Book Review: Sam’s Story by Elmo Jayawardene

(First published in The New Indian Express, 02 August 2009.)

Sam is poor, Sinhalese, and a servant in the Master’s River House. His only best friend is the owners’ dog Brutus. Sam is someone who can never figure out what a problem is, someone who doesn’t know why people cry. He has never learnt anything, not even how to write his name. He is a village idiot who doesn’t know what breasts are, but then, surprisingly, he knows about the Tamil militants.

Employing the first person narrative throughout the text, Sam’s Story succeeds in its attempt to imitate the raw, sparse prose style of Hemingway — the stark simplicity blends with the irreverence and dumbness of the protagonist, and the sudden shifts of action make for an aesthetic reading experience. But the story-telling embeds a clear-cut political agenda and is nowhere as remarkable as the superficially successful prose-style.

Sam’s Story, first published in 2001, painstakingly avoids even a single oblique reference to Tamil suffering on the island. Perhaps, it is left for us to infer that just as the stupid Sam is incapable of looking at reality, even to the minimum extent of noticing that Tamils are being discriminated against, people too refuse to accept that linguistic and racial chauvinism have wrought a climate of hatred on the island.

Most of the novel is a successful study in hate: the narrator prefixes everything about the Tamil language, people or culture with the word “stupid” and goes little beyond depicting Tamil people as those “who threw bombs and killed our soldiers and tried to divide our country”.

After more than 100 pages of a monotonous rant, we are privy to the picture on the other side, of how the Sri Lankan military is also a convoluted place to be. Perhaps, this is one way of striking a balance and attempting neutrality, although the damage is already done; no amount of salvaging can help the text.

The depiction of the brutalities of army life begin when Sam talks of his brother Jaya who’s killed-in-action, and his brother Madiya who deserts the armed forces. From this point forward, the book changes vastly in tone and treatment. Madiya, in his brief stopover at his home (after his desertion, and before going into hiding) explains the poverty draft and the meaninglessness of the war.

Against this backdrop, Jayawardene explores how poor people, bereft of all opportunities, send their children to war; and how they make do without food and medicine whereas a rich man’s dog gets immediate access to the best doctors and a stream of visitors inquiring about its health. He writes of this divided world where the political ‘punishment’ for a Sinhalase man campaigning for the Other Party involves being transferred to teach at a faraway Tamil school.

Sam’s lives his life in a climate of mutual hatred, and he instinctively distrusts the Tamil servants at River House. While Sam tolerates the housekeeper Janet, he resents the cook Leandro, who, with his talk of Eelam, divides the world into easy binaries — the people who are willing to kill (The Army) and the people who were willing to die (The Tigers).

Sam’s suspicion of Tamils extends to everybody: he thinks Velu, a servant in a nearby bungalow is a spy; and he doesn’t appreciate that Master’s son has found himself a Tamil girlfriend. The fatal climax, replete with a truck-bomb driving into a national bank, throws them all apart, and widens the rift to such an extent that any coming together seems fraught with impossibility.

Books and Blogging: My Side of the Story

This presentation was made at the Panel Discussion on The Digital Public Sphere: Books in the Age of New Media, Oct. 15, 2009, Iowa City Public Library as part of the 2009 Obermann Humanities Symposium PLATFORMS FOR PUBLIC SCHOLARS. Professor Teresa Mangum at the Department of English, University of Iowa invited me to this, and I had the privilege of discussing with important literary personalities. Translated into direct non-roundabout speech, it means that I was overwhelmed, and scared, and frightfully unsure of what I was going to say. There was essayist Scott McLemee, and the International Writing Program’s Director Chris Miller as the other speakers. And then, Joseph Parsons, Acquisitions Editor of the UI Press was the moderator.

Scott McLemee made points about the emergence of the public sphere in the context of the digital discussions–I have a whole page of notes, but nervous to type it out for fearing of going wrong with the transcriptions. I have never scribbled so furiously since I heard my Chemistry teacher at school go about the structure of Benzene. Heavy, but wonderfully well-articulated academic discussion. Chris Miller was much more down-to-earth, speaking from experience and personal history, and you will certainly know how much I love that. He spoke about reviewing books for Public Radio International’s The World program. Some bits of that talk (called Talk is Cheap) were truly hilarious.

Here’s my stuff:

I review one or two books every fortnight for The New Indian Express. And since I have just finished my doctoral thesis, I can safely say that I read about twenty books a month, if only for research purposes. I faithfully post all these reviews on my blog, leaving the door open for discussion. Readers tell me they have gotten lazy since they go around selecting books with the kind of reviews I write. Some urge me to be more spiteful, more vicious and develop an acidic style of attack. Many of the readers stray into my blog looking for a review of some book, then they chance upon my poetry, and taken an interest in my writing and activism. I love all of this. Teresa, in an email, asked me if blogging about books led to relationships with authors? I love that prospect too, but right now, they are all just friends. Facebook friends, to be precise. Let’s leave it at that. Translating got me into enough entanglements, so you see, I am playing it safe this time around.

Why did I get to blogging in the first place? I started blogging in 2002—when it was really not such a craze—I called my web-log Impudence, and it was typically at Blogspot, and I pulled it down two years later when I lost my anonymity and was stalked. That is another story for another day.

But, the democracy to speak up and speak out ensured that I was back to blogging again. Big media houses which own the major publications rarely give opportunity to Dalit (ex-untouchable) writers, and there’s an absence of Dalit/anti-caste writers who write in English. The elitist writers want to write the feel-good stuff, India Shining myths, and that’s the work that gets into print. So, I wanted to tap the power and enormous outreach of the internet: how anyone can write and be read/heard in the virtual space. I was not writing because anyone was commissioning me, I didn’t have to follow other people’s diktats, I could speak my mind. Google and tagging ensure that I can get heard without having my own column in any newspaper. Sometimes its helped me bring some happenings to light—such as the recent inside story of Dalit students being beaten up at a law university in Chennai (the mainstream media merely reported it as a “clash” at first) and so on. Blogging on feminist issues, with a caste perspective, was also something that I set out to do, because feminism in India forgets that caste exists at all, and that women at the bottom of the caste hierarchy do suffer more. Blogging about literature and books ensured that I got a larger audience–and consequently I got into the print media in a big way. Now, I review books for a major national newspaper. And, on an average day, my blog gets anywhere between 250-300 hits, which I guess is pretty modest for someone at the start of her writing career.

Since the cost of establishing alternative media in India is extremely high, activist groups have taken to the Internet in a big way. There is a hunger to use the potential of this media, and human rights defenders are doing it the right way. The campaign to free Binayak Sen; the exposes on state terrorism, fake encounters and police atrocities; the virulent speed in which fact-finding reports can be circulated; the ease with which the LGBT community in India came together and organized their shows of strength in every major city—these have all been possible because of the digital sphere and the space for social networking, discussion and dissemination that it allows.

For a few years, I was collaborating with Tamilnet.com, the only independent website that reported from the Vanni, the battle-zone, Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged territory. The news-site is banned in Sri Lanka, but proxies provide people a way out to retrieve some of the real information. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils across the world access that website on a daily basis. Just one single website in English, along with a couple of others in Tamil, had the power to destroy and dispel one of the worst disinformation campaigns ever undertaken by a state. Not just that, it binds them together as a community. Even if the absolutely paralyzed and impotent international community did nothing to stop the genocide of fifty thousand Tamils in the course of a few months earlier this year,  they at least acknowledged and addressed the fact that innocent civilians were being slain as part of a ruthless cleansing campaign. Were it not for the advent of online publishing, I doubt if the truth would have ever been told.

This sort of publishing on the internet has its payoffs too. I think E-books actually ease the cruel war against terror. A Catholic priest in Colombo told me stories of how Sinhalese soldiers doing a routine check on the local seminary in March this year checked for guns stashed inside hardback, hand-bound Bibles. If that Holy Book were just an unread PDF file, whatever threat could it pose? For the sake of argument, had Satanic Verses been released merely in its zipped version, whoever would have read it through? And what would the zealots have burned on the streets when they sought a ban? And what would I have religiously lugged around with me, as a hefty style statement, in order to impress a certain older man?

A book is no longer a material thing that you can use to flaunt your knowledge. It has outgrown its handiness as a pillow or a paperweight. Forget the dilemma of choosing the right shade of burgundy that would work well with lipstick-kissing your collection of poetry! Books, in their 21st century digital avatar cannot even be autographed. They have lost their fresh scent, their serrated edges. The loss of personality has ensured that books are no longer independent entities. It is time for them to collectively call upon a shrink. Or they can fall back upon their cosmic power, their new-found God-like ability to exist without any beginning or end. Reading one book is no longer just reading that book. Something in it prods one to look up for more, to chance upon tens and hundreds of other books. Every book entices you into its exclusive lair. But walking away has never been easier. Information is now served in its sexiest scrambled form, and extracting just a little something from that whole system is quick, but also cumbersome. And I somehow believe that the way a book is read presently is certainly going to radically affect the way in which books are written. Google-addicted audiences demand and deserve nothing less, I guess.

Yesterday, I met a young man as fierce and weird as me. I met him online of course, on Facebook, and by the time it was our fifth conversation there was talk of snipers. And he recalled sniper alley in Sarajevo, asked me if I had read Kurt Schork’s famous and heart-wrenching dispatch, spoke of correspondents being killed while reporting from conflict zones, selected Dan Eldon’s story in Somalia as the most tragic of that lot, condemned the necessity to make a biopic on him. And then we both laughed at the fact that the said biopic was going to star Daniel Radcliffe. Until the Harry Potter reference, I had to simultaneously google in order to keep up with this charming, but overloaded guy. But believe me, I managed to come out pretty unscathed, with no ruin to my reputation as someone well-read. Even of course, if the reading did take place way past the eleventh hour. Had the said conversation been taking in a coffee shop, or at the college library, I can imagine how wide-eyed and tongue-tied I would have been.  Thank god for the internet, for its explosion of knowledge, its enormous ease of access.

Would this presentation ever have been possible without the web? Where else in the world can ideas be bounced around with wild abandon, where else would people have the opportunity to offload all their knowledge on another hapless soul whose only sin was to have a green button indicating availability to chat. And above all, where else could anybody get away with preparing a whole essay and never having referred to a single book to do so? In which other world, would an author shamelessly admit to this?

(I thank all my friends who helped me shaped this presentation. I owe special thanks to Ravi Shanker, my friend-in-need whom I never stop bothering; his inputs were most valuable).

~~~~ End of article~~~~

The happiest part of the night was the $100 voucher to buy books at Prairie Lights. Thank you Teresa.

And the saddest part, was an American man, almost in his sixties, walking up to me and asking, “They got your leader, didn’t they?” and I would have cried then and there, had he not said (seeing my reaction perhaps), “But it was great. For 25 years nearly, he put up a pretty fight.” I am so shaken as I write this, but I think that’s all that matters. That one fights. For rights. For as long as it is possible.

I review one or two books every fortnight for The New Indian Express. And since I have just finished my doctoral thesis, I can safely say that I read about twenty books a month, if only for research purposes. I faithfully post all these reviews on my blog, leaving the door open for discussion. Readers tell me they have gotten lazy since they go around selecting books with the kind of reviews I write. Some urge me to be more spiteful, more vicious and develop an acidic style of attack. Many of the readers stray into my blog looking for a review of some book, then they chance upon my poetry, and taken an interest in my writing and activism. I love all of this. Teresa, in an email, asked me if blogging about books led to relationships with authors? I love that prospect too, but right now, they are all just friends. Facebook friends, to be precise. Let’s leave it at that. Translating got me into enough entanglements, so you see, I am playing it safe this time around.

Why did I get to blogging in the first place? I started blogging in 2002—when it was really not such a craze—I called my web-log Impudence, and it was typically at Blogspot, and I pulled it down two years later when I lost my anonymity and was stalked. That is another story for another day.

But, the democracy to speak up and speak out ensured that I was back to blogging again. Big media houses which own the major publications rarely give opportunity to Dalit (ex-untouchable) writers, and there’s an absence of Dalit/anti-caste writers who write in English. The elitist writers want to write the feel-good stuff, India Shining myths, and that’s the work that gets into print. So, I wanted to tap the power and enormous outreach of the internet: how anyone can write and be read/heard in the virtual space. I was not writing because anyone was commissioning me, I didn’t have to follow other people’s diktats, I could speak my mind. Google and tagging ensure that I can get heard without having my own column in any newspaper. Sometimes its helped me bring some happenings to light—such as the recent inside story of Dalit students being beaten up at a law university in Chennai (the mainstream media merely reported it as a “clash” at first) and so on.

Blogging on feminist issues, with a caste perspective, was also something that I set out to do, because feminism in India forgets that caste exists at all, and that women at the bottom of the caste hierarchy do suffer more. Blogging about literature and books ensured that I got a larger audience–and consequently I got into the print media in a big way. Now, I review books for a major national newspaper. And, on an average day, my blog gets anywhere between 250-300 hits, which I guess is pretty modest for someone at the start of her writing career.

Since the cost of establishing alternative media in India is extremely high, activist groups have taken to the Internet in a big way. There is a hunger to use the potential of this media, and human rights defenders are doing it the right way. The campaign to free Binayak Sen; the exposes on state terrorism, fake encounters and police atrocities; the virulent speed in which fact-finding reports can be circulated; the ease with which the LGBT community in India came together and organized their shows of strength in every major city—these have all been possible because of the digital sphere and the space for social networking that it allows.

For a few years, I was collaborating with Tamilnet.com, the only independent website that reported from the Vanni, the battle-zone, Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged territory. The news-site is banned in Sri Lanka, but proxies provide people a way out to retrieve some of the real information. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils across the world access that website on a daily basis. Just one single website in English, along with a couple of others in Tamil, had the power to destroy and dispel one of the worst disinformation campaigns ever undertaken by a state. Not just that, it binds them together as a community. Even if the absolutely paralyzed and impotent international community did nothing to stop the genocide of fifty thousand Tamils in the course of a few months earlier this year,  they at least acknowledged and addressed the fact that innocent civilians were being slain as part of a ruthless cleansing campaign. Were it not for the advent of online publishing, I doubt if the truth would have ever been told.

This sort of publishing on the internet has its payoffs too. I think E-books actually ease the cruel war against terror. A Catholic priest in Colombo told me stories of how Sinhalese soldiers doing a routine check on the local seminary in March this year checked for guns stashed inside hardback, hand-bound Bibles. If that Holy Book were just an unread PDF file, whatever threat could it pose? For the sake of argument, had Satanic Verses been released merely in its zipped version, whoever would have read it through? And what would the zealots have burned on the streets when they sought a ban? And what would I have religiously lugged around with me, as a hefty style statement, in order to impress a certain older man?

A book is no longer a material thing that you can use to flaunt your knowledge. It has outgrown its handiness as a pillow or a paperweight. Forget the dilemma of choosing the right shade of burgundy that would work well with lipstick-kissing your collection of poetry! Books, in their 21st century digital avatar cannot even be autographed. They have lost their fresh scent, their serrated edges. The loss of personality has ensured that books are no longer independent entities. It is time for them to collectively call upon a shrink.

Or they can fall back upon their cosmic power, their new-found God-like ability to exist without any beginning or end. Reading one book is no longer just reading that book. Something in it prods one to look up for more, to chance upon tens and hundreds of other books. Every book entices you into its exclusive lair. But walking away has never been easier. Information is now served in its sexiest scrambled form, and extracting just a little something from that whole system is quick, but also cumbersome. And I somehow believe that the way a book is read presently is certainly going to radically affect the way in which books are written. Google-addicted audiences demand and deserve nothing less, I guess.

Yesterday, I met a young man as fierce and weird as me. I met him online of course, on Facebook, and by the time it was our fifth conversation there was talk of snipers. And he recalled sniper alley in Sarajevo, asked me if I had read Kurt Schork’s famous and heart-wrenching dispatch, spoke of correspondents being killed while reporting from conflict zones, selected Dan Eldon’s story in Somalia as the most tragic of that lot, condemned the necessity to make a biopic on him. And then we both laughed at the fact that the said biopic was going to star Daniel Radcliffe. Until the Harry Potter reference, I had to simultaneously google in order to keep up with this charming, but overloaded guy. But believe me, I managed to come out pretty unscathed, with no ruin to my reputation as someone well-read. Even of course, if the reading did take place way past the eleventh hour. Had the said conversation been taking in a coffee shop, or at the college library, I can imagine how wide-eyed and tongue-tied I would have been.  Thank god for the internet, for its explosion of knowledge, its enormous ease of access.

Would this presentation ever have been possible without the web? Where else in the world can ideas be bounced around with wild abandon, where else would people have the opportunity to offload all their knowledge on another hapless soul whose only sin was to have a green button indicating availability to chat. And above all, where else could anybody get away with preparing a whole essay and never having referred to a single book to do so? In which other world, would an author shamelessly admit to this?

(I thank all my friends who helped me shaped this presentation. I owe special thanks to Ravi Shankeran, my friend-in-need whom I never stop bothering; his inputs were most valuable).

Two links: an interview and an essay

Back from SFO, but I am not going to write anything here..  If I verbalize things too soon, I just guess it could end up being superficial… So, will instead just share two links (one is an interview, the other is a panel paper I read in Iowa)..

• This interview (by Dr.Ujjwal Jana appeared in Post-colonial Text. Feels like an impossible dream come true.. it’s a very, very prestigious place to be in.. and even more, this is my best (and most extensive) interview to date in which I address a lot of issues which are really, really important to me.. Pls. chk it out here.

• And this is the panel paper that I read at the Iowa City Public library. It’s called the woman with too many names… and deals with the many ways in which I relate to my name..  Haven’t done any personal writing in a long, long, long while…

More later… I am much more active on FB, so if you are curious, you know where to look.

• http://iwp.uiowa.edu/news/event-docs/2009/KANDASAMY_Meena_ICPL_name.pdf

Rough-cut schedule

This monday I got back from a helluva weekend at Pittsburgh (I was in about six events crammed into two and a half days) and I kept eating as if I was eating for a whole family. Like once every two hours. Here, in Iowa City, I starve most of the time. But compared to my Indian standards, I am doing great where the consumption of food is concerned. I guess seeing all the gleefully chubby Americans has done wonders to my body image. More on that bit later…

So what I did at Pittsburgh? Since I am not yet into a serious diary writing this blog should bear the brunt of my sudden confessional mode/mood. I read at Seton Hill on Thursday night (and on opening football night, we still managed to have a sizable audience), then on Friday afternoon I read to a very receptive, interactive, appreciative audience at the Duquesne university, and we rehearsed for the City of Asylum Jazz Poetry Concert with these big-names that made me faint at first. Imagine Geri Allen, Oliver Lake, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cryille…  And there were big-name poets too: Khet Mar (Burma), Irakli Kakabadze (Georgian, very, very charming), Sohail Najm and Milos Djurjdjevic (Iran and Croatia and from the IWP, Iowa).. And then the concert happened, and although I was in such great company, I did manage to make a name for myself… Look for my space under the stars in this article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette..

This was the poem that I read, and it is not about the Tamils, but about the fate of inter-caste lovers who are sometimes done to death.. The other was a love poem by Pakistani filmmaker Azeem Sajjad–and I read in both in Urdu (which is so musical) and in English.

What else? I was also part of a panel discussion on censorship and media freedom and I spoke about it in the context of women poets, as well as the trouble Tamil/ pro-Tamil journalists have been facing in Sri Lanka. That’s enough for now, will keep you posted when the interview is officially published.

Today, I finished writing a panel paper on naming–doing a personal take on my own names. Will post that online too, once I finish reading it tomorrow. Why did I ever start this post? Well, friends in the US (never knew so many guys from here knew me) have been asking me to join them for a cup of coffee. If only I could do that and more. But this excitement can be contained if I will reveal a rough version of my schedule and let’s see how it goes. If I am in your place and you are free and I am free, I am all yours. Really.

Here are the out of city things:

29 September to 3 October: San Francisco
5 November to 7 November: Chicago
11 November to 12 November: Washington D.C
13 November to 17 November: New York City

I am also thinking of making it to Michigan/ Colombia, so once again drop me a line, or wait for updates here.  More later. And if you know me, and I haven’t written to you in a long, long while, don’t get mad at me. It is really not personal, and just that I am as inefficient as ever in managing my time especially when it comes to email, orkut and FB.

If you ever find me

saying the Pledge of Allegiance some day, you can be sure that it is because of the libraries here (at least the University of Iowa’s Main Library).  I am allowed to check out 500 books. At once.

Can it get any better? At all? God, I so love this place, this arrangement.

Apologies, and Updates

I know, I know, I haven’t come this side in two months nearly….
And far worse, as if hiding away from the blog was not enough, I have not even replied many of your email messages properly.. I am trying hard to get through the email… so bear with me… If all goes well, all unreplied mails for the last month will get replied by tomorrow… So, what’s happening to me? Nothing that anyone will believe, but then, where women are concerned, the unexpected always happens (it’s wilde, not me, fyi)..

• my Ph.D. is 90% done.. what’s not yet done is the final draft and the submission… It took a long time writing it, and now it is around 70000 words, and it is lovelier than I imagined..I fell ill in the middle of it (who wouldn’t if they spent all their nights writing the thesis, and all the days going to the university and handling a day job as well)… so.. why did I not push myself and submit the thesis?  I am not around at the University, and I don’t want to be worrying about it when I am there… When I get back, I officially get it bound and signed and submit it..
• I am right now part of the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program.. Which means for the next three months, I will be a writer-in-residence at the University..  It is beyond my wildest dreams, so I am just thankful and happy this happened. I am reading at Pittsburgh, Iowa, Chicago, New York, Washington D.C. and couple of other cities as well, and all those details will be uploaded on this blog shortly. I came here on August 29th, and I am just settling in. Then again, there’s so much to write about since this is the first time I am alone, and on m own, but then that’s all for another day. Right now, I just want to concentrate on my work. Which is pretty difficult because the thesis still haunts me. I hope the hangover goes away fast. I am reading this Sunday, 4p.m. at the Prairie Lights Bookstore, and guess, after one reading, I might miraculously become more confident that I can write when I am here… More on all this later…
• What am I doing when I am here? When I am not giving readings and participating in panels that is? I am working on my novel, and my second collection of poetry, and wallowing in individuality.

Review of V.V.Ganeshananthan’s LOVE MARRIAGE

(Exclusive to my blog, this hasn’t been published elsewhere)

DANCING ON LAND-MINES

Love Marriage
By V.V.Ganeshananthan
Publisher: Phoenix
Price: Rs 350
Pages: 310

Set in a land where death is alive and has renewed lifetimes, Love Marriage, is a work of fiction that deals with the ethnic strife in Sri Lanka. By tackling the complex issues of violence, politics and identity in the war-ravaged island, Love Marriage, with its deceptive title, joins the prestigious league of Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens (Shyam Selvadurai), Anil’s Ghost (Michael Ondaatje), and Bodies in Motion (Mary Anne Mohanraj).

Using several dozen short chapters to embody the scattered narratives, the author succeeds in creating a split-screen effect through which we watch the protagonist Yalini caught in the crossfire between tradition and modernity. Born to Jaffna Tamil immigrants in the US, she enters the world during the gruesome 1983 Black July riots. As the state-sponsored Sinhalese mobs massacre lakhs of Tamils in the Sri Lankan capital, the separatist, secessionist movement in the island embarks on a path of no-return. After locating Yalini’s birth in such troubled times, V.V.Ganeshananthan traces the Tamil struggle through her story, and the stories of her Sri Lankan ancestors.

Interwoven into this saga, are the many marriages that make up their family tree, and the many single women who never attain the privilege of entering into such arrangements of convenience: the burnt and disfigured grand-aunt Thevayani, the jilted Mayuri, and the schizophrenic Uma. Faced with such a plethora of possibilities, Yalini strives hard to figure out what could work for her. The source of these stories/ scandals is her mother’s brother, Uncle Kumaran, a terminally-ill Tamil Tiger smuggled into Toronto for treatment. The genesis and the growth of Eelam liberation struggle are recorded through his credible/ incredible confessions that traverse continents. One can see through the gossamer veils of fiction that LTTE Chief Pirabakaran is depicted in this novel as Nadarajan and the London-based rebels’ ideologue Anton Balasingam has been conveniently transformed into Victor Rajadurai.

In order to keep the plot moving forward, Yalini makes futile attempts to stop Kumaran’s daughter Janani from marrying Suthan, a young man who works for the Tamil Tigers in Canada. Janani, however, believes that her marriage to Suthan is the only manner in which she can continue to contribute to the movement to which her parents dedicated themselves. The novel ends with Kumaran’s funeral and Janani’s marriage.

This novel’s Tamilness is its strength, but the novelist goes overboard with her enthusiasm and provides ethnic-lit description of culture and (marriage/death) ceremonies making us wonder where the author ends and the anthropologist takes over. This weakness gives rise to the digressions on Proper and Improper marriages, and the cataloging of the whole spectrum of marriages that lie between Arranged Marriage and Love Marriage. Why delve so deep into man-woman relationships that are relentlessly marriage-bound, in a novel that tries to capture the pain of exile and the importance of political engagement? Is the only connective thread, that both a love marriage and a liberation struggle emphasize the right to make choices, sufficient to hold it all together?

This fine first novel discusses an exhaustive array of cultural and political issues—even as the novelist chronicles the Tamil peoples’ suffering and struggle, she also puts forth a powerful indictment of genocidal state terrorism  (“a government that gets away with everything because it is a government”) through an evocative description of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library, and the discovery of the Chemmani mass graves.

Within the framework of fiction, V.V.Ganeshananthan documents every major massacre that took place in the island’s north. Diaspora memory, like its imagination, is burdened with responsibility. Here, despondency is self-destructive. Here, hope has to outweigh the 14.4 million kilograms of military grade explosives that have been air-dropped into the Tamil homeland. Here, dreams have to outlast death. Love Marriage gracefully captures this unique situation of the Tamil Diaspora whose last refuge lies in the land of recollection.

10 days later

I come here to just retain my sanity…

1. I submitted a 20-page synopsis of my Ph.D. thesis. After three drafts and plenty of torture. Finally. So the title and etc are decided… For now, all that I can safely say is that my thesis is on classroom dynamics and learner identity. More horror stories will follow. Trust me, and if you are the type who believes in either god, or the power of positive thinking, say a prayer for me. (I am planning to work on a “Memoirs of a Ph.D. student” once this is all done… It will be the finest piece of non-fiction from me, if only if I am alive long enough to write it).

2. A poem of mine (Seven Stages) is to appear in the Tasmanian indie magazine Famous Reporter, issue no.40, Dec 09. This is just the online version….

and

3. Watch this space for more details. After ages I might perhaps be getting the chance to make a public/literary appearance in Chennai this weekend, and will keep you posted abt the details. Things are pretty hazy right now.

Flowers of Violence: Review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Thing Around Your Neck

With her latest book The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, proves that she is much more powerful on the rigorous terrain of the short-story. Hailed by Chinua Achebe as a “writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers,” Adichie leaves an indelible mark through her first foray into short fiction. Seven of the dozen unlinked, stand-alone short stories in this collection are set in a turbulent Nigeria whose crime and corruption she describes with detachment.

Set in the University of Nigeria campus at Nsukka, “Cell One”, is a young girl’s tender retelling of the story of her handsome brother Nnamabia’s arrest and subsequent release. Without screaming for attention, it also offers an insight into college cult warfare, police excesses and custodial deaths. In “A Private Experience”, Chika, an Igbo Christian medical student is herded into safety by a poor Hauza Muslim woman even as a violent regional-religious riot is on. Three hours later, both these women — who discover friendship and faith — return to a city full of charred bodies and unsure of the fate of their loved ones.

The mindless violence that haunts Nigeria is a theme that Adichie often revisits. A young asylum seeker in “American Embassy” refuses to hawk the story of her son being shot dead by government agents in order to keep her dignity intact. The most engaging story in this collection, “Tomorrow is Too Far”, is set in the amoral world of children where sibling rivalry leads to the young Nonso’s death.

In “Ghosts”, the despondent survivors of the January 1970 war, torn

between alienation and allegiance, share their memories even as they carry with them the weight of what could have been: Biafra, the nascent nation that

no longer exists. This short-story preceded the publication of her celebrated novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which dealt with genocide and starvation in Biafra even as it explored how the Nigerian nation never allowed its peoples to break away but brutally forced them to stay together in submission.

Unlike the ideological rigidity that characterises states, Adichie portrays the family as a fluctuating unit that is free to fracture. Certain shared facets of her stories don’t evade notice — for instance, all (but one) of the protagonists are young Nigerian women. And, all the men, invariably, inexcusably, cheat. Therefore, when some of the stories delve into the multiple crises of married life in an alien land, there is nothing intriguing or puzzling about what the men will do. Women, on the other hand, hold the answers. They take the decisions that really count.

“Imitation” is the story of a middle-aged Nigerian wife who finds her voice when she has lost her space. When Nkem discovers that her husband has installed his young mistress at their Lagos home, she decides to leave the comfort of America in order to secure her marriage. Nkem’s rage, though legitimate, is more a reaction that springs from her own experience as mistress to married men than from harbouring tragic illusions.

“The Arrangers of Marriage” echoes Indian Diaspora writing as it brings out the series of shams that constitute any arranged marriage. Here, Adichie makes inroads in understanding an immigrant’s efforts to merge with the mainstream at the cost of his identity: Ofodile Emeka Udenna names himself Dave Bell, conveniently opts for a visa marriage with an American, and orders his African wife to forget Igbo language and food.

Adichie probes into same-sex love in two stories, “The Shivering” and “On Monday of Last Week”; but the doomed endings are disappointing, and sound almost as if the protagonists were punished for daring to love differently.

By dwelling on lesbian desire and the female body, “On Monday of Last Week” stands a great chance to be a influential story, but our hopes are dashed when we learn that artist Tracy was merely ‘flirting’ when she kept asking Kamara to pose in the nude. “The Shivering”, a story set in the Princeton University, follows the lives of Chinedu and Ukamaka who miss the obvious future by carrying the burden of past loves.

Once out of Nigeria, and in America, people enter into relationships that would never have been possible back home: an upper middle-class girl befriends an impoverished gay driver, a domestic help turns into a rich wife’s confidant and best friend, a waitress finds a college-going boyfriend, and a university-educated woman becomes a babysitter. The Thing Around Your Neck experiments with the second-person narrative to depict how the American dream is rendered meaningless for Anukka when she realises that most of the population in USA adopts either a curious, or a condescending attitude towards her.

Switching between dualities with ease, Adichie repeatedly returns to her preoccupation with cultural encounters. The mischievous and tightly-crafted “Jumping Monkey Hill” explores prejudices, subtle racism and attempts to define the Other that occur over a two-week long writing workshop. A British Africanist has the self-righteous superiority to tell a group of young African writers what constitutes “an African story.” Significantly, this story-within-a-story mentions no workshop participant by name, preferring to refer to them by their nationalities such as Ugandan, Kenyan, Tanzanian and Senegalese and so on.

She takes off from where she left in her debut novel Purple Hibiscus by using these short stories to explore how Christianity and colonisation succeed in demonising native traditions. In “The Headstrong Historian”, we come across Nigerians who have been conditioned by Christian education to disregard their own culture. Nwamgba’s soul is crushed when her son becomes a priest and treats her contemptuously as a pagan, but she is avenged when her grand-daughter Grace renames herself with Afamefuna (“My Name Will Not Be Lost”) and writes about the lost and undocumented history of the African peoples.

It is evident that Adichie subscribes to the show-don’t-tell school of story-telling, but sometimes she goes a little overboard with the symbolism. But for this slightly irritating flaw, there is no fantastic chutneyfication of language, no bombastic driving-the-reader-to-a-dictionary. Armed with broad strokes and a straightforward style, Adichie subverts on other levels.

Her critique spans continents, her stories flit across timeframes but throughout the book, she maintains the restraint of an oracle, never wasting a single word, never sitting in judgment.

It’s turned out to be something of an Adichie festival because the publisher has taken advantage of the opportunity to make available reprints of two earlier works, Purple Hibiscus and the award-winning  Half of a Yellow Sun. Both are ideal candidates for re-reading and enjoying again the world that she has created with her carefully crafted words.

(Published in the New Sunday Express, i.witness, 12 July 2009)

I have aged 10 years in two weeks and

I wish this kind of slow horror stops. My sister tells me part of the reason for things spiralling out of control on the personal and domestic front (I hope I sound as vague as any astrologer) is that I am no longer normal. In her words, “Akka, because of this PhD tension, and the workplace tension you are not yourself. So you better stop thinking about other things okay.” Sane, dangerously sane words.

Either, sitting with research books and papers all day long gives me a kind of scary clarity (and I see things in a different light) , or, I am venting out the pressures of this work on innocent people. Trust, right now, is the most difficult emotion that I will be able to come up with.

I just keep praying that all this confusion, bitterness and pain goes away. A few years down the lane, I think none of this should matter. May be it’s just plain wishful thinking.

And I also realized, part of the reason why a PhD has to be such an “unforgettable” (in every negative sense of the word) experience has to do with the fact that it is less of writing and research, than it is of people-pleasing. From simply filling in forms, to keeping clerks in good humour, to searching for all those photocopies of fee receipts (I have paid the university more than half-a-lakh in fees), I feel so defeated. It is not a process that will ever encourage creativity. Or ideas. Or even outspokenness. Well, well, I will get back to work (not writing, but some or other clerical crap).

Markers of Marriage (Cross-posted from Ultra Violet)

This is what happens when you are stuck with thesis-writing!
Articles that have been pending for ages write themselves..

RECENTLY, I PARTICIPATED in the launch function of a documentary film Pottu about the hardships and social humiliation faced by widows and deserted women in Tamil Nadu. Produced by the Kalangarai Trust which works among the widows in the southern district of Nagappattinam (particularly in Vedaranyam, Sirkaali and Poompuhaar), the 50-minute documentary attempts to describe the torture that widows are forced to undergo in the name of tradition. The documentary started off with a young girl’s story: the gaudy ceremony surrounding puberty, her early marriage (to prevent the chance of the family name getting “spoiled” if she were to be left “free”), the dowry that her parents are forced to pay, the hard work that she is forced to do in her husband’s home, his alcoholism and domestic violence, his death and finally, her enforced widowhood. Although Pottu seemed to make of every cinematic cliché, some issues highlighted by the documentary deserve to be taken up for debate.

Bangle-breaking ceremonies (where all the symbols of marriage: the red kumkum mark (pottu), the thaali (mangalsutra) are removed) are notoriously common in Tamil Nadu’s southern villages. In fact, these ceremonies are conducted before dawn, when even the gods are supposedly sleeping, because such a merciless sight is capable of disturbing even them.

Not only is a woman forced to undergo emotional agony because of her husband’s absence, but she is also forced to face social humiliation. The things that society puts forward as symbols of femininity and desirability are snatched away overnight. Widows are systematically kept out of social functions (celebration of menarche or marriage), they are stigmatized and heaped with abuse and they are denied all decision making at the family level. They are also denied civil rights–commonly-held beliefs discriminate widows by virtue of their being considered “inauspicious”. Tamil proverbs say that to see a widow early in the morning effectively ruins a day, and so on.

Yesterday, the women who were the driving force behind the documentary Pottu, got together and announced that soon they would be hosting the first international conference of widows, destitute and deserted women. They have two demands: laws to prosecute people who abuse widows in degrading terms and social, economic, legal rehabilitation for the widows.

There are several reasons why such a project has emerged from Tamil Nadu. According to a statistics by the Kalangarai Trust approximately 10% of the households in the state are headed by widows, and that 24% of the widows live alone. Majority of the widows are mothers of the head of the household. Their study also shows that the highest concentration of widows (8.06% of the general population) in Tamil Nadu arises from two categories of widows particular to the southern-coastal districts of the state: Tsunami widows and widows of men who have succumbed to HIV/AIDS. A large number of them work as daily wage labourers.

Tamil widows face a particular problem because of the manner in which their language subjugates them. The English word widow has an equivalent masculine form widower (which might carry fewer negative connotations may be, but at least a word exists). There’s no equivalent masculine form for the word vidhavai (widow) in Tamil. On the other hand, in popular practice, a just-widowed man is humorously referred to as the pudhu maapillai (new bridegroom)–perhaps enshrining the fact that he would soon be married to someone.

Widowhood is also becoming a problem that cuts across cultures. No longer are Hindu widows alone subjected to such torment. Even a religion like Islam, where there’s no bar on widow remarriage, is being influenced by local practices. At the documentary release function, a Muslim woman lamented how her own community was now following these meaningless practices which has historically plagued the Hindu religion.

The efforts of William Benetick and Raja Rammohun Roy put an end to the Sati system in 1829. The Widow Remarriage Act was passed in 1856. Another hundred years later, the Child Marriage Restraint Act came into place. Every reformer and every revolutionary on the Indian soil has voiced about the condition of widows: Phule opened a home for widows and abandoned children, Dr. Ambedkar traced the roots of the sati system in the necessity to maintain/preserve the endogamous caste structure, Periyar argued for widow remarriage. Even a middle-of-the-road traditionalist reformer like Gandhi condemned the practice of widowhood in no uncertain terms. Pandita Ramabai became an icon by speaking out against the heinous nature of imposed widowhood.

Today, as women fight against gender injustice and social indignity, they are forced to confront several challenges: how to oppose cultural facets that alienate widows, how to create alternative cultural symbols that don’t differentiate between women, how to develop a policy framework not only for widows but also for single women in India and especially how to fight against a hypocritical system where the oppressor is not someone from the outside, but one’s own blood, one’s own family? Perhaps this is one area where there is no dearth of Hindi/Tamil films that describe the plight, but there is a paucity of public debate and discussion.

(p.s.: Women members of this organization demanded (rightfully of course) that they should be allowed to wear bangles, wear flowers, and above all, wear the pottu. However, every ‘invited’ speaker pointed out that all women should unite to throw away the markers of marriage and/or femininity such as the bangles/flowers/pottu/thaali and so on? All of us might agree that these are decisions which women should take as individuals, and not just as a category, but then, what’s your take on this?)

Isaignani Ilayaraja

If I ever finish writing my Ph.d. thesis anytime soon, I think one of the foremost people who should take credit for it should be Maestro Ilayaraja… But for his soulful music and melodies, I wouldn’t even share a room with an ELT textbook!

Rajapaksa-inspires India?

Sorry for this late-night, incoherent post, I had to get it off my chest. Many of the mainstream media reports on Lalgarh (with pictures if you please) use the same terminology that Rajapakse used when he started his genocidal war on the Tamils (“flushing out the militants”, “clearing operation”, “liberated zones”, “deployments of companies” (not the ones that sell stuff, but the ones which send your souls to hell), “security forces-militants face off”, and those many requests by the Army to the people to refuse to be allowed to use as “human shields(!)”, the promise of minimum damage, the wiping-out, the calls to lay down arms, the setting up of base camps).. Either it is my memory at this late hour, or are they really mouthing Sri Lanka. Doesn’t all this sound like a rerecording of the Fonseka-Rajapaksa statements? I am scared for the adivasi people and their homelands.

To get a clearer picture/history of the problem, read this fact-finding report by JNU students. I really believe that this is a classic case of “Then they came for me”..

Only the future ought to tell us who will be spared and who will be silenced. But, right now, looking at what’s happening, it does not look as though even the silent ones will be spared.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Reproduced from Tehelka.com

MEENA KANDASWAMY has an electric effect on rooms when she reads her poetry. The erotic content quite apart, the juxtaposition of her highly femme persona and the tartness of her observations always charges the atmosphere.

The late Kamala Das wrote the foreword to Touch, the collection of poetry Kandaswamy published at age 23. ‘Love and its politics inform my poetry. Caste atrocities happen most frequently because of intercaste love affairs.” A happy denizen of the Internet, 25-year-old Kandaswamy’s first short story The Suicide’s Inbox was the perverse unfolding of a correspondence between two women.

The daughter of a Tamil professor and a Maths professor at IIT, Meena has been always aware that even PhDs are not invincible armour. She chose to pursue a degree privately. “I knew I would not rest quietly if I had to suffer the usual caste slurs in college. Such a waste of time.”

Kandaswamy pins her dalit identity on the act of rebelling against any kind of oppression. She describes what it is like to live in a state with powerful dalit movements going back to the legendary Nandanar, who died claiming his right to worship Shiva: “Discrimination is sophisticated. Once a day — I’m not exaggerating — once a day someone will ask me whether I am vegetarian to figure out whether I am Brahmin.”

She avidly follows the media’s handling of dalit public figures. ‘People say dalits smell but when dalits stand for elections people say that suchand- such dalit’s perfume was expensive.” She has funny stories about the liberals left as well. “People exoticise our ‘sexual freedom’ as if dalits live in a nudist colony. I once met the editor of a left-leaning national newspaper. He told someone to verify if I was a dalit since I spoke English well.”

Kandaswamy says she wrestles daily with the biases of language in her writing, her PhD thesis and her rapacious translation of Tamil literature. She teaches English in a college. She blogs about local politics but is writing a novel set far from Tamil Nadu. Is this the life she dreamt of? “I dream of too many lives,” she replies.

NISHA SUSAN

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 24, Dated Jun 20, 2009

Two poems, and one review

For once, I will let my words do the talking

• Two of my poems (Straight Talk and Mrs.Sunshine)
• A review of Touch by Professor Jaydeep Sarangi

have appeared in MASCARA LITERARY REVIEW that’s published from Australia and edited by Boey Kim Cheng, Michelle Cahill and Adam Aitken.

Please stop over and read the review by Prof.Sarangi. It’s really the way I would love my poetry to be approached.(I can go on and on and on about the stuff I like in there, but then, I am not in a mood for spoilers)

Apart from the happiness of such a beautiful, beautiful review, I am also moved by the company that I find myself in. I have studied Keki Daruwallah’s poetry and short-stories at school. God! He is the *canon*. I can still reel off lines from his story, Love across the Salt Desert. I can smell the rainstorm building in the last lines of that short-story. And now, my poems appear alongside his, and I don’t know what to make of it, how to react really. And Michelle told me that he liked the review. I nearly swooned.

Sukrita Paul Kumar is another writer I am in awe of. She works among the homeless, and writes about a host of social issues through poetry. I always admire that.

Or take Geoff Page for instance. Last year, in August he was in Chennai. At the University of Madras, and I translated ten of his poems into English. And this year, I find my name beside his, but in a wholly different context. I don’t know whom to thank for all this happening to me. But thank you to the whole universe in that case. Things can never get any lovelier. I return to poetry like the way in which people return to an old lover, seeking the shoulder to cry on. This time, the sobbing shoulder has given me reasons to smile.