Archives for March, 2008

from “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight”

“Rizwan, it’s you, Rizwan, it’s you,” I cry out
as he steps closer, the sleeves of his phiren torn.
“Each night put Kashmir in your dreams,” he says,
then touches me, his hands crusted with snow,
whispers, “I have been cold a long, long time.”

“Don’t tell my father I have died,” he says,
and I follow him through blood on the road
and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners
left behind, as they ran from the funeral,
victims of the firing. From windows we hear
grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall
on us, like ash. Black on edges of flames,
it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods,
the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers.
Kashmir is burning:

                           By that dazzling light
we see men removing statues from temples.
We beg them, “Who will protect us if you leave?”
They don’t answer, they just disappear
on the road to the plains, clutching the gods.

Continue reading this entry »

and your newly uncontrollable sense of moral outrage

-Merlin Mann

Once one has read his first poem he turns to his second and to the others that will follow thereafter with an increasing series of preconceptions about the sort of activity in which he is indulging. In matters of literary experience, as in other experiences, one is a virgin but once.

- Krieger, Murray. Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System. qtd in “Dancing Through the Minefield” by Annette Kolodny.

For a core group among my friends, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was formative reading. We read it as teenagers and the book became foundational to the different ways we learned to live with the politics of race and culture. Malcolm and his life represented for us an education that we sensed only for its obvious absence in our regular schooling. Books and writers like these, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time being another example, made critical race theory important to us in profoundly pragmatic ways: it permeated our lives, our creative work, our activism. It continues to do so. This was not mere high theory; this is a practise of resistance that we live because this is the world we inhabit and the inequities we recognise.

I remember how thrilled I was when I first read the book. When I was younger, I badly wanted heroes. I wanted to read about people whose lives stretched further than my own. I wanted their energy, that surety of an early death preceded by a life that had been worth living, worth dying for. Malcolm possessed all the traits I wanted to find in myself: intelligence, charisma, force. And he was angry – a beautiful rage, sharp and disciplined.
We were all of us, this handful of people among my friends, angry adolescents, angry in specific ways. That anger stays with us still, making Malcolm X, or rather the memory of reading his life, integral to the ways we continue to relate to and function in a fundamentally fucked up world.

In a few weeks, I will be presenting on the book in class. I’m excited, but also nervous, because I’m not entirely prepared for the internal messiness that this subject threatens. Continue reading this entry »

On looking at ‘the photograph of Mammy Prater, an ex-slave, 115 years old when her photograph was taken’

she waited for her century to turn
she waited until she was one hundred and fifteen
years old to take a photograph
to take a photograph and to put those eyes in it
she waited until the technique of photography was
suitably developed
to make sure the picture would be clear
to make sure no crude daguerreotype would lose
her image
would lose her lines and most of all her eyes
and her hands
she knew the patience of one hundred and fifteen years
she knew that if she had the patience,
to avoid killing a white man
that I would see this photograph
she waited until it suited her
to take this photograph and to put those eyes in it.

- Brand, Dionne. “Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater,” No Language is Neutral.

I love Nina Simone. My god but I love her and with an awestruck kind of love. It’s not just about her voice, but the confidence that carries through it, something bordering on arrogance. There’s this self-sufficiency in her songs, even when she sings about being in love, that I can’t find in most other places. Generally things this good depress me, but Simone never has that effect. The music is so self-contained, so unyielding, so aware of its rights unto itself, that it has seems to have nothing to do with me. It’s soothing being that utterly external to anything. At some level I can delude myself into thinking that Simone in these songs is having a conversation only with herself, is absolutely uninterested in my presence; which is amazing, because for the length of those songs I don’t need to pretend to know me.

I would like to one day write something of that measure. To put down in words something with the raw need of “Sinnerman” or the assurance of “Aint Got No, I’ve Got Life.” And then, having written it, actually recognise it for its own worth. And after that – I don’t know; things could only go downhill after that. But I think the inevitable depression would be worth it, worth that one writing.

In the meantime, I will content myself with half-assed essays and embarrassingly angsty blogposts.

And yet I barely understood. Not even when I came upon him unnoticed among his flowers, his gaze more and more frequently floated on distances. I turned a corner of the house and surprised him speaking softly to himself with an annoyed shake of the head.
“Oh dear, what a pitiful death.”
It happened a number of times. There was no mistaking the words. On his face played his smile of half-regret, half-annoyance, perhaps also, a touch of curious anticipation, but the words were unmistakable. Sometimes he tossed his head, smiling with a touch of indulgence, as if he was chiding a wayward, precocious child.
“Yes, what a pitiful death.”

- Aké by Wole Soyinka

I grew totally perplexed when people demanded that I should look like myself.

- Walter Benjamin; qtd in Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada by Smaro Kamboureli

… the peoples dragged into slavery, transportation, colonisation, migration, came predominantly from Africa – and when that supply ended, it was temporarily refreshed by indentured labour from the Asian subcontinent. (This neglected fact explains why, when you visit Guyana or Trinidad, you see, symbolically inscribed in the faces of their peoples, the paradoxical ‘truth’ of Christopher Columbus’s mistake: you can find ‘Asia’ by sailing west, if you know where to look!)

- Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed Padmini Mongia. London: Arnold, 1996. 110-121.

It’s a small place. There are four tables, with two rickety chairs each, set against the chipped and whitewashed walls. On the right wall, they’ve hung two blown-up newspaper articles featuring the place, one from The Star, another from Now. An off-white bust of Gandhi looks impassively past the enlarged headlines and inset quotations. There’s a telephone nailed to the left wall, its loosely coiled extension cord hanging flat against the greying plaster and underneath it, the cash register. They’ve set a tray out, holding a canister of water, another of coffee, and some mugs.

The phone rings. “Hello Gandhi,” says the owner. There’s almost comma in there somewhere in his greeting, but not quite.

We order our lunches and sit down. The food’s good, spicier than we expected. Surreptitiously, we dab at our noses with our napkins, feeling like failures for having not only taken but also warranted the advice of the white girl who, sniffing, had told us to be careful as she left.

“Next time,” says the owner, from behind the counter, amused, “order mild-to-medium. It’s too hot, huh. Even our chef is saying order mild.” The man in the kitchen waves at us; he looks vaguely Filipino, vaguely Spanish. “You’re finishing all my water,” he continues dryly. “Water’s expensive.”

I seize the opportunity, have in fact been waiting for this moment. “Thanni expensive ah?”
He nods. “Thanni expensive.”
I wait.
And then he looks at me again. “… Thanni expensive?”
I grin, satisfied.

The man wheeling in crates stops to join us. “How did you know we spoke tamil?”
“I heard you.”

One of them is from Tamil Nadu, the other from Jaffna. Since I can’t just be from the island, I am from the city I was born in and the towns my parents called home.
“Pottuvil. Near Batticaloa – and Gaul.” I have a sudden memory of the bridge to Gaul, the jeep, the sand dunes, the paddy fields.

We talk about the trouble. “The trouble,” which is the standard euphemism for the war. Other translations from the thamizh word include suffering and distress.

When I get home that night, my father is at the computer. I stand in the doorway, watching him. It’s a tamil website, advertisements all over the page and it hasn’t finished loading. My father is peering at the screen, one hand enveloping the mouse. There are two computers in the living room, but my father’s sitting at the monitor we’ve had for a decade now. The one behind him, surrounded by the paraphernalia of my brother’s sketches and notes, looms anorexic thin and cool, and I can’t understand why my father is sitting at the old one. That seems an important point to resolve, why my father chose this computer, with its painfully bad colour controls, over the one we’d bought last week.

“There was a bombing,” I say, leaning against the doorframe. “In Colombo. Forty people died.”

He nods. It’s the kind of website I avoid, with flashing headlines and animated images. “There’ll have a lot now these days. Today was the independence day. They always do things around this time.”

It feels, momentarily, like an important point to resolve.
But I can think of several reasons my father chose this computer over that.

What I can’t reconcile is the fact of my father’s reading thamizh websites with the silence of this conversation. The door is still open behind me, I still have my jacket on and my bag weighs heavy on my shoulder. In my father’s room, beside his bed is a stack of thamizh newspapers and magazines, bought at grocery stores where my father buys wadas in brown paper bags. A few of them are in English, printed in Sri Lanka and always a few days out of date. I’ll occasionally skim through those papers, trying to piece together a politics and a present history that escapes me. I cannot reconcile those inky sheets of newsprint, the fact of them sitting beside the phone in my parents’ bedroom, with the casualness with which my father agrees with me.