguin Book of New Zealanders at War (Auckland: Penguin, 2009). Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient (London: Bloomsbury, 1992). Parr, Alison. Home: Civilian New Zealanders Remember the Second World War (Auckland: Penguin, 2010). Plaatje, Sol T. The Mafeking Diary of Sol T. Plaatje, ed. John Comaroff & Brian Willan (Oxford: James Currey & Cape Town: David Philip, 1999). Ratheiser, Ulla. “Agents of Change: Childhood and Child Characters in Patricia Grace’s Novels” (doctoral dissertation, University of Innsbruck, 2008). Sorrenson, M.P.K. “Modern Mǒori: The Young Mǒori Party to Mana Motuhake,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, ed. Keith Sinclair (Auckland: Oxford U P , rev. ed. 1996): 323–51. Sullivan, Robert. Cassino: City of Martyrs/Città Martire (Wellington, Huia: 2010). Wilson, Janet. “The Maori at War and Strategic Survival: Tu by Patricia Grace,” Hecate 34.1 (May 2008): 73–88. Zagratzki, Uwe. “Fighting on Three Fronts – First Nations Soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1918,” in Krieg und Literatur/War and Literature 9 (2003): 105–20.

Recording Ake, Ake, Kia Kaha E! Songs of the New Zealand 28 (Mǎori) Battalion, produced by the National Library of New Zealand (A C D 206).

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C REATIVE W RITING

D AVID D AB YD EE N

Chinese Mothers ——— ጓ ———

“M

B I C Y C L E ! ” S W E E T L I Y E C R I E D in the second before toppling to the ground, hitting her head. Wind whipped up dew, road-side plants sneezed, were uprooted in the sudden dust storm. The second stretched, she saw her plums tossed in the air and scattering, dozens of plums, the day’s succour, three yuan. Three yuans for noodles, salt, pepper, even a piece of bone with some meat clinging to it, if Butcher Shen was drunk and his knife (perfected in the battlefield) failed to scrape off every morsel. Butcher Shen ... normally she would tremble when thinking of him but not in the second which seemed to stretch into a season as she fell. Neither Butcher Shen nor the loss of fruit and the day’s livelihood affected her. “My bicycle!” she cried before unconsciousness. It had been a year since the bicycle had become hers, a gift from Jia Yun, the suitor she had spurned. The ‘Sweet’ was her mother’s doing, to entice her out of despair, which was Li Ye’s sickness. “The girl’s head crawls with lice. They have put gu into her mind, but I can rid the poison,” the village doctor, Du Fu, had promised in return for twenty yuans, paid over a year. “It will take a year to purge her thoughts and bring her back to laughter,” Du Fu said. “Will you make her a child again, a sweet child? Will you take ten yuans and some plums?” Hongniang, her mother, asked in a craven voice. She knew Du Fu was a quack who demanded too much, too much, of the poor, which was the condition of all the villagers. All except Rich-Beyond-Dreams Wang Changling, who was more cruel by far than Quack Du Fu, owning the land which they tilled for a sickly living, blood-rents drawn from them week after month after year. “I will cure her,” Quack Du Fu lied. The mother sensed the lie. He had taken so many yuans from so many folks from the time he had come to the village, and most of his remedies had failed. Ma Hongniang sensed the lie, but could not know for certain, since Quack Du Fu, on occasion, did bring health to the ailing, 

Y

From a novel in progress.

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a limb healed, a stomach pacified; small acts but signs of hope which folk seized upon out of want. Quack Du Fu was better than nothing, so they gambled their yuans on his doubtful skill. “Ten yuan! Ten yuan!” Quack Du Fu said, sucking his teeth, hawking and spitting on the ground before Ma Hongniang’s feet, at the doorway, knowing that she would not step beyond the phlegm, such was her superstition and that of the villagers. Yellow phlegm, for he had been careful to chew dried mango, fennel seeds, and burdock before his coming. Yellow as jaundice, as fever, as pus, which, if she walked over it, could afflict her. It was not lice that caused Li Ye’s face to crease with worry or made her clench her mouth to prevent smiling. “You’re fifteen years of age today, and in all the time I have sought your affection, you have not once shed your sorrow,” Suitor Jia Yun said, presenting her with his own bicycle and looking upon her like a doting dog. As usual her eyes were lowered, avoiding his, and she said nothing. “I’m going far, many years before I return,” he said. “Will you wait for my return? Will you run up to me as I approach with a sprig of bamboo?” Silence. A fretful look crossed her face. Ma Hongniang, who was watching from afar, shouted to Li Ye, “Say words to comfort poor Jia Yun, can you not see how his eyes bleed? At least give thanks for his bicycle.” Li Ye shuddered as Jia Yun reached out for her hand. She wanted to rise, kick away the stool, run to the barn, and hide herself in hay. Still, she let him caress her hand, stroking it as if to arouse sensitivity. She remained numb within, and deaf to her mother’s entreaty. She looked to the bicycle and opened her eyes wide in a show of gratitude. “My burden, my curse,” Ma Hongniang shouted. “To get her to smile... easier to cut water with a knife....” Afterwards, as she led Jia Yun out of the yard, Ma Hongniang consoled him with a hug. “I will cure her before you return and I will keep her for matrimony. Come back with good health and good fortune.”

ጓ A small house made of bamboo, with bare furnishing – a rope-bed where she slept beside her mother; two cooking pots; a water bucket; a potter’s wheel; an earthen stove with coconut husks for fuel; a knife, and a stone to sharpen it; twigs for chopsticks. A few corncobs hung from a roof-beam, drying. Outside, a makeshift barn with hay for the goat and a cage for the three hens to shelter at night. Behind was a field of plum trees encircled by similar houses. The field belonged to Rich-Beyond-Dreams Wang Changling. Each morning, when plum was in season, Li Ye would pick as many as she could fit into her baskets. She hoisted the bian dan onto her shoulder and walked the six miles to the neighbouring village to sell her stock or exchange them for onions and peppers. Her

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mother made pots for special occasions – the Spring festival, the Pure Brightness festival, ceremonies to honour Chih-Nii and Ma-Ku, the goddesses who protected the trees from blight and the land from barrenness. The plain ones she gave away to the very poor, mostly elderly widows who could not afford the expense of ceremonies. Some she painted, crushing the end of a twig and soaking it in saffron and purple from powders she ground from coloured stones harvested from the hill nearby. Six of these sold for a yuan. Plums and painted pots, a patch of common land to grow rice, goat-milk, and eggs, and whatever vegetables could be harvested from their garden-plot, were all they were worth in the world. The bicycle was a boon, multiplying their fortune many times over. Li Ye soon learned to steer it. She learned to balance two baskets on the handle, and one fastened behind the saddle. That way more plums could be taken to market and two trips could be made each morning. She could find space to fetch a few of the smaller pots, so her mother was able to increase production. And when she returned home, there was time to help dig the clay for her mother’s pottery, scout the hills for coloured rocks, and prepare the kiln with freshly gathered firewood. Ma Hongniang’s income swelled. She bought a necklace of cinnabar beads for Sweet Li Ye, but Li Ye cared nothing for ornaments, nothing for her appearance. She wore the same plain dress day after day. She shunned the village girls who wove flowers into their hair or dyed their lips. Ma Hongniang despaired of her daughter’s solitude. But at least Sweet Li Ye was healthy to look at, plump enough to attract suitors, and with long lustrous hair which made her pale skin even more translucent. And her eyebrows were joined, adding to her value. And there was the gift of the bicycle, even though the suitor, Jia Yun, had gone away empty-handed. The bicycle portended more gifts to come from other suitors, Ma Hongniang hoped. This prospect of future wealth -- a watch perhaps, even a sewing machine -- gave her comfort, and she left Sweet Li Ye to her odd ways. Li Ye, though she showed no emotion, was grateful to be left alone. Nothing pleased her more than to wake up at first light, gather her plums, and cycle to market. She grew to love the speed of the bicycle, and the skill of manoeuvering around stones and pot-holes to stay upright. The thrill of speed, of balance. And the spectacle of flowers! Before, she walked for miles, yoked to baskets of plums, so fatiguing that there was neither time nor desire to raise her eyes to the flowers that dotted the road, blooming in lavender and red and indigo. Now she could stop pedalling, let the bicycle flow downhill on its own, and she could look out to the fields, to the cork oak and maple trees from which birds burst out, startled by the noise of wheels and chain. There were dozens of butterflies,

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fierce in colour yet so dainty at the lips of flowers, opening and closing their wings as they surfeited on dew. The excitement of birds, or butterfly wings, of trees courting the wind. She surrendered to such spectacle, but always, without warning, the air froze, her eyes froze. Fear made her hands tremble, she struggled to steady them on the handlebars. When she recovered she peddled faster, faster, to reach market and the shelter of the crowd. Her goods disposed of, she hurried to reach home, focusing on the dirt road so as not to witness the features of the land. Ma Hongniang took the money, noting how pale Li Ye’s hands were. She said nothing: to question Li Ye, to seek to comfort her, would elicit no response. Best to leave Li Ye to live out her torment, as she, Ma Hongniang had done. A soldier had shattered her husband’s skull, but she had managed to escape the invaders, flee through woods and over hills to this remote corner, where fruit trees were the main means of survival but with a pasture rich enough to support a few dozen goats. Li Ye was barely four, too young to remember how Ma Hongniang picked her way through the woods, finding a trail here and there, wading through streams with only tree branches saving them from drowning, inching up hills, and then down again. Weeks later, they reached the safety of the village. Wild berries and raw mushrooms had been their diet, but they had survived. The villagers took them in, fattened them. They were anxious to hear about the devils who had invaded their country and were spreading in all directions. News had not reached them, they doubted Ma Hongniang to begin with, but when she wept a storm in telling of her husband’s murder, they believed. The men continued to work the fields, but instead of placing clay charms in the soil to call forth rain they planted models of soldiers. At night they retreated to the caves in the surrounding hills, which they camouflaged with branches. Only Rich-Beyond-Dreams Wang Changling stayed in his house. He was educated. In his travels out of the village he had learnt of the British occupation of Nanjing. The British kept order. They chopped whoever blocked their way. After a while the Chinese did what they were told. Wang Changling respected such order. For as long as he could remember, as a child of five or so, the peasants barely contained their hatred of him. They patted his head in friendly jest, especially when his parents were around, but at a safe distance they sucked their teeth and spat. He grew up listening to their complaints. Every ill – whether a flash-flood that washed away their seeds or a hidden stone against which one stumped his toe – was blamed on his parents. They died, he became the landlord, the target of renewed malice. He knew that the peasants had buried effigies of him at the edge of the fields, but he cared not for their superstitions. His two guns were enough

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to see off any attacks and he had paid spies among the peasants. No, he was not fearful of the coming of the Japanese. He could work with such strong people, and pay them sufficient tribute to be left alone with his kingdom of the village and its ancient plum trees. And how could such an attitude be considered disloyal? Wang Changling grimaced at the word. Stupid! The British were only the latest conquerors, and they in turn would be hunted down with dogs. One dynasty had given way to another, warlords had come and gone, leaving behind ramparts, escarpments, walls, which crumbled and were built back, only to disappear again. There was barely a field in the country which, if dug up deeply enough, did not reveal generations of bones. His own family had fled from a rebellion and settled in this forgotten space where the peasants could be cowed by the odd hanging, and easily bonded. His father had sent ahead a retinue of three guards. He let them loose on the peasants a week before he arrived. His father, though a warlord, didn’t care too much for the sight of blood or the screaming of victims. When he entered the village, all was calm. He immediately renamed the village after himself, Wang Qian. He organized the work gangs and agreed with them the terms of their bondage. He dispensed with the guards, investing instead in paid spies, so during his reign there was little bloodshed, only a few beatings. Paid spies, and on occasion he provided food in addition to what they had reaped from the common land granted to them: such management limited unrest to secret cursing, spitting out of sight. The village endured, the goats multiplied, the plum trees bloomed, the harvest of rice was regular. His father died a contented man, and his mother followed dutifully, starving herself to bring on weakness and death.

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K E K I N. D A R U W AL L A

Cabral ——— ጓ ——— 1 We head east at last, the sails full and gulls skimming over the wake, till they find a claw-hold on the rigging. We have left behind Vera Cruz and the natives, copper-coloured, innocent and naked – the naked are normally innocent. The Franciscan Friars on my ship would be unhappy to hear me speak thus, but they were friendly enough (the friars I mean) to actually adorn those brown necks with crucifixes. The natives didn’t know what a cross stood for, but they were intrigued by the metal. We move towards the southern tip of this land-spill that is Africa, putting our faith in God and Bartolomeu Dias, first in history to have rounded the Cape. We’re almost there. Our spirits rise like yeast and then subside, for first the wind rises, soughing like a million beetles wheezing in unison; clouds drape the skyline, and the waves blot it ; then the sea coils and storms up, recoils and falls while rigging and mast turn frail as bird-bone. Four ships go down, not mine though, but Dias is now a skull on the seafloor. The Cape of Good Hope we called it, of good hope! 

Pedro Alvares Cabral, with a fleet of thirteen ships and 1200 men, embarked from Portugal on 8 March 1500 for India – a voyage during which he accidentally ‘discovered’ Brazil, initially named Vera Cruz by him.

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We’re not forging a new epoch and that’s hard for me to say, and for the rest to understand. I look within – to the inner workings of an outer bound era. I look for light in the brown cave of solitude. Does an era have interiors, secrets, anxieties, silences? I can’t answer that one. Thank God I am no Indian, who looks for every answer in the oceans of the self. The next voyage on the first route garners no glory. Bohemians of the sea, we wind-crawl, current-crawl carrying the load of our unknowings; worrying about barter: cruzados and cowries; watching the frenzy of vegetation on the coasts, and losing our way in the thickets of their language. But even Swahili must have a word for sorrow and one for love, and while about it a word for mating, for after sundown and sin-fall it is mating that’s crucial, isn’t it (?) whatever those Platonists might say. 3 The silt of despair didn’t weigh us down though our mood was sombre as we struck north for Sofala, axle and hub of the gold trade; the harbour narrow, shoal and shingle mingled to frighten the pilots. We moved to Kilwa knowing that the place was hostile. We received live goats and a boatload of food from Sultan Ibrahim. A meeting was arranged on a raft gaudily touched up. His musicians blew on ivory horns, ours on trumpets. I handed our King’s letters, just two things he wanted – a trade-post to get at Sofala’s gold and the people of Kilwa to give up Islam. We need time said the Sultan, and the next day I found it was not the Sultan we’d met

K E K I N. D A R U W A L L A

244 but an imposter! Who was it who said ‘the twine of the East is hard to unravel.’ We waited two days, and when no answer came, we demanded fresh water.

Boatloads arrived with water sloshing in earthen jars. The boats halted and the rowers swung at the jars with their oars and smashed them. That was their answer to Dom Manuel, our King. It’s as difficult to cross the seas as it is to ask the Moors to cross over to Christ. (22–5–2007)

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A DIL J U S SA W A L L A

Memoirs for Bruce

——— ጓ ———

Words move us forward on a river that turns, behind our backs, into mountains. On them bricabrac and bling – stuff that needs to be cleared. The more we voyage the more the backlog nears. An old man plays a clarinet on a summer’s night in Paris, and you hear a bulbul’s note. And here’s the Mississippi, throwing its long slow light on a Bombay waterfront. You write. A river moves you forward. Ranges you never saw before come round and face you.

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J E E T T H AY IL

The Book of Bruce ——— ጓ ———

I set out as soon as we made landfall. I took only water, my sketchbook, a box of paints. I wanted to be on my own. I wasn’t looking for adventure – I’ll tell you that much straight off the bat. I climbed up through the brush with my pack swinging against my side and soon I came to a village. Put it this way: one minute I’m stumbling up a hillside and the next I’m stumbling into a huddle of huts, cooking-fires going for dinner, smoke rising into the trees. I’m looking at a bunch of faces looking back at me. They took me to the headman, whose name was Bruce. He wasn’t happy to see me. He was busy conducting the evening prayer, chanting to a pair of bus tickets and an old copy of Time. (Everybody prayed twice a day, at twelve-hour intervals. Each family had its own gods – this was a strict rule – gods that could not be interchanged or cross-worshipped. Bruce and his family worshipped paper.) Bruce got up off his knees. He welcomed me and asked me to be seated. Then, going to the family shrine, he pointed out his favourites, in order. 1. Currency notes, mostly euros, rials, and rupees. No dollars. 2. Expired prescriptions for unavailable medication, written in a sloping hand: Opium Tincture. Absinthe Balm for Neuralgia. Etc. They were nailed to the wall above the bed. 3. A page from Larousse’s French–English dictionary. 4. Toffee wrappers. 5. A calendar of Asian birds, with colour plates of the Brahmani Kite, the Bustard, and the Bee-Eater. There was a faded printout stapled to February:

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Statistically Improbable Phrases: peninsular juxtaposition, evergreen biotope, black mesial stripe, tank margins, cognitive trespass, black wing quills, gentle interrogation, mixed heronries, remarkably obliterative. 6 Several pages from a biology textbook (with illustrations of the reproductive cycle of freshwater fish). 7. A napkin from Wendy’s with a line-drawing in blue ballpoint of a woman whose legs were so long her head seemed to be growing out of her hips. She was riding a missile powered by a submarine propeller. There was a phone number, 9872437766, and an initial, S. Bruce was happy to show me the family gods, and though he didn’t insist that I join in the prayer – a low chanting punctuated by percussive yelps – I could tell he was hoping I would. I didn’t, of course. Taking sides in local disputes, debates, or religious bonhomie is strictly forbidden to the crew of the Ark. Instead, I showed Bruce a snapshot of my wife and son. Big mistake: he wanted it. He installed it right away, on a shelf above the front door, with a candle. I’m sure it’s still there, a picture of my wife and son eating chocolate ice-cream from a blue bowl. Then he noticed my sketchbook and I had to give that to him as well. Bruce had a special prayer service to welcome the additions to the family pantheon. Afterwards I took a tour of the village. Bruce’s immediate neighbours worshipped an empty bottle of Lancôme perfume and a muddy shoe, the mud lovingly incorporated into the shrine. A family worshipped copper utensils and plastic bags; another worshipped a mouse, which it fed and bathed and called Fred. An extended family of bald men and dreadlocked women worshipped prosthetics and rubber tubing. A family whose hut was on the outskirts of the village – they were unpopular – worshipped nothing at all in an empty room. They said their god was invisible. I would have liked to see more, but it was getting dark and I was expected back on the Ark. Since I’d given Bruce worship gifts, the other families said they, too,

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wanted a keepsake of some sort. I left the paints, a tin box with evenly spaced circles of colour. Bruce divided the pigments among the villagers. Each family got a colour, and there were some left over. Colour was their newest god and the most mysterious.

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O L I V E S E N IOR

Fabulous Eyelids ——— ጓ ——— Et nos paupières fabuleuses.O (And our fabulous eyelids O) Saint-John Perse, Éloges 2

O ma mère, Madonna of the clothes-line Embrace me, the child cries. Stiffened against the breeze, braced against the sun in her eyes, Madonna the vise grips clothes pins in her mouth, jabs the line, nappies endlessly slapping white clothes Jesusing to blue skies and khaki pants for sons 1, 2, 3, 4, stiffening in the breeze with father’s workingman’s blue that wouldn’t do for Sunday sporting that she pretends she doesn’t know about though she adds more and more blueing to his whites nicely ironed for the village rooster’s outing. One day, the sport was left on our doorstep. She took her in, grudgingly. O sister, my sister of the fabulous eyelids unlocked, you have our father’s eyes. I took your hand. With you, our house at once grew. In the wash, increasingly, much too much blue.

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F R E D D’A GUIAR

For Bruce (& Adèle) ——— ጓ ———

Dance floors never had it so good, Lit up on both sides of the Atlantic, Libraries too, as well as our lives, Thanks to you. The story goes something like this. One day you walked out your front door From a colony and bumped into A post box! One day the mailbox was not There, and the next, voilà! There it was, like an independent Thing, of beauty. A thing for all to see, except you, With your head down and your glasses In your hand, you stumbled right (That should be left) Into it, as if you had emerged from A taxi abandoned by its driver, In the middle of a revolution, Led by students. What was in that post box? A letter dropped there by you, Immediately after you bumped Bodily into it.

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You put on your specs, saw where You were, took a moment to get Your bearings (as the revolution Raged around you), And you headed to the ballroom Where Adèle waited, all couture! You (both) made it look elegant And simple: From the library to the classroom, To the ballroom, from colony to post, Your books, your steps (with Adèle) Inviting us to this dance.

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T AB ISH K HAIR

Past Dawn ——— ጓ ———

1. The past is myth, a haven of return. The past is fire; it makes our heavens burn. The past can be revenge or forgiveness; You may curse with the past, or with it bless. The past is anger, hatred, and bloodshed: A knife to slaughter life to feed the dead. The past is knowledge of our common world; The past is seed that bears a tendril curled. The past’s injustice, cruelty, lust; The past is also monumental dust. The past’s the home of happiness and hope; The past is true starlight by which we grope. The past is only what our hearts have meant: The shape we give it shall be our present. 2. A dawn is not the end of night; A dawn is not the start of day: A dawn is its own kind of light, It says only what it can say.

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A N A N D T H AK OR E

Puppet’s Life Ends on String ——— ጓ ——— The lone surviving gunman of 26/11 was hanged at Pune’s Yerawada Jail at 7.30 am on Wednesday. Asked for his last wish the 25-year-old terrorist from Faridkot village in Pakistan’s Punjab province said: “Gharwalon ko milna hai” (I want to meet my family) Times of India (22 November 2012)

See: they recur, approach and recur beyond terror and grave, The low tin roofs and ambient wheatfields, The hills and goat-filled alleys of remembered infancy – And soon – but here they are already, Filling their water-pots, tending to their goats, Those I could not forgive for being so poor, So blind to my rage; for refusing To see themselves reflected in my hate. They cannot see me now, of course, Capering through barbed wire and thin mud walls – But this is hardly strange; It was so much like this when I lived amongst them, Only suddenly more acceptable now. What is strange is being unable to feel the cold they feel, The fireside warmth, as winter comes over us, Here in Faridkot, village of my birth, visited once And blessed for all time – as my mother Never forgot to mention at meals – by the Sufi,

A N AN D T H A K OR E

254 Baba Farid, mystic of the floating basket, Whose rapt levitations I marvelled at as a child, And whose spirit I spat upon when I turned fourteen: There was so little left by then in our lives to praise, And his talk of delight in poverty had come to seem Like senseless rant; the little land we owned sold

For so little, our torn pockets empty, our jackets threadbare, As we stared, half-starved, at the full moon of Id, with no goats Left to slaughter or sell, or barter for new clothes and sweets; No money for cooking-oil or kerosene, then none for wheat; And then, to top it all, that hard, unoutstareable look In the eyes of a tribal girl, which could only mean no, never, Not good enough, never will be – Baba Farid, Whom I dismissed as a fake when I turned into a man, And whose verse the living still lift their arms to, In the warmth of winter fires at Faridkot! – I am glad he was with me, Before that final steeling of burnt nerves against all fear – Terror of the torqued neck, trapdoor and noose – Your last wish, he said, will not be granted, But will surely be voiced – A single sentence that survives your death. I am glad it was this and nothing else: Let them come to me now – listen, I say it again – Those I ran away from; gharwalon ko milna hai.

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J A N E B HAND ARI

A Sheet Like Snow ——— ጓ ———

At first our clothes intervened, the naked caress confined to hands, to lips, to eyes and ears; It sufficed for a while. At some point a general dissolution occurred akin to melting snow, so that garments remained in patches like snow clinging to crevices, untouched by passion’s sun but about to vanish as the day warmed: finally all that remained was the sheet, which over time crumpled and melted into a little heap unnoticed on the floor. Not even the Japanese convention of a concealing sheet could induce us to comply, nor the old Hollywood rule Of three feet on the floor at all times, since we were neither Japanese, nor Hollywood stars, but new lovers experiencing our version of global warming.

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M ANOHAR S H E TT Y

Threshold ——— ጓ ———

He has begun to wind Up things though there’s not Enough for a grand will. He worries over his meagre Savings, his hospital bills. He has long forgotten his Enemies but not his friends And family who went before him Or those he’ll leave behind With a few odd memories. He wonders if there are still Amends to be made, not to Appease the gods he refused To believe in, but merely to Depart with a clean sheet.

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S MIT A A GRAW AL

I Love You From Mofussil Notebook

——— ጓ ———

Babli Pandey says “I love you …” to Bittu Sonkar. The campus is agog … A high-caste girl, Brahmin at that, Wanting to wed a Backward boy … Babli’s brother, gets his act together. He and his gang, with Cycle-rickshaw chains And crowbars, beat The hell out of Bittu, Who, for a month, lies festering In the town’s most Infection-riddled zone, The Govt. Medical College. Miraculously, Sonkar survives. And, but naturally, after full And final recovery, collects All the Backward-caste warlords Of every out-house locality And seeks vengeance. Siege-like conditions prevail Around the university’s SSL Hostel Where Pandey and his chaps Are holed-up … Meanwhile, Babli, willingly Abducted by the Sonkar gang, Under the banner of the progressive

258 Arya Samaj, marries Bittu; A scene-from-a-movie-like exchange Of garlands in the presence Of the liberal intellectual, Prof. Das … 24x7, the mofussil town’s single T V channel Blazes footage of Babli weds Bittu. For the bristling brother and his goons Attention is for the time being Relocated from Bittu to Dr. Das. Next morning, Dr. Das takes An extra class on “Break, break, break …” And discusses the forthcoming Freshers Function In room # 8, where he shall encourage Boys and girls of postgrad English To dance to “Tera, tera, tera Suroor” And “Beedi Jalaile” … Exhortations over for the day, Dr. Das leads the way Down a flight of stairs Where Birju Pandey And his hoods waylay him … Residual decency cannot make Birju punch the don in his face. So he pulls out a matchbox, Strikes a match, waves the flaming Stick, menacingly, three times, Under the paralysed prof’s nose And growls “Last chance, saar …” Prof. Das clutches his heart and collapses. The girls of the class let out a collective Squeal and beg forgiveness for his lapses … Tension is temporarily dissipated. Mofussil India’s struggle With modernity, abated. The Babli Pandey, Bittu Sonkar Saga, by these unforeseen

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Circumstances aided and abetted, Postponed for the next Bright, new day …

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J O H N H AY N E S

Back ——— ጓ ———

Weaver birds are screaming in the orange leaves. Outside the bedroom, ripped banana pads droop with beads of rain on them. It’s such a long time since I heard a cockerel crow. Tony fingers his newly circumcised taban. When ‘aunties’ come they ask him how it is because by now they know he’s going to haul his shirt up, and beamingly thrust it forward at their rocking back and clapping laughter, and exclamations of Ah my hosban! So many people come to welcome us daga Londo’, and when I answer them in my attempted Hausa with the tones all wrong, are really pleased, pretending yes, wallahi, kana jin Hausa so sey, mallan John! Truly you speak Hausa excellently Mr John. Do I? They mean that trying to greet’s a greeting too. Years later, now, I want to say the same to you.

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K EV IN I RE L AND

A Mute Biography for Bruce King

——— ጓ ———

Most silences go without saying, but yours drawl pronouncements on a soundless tongue. Yet your silences are all ears. This is the scholar’s trick of catching the tap-tap of words mouthed but not spoken for. Silence raises eyebrows while keeping its trap strictly shut. So your biography, though solid as a bare desk, means to tell us nothing,. shadows tight-lipped on its polish. It projects itself in dancing echoes, each one gliding sedately over gaps in the story until the grey hush of plausibilities becomes too soft to get your teeth into. Knowing you has to be enough. Going out to dine with you offers scraps of another chapter of a clammed-up fiction. We may yet call your book An Immense Absence.

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S H AN T A A CH AR Y A

Wonder of the Age ——— ጓ ———

He had seen emperors come and go – some rising to giddy pinnacles of wealth and power only to be imprisoned, murdered – yet a true artist never lacked work. A painter of saints, holy men and gods, he knew all about creation. Each time he painted a living thing, etching every bone, nerve, muscle and limb, he could never breathe life into the image. Made him marvel at the miracle wrought by the Supreme Artist – the universe an expression of the divine imagination. As a child he learnt how to chisel paintbrushes from quills of birds, setting them with fine hairs plucked from kittens and baby squirrels. He sorted minerals, grain by grain – carnelian, malachite, lapis lazuli and emeralds, according to their purity and brilliance, each stone a prayer speaking in colours. Other pigments he made from insects, metals, earth and animal matters, the world his canvas and palette, a rainbow of dreams – for a cool yellow gold he added silver, for a warmer hue he used copper, learning to master the art of making gold glitter. Early in life, he had the honour of receiving the royal title, Wonder of the Age. Sitting on a kelim, one arthritic knee flexed

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to support his drawing board, he had attained an awareness of being. Is this how God feels? he wondered, his loneliness dissolving at the transmuting touch of his paintbrush, connecting him with everything.

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K A R T H I K A N AÏR

Habits: Remnants ——— ጓ ———

Listen, let’s get this straight: it isn’t you I miss, not you at all. Warm rain – its scent and smoky song are what I miss, not you at all. Nor all that jazz – the moon, the stars, the wine, the flame – that you conjured before our verses grew old. That was a promise, not you at all. A sky, an earth, this air, the awning, your mouth, my tongue, the impress of skin on skin – these I hold as love’s edifice, not you at all. Last week at the laundrette I tripped; a block-printed quilt snagged the heart. A new voice pulled away my feet from the abyss, not you at all. Yes, I’ve grown to like pine seeds and salted caramel, to worship Steve Reich. But, surely, that’s what they call osmosis, not you at all. I swear I’d spring-cleaned you from the mind. So I feign, when I find slivers of laughter, a cinnamon-coloured kiss, not you at all. The past invades our present, still imperfect yet continuous; becomes a mutant who sings, from each interstice, Not-you-at-all. By the Pleiades, by the quicksilver moon, I renounce the heart’s feints, I will drink from this harvest chalice – it’s all you, after all.

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A LAMGIR H ASHMI

They Say, They Never Wrote ——— ጓ ———

They say, they never wrote themselves – which gets my goat. Fred Douglass espoused his secretary, or amanuensis, when he became a judge. She handled his long sentence deftly and saved the bubbling fudge for family occasions. Another Earl of Rochester had a better ruse. He rode and hunted by the day and slipped into his English sleeping-bag at night, so tired he named the girl his Muse. Maybe it’s all made up by the scions of pen-pushers wanting a rebate on the yarn, and who have also made a go at Zora and Phillis, right up to Olaudah, abolishing them. Even easy-rider Du Bois. For he may have hollered through the barn, but to be read around ho, ho, ho, W.E.B. double-bleached his memoir!

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S USAN V ISVAN AT HAN

Conch ——— ጓ ———

I

T WAS RAINING AGAIN.

And why not. It was monsoon. Let it rain. The land would breathe again when the Asuragod Mahabali returned. He belonged to the people, a simple King rendered a beggar, yes, devoid of land, people, tithes, tribute. The boy looked up. It was a roof after all. The thatch was made of crumbling palm leaves. Sometimes he saw a spider or bees, or even a bevy of tiny sunbirds resting or playing in the eaves. They had their own life, their own language. He blinked. The spider was swinging down. Sometimes it would draw its length of thread upwards and disappear. He rubbed his eyes. It was time to wake up. The sun was glinting through the rain. The raindrops had begun to form, incandescent in the dim light of the room, as they shimmered at the edges of the slim logs that made up the roof. The roof was not leaking; the drops formed and evaporated on the dusty ledge below it. That was where they kept the large vessels his father had inherited from his mother. No one climbed up there but the lizards and the cat, and those minstrels from the sky: sunbirds, moths, butterflies, dragonflies, fireflies, and that spider swinging on its selfmade trapeze. The rain had stopped. The sky was red, and the sun was rising up, steadily. He said his morning prayers, looking at the lotus-filled river, and the hill they called Malayatoor. He sang his morning song. Many salutations to you O peacock, Salutations to you and the weapons of Shakti Salutations to you O goat, also salutations to you O Rooster, My salutation to you O Sindhu My salutations to your divine abode on the shore. My salutations to you O Skanda. Again and again my salutations to you. 

From Chapter 1 of Adi Sankara, a novel.

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He worshipped equally, sought no combat. He believed that his own birth was a blessing to ancient parents. He had no concern with the span of his life; his short life would match the remainder of theirs. They had chosen him, and now no one could change his future. How could it be chosen? It was a shimmering river, with no beginning and no end. It was like the celestial stars, each resembling the raindrops strung like a sequence of diamonds. The Nestorean merchants sometimes paused on roads outside his house, on their way to the mountain of Thomas. And some of them were gold and diamond merchants paying for pepper and cloves with their carefully carried goods, stitched cautiously into cloth bags. He had seen them in the marketplaces, and occasionally one of them would expose his hoard, the diamonds in sizes too small to have any value, to other merchants, except to a man buying for his wife. The women never came out to look, but sometimes the children did, choosing for their mother a new nose ring or a pair of earrings. Every morning he blew the conch, and having bathed in the river looked for his mother. She was busy, but he would always go from house to house looking for her. The sound of the conch remained in his mind, a hollow shout, a long dim memory of the wind as it blew through the caves. His father had died long ago; he had very little memory of him. Words were Sankara’s anointment: a long life but unbestowed with virtue; dim, unknown, forgotten at his very birth; or a short one, full of virtue. And his devout parents left it to God, not choosing to know his fate. The God with the rice dumpling, the elephant-faced one, became his protector, the one who obstructed his Father and was slain and then reborn with all the might of his mother’s desire and his father’s imagination, and, of course, gifted with heroism and memory. And so, the silent one, the boy, the one without spouse, became his very own Isa, the chosen. And so, too, the brother Skanda, with the peacock who travelled all over the universe, chose him. To be chosen, or to choose, what was the difference? He sang praises to all. A boy like Dakshinamurty, he used the thumb and forefinger to show the integrity of the world, and the peace within himself. The paddy swayed in the breeze, the green shining in the early morning sun. He was hungry. The long night of peaceful sleep was now replaced by the tumult of his hunger. He had nothing to calm it, no shloka would still his appetite. Their garden grew nothing, the red earth was too stony, not even coconuts grew, and as for yams and tapioca, the rats ate them before they became ready for eating. Hibiscus, red, large, bell-like, grew profusely. They filled his eyes, the colour deep and the stamen golden with pollen. The rain started to fall, and he ran back to his house. It had become oddly dark, the clouds raging in the sky, the thunder now repetitive. He was alone in

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the world. His heart became still. The fig trees were huge, and the roots, like snakes, billowed in the earth. They were gnarled, independent, and manypronged. He passed them saying his prayers; the red earth laughed at him, and in the gravel that washed away so easily he saw the poetry of his forebears, ever wandering in search of food, offering words as their only currency. The trunks of the trees stood out like sleeping elephants, still, somnolent, and huge. Elephants; these were the stuff of his dreams. They assembled and trumpeted, chased away demons, carried kings and soldiers and slaves. They were the one reason that he slept so well. His mother would begin her day with prayers to Ganesha. She would beg him, too, to protect her son. Sometimes he could not tell the difference between Ganesha and himself. He would, when small, lie in her lap, pretending he had the longest nose in the world, the largest ears. He would trumpet and dream and fall asleep. The very nature of truth is manifold and lives in our mind as the unfolding lotus. His parents, those poor pious people, found that he had given his life to poetry. The words that came from his mouth were fully formed. He lived as if he were indeed one with God. That God, Isa, Brahman, Gauri, the sons Ganesha and Skanda, Vishnu with his peacocks and great and discerning love – each spoke of the essential way of the world. The snake that coiled on his head, the keeper of the diamond they all sought for its brilliance, was the one that enthralled him most. He was at first pleased with the appearance of the snake. He thought he would accept the snake as an ornament. He was afraid, though. It wanted nothing but to protect him. Yet, as Isa’s son, he would have to keep it calm, asking only that it should not uncoil and breathe venom. The fear of death was his only companion, the beautiful landscape of death and dreams. He had no reason to establish that it was an illusion. The snake uncoiled, unfurled its hood, merged with the spine. It made him feel that he was only part of the natural world, that he was essence of rainbow and the emptiness of sky. He was the keeper of wisdom, of memory, of touch, of the sorrow that makes people wise. Why give his parents a choice of the fate he had before him? His death was preordained by many things, most of all his need to learn. He lay down on his bed, hunger making him recite all the mantras he knew; some he made up, most he had learned by rote when very young. He was, of course, expected to recite them. His mother was not harsh, merely expectant and yearning. He was her only son, the one they had prayed for, the one who had been born when the skies were broken. The snake, more gorgeous than ever, appeared as Seshadri. He bowed to it. The snake had six hoods, and so, to each he spoke a verse. Let them be united.

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They were each resplendent, each marked by the peculiar black and ivory typical of their tribe. Up on the hill, at Malyatoor, the Christians kept a safe distance from snake worship; in fact, they killed them on sight. By the cry of ‘Pambu!’, they sought no differentiation between those that were marked and those that were not, those that were poisonous and those that merely ate the mice plaguing the tapioca patches, and the fish swimming in the rice fields. The Christians were polite, powerful, civil, exchanging nods with Kings and Brahmans, dressed similarly with topknot, the diamond, and the sabre. The sword was their right, as was the use of the sandalwood paste, the elephant, the fan, the sandals on their feet, the keeping of slaves, and the right to trade and grow things. He himself found their ideas interesting: Isa with the uncombed hair and the flowing robes, the three godheads united and made one (no rivalry there), and the moment when truth and love became one. They said that Isa had travelled to Sindhu. The Sindhu so beautiful, it had the coldness of wisdom, detached from the mountains, spilling uncontrolled, ready to merge with other rivers, high up in the sky. He could imagine the snow mountain, the home of the river, passing over their heads, encircling with its many lines the mountains like the passion of snakes. In the corner of the room he saw the fat white snake with the black blotches, watching him. He was startled by its beauty, its fat concupiscence, its mottled nature. It stared steadfastly back at him, its small black eyes intelligent and inquiring. The snake, too, was waiting for its breakfast, just as he was. It would not eat him, of that he was certain. If at all he stood in its path, creating an obstacle to its movement, he would indeed be killed. Adi swallowed a little, phlegm as well as his own hopelessness. By calling him Adi the first, was he expected to be the only child? Of course, his mother was a widow. Sometimes she looked at him the way the snake was gazing at him now: curiosity and a banality of enquiry about his well-being. She hid the roots of her agony. The snake, too, seemed to be asking ‘What shall I do with this boy?’ He shuddered, thinking of the blue–green waters of the Sindhu which he had never seen, but had been informed of so frequently by the Nestorean travellers, who had no fear of rivers or seas, crossing them at will, with their precious cargo of pepper, cloves, ginger, silks, cotton, diamonds, gold, wool, and incense. O Lord, I am poor, wretched, defeated, helpless, miserable, tired, depressed and doomed. O Sambhu, why is it that though you are the common inner spirit residing in all the creatures (thus residing in me also) you are indifferent to my sorrows? O Lord, please save me. In the still hollow of his bed he lay down thinking of nothing in particular. The snake was coiled, too, and the spider was still. He wandered, thinking of the

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oath of early death to which he had been sworn at so young an age. His father’s body lay before his eyes, hard cold, and he, too, became breathless, astounded by the enormity of it all. Could such a thing be, a loving father turned into something so inanimate, like the large fish he saw in the fishermen’s shops? He shuddered, wept a little, saw how his own body was stretched out in half-sleep, sighed with pleasure, and dozed off. When he woke, he saw that the black-andwhite snake had gone away; perhaps she was hidden in the house itself, and his mother would find her, while she was sweeping.

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Notes on the Contributors and Editors ——— ጓ ———

C R E AT I V E S H A N T A A C H A R Y A was born and educated in Cuttack, Odisha, India. She won a scholarship to Oxford, where she completed her doctoral dissertation in English before going to Harvard as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English and American Literature and Languages. She is the author of ten books, the latest of which is A World Elsewhere, her first novel. Her poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in major publications in the U K , the U SA , and India, including the Poetry Review, the London Magazine, the Spectator, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Guardian Poem of the Week, the Edinburgh Review, Oxford Today, The Little Magazine, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, India International Centre Quarterly, Fulcrum, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and the Literary Review (U SA ). She is the founder director of Poetry in the House (Lauderdale House, London), where she has been hosting monthly poetry readings since 1996. She twice served on the board of trustees of the Poetry Society, as well as on the boards of the Poetry School and the Arvon Foundation. Consult the website www .shantaacharya.com for further information. S M I T A A G A R W A L is the author of two collections of poems, Wish-Granting Words (2002) and Mofussil Notebook (2014). She is the editor of Marginalized: Indian Poetry in English (2014). Her poems have appeared in magazines, journals, and anthologies in both India and abroad, and she has published critical articles in the Poetry Review, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Plath Profiles, for the last of which she is also an editor. She is Professor of English at the University of Allahabad, India, and a professional singer. Samples of her songs are available on http://www.beatofindia.com and You Tube. J A N E B H A N D A R I has lived in India for forty-eight years and is a poet, writer, and interior designer. She coordinates ‘Loquations’, a Mumbai poetry-reading group. She also reviews poetry and books for children. She has authored two volumes of poetry, Single Bed (1999) and Aquarius (2002), and two collections of short

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stories for children, The Round Square Chapatti (1972) and The Long Thin Jungle (1973). Her poems have appeared in Rattapallax, Fulcrum, and the Little Magazine, as well as on websites such as H O W 2, Talking Poetry (Open Space), and Softblow. Six poems appeared in We Speak In Changing Languages (2009). With Anju Makhija, she co-edited an anthology of poems for children, To Catch a Poem (2014). A new collection of poems and a novel are in progress. She is also editing the biography of Madan Puri, written by her husband, Lt. Col. K.K. Puri. D A V I D D A B Y D E E N was born in Guyana. He read English literature at Cambridge and is currently Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick (on leave) and Guyana’s Ambassador to China. He has published seven novels and three collections of poetry. F R E D D’ A G U I A R ’s books of poetry and fiction have been translated into a dozen languages. His first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was made into a film by Channel 4 (U K ). A number of his essays have appeared in Harper’s, Wasafiri, Callaloo, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. His play A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (publ. 1995) was staged at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1991. His BBC -commissioned radio plays Days and Nights in Bedlam and Mr. Reasonable were broadcast in 2005 and 2015 respectively. His sixth poetry collection, Continental Shelf (2009) was a UK Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the U K ’s T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. His most recent collection, The Rose of Toulouse appeared in 2013; his sixth novel, Children of Paradise (2014), is inspired by the events at Jonestown. Born in London in 1960 of Guyanese parents and brought up in Guyana, he has taught at Virginia Tech since 2003, and has now joined the faculty of the Department of English at U CLA . K E K I N. D A R U W A L L A has published ten volumes of poetry and five of short stories, the most recent of which is Islands (2014), which focuses on human beings as islands as well as on life on islands. His poems have figured in many anthologies, such as Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (1999), edited by Peter Forbes. His Collected Poems appeared in 2006. He gained the Sahitya Academy Award in 1984 and the Commonwealth Poetry Award (Asia) in 1987. A national award (Padma Shri) followed in 2014. His novel For Pepper and Christ was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize (Asia–UK ) in 2010. He spent a year at Oxford’s Queen Elizabeth House as a Visiting Fellow, and was a member of the Commonwealth Observers team for the 1980 Zimbabwe elections. He retired from Government as Chairman J I C (Joint Intelligence Committee) and Secretary in the cabinet secretariat in 1995.

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He also worked as Special Assistant to the Prime Minister and was a Member of the National Commission for Minorities (2011–14). A L A M G I R H A S H M I is the author of numerous books of poetry and literary criticism, and has taught as a university professor in Europe, America, and Asia. Both his creative and his critical writings are required reading in university courses across the world. He has edited or co-edited over a dozen international journals. He began teaching and publishing in English, comparative, and world literature studies in the 1970s. Some of his best-known titles are: My Second in Kentucky (1981); Commonwealth Literature (1983); The Commonwealth, Comparative Literature and the World (1988); A Choice of Hashmi’s Verse (1997); and The Ramazan Libation (2003). His more recent work has been published in the Poetry Review, Poet Lore, the Contemporary Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, the Capilano Review, Poetry International, Poetry New Zealand, Meanjin, Westerly, the Connecticut Review, and many other journals and anthologies. A Pushcart Prize nominee and Rockefeller Fellow, he has won many honours and awards for his work, some of which has been translated into European, Asian, and African languages. He has served as a judge of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and as a jury member for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He is founding president of the Literature Podium, an independent society for literature and the arts. J O H N H A Y N E S was a colleague of Bruce King’s at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, where he taught in the 1970s and 1980s before returning to England, where he lives in Hampshire. John has published four books of poetry; his Letter to Patience, set in Zaria and Ahmadu Bello University, won the Costa Award (2006), and the book-length You, a love poem to his Nigerian wife, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2010. He was the founder, in Nigeria, of the literary journal Saiwa, and is also the author of books on language theory, teaching, African poetry, and African children’s literature. K E V I N I R EL A N D is a New Zealander who has published two memoirs, six novels, a book of short stories, another on growing old, and a discursive book on How to Catch a Fish. He is best known as a poet and his Selected Poems 1963–2013 was published in 2013, followed by a twenty-first book of poems, Feeding the Birds, in July 2014. He is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature and in 2000 he received a DLitt from Massey University. T A B I S H K H A I R , born in 1966 and educated in India, is the author of a number of books, including critical studies, poetry collections, and novels. Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, he has held university fellowships at Hong Kong, Delhi,

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and Cambridge; his novels have been shortlisted for the Encore Award ( UK ), the Vodafone Crossword Award (India), the Hindu Best Fiction Prize (India), the Man Asian Literature Prize (Hong Kong/U K ), the DSC Prize for South Asia (U K /India), the Aloa Prize (Denmark) etc. His most recent novel, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (2012), was dubbed “unmissable” by the Times and “irreverent, intelligent, explosive” by the Independent. He is currently an associate professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. A D I L J U S S A W AL L A , born in Bombay in 1940, is the author of four books of poems, the third of which, Trying to Say Goodbye (2012), recently won India’s Sahitya Akademi Award for an outstanding work of literature in English. He also edited the anthology New Writing in India (1974). Maps for a Mortal Moon (2013) contains some of his prose, selected and introduced by Jerry Pinto. I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky, a selection of his poems, fiction, and non-fiction, appeared in 2015. A R V I N D K R I S H N A M E H R O T R A ’s Collected Poems 1969–2014 is published in Penguin Modern Classics. His collected essays, Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History, appeared in 2012. He is also the translator of Songs of Kabir (2011) and The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry (2008). K A R T H I K A N A Ï R , a writer and dance producer, is the principal scriptwriter for D E S H (2011), the choreographer Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning dance production, the author of Bearings (2009), a poetry collection, The Honey Hunter/Le Tigre de Miel (2013), a children’s book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet, Until the Lions, a reworking in verse of the Mahabharata in multiple voices, which won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (Fiction), and Chotto Desh (2015). In her résumé as a producer, one finds mention of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Damien Jalet, Käfig/Mourad Merzouki, two Olivier-awardwinning productions, the Louvre, the Shaolin Temple, misadventures with ninja swords and pachyderms, among others, many of which find their way willy-nilly into her poetry. O L I V E S E N I O R is the prizewinning author of fifteen books of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and children’s literature. Her latest is a collection of short fiction, The Pain Tree (2015). Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal was published in 2014 on the centenary of the opening of the Panama Canal and is currently on the shortlist for the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize and a finalist for the Foreword Reviews I NDI E F AB Book of the Year Awards (history category). Her work is taught internationally and her poetry book Gardening in the Tropics is currently on the CAPE syllabus for Caribbean schools.

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She can be heard reading her poetry on the Poetry Archive http://www .poetryarchive.org. Olive Senior lives in Toronto, Canada but returns frequently to Jamaica, where she was born, and much of her work reflects her Caribbean heritage. Her many awards include the Commonwealth Writers Prize (for Summer Lightning and Other Stories, 1986) and the Musgrave Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica for her contribution to literature and cultural heritage. She lectures and conducts writing workshops internationally and is on the faculty of the Humber School for Writers, Humber College, Toronto. M A N O H A R S H E T T Y was born in Bombay. He has published seven books of poems, including Domestic Creatures (1994), Creatures Great and Small (2014), and Living Room (2014). He has co-edited a special edition on English-language poets of India for Poetry Wales. Several anthologies feature his work, notably The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, 1993) and anthologies edited by Eunice de Souza and Vilas Sarang. He has edited Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa (1998) and Goa Travels: Being the Accounts of Travellers from the 16th to the 21st Century (2014). He has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow and a Senior Sahitya Akademi Fellow. He edited Goa Today for eight years and has worked on other magazines and newspapers in Bombay, Bangalore, and Goa, where he has lived since 1985. A N A N D T H A K O R E , born in Mumbai in 1971, is an anglophone poet and Hindustani classical vocalist, raised in Mumbai and in the U K . He has spent most of his life on the Indian subcontinent. Waking in December (2001), Elephant Bathing (2012), and Mughal Sequence (2012) are his three collections of poetry. He undertook vocal training for many years with Pandit Satyasheel Deshpande and has given concerts in various parts of the country. He is the founder of Harbour Line, a publishing collective, and runs Kshitij, an interactive forum for musicians. He is the recipient of the National Scholarship for music from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, a grant from the Charles Wallace India trust for experimental work in the U K , and the Sur-Mani award for excellence in musical performance. He describes his work as “having arisen from a fortuitous confluence of seemingly disparate cultural Histories.” He lives in Mumbai, where he teaches Hindustani vocal music in the Guru-shishya tradition, and is currently working on his fourth collection of poems. J E E T T H A Y I L was born in Mamalasserie, Kerala, and educated in Bombay, Hong Kong, and New York. He has written four poetry collections: Gemini (1992); Apocalypso (1997); English (2004); and These Errors Are Correct (2008), which won the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award for poetry. He is the editor of the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008) and is a visiting professor of poetry at

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the University of Goa. As a musician and songwriter, he is one half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil. His Delhi-based band is Still Dirty. His novel Narcopolis (2012) won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was shortlisted for five other prizes, including the Man Booker prize, the Man Asian Literature Prize, and the Commonwealth Prize. S U S A N V I S V A N A T H A N is Professor of Sociology in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She is the author of The Christians of Kerala (1993), Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism (2007), and The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi (2010). She is the editor of Structure and Transformation (2001), and her most recent books are Reading Marx, Weber and Durkheim (2012) and the essay collection The Wisdom of Community (forthcoming). She has been Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and Honorary Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Trained at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, she has been Visiting Professor at MSH , Paris and Université Paris 13, also at Queen’s University Belfast as Charles Wallace Fellow, and as guest faculty at the Freie Universität, Berlin, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Susan Visvanathan was Visiting Professor to the South Asia Network in Lund University, Sweden in 2014. She is a well-known writer of literary fiction; her novels include Something Barely Remembered (2000), Indiaink (2000), The Visiting Moon (2002), Phosphorus and Stone (2007), The Seine at Noon (2007), and Nelycinda and Other Stories (2012). She was co-editor, with Geeti Sen, of two issues of the India International Centre Quarterly – Kerala (1995) and Women and the Family (1997).

C RIT ICAL G O R D O N C O L L I E R taught postcolonial and American literature at the universities of Mannheim and Giessen and has published articles on postcolonial film, Caribbean, Canadian, and Australasian literature, narratology, and iconography, and books on translation and on Patrick White (The Rocks and Sticks of Words, 1992). He is the editor of U S /TH E M : Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures (1992) and of a retrospective two-volume essay collection by John Kinsella, Spatial Relations: Essays, Reviews, Commentaries, and Chorography (2013), and has co-edited a two-volume selection of Derek Walcott’s occasional journalism, The Journeyman Years (with Chris Balme, 2013), as well as the critical anthologies Shuttling Through Cultures Towards Identity (with Judith Bates, 1996), A Talent(ed) Digger (with Hena Maes–Jelinek

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and Geoff Davis, 1996), Postcolonial Theory and the Emergence of a Global Society (with Dieter Riemenschneider and Frank Schulze–Engler, 1998), Crabtracks: Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English (with Frank Schulze–Engler, 2002), and A Pepper-Pot of Cultures: Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean (with Ulrich Fleischmann, 2003). African studies collections he has edited are Spheres Public and Private: Western Genres in African Literature (2011), Focus on Nigeria: Literature and Culture (2012), African Cultures and Literatures: A Miscellany (2013), Landlines in African Literary Studies (2015), and African Perspectives on Southern African Literature (2016, with Ogaga Okuyade). He is co-general editor and technical editor of the book-series Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English and of the journal Matatu. He is currently compiling a comprehensive bibliography and filmography of the African diaspora. J. M I C H A E L D A S H , born in Trinidad, has worked extensively on Haitian literature and French Caribbean writers, especially Édouard Glissant, whose works The Ripening (1985), Caribbean Discourse (1989), and Monsieur Toussaint (2005) he has translated into English. His publications include Literature and Ideology in Haiti (1981), Haiti and the United States (1988), Édouard Glissant (1995), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998), and, most recently, Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001). He is currently working on a book entitled ‘The Painted Word: Painting, Poetry and the Other Caribbean AvantGarde’. G E O F F R E Y V. D A V I S read Modern Languages at Oxford and wrote his PhD on Arnold Zweig and his post-doc Habilitation on South African Literature. He taught for many years at the University of Aachen and has held research fellowships at Cambridge, Curtin University (Western Australia), and the University of Texas. He is currently working with the Bhasha Research Centre (India) on the culture of indigenous peoples. His research interests include colonial and postcolonial writing, drama, and film, with a particular emphasis on the literatures of South Africa, Canada, and Australia. Among his more recent publications are the co-edited volumes African Literature and Beyond (2013), Sources and Resources in African Literature (2013), Narrating Nomadism: Tales of Recovery and Resistance (2013), Knowing Differently: The Challenge of the Indigenous (2014), and Performing Identities: The Celebration of Indigeneity (2015). He is co-editor of the book series Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English and of the African studies journal Matatu. He was chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies ( ACLALS ) from 2007 to 2010.

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J E A N –P I E R R E D U R I X is Emeritus Professor at the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France. His numerous publications on postcolonial literature include The Writer Written (1987), An Introduction to the New Literatures in English (1993), Mimesis, Genres and Postcolonial Discourse (1998) and Derek Walcott: Collected Poems (2005). He was editor of the journal Commonwealth: Essays & Studies for twenty-two years and has translated Wilson Harris, Albert Wendt, Derek Walcott, and Witi Ihimaera into French. M A R T A D V O â Á K , born in Budapest and raised in Canada, went to France to do her doctorate and stayed on to teach Canadian literature at the University of Rennes and then Commonwealth literatures at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is former associate editor of the International Journal of Canadian Studies, former editor of Commonwealth: Essays & Studies and president of the French Society for the Study of the Countries of the Commonwealth, as well as former Visiting Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Focusing on the interactive relations between (post)modernist writing and postcolonial literatures as well as the interconnections between socio-political issues and aesthetics in contexts of global circulation, her most recent books include Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue (co-ed. Diana Brydon, 2012), Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, and Canadian Writing in Context (co-ed. W.H. New, 2007), and Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s “In Custody” (2008). She is currently co-editing Translocated Modernisms, a book on the cross-fertilization between early, dominant modernisms and the peripheral modernisms which emerged subsequently in other regions of the globe. G E E T H A G A N A P A T H Y –D O R É is a research-accredited associate professor of English in the Faculty of Law, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité. She is the author of The Post Colonial Indian Novel in English (2011). She has edited and co-edited several other volumes, including Images changeantes de l’Inde et de l’Afrique (ed. with Michel Olinga, 2011) and On the Move: The Journey of Refugees in New Literatures in English (ed. with Helga Ramsey–Kurz, 2012). She has also translated Tamil short stories and poems into French. Her current research focuses on literature and cinema and EU –India relations. J O H N T. G I L M O R E was brought up in Barbados and educated there and in England, where he studied History at the University of Cambridge, completing a PhD on the history of the Church of England in the Caribbean. After four years teaching at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies, he worked at the National Cultural Foundation in Barbados, and later as managing editor of the newspaper Caribbean Week. Since 1996 he has been at the Univer-

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sity of Warwick, where he is currently an associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. His publications include The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s “The Sugar-Cane” (2000) and (with Sean Carrington, Henry Fraser and Addinton Forde) A–Z of Barbados Heritage (2003). Together with David Dabydeen and Cecily Jones, he edited the Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007), to which he contributed over forty entries. K A T H L E E N G Y S S E L S teaches African and Jewish Diaspora Literatures at Antwerp University. Her publications on Caribbean authors and such topics as intertextuality, canon formation, and francophone vs Commonwealth literatures have appeared in Prooftexts, Thamyris, and the French Review. She has two monographs in print on the third man of négritude, Leon–Gontran Damas, and is the convenor of international conferences on the three Guyanas (in partnership with the Université Paul Valéry, the Université de Liège, and the University of Amsterdam) and on Patrice Lumumba (with Visual Poetics at the University of Antwerp). R O B E R T D. H A M N E R received his doctorate in English at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1971. He taught in the English Department at Hardin–Simmons University for thirty-five years, achieving the rank of Senior Professor of English and Humanities, until his retirement in 2006 as Professor Emeritus. In addition to books on Joseph Conrad, V.S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott, he has published articles, bibliographies, and reviews in numerous critical journals. He has organized or served on panels for several professional organizations. In addition to acting as external examiner for graduate programmes at a number of international universities, he has served as critical evaluator for various periodical and book publishers. He received a Senior Fulbright Professorship to teach at the University of Guyana in 1976, and was recognized as a Minnie Stevens Piper Professor in Texas in 1996. B É N É D I C T E L E D E N T is a professor at the Université de Liège (Belgium) where she teaches English language and postcolonial literatures, particularly those of the African diaspora. She has published on contemporary Caribbean and black British writing and is the author of a monograph on Caryl Phillips (2002). She has edited or co-edited several volumes, including The Contact and the Culmination: Essays in Honour of Hena Maes-Jelinek (with Marc Delrez, 1997), Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean (2002, with Hena Maes–Jelinek), Bridges Across Chasms: Towards a Transcultural Future in Caribbean Literature (2004), Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life (2012, with Daria Tunca), and The Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities (2013, with Maria Cristina

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Fumagalli and Roberto Del Valle Alcalá). She is also co-editor of the book series Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English. C H R I S R I N G R O S E has a BA in English from the University of Cambridge; he completed his MA at the University of Alberta and his PhD on Victorian autobiography. He has worked at Dalhousie University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Northampton, U K , where he was awarded the University’s prize for teaching excellence. He now lives in Australia, where he is an adjunct associate professor of English at Monash University in Melbourne. His poetry has won awards in England, Canada, and Australia, and he has published critical work on modern fiction, literary theory, and children’s literature. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and a poetry reviewer for the Australian Poetry Journal. M U N E E Z A S H A M S I E is a Pakistani writer and critic. She is the author of Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani English Literature (forthcoming 2016), managing editor of a work-in-progress, The Oxford Companion to the Literatures of Pakistan, and guest editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Andalus issue, forthcoming 2016; and a special Pakistan issue, 47.2, May 2011). She is the bibliographic representative, Pakistan, for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and is on the international advisory board of Bengal Lights, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She served on the 2013 DSC Prize Jury and was the regional chair (Eurasia) of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2009–11. She has edited three pioneering anthologies of Pakistani English literature, including the award-winning And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women (2005, repr. 2008), A Dragonfly in the Sun (1997), Leaving Home, Towards a New Millennium (2001), and Beyond Geography (2011). She lives in Karachi and freelances for the Dawn newspaper and Newsline magazine. J A N E T W I L S O N is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, and previously taught at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She has published widely in the literature and film of the white settler societies of New Zealand and Australia and also on postcolonial and diaspora writing and criticism more generally. Her current publications focus on the stories of Katherine Mansfield and the global fictions of Moshin Hamid. She is co-editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and of the book series Studies in World Literature, and is vice-chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society. She coedited Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium (with Cristina Sandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 2010) and a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (with Daria Tunca, 2015), and is currently editing

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another special issue of JP W on Asian Australian Literature (with Chandani Lokugé). Her most recent publication is Under Construction: Postcolonial Gateways and Walls (2016), co-edited with Daria Tunca. L A E T I T I A Z E C C H I N I is a research scholar at the CNRS in Paris. Her research interests and publications focus on contemporary Indian poetry, on the politics of literature, and on postcolonial criticism as a field of debate. She has recently published Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines (2014) and the translation of Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems into French (2013), and is currently co-editing (with Anjali Nerelkar) a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing called ‘The Worlds of Bombay Poetry’, as well as preparing a study of censorship and cultural regulation in India; and an anthology of contemporary Indian poetry translated into French.

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Index ——— ጓ ———

62: A Model Kit (Cortázar) 200 Aaron, David 41 Abidi, Azhar, The House of Bilquis 157; Passarola Rising 157; Twilight 157 Acheson, James xiv Across the Black Waters (Anand) xxi, 218 Adorno, Theodor 47 Adventures of Vela, The (Wendt) 173–91 Afghanistan 151, 153, 154, 155, 159, 160 African diaspora, and Jewish Diaspora xvi, 35–58 “Afterlife, The” (Manhire) 196 Afzal-Khan, Fawzia 138 Ahmad, Eqbal 151, 155 Ahmed, Jamil, The Wandering Falcon, The 166 Alexander, Neta 45 Ali, Ahmed 161 All About H. Hatterr (Desani) 106, 108 All Blacks 204 Amerindians 67, 74 Anand, Mulk Raj, Across the Black Waters xxi, 218 Anderson, Sherwood 213 Anil’s Ghost (Ondaatje) 96, 100, 109, 154 Another Life (Walcott) 16, 17, 20, 21, 26, 29, 32, 34 Antarctic Field Notes” (Manhire) 198 Antarctic/Antarctica 197, 198, 201 Antigua 63 Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (Walcott) 11–12, 33, 43 antisemitism 39, 41, 42, 50, 51, 52, 58 A N Z A C 219

Apollinaire, Guillaume 113, 120, 124 Aquien, Pascal xviii, 113, 117, 126 Aragon, Louis, Le Paysan de Paris, Le 120 Aristotle 138, 140 Ashbery, John 194 Aslam, Nadeem xix, 149, 151–53, 154, 156, 161; Maps for Lost Lovers 152–53; Season of the Rainbirds 152; The Wasted Vigil 154 Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, An (Perec) 122 Auckland 173 Auckland province 207 Auschwitz 47, 49, 50, 55 Australia, in First and Second World Wars 218 “Bad Blood” (Kolatkar) 125 Baena, Rosalia 136 Bahamas 64 Bail, Murray 105, 108; Homesickness 105 Baillie, Andrea 96 “Bajan Fishermen” (Collymore) 74 Baldwin, James 36, 41, 42, 58, 61 Balibar, Étienne 100 Bandele, Biyi, Burma Boy 218 Bangladesh 85, 149, 162, 163, 164 Barabajan Poems (Brathwaite) 74, 75 “Barbadoes” (Chapman) 73 Barbados xvii, 15, 34, 44, 63–75, 76 Barbados: A Poem (Weekes) 71 Barbuda 63 Barth, John 210

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Barthes, Roland, “The Brain of Einstein” 199 Batarbee, Keith 229 Baudelaire, Charles 113, 124, 125; “The Rag Picker’s Wine” 125 Baugh, Edward 79; & Colbert Nepaulsingh 20 Baxter, James K. 174 Beaujour, Michel 99 Beautiful from This Angle (Khan Phillips) 165 Beehive (Parliament, Wellington) 205 Bellow, Saul 39 Belly of the Atlantic, The (Diome) 98 Beloved (Morrison) 40, 41, 45, 59, 60 Ben Abdelahim, Maha 47, 58 Bengal Raag (Hameed & Soomro) 164 Bengali English, in London 82 Bermuda 64 Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau & Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité 6, 7, 13 Bhabha, Homi K. xi, xxiv Bhutto, Benazir 152 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali 151 Bielawski, Ellen 218 Bilgrami, Shahbano, Without Dreams 164 Birth and Death of the Miracle Man, The (Wendt) 180 Bitter Sweet (Farooki) 164 Black Muslims 41 Black Rainbow (Wendt) 173, 175 Black, Jeremy 105 Black-Label (Damas) 36 Bloom, Leopold 16 Bly, Robert 196 Boatride & Other Poems, The (Kolatkar) xxiii, xxiv, 118, 119, 126 Boehmer, Elleke 133 Bogotá 48 Bölling, Gordon 228 “Boomtown Leper’s Band” (Kolatkar) 125

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Bouchareb, Rachid, dir. Indigènes xxi, 215–17, 222, 231 Boyden, Joseph 215, 218, 226–31; From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans 218, 224, 228; Three Day Road 215, 218, 226–31 “Brain of Einstein, The” (Barthes) 199 Brain of Katherine Mansfield, The (Manhire) 193, 199–206 Brand, Dionne, A Map to the Door of No Return 55, 58 Brassens, Georges 125 Brathwaite, Kamau xxii, 69, 74, 75; “The Dust” 74; Barabajan Poems 74, 75; “Cane” 74; Mother Poem 75; “Tom” 69 “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda” (Kolatkar) 120, 122, 123, 124 “Breakfast” (Manhire) 197 “Breaking the Line” (Manhire) 194, 206 Brent (London) 84 Breslin, Paul 16, 34 Brodzki, Bella 46, 58 Broken Verses (Shamsie) 161 Brothers In Trouble (dir. Prasad) 150 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall) 44 Bruckner, D.J.R. 28 Brydon, Diana 147 Buber, Martin 48 Budick, Emily Miller 36, 41, 58 Burma Boy (Bandele) 218 Burnt Shadows (Kamila Shamsie) 160 “Bus, The” (Kolatkar) 129 “Butterfly, The” (Kolatkar) 116 Campbell, Alistair 201, 202; The Dark Lord of Savaiki 201 Campbell, George 18 Camus, Albert 134, 174 Canada, in World War One 221–22 —See also: First World War “Cane” (Brathwaite) 74 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 136 Cape Reinga 176

ጓ

Index

Caribbean Discourse (Glissant) 40, 42, 43, 48, 57, 59 Caribbean literature 6–12, 35–58 Caribbean, East Indians in 6–12 Carretta, Vincent 64 “Casabianca” (Hemans) 154 Casamance (Senegal) 48, 54 Case of Exploding Mangoes, A (Hanif) 155 Cassino: City of Martyrs/Città Martire (Sullivan) 219 Castaway, The (Walcott) 19, 20, 34 Castle, The (Kafka) 209 Castries 19, 23 Cat’s Table, The (Ondaatje) xvii, 95–108 Catherine the Great 204 Cazabon 31 Celan, Paul 38, 113 Central Otago 202, 204 Certeau, Michel de 121, 126 Césaire, Aimé xvii, 38, 42, 49, 56, 58; Notebook of a Return to the Native Land 56 Ceylon 96, 101 Chagall, Marc 212 Chakrabarty, Dipesh xv, xxiv Chambers, Claire 151, 153 Chamoiseau, Patrick 6, 7, 13, 40, 57, 58 Chapman, M.J., “Barbadoes” 73, 74 Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales 108, 136 Chaudhuri, Amit 115 Chaudhuri, Nirad xxiv, 105, 106, 108, 126, 129, 159; A Passage to England 106 Chekhov, Anton xix, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146; The Cherry Orchard 136, 137, 144, 145, 146; Uncle Vanya 136, 137, 139, 141, 143, 144 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov) 136, 137, 144, 145, 146 Chitre, Dilip 132 Choiseul (St Lucia) 20 Chosen Place, the Timeless People, The (Marshall) 44

285 Christchurch xx, 201 Christianity xx, 37, 42, 52, 65, 136, 143, 148, 152, 155, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188, 191 Christiansë, Yvette 44, 58 Cilano, Cara 163 “Cinema, The” (Manhire) 194 Cinnamon Peeler, The (Ondaatje) 96, 109 Clear Light of Day (Desai) 135 Cliff, Michelle 38 Clifford, James 6, 13 Coates, Donna 219, 228 Cockney English 82 Cole’s Cave (Barbados) 71, 74 Collymore, Frank 70, 71, 74, 76; “Bajan Fishermen” 74; “Homage to Planters” 71; “Hymn to the Sea” 74; “This Land” 70 Colombo xviii, 96, 97 Columbus, Christopher 9 Coming Through Slaughter (Ondaatje) 97, 109 Condé, Maryse xvi, 8, 13, 45, 59; Crossing the Mangrove/ Traversée de la mangrove 8, 13; I, Tituba... Black Witch of Salem 45 Confessions of Nat Turner, The (Styron) 45, 61 Confiant, Raphaël 6, 7, 13, 40, 58; La Panse du chacal 7, 13 Conrad, Joseph 100, 101; Youth 101 Constable, John 212 Cook, Captain James 204 Cook Strait 199 Cookson, Catherine 204 Coral Rooms, The (Kellman) 74, 76 Corner Shop (Farooki) 164 Cortázar, Julio, Rayuela (Hopscotch) 200; 62: A Model Kit 200 Cree peoples, in Canada 226, 227, 229–31 Creeley, Robert 196 Creole identity xvi, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 50, 79

286

N E W S OU N DIN G S IN P O S T C O L ON I A L W R I TI NG

Créolité movement 88 —See also Creole identity; Éloge de la Créolité Crete, Maori troops in 223 Crossing the Mangrove/ Traversé de la la mangrove (Condé) 8, 13 Crusoe, Robinson 9, 10, 92 Cuba 10 Damas, Léon–Gontras 36, 38, 42, 45, 59; Black-Label 36; Pigments, Névralgies 36, 42 Dante Alighieri 18, 28, 97 Dargaville 208, 209, 211 Dark Lord of Savaiki, The (Campbell) 201 Dash, J. Michael 133, 134 “David Sassoon” (Kolatkar) 121 De Souza, Eunice xxiv Death of a Salesman (Miller) 140, 143 Dedalus, Stephen 16 Deleury, Guy 114 Delgrès, Louis 48 Demerara 73 Dempsey, L. James 221, 222 Deneuve, Catherine 204 Derrida, Jacques 50, 102, 103, 108 Desai, Anita 134–46; In Custody 134–46; Clear Light of Day 135 Desani, G.V., All About H. Hatterr 106, 108 Descartes, René 147 Description of the West-Indies, A (Singleton) 72 Diary of a Social Butterfly (Mohsin, Moni) 165 diaspora, Jewish and African —See: African diaspora, and Jewish Diaspora diaspora, South Asian 164 Dickason, Olive Patricia 221, 222 Diesel Mystic (O’Brien) 193, 206–12 Diome, Fatou, Belly of the Atlantic, The 98 Diviners, The (Laurence) 218

ጓ

Dominica 6, 66 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 37, 134 Douglas, Roger 205, 206 Douglass, Frederick 38, 60 Dragon Can’t Dance, The (Lovelace) 8 Dreyfus case 37 Du Bois, W.E.B. xvii, 37 Dubuffet, Jean 120 Duchamp, Marcel 120, 125 Dunedin 200, 202 Dungeons and Dragons 201, 203 Durix, Jean–Pierre 187 “Dust, The” (Brathwaite) 74 Dvorak, Marta 134 Dylan, Bob 196 East Indians, in Caribbean xv, 6–12 Eichmann, Adolf 56 “Elegy, An” (Walcott) 15 Eliot, T.S. 125, 135, 145; “Little Gidding” 135; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock” 125 Éloge de la Créolité (Bernabé et al.) 6, 7, 13 Éluard, Paul 113 Emigrants, The (Lamming) 105 Émigré Journeys (Hussein) 149, 150 Empire Windrush 88 End of Innocence, The (Mohin, Moni) 164 English language, Trinidadian 79 English Patient, The (Ondaatje) 96, 100, 109, 154, 218 Episkenew, Jo–Ann xxii, 226 Epitaph for the Young (Walcott) 15, 16, 17, 18, 34 Equiano, Olaudah 49, 64, 76 Evans, Patrick, Making It 213 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed 151, 159, 161 Fanon, Frantz 38, 39, 40, 45, 53, 54, 59, 89, 92 Farooki, Roopa 157, 163–64; Bitter Sweet 164; Corner Shop 164; Half Life 157, 164; The Way Things Look To Me 164

ጓ

Index

Farooqi, Musharraf xix, 149, 165; Passion in the Time of Termites 165; The Story of a Widow 165 Farrakhan, Louis 41, 45 Fatel Rozack 11 Faulkner, William 114, 173 Fazli, Shahryar, Invitation 164 Feast of the Goat, The (Vargas Llosa) 155 Fiji 174 Final Passage, The (Phillips) 106 Findley, Timothy, The Wars 218 Fine Clothes to the Jew (Hughes) 37 First World War, Canadians in 218; First Nations in xxi, 221–22, 228–29 —See also Joseph Boyden, Timothy Findley First World War, New Zealand Mǒori in 220 —See also: Patricia Grace; A N ZAC ; Gallipoli Fischel, Jack R. 41, 59 Fitzcarraldo (film) 212 Five Queen’s Road (Khan, Sorayya Y.) 163 Fly Away, Peter (Malouf) 217 Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree (Wendt) 190 Forbury Park (Dunedin) 195, 200 Forster, E.M., A Passage to India 106 Foucault, Michel 97, 108 Four Feathers, The (film) 100 Friedeman, Joë 56 From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans (Boyden) 218, 224, 228 “From Saga Seminar to Writers’ Workshop” (Manhire) 196 Gallagher, Tess 119 Gallant, Mavis 135 Gallipoli 219 García Márquez, Gabriel 212 Gauhar, Feryal Ali 149, 154; No Space for Further Burials 154; The Scent of Wet Earth in August 154; Tibbi Galli 154 Genette, Gérard xix, 134

287 Geometry of God, The (Khan) 156 Ghalib, Mirza 151 Ghosh, Amitav 6 Ghost Dance, The (Walcott) 25 Gide, André 113 Gillman, Susan 38 Gilman, Sander L. 56 Gilman, Susan 52 Gilmore, John 72 Gingerich, Philip D. 156 Ginsberg, Allen 114, 120 Gitanjali (Tagore) 114 Glasgow, Melita, & Don Fletcher 83 Glissant, Édouard xvii, 7, 8, 12, 13, 40, 42, 43, 48, 50, 57, 58, 59; Caribbean Discourse 40, 42, 43, 48, 57, 59 ; Introduction à une poétique du divers 7, 13; Mahagony 7, 8, 13 Gold Coast 54 gold rush, in California and Central Otago 204 Gongorism 211 Gordimer, Nadine 39, 60 gospel music 37 Grace, Patricia 187, 215, 218–32; Ned & Katina 220, 224; “Sun’s Marbles” 187; Tu 215, 218, 222–32 Graham, Billy 198 Grainger, James 71, 76 Graves, Robert xiv, 217 Gray, Alasdair 207 Great World, The (Malouf) 217 Greene, Graham 212 Grey, Sir Charles 66 Guadeloupe 8, 11, 35, 44, 45, 46, 48, 54, 55, 105 Gulf, The (Walcott) 20, 34 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 177 Gurkhas 217 Gutleben, Christian 136 Gyssels, Kathleen 44, 49, 57 Haiti 38, 45, 57, 73

288

N E W S OU N DIN G S IN P O S T C O L ON I A L W R I TI NG

Half Life (Farooki) 157, 164 Hall, Stuart 5, 6, 9, 13 Hameed, Ghazala, & Durdana Soomro, Bengal Raag 164 Hamid, Mohsin xix, 149, 152, 155, 157–59; The Reluctant Fundamentalist 158, 159; Moth Smoke 157 Hamlet xvi, 16, 20, 23 Hamner, Robert 17 Handwriting (Ondaatje) 96 Hanif, Mohammed xix, 149, 152, 155; A Case of Exploding Mangoes 155; Our Lady of Alice Bhatti 155 Hargreaves, Alec 216, 217 Harris, Wilson 50 Hau’ofa, Epeli 174, 175; Kisses in the Nederends 175 Haynes, Robert 65 Heaven on Wheels (Kanga) 106 Hemans, Felicia, “Casabianca” 154 Hentoff, Nat 42, 58 Herbert, Caroline 162 Highway, Tomson 228 Hindu identity-politics 134 Hinduism 9, 10, 12, 102, 135, 136, 143, 163 Hitler, Adolf 39, 42, 54 Hockney, David 99 Holocaust, Jewish 40, 41, 46, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61; Jewish and African 35, 39, 40, 41 “Homage to Planters” (Collymore) 71 “Homages to Bombay” (Kolatkar) 125 Home Boy (Nqvi) 159 Homer xvi, 16, 18, 24, 27, 28, 31, 174 Homesickness (Bail) 105 Honolulu 173 Hoosh (Manhire) 198 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, “Pied Beauty” 125 Horace 136 Hosain, Attia, Sunlight on a Broken Column 161 Hosseini, Khaled 151

ጓ

Hotere, Ralph 205 House of Bilquis, The (Abidi) 157 Hughes, Langston xvii, 37, 72, 76; Fine Clothes to the Jew 37 Hughes, Griffith 70, 71, 72, 74 Hughes, Ted, Crow 125 Hulme, Keri 202 Human Stain, The (Roth) 39 Hurston, Zora Neale 36 Hussein, Abdullah, Émigré Journeys 149– 50 Hussein, Aamer 149, 151, 161 Hutcheon, Linda 146 Hutching, Megan 219, 220 “Hymn to the Sea” (Collymore) 74 I, Tituba... Black Witch of Salem (Condé) 45 Ibsen, Henrik, Peer Gynt 33, 34 Icarus 16 Iceland 198 Ihimaera, Witi xx, 200, 201, 202; Pounamu Pounamu 200 In a Green Night (Walcott) 15, 34 In Custody (Desai) 134–46 “In My Eighteenth Year” (Walcott) 15, 34 In The City By the Sea (Shamsie) 160 Indigènes (dir. Bouchareb) xxi, 215–17, 222, 231 Indo-Caribbean population 7 —See: Caribbean, East Indians in Introduction à une poétique du divers (Glissant) 7, 13 Invercargill 201, 202 Invitation (Fazli) 164 Ireland, David 212 Isle of Wight 66 Italian campaign, Second World War 219, 220, 224, 225 Italy, New Zealand Mǒori troops in 223 —See also: Patricia Grace Jackson, Keith, & Alan McRobie 219, 220

ጓ

Index

Jaggi, Maya 84, 160 Jamaica 22, 59, 66, 73, 75, 87, 89, 91, 92 Jamaican patois, in London 82, 85 Jamaicans, in England 89, 90; in London 81 James, Cynthia 80, 91 Jeffares, A.N. xiii Jejuri (Kolatkar) 116–18, 129–32 Jejuri (Western Maharashtra) 129–32 Jewish Diaspora, and African diaspora 35–58 Jewish-British, in London 81 Joseph Anton: A Memoir (Rushdie) 107 Joseph’s Box (Saadi) 150 Joyce, James xvi, 16, 27, 107 Jungle Book (Kipling) 99 Jussawalla, Adil 115 Juvenal 136, 137 Kabir, Ananya Jahanara 114, 156 Kafka, Franz 209, 211; The Castle 209 Kala Ghoda (South Bombay) 120, 121 Kala Ghoda Poems (Kolatkar) 113, 118, 119, 121, 122, 126 Kanga, Firdaus, Heaven on Wheels 106 Karibische Geschichten (Seghers) 36, 61 Kartography (Shamsie) xix, 162 Kay, Eve 83 Kellman, Anthony The Coral Rooms 74, 76 Kennedy, Anne, 100 Traditional Smiles 213 Khalfa, Jean 54 Khan, Sorayya Y. xix, 149, 163; Five Queen’s Road 163; Noor xix, 123, 163 Khan, Uzma Aslam xix, 155–57; The Geometry of God 156; The Story of Noble Rot 156; Trespassing 156–57 Khan Phillips, Maha xix, 149, 165; Beautiful from This Angle 165 Kiem, Elizabeth 87 King Lear (Shakespeare) 33 King, Adèle xiii, xx, xxii King, Bruce xii–xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxii, xxiv, 23, 27, 133, 135, 159, 160, 161;

289 commitment to Indian poetry xxiii; commitment to literature xxiv; interest in poetry xxii King, Michael 203 Kipling, Rudyard 99, 198; Jungle Book 99 Kisses in the Nederends (Hau'ofa) 175 Kolatkar, Arun xviii, xxiii, xxiv, 113–26, 127, 129–32; “Bad Blood” 125; The Boatride & Other Poems xxiii, xxiv, 118, 119, 126; “Boomtown Leper’s Band” 125; “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda” 120, 122, 123, 124; “David Sassoon” 121; “Homages to Bombay” 125; Kala Ghoda Poems 113, 118, 119, 121, 122, 126; “Meera” 125; “The Bus” 129; “The Butterfly” 116; Jejuri 116–18, 129–32; „Little Devil” 125; “A Little Pile of Stones” 130; “Making Love to a Poem” 118, 119; “An Old Bicycle Tyre” 125; “The Priest” 130; “The Railway Station” 130; “The Rat-poison Man’s Lunch Hour” 121; “Silver Triangle” 125; “To a Charas Pill” 125; “To a Crow” 122 Kovesi, Simon 150 Kristeva, Julia xix, 107, 108, 134, 135 Kumar, Amitava 158 Kureishi, Hanif 149 Kurlansky, Mark 36, 59 La Capra, Dominick 51 Lacan, Jacques 101, 102, 109 Lahiri, Jhumpa 98, 109; The Namesake 98 Lahore 154, 157, 158, 159, 163, 164 Lamming, George 79, 92, 105, 106, 109; The Emigrants 105 Lange, David 205 Langeland, Agnes Scott 82 language, English, in England —See: Andrea Levy, Samuel Selvon, Zadie Smith 82 Lapierre, Nicole 57 Larsen, Nella 38 Lartigue, Jacques Henri 101

290

N E W S OU N DIN G S IN P O S T C O L ON I A L W R I TI NG

Last of the Just, The (André Schwarz–Bart) 35, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60 Laurence, Margaret, The Diviners 218 Lazarus, Neil 115 Leaves of the Banyan Tree (Wendt) 173, 190 “Leaving School” (Walcott) 19 Lee–Potter, Charlie 153 Leeward Islands 63 Levi, Primo 38 Levinas, Emmanuel 47, 48, 50 Levy, Andrea xvii, 80, 87–91; Small Island xvii, 80, 87–91 lieux de mémoire (Nora) 41 Life: A User’s Manual (Perec) 119 literature, black British 79–92 “Little Devil” (Kolatkar) 125 “Little Gidding” (Eliot) 135 “Little Pile of Stones, A” (Kolatkar) 130 Location of the Least Person (O’Brien) 207, 208 Lodge, David, Small World 136 Lonely Londoners, The (Selvon) 79, 92, 105, 109 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock, The” (Eliot) 125 Lovelace, Earl xvi, 8; The Dragon Can’t Dance 8 Lowe, Jan 84 Mahagony (Glissant) 7, 8, 13 Making It (Evans) 213 “Making Love to a Poem” (Kolatkar) 118, 119 Malamud, Bernard 39 Malcolm X 52 Malouf, David 217; The Great World 217; Fly Away, Peter 217 Mandelstam, Osip 124 Manhire, Bill 193–207, 213; “The Afterlife” 196; “Antarctic Field Notes” 198; The Brain of Katherine Mansfield 193, 199–

ጓ

206; “From Saga Seminar to Writers’ Workshop” 196; The New Land: A Picture Book 213; “An Outline” 196; “Breakfast” 197; “Breaking the Line” 194, 206; “The Cinema” 194; Hoosh 198; “The Pickpocket” 193–94; “A Scottish Bride” 196; “Wingatui” 195–96, 208; ed. The Wide White Page 198; “Zoetropes” 196–98, 208 Mani, K., & Shela Ratna 141 Mansfield, Katherine 199, 202, 204, 205 ǒori xx, xxi, 174, 176, 200, 202, 203, 204, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 230, 231, 232 Maori Battalion xxi, 215, 218, 220, 222, 223, 224, 230, 231 ǎoritanga 203 Map to the Door of No Return, A (Brand) 55, 58 Maps for Lost Lovers (Aslam) 152–53 Markham, E.A. 133 Marshall, Paule xvii, 44, 45, 59; Brown Girl, Brownstones 44; Soul Clap Hands and Sing 44; The Chosen Place, the Timeless People 44 Martinique 7, 11, 38, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 56, 58, 67 Massachusetts 27, 45 Mazrui, Ali Al’Amin 40 McLuhan, Marshall 183 Meads, Colin 204 “Meera” (Kolatkar) 125 Meerabai (poet) 121 Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna 118 Memmi, Albert 39, 60 Mengele 204 Metivier, Norline 26 Mezzadra, Sandro 105 Middle Passage xvii, 18, 24, 40, 43, 54, 55 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) 136

ጓ

Index

Miller, Arthur 140, 143, 144; Death of a Salesman 140, 143; “The Nature of Tragedy” 140; “Tragedy and the Common Man” 140 Miller, Gavin 207 Millet, Jean–François 30; The Gleaners 19 Minhas, Shandana, Tunnel Vision 165 Mitchinson, Bishop John 66 Mitre Peak (New Zealand) 202 modernismo, Latin American 211 Mohsin, Moni xix, 149, 158, 164–65; The End of Innocence 164; Diary of a Social Butterfly 165; Tender Hooks 165 Monte Cassino 225 Moorhouse, Frank 213 Morey, Peter 158 Moriori 202 Morning Star (André Schwarz–Bart) 50, 58, 60 Morrison, Toni 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 59, 60; Beloved 40, 41, 45, 59, 60 Morrison, Howard 202 Morrison, Van 196 Moth Smoke (Hamid) 157 Mother Poem (Brathwaite) 75 Mulâtresse Solitude, La (André Schwarz– Bart) 46, 48, 49, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61 Mullan, John 88 Muneeza, Shamsie 159 Munro, Alice 213 “Muse of History, The” (Walcott) 19, 34, 43, 134 Musharraf, General 152 Muslim identity-politics 134 Muslim traditions, in India 135 Muslim-British, in London 81 My Name is Red (Pamuk) 151 N A A C P 41 Naipaul, V.S. xiv, xvi, 8, 9, 11, 13, 105, 106, 109 Namesake, The (Lahiri) 98 Naqvi, H.M. xix, 149, 152, 159

291 Narayan, R.K. 105, 138 Nasta, Susheila 79, 82, 92, 93 Nature of Blood, The (Phillips) 52, 60 “Nature of Tragedy, The” (Miller) 140 Ned & Katina (Grace) 220, 224 Negerjood in moederland (Ombre) 44, 59 Négritude 38, 45 Neruda, Pablo 113, 159 New Land: A Picture Book, The (Manhire) 213 New Statesman 195 New Zealand literature 193–213, 218–32 New Zealand, Maori myth in 183 No Space for Further Burials (Gauhar) 154 Noor (Khan, Sorayya Y.) xix, 123, 163 Nora, Pierre 41 North Island (New Zealand) 176, 199 Northern Canada 230 Northern Ontario 224, 227 Northup, Solomon, Twelve Years a Slave 45 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Césaire) 56 novel, Canadian xvii, 95, 224 —See also: Joseph Boyden, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje 95 novel, Caribbean 44–58 novel, Caribbean-English xvii, 79–91 novel, Indian 134 —See also: Anita Desai 134 novel, New Zealand 193 —See also: Patricia Grace, Bill Manhire, Gregory O’Brien, Albert Wendt novel, Pacific —See: Albert Wendt, Epeli Hau'ofa 173 novel, Pakistani xix, 149–66 Nqvi Home Boy 159 O’Brien, Gregory 193, 199, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206–12; Diesel Mystic 193, 206–12; Location of the Least Person 207, 208; “Old Man South Road” 207

292

N E W S OU N DIN G S IN P O S T C O L ON I A L W R I TI NG

O’Brien, Flann 211 Obama, Barack 80 Odysseus 16, 27 Okri, Ben 107 “Old Bicycle Tyre, An” (Kolatkar) 125 “Old Man South Road” (O’Brien) 207 Ombre, Ellen 44, 59, 60; Negerjood in moederland 44, 59 Omeros (Walcott) 16, 21, 22–29, 30, 31, 34, 43 Ondaatje, Michael xvii, 95–108, 154, 196, 218; Anil’s Ghost 96, 100, 109, 154; The Cat’s Table xvii, 95–108; Coming Through Slaughter 97, 109; The Cinnamon Peeler 96, 109; The English Patient 96, 100, 109, 154, 218; Handwriting 96; Running in the Family 96, 109 Oronsay (meaning of name) 97 Orwell, George 83 Otago 207 Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Hanif) 155 “Outline, An” (Manhire) 196 Ovid 147 Owaka (New Zealand) 202, 204, 205 Owen, Wilfred 217 Pakistan, novel in 149–66 Pakistani immigrants in Britain 149, 150, 152, 153, 164; in Australia 157; in the USA 158, 159 Pamuk, Orhan, My Name is Red 151 Panama 69 Panse du chacal, La (Confiant) 7, 13 Papakura (New Zealand military training camp) 222, 223 “Papa-tu-a-Nuku (Earth Mother)” (Tuwhare) 187 Parr, Alison 219, 220 Partition of India 151, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164 Partition of Pakistan 163 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 113 Passage to England, A (Chaudhuri) 106 Passage to India, A (Forster) 106

ጓ

Passarola Rising (Abidi) 157 Passion in the Time of Termites (Farooqi) 165 Paterson (Williams) 119 Paysan de Paris, Le (Aragon) 120 Peer Gynt (Ibsen) 33, 34 Pegahmagabow, Francis 228 Pelican Island 64 Perec, Georges 119, 120, 122; An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris 122; Life: A User’s Manual 119 Peterson, Dale 37, 60 Phillips, Caryl 52, 60, 83, 84, 92, 105, 106, 109; The Final Passage 106; The Nature of Blood 52, 60 Phillips, Mike 88 Photographs (Wendt) 174 “Pickpocket, The” (Manhire) 193–94 “Pied Beauty” (Hopkins) 125 Pigments, Névralgies (Damas) 36, 42 Pinckard, George 65, 76 Pinto, Jerry 115 Pioneer Battalion, Maori, in First World War 220, 225 Pissarro, Camille 29, 30, 31 Pissarro, Joseph 30 Plaatje, Sol 218 plat de porc aux bananes vertes, Un (André & Simone Schwarz–Bart) xvii, 35, 46– 56, 58, 59, 61 Plath, Sylvia 114 Poésie/Gallimard xviii, 113, 114, 126 “Poetry – Enormously Complicated Art” (Walcott) 18 poetry, Indian xviii, 113 —See also: Kolatkar poetry, Urdu 151 Polynesian culture xx, 175, 182, 183, 184, 189 —See also: Mǒori; Samoa Ponge, Francis 113 Port of Spain 27 Portelli, Sandro 38, 60

ጓ

Index

Portulan (Martinican journal) 38, 45, 61 Pouliuli (Wendt) 173, 190 Pounamu Pounamu (Ihimaera) 200 Prasad, Udayan, dir. Brothers In Trouble 150 “Priest, The” (Kolatkar) 130 “Prince, The” (Walcott) 19 Private Eye 195 Prodigal, The (Walcott) xvi, 21, 32–33, 34 Progressive Writers Association 152 Psychoraag (Saad) 150 Punt, Charli–Ann 101 Queen of Sheba 42 Rabelais, François xx, 136, 175 “Rag Picker’s Wine, The” (Baudelaire) 125 “Railway Station, The” (Kolatkar) 130 Ramayana 11, 12 Ratheiser, Ulla 223 “Rat-poison Man’s Lunch Hour, The” (Kolatkar) 121 Ratti, Manav 100, 109 Rayuela (Hopscotch) (Cortázar) 200 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid) 158, 159 Rilke, Rainer Maria 118 Rimbaud, Arthur 113, 125, 134 Rockwell, Norman 99 Rodriguez, Alex 166 Roegiers, Patrick 101 Rogernomics 206 Ross, Michael L. 80 Roth, Philip, The Human Stain 39 Rumi 125 Running in the Family (Ondaatje) 96, 109 Rushdie, Salman xvii, 82, 95, 98, 101, 107, 115, 155, 161; Joseph Anton: A Memoir 107; Shame 155 Saadi, Suhayl 150; Psychoraag 150; Joseph’s Box 150

293 “Saddhu of Couva, The” (Walcott) xvi, 9, 12 Saint-John Perse 18 Salt and Saffron (Shamsie) 161 Samoa xx, 173–90 Sargeson, Frank 213 Sarraute, Nathalie 49 Sartre, Jean–Paul 45, 60, 61 Sassoon, Siegfried 217 Savage, Michael Joseph 219 Scent of Wet Earth in August, The (Gauhar) 154 Scharfman, Ronnie 46, 58, 60 “Schooner Flight, The” (Walcott) 63 Schwartz–Bart, André xvii, 35, 37, 46, 48, 49, 50, 56–61; The Last of the Just 35, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60; Morning Star 50, 58, 60; La Mulâtresse Solitude/ A Woman Named Solitude 46, 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61 Schwarz–Bart, André & Simone 46–57; Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes xvii, 35, 46–56, 58, 59, 61 Schwarz–Bart, Simone xvii, 35, 56, 59, 61 Scotland District (Barbados) 66, 67 “Scottish Bride, A” (Manhire) 196 Season of the Rainbirds (Aslam) 152 Second World War, French colonial troops in 215 —See also: Indigènes Second World War, Gurkhas in 217 Second World War, New Zealand Maori in 218–22 —See also: Patricia Grace Seghers, Anna, Karibische Geschichten 36, 61 Séjour, Victor 38 Selvon, Samuel 79, 80, 92, 93, 105, 109; The Lonely Londoners 79, 92, 105, 109 Senegal 48, 54, 55 Shakespeare, William 23, 82, 114, 136; King Lear 33; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 136

294

N E W S OU N DIN G S IN P O S T C O L ON I A L W R I TI NG

Shame (Rushdie) 155 Shamsie, Kamila xix, 149, 151, 155, 160, 162, 163, 166; Broken Verses 161; Burnt Shadows 160; In The City By the Sea 160; Salt and Saffron 161; Kartography xix, 162 Shamsie, Muneeza 151, 152, 154, 161, 166 Sharif, Nawaz 152 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 12 Shoah 40, 49, 56, 59 Sierra Leone 69 Silkstone, Dan 88 “Silver Triangle” (Kolatkar) 125 Singleton, John 71, 72, 74, 76; A Description of the West-Indies 72 Sioux 25, 26 slave trade xvi, 40, 41, 45, 55, 64 Small Island (Levy) xvii, 80, 87–91 Small World (Lodge) 136 Smith, Zadie xvii, 80–87; “Speaking in Tongues” 80; White Teeth xvii, 80–87 Solomon 42 Sommer, Doris 36, 61 Songmaker’s Chair, The (Wendt) 173, 184 Sons for the Return Home (Wendt) 173 Sorrenson, M.P.K. 220, 221 Soul Clap Hands and Sing (Marshall) 44 South Island (New Zealand) 199, 200 South Otago 195, 203 Southland 207 Soyinka, Wole 105, 106 Spaceship Enterprise 201 Spanish Civil War 218 “Speaking in Tongues” (Smith) 80 spirituals 37 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 46, 61 Spolsky, Bernard 85 Squires, Claire 82 Sri Lanka xvii, 96, 154 Srivastava, Ramesh K. 134 St Lucia 11, 16–32, 43, 66 St Omer, Dunstan 17, 21 St Thomas 29, 30, 31

ጓ

St Vincent 6, 64, 67, 73 Star-Apple Kingdom, The (Walcott) xvi, 9, 10, 13, 63 Stead, Karl 204 Stein, Sol 41, 42 Steiner, George 86 Stevens, Wallace, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” 125 Story of a Widow, The (Farooqi) 165 Story of Noble Rot, The (Khan) 156 Styron, William, The Confessions of Nat Turner 45, 61 Suleri, Sara 149 Sullivan, Robert, Cassino: City of Martyrs/Città Martire 219 “Sun’s Marbles” (Grace) 187 Sundquist, Eric 52, 61 Sunlight on a Broken Column (Hosain) 161 Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky) 212 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels 177 Tagore, Rabindranath 113, 115; Gitanjali 114 Taliban 152, 153, 154, 166 Te Puea Herangi 231 Te Rauparaha 204 Tender Hooks (Mohsin, Moni) 165 Thayil, Jeet xxiii, xxiv Theresienstadt 49 Third Reich 40 “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (Stevens) 125 “This Land” (Collymore) 70 Three Day Road (Boyden) 215, 218, 226–31 Tibbi Galli (Gauhar) 154 Tiepolo’s Hound (Walcott) 21, 22, 29–31, 34 Times Literary Supplement 195 tirailleurs sénégalais 41 “To a Charas Pill” (Kolatkar) 125 “To a Crow” (Kolatkar) 122 Tobago 11, 66 Tolstoy, Leo 37 “Tom” (Brathwaite) 69

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Index

Toumson, Roger 45 “Tragedy and the Common Man” (Miller) 140 “Train, The” (Walcott) 20 Traversée de la mangrove (Condé) 13 Treblinka 49 Trespassing (Khan) 156–57 Trinidad xvi, 6, 8, 9, 11, 18, 27, 31, 32, 34, 43, 66, 106 Trinidad Theatre Workshop 22 Trollope, Anthony 68, 76 Trouillot, Michel–Rolph 6, 13 Tsvetayeva, Marina 118 Tu (Grace) 215, 218, 222–32 Tunnel Vision (Minhas) 165 Tuwhare, Hone 174, 187; “Papa-tu-a-Nuku (Earth Mother)” 187 Twelve Years a Slave (Northup) 45 Twilight (Abidi) 157 Tzara, Tristan 120 Uncle Vanya (Chekhov) 136, 137, 139, 141, 143, 144 Uttar Pradesh 11 Utu (film) 206 Vargas Llosa, Mario 36, 155; The Feast of the Goat 155 Velter, André 113 Verne, Jules 157 Victoria University of Wellington 196 Victoria, Queen 69 Villon, François 124 Virgil 28, 71 Voltaire 157 Wairarapa 202 Wairoa River 209, 212 Walcott, Charles 20 Walcott, Derek xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 9–13, 15–34, 43, 44, 58, 63, 76, 133, 134; Another Life 16, 17, 20, 21, 26, 29, 32, 34; Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory 11–

295 12, 33, 43; The Castaway 19, 20, 34; Epitaph for the Young 15, 16, 17, 18, 34; The Ghost Dance 25; The Gulf 20, 34; In a Green Night 15, 34; “In My Eighteenth Year” 15, 34; “Leaving School” 19; “The Muse of History” 19, 34, 43, 134; Omeros 16, 21, 22–29, 30, 31, 34, 43; “Poetry – Enormously Complicated Art” 18; “The Prince” 19; The Prodigal xvi, 21, 32–33, 34; “The Saddhu of Couva” xvi, 9, 12; “The Schooner Flight” 63; The StarApple Kingdom xvi, 9, 10, 13, 63; Tiepolo’s Hound 21, 22, 29–31, 34; “The Train” 20; 25 Poems xvi, 15, 34; “What the Twilight Says” 43; “Young Trinidadian Poets” 18 Walcott, Warwick xvi, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33 Wandering Falcon, The (Ahmed, Jamil) 166 Wars, The (Findley) 218 Warsaw Ghetto 48 Wasted Vigil, The (Aslam) 154 Waterman, David 153 Watson, Kai 65 Way Things Look To Me, The (Farooki) 164 Wedde, Ian 195 Weekes, Nathaniel, Barbados: A Poem 71, 72, 76 Weinberg, David 55 Weinberg, Henry 56 Wellington 173, 205 Wendt, Albert 173–91; The Adventures of Vela 173–91; The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man 180; Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree 190; Black Rainbow 173, 175; Leaves of the Banyan Tree 173, 190; Photographs 174; Pouliuli 173, 190; The Songmaker’s Chair 173, 184; Sons for the Return Home 173 “What the Twilight Says” (Walcott) 43 White Teeth (Smith) xvii, 80–87 White, J.P. 28

296

N E W S OU N DIN G S IN P O S T C O L ON I A L W R I TI NG

Wide White Page, The (ed. Manhire) 198 Wiesel, Elie 49, 56 Wilkins, Damien 210 Willesden (London) 81 Williams, William Carlos 114, 119, 120, 208; Paterson 119 Williams, Mark 208 Wilson, Betty 46 Wilson, Janet 223, 225 “Wingatui” (Manhire) 195–96, 208 Without Dreams (Bilgrami) 164 Woman Named Solitude, A/ La Mulâtresse Solitude (André Schwarz–Bart) 48, 54, 55 Women’s Action Forum 161 Wordsworth, William 29, 125, 135

World War One —See: First World War Wright, Richard 37, 39, 54 Wylie, Herb 222 Yaeger, Patricia xii, xxiv Yeats, W.B. 174 “Young Trinidadian Poets” (Walcott) 18 Young, James E. 41, 61 Youth (Conrad) 101 Zagratzki, Uwe 222 Zecchini, Laetitia xxiii, xxiv, 116, 127 Zia ul-Haq, General 151, 155, 161 “Zoetropes” (Manhire) 196–98, 208

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