What is freedom but an absence of bondage? Freedom is the ability to have a voice. Freedom is to say ‘No’ to segregation, to oppression, to abnegation. Most of all, freedom is to be visible. Freedom is to exist. From Rosa Park’s legendary ‘No’ to Barack Obama’s victorious ‘Yes We Can’: Black America has traveled from the ghettos of oblivion to the centre stage and the rightful place of equality. But this visible presence is the answer to the ages of absence and invisibility. Black is not the absence of white, Black is indeed beautiful. This colour blindness is the result of the innumerable years of non-existence.

Surrounded by a crowd of people, the Blacks were sold as slaves at the auction blocks. From the podium surrounded by a multitude of people, Martin Luther King Jr. people proclaimed: ‘I have a dream’. On 20^th January, 2009 Barack Obama proved ‘Yes We Can’ from this very symbolic position of the podium surrounded by the world.

But the visible site of power is not what defines the ‘soul’ of Black America, rather the absent voices do. It is the gaps in the history that heralded this change. It is the ‘No’s of the past that made this possible. The visibility might fade but the invisibility never does.

This paper intends to portray the importance of absence and ‘No’ in the Black American sensibility. For ages, Blacks were not seen as rightful citizens but rather as “trespassers of humanity”, as Toni Morrison notes in her novel “Beloved”. They were absent. They were invisible. Their language was seen as inferior. And their culture as no culture at all. ‘That invisibility to which I refer’, explains the anonymous narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, ‘occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I came in contact.’ Invisibility is the absence of a social identity whereby the Black is not ‘seen’ by others (even by those of his own race) because of the colour of the skin. So ‘black’ becomes a commodity to be bartered, traded and sold. Not only as physical objects but also as a symbol. Black exists as a symbol but still remains invisible as a being. The Black in Invisible Man thus becomes a Black American Everyman. This paper would try to point out the different zones of invisibility and absences and the importance of them in the Black American sensibility.

Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 and thereby declaring freedom for four million black slaves. On July 2, 1964 the Comprehensive Civil Rights Act was passed. During this 101 years one event altered American perception forever. This was the simple utterance of a “No” by Rosa Parks. She refused to follow the discriminatory practice of segregation on public transport. This simple act fueled the resistance movement further. The local chapter of the National association for the Advancement of Colored People organized a boycott of the city buses that lasted for more than a year. It ended with United States Supreme Court order that the segregation on the buses was unconstitutional.

Blacks were made aware of a white ‘civilization’ that was in stark difference with their own. The domination and subjugation was on both body and mind. The Black suffered jailing and also socio-economic imprisonment of life in ghettos. Black was portrayed as an absence of white. The absence of purity and goodness was equated with Black. Thus, the very skin colour became synonymous with evil. The colour in itself began to be portrayed as the absence of values and principles that the white held pious and moral. Stephen E. Henderson in his essay, “Survival Motion: A Study of the Black Writer and the Black revolution in America” argues that “Western religion, western iconography, western symbolism, all conspire to create black self-hatred, black self-denial, black slavery.” This systematic subjugation of the Black culture and abnegation of a Black history was countered not only with an attack at the concept of the superior white ‘civilization’ but more importantly by the search for a black identity. “Absence”, which was the very tool of subjugation was itself taken up to fight it. The idea was not to deny these absences but rather to overwhelmingly indulge in these. The values and principles which were seen as an antithesis of the white civilization and hence absent, were themselves used to portray a pan Black American identity.

Mercer Cook in the essay “African Voices of Protest” describes the impact of this search on the Black writer: “Taking the white man’s language, dislocating his syntax, recharging his words with new strength and sometimes with new meaning before hurling them back in his teeth, while upsetting his self-righteous complacency and clichés, our poets rehabilitate such terms as Africa and blackness, beauty and peace.” This was an affirmation of the negation. In Invisible Man, the ‘nameless’ hero confronts and accepts his blackness by eating a baked yam openly on the street. The hero exuberantly says: “I yam what I am”.

The Black rejected the White values, the rationalistic response to life. Feelings as the absence of rationalist thinking were held in high respect. The body became the unimportant aspect of the Black imagination. “Soul” was the “Black man’s thing”, as Henderson notes. Soul was the absence of any bondage. It was beyond the body and beyond the physical colour of the skin. Soul was truly the absence of any race. Soul was colour blind. Lerone Bennett describes the term as: “Soul is a metaphorical evocation… It is the feeling with which an artist invests his creation, the style with which a man lives his life. It is, above all, the spirit rather than the letter: a certain way of feeling, a certain way of expressing one-self, a certain way of being.”

Blacks had to prove that they existed and not only to the Whites but to themselves too. The slave narratives tried to write themselves into existence. They merged oral histories with emotive languages and situations to assert the equality and ‘differentness’ of Blacks and Black American way of doing and perceiving things.

During the Civil Right Movement, it became more important than ever to speak up and come out of the invisibility. The literature of this era was the written experiences of a cross-section of people who had their own special places and relationships within the movement. Stories of personal courage and heroism and personal memoirs were able to transform the microcosmic experiences to larger personification of whole classes and races. The struggle for civil rights was both an outward and inward directed movement. It was against the most recognized symbols of racism and it sought to convince the Black Americans of the righteousness of their cause. Antony Lewis wrote, “The real significance of the protest movement was psychological”. Writers created documents of the lived history.

The process of naming became the important way to fill the void of identity. Ambivalence towards names and naming become a touchstone in Ellison’s novel. In Ellison’s view “the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are.” Invisible Man is “a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality.”

The story of Ellison’s protagonist is a search for an identity. The invisible man is driven by his quest to exist, to be visible. Throughout his life, he encounters figures of authority who impose fake names or unsuitable identities upon him. He realizes that to have a name meant to be present. The act of naming is linked inextricably to issues of power and control. The very act of telling this story is an attempt by the narrator to name himself. By narrating the story, the invisible man tries to be visible, to exist. He does not want to be absent any more. By linking the act of narration to the achievement of identity, Ellison places the protagonist in a tradition of Black American letters that originated with the slave narratives.

The protagonist’s sense of an identity is deeply connected with the approval of the White. To him, the opportunity to speak before “a gathering of the town’s leading white citizens” is “a triumph for community”. Seeing the mockery at the Battle Royal, he is repelled. But repelled not of the degrading match but because he resents to be associated with other black boys. The psychological subjugation makes him search for identity in the eyes of the Whites. He wants to fill his void. He learns that if he does what the world demands of him then he would get respect and acceptance. The narrator is in a constant search of a “usable past”. The novel attempts to construct its own universe.

The negative concord in the Black vernacular also shows the importance of negative in the speech of the Black Americans. The reason for this non-standard English was often portrayed by the Whites as an effect of cultural deprivation. The naïve view is that the nonstandard dialect simply have too many negatives. Historically-minded linguists and dialectologists point out that multiple negation is the traditional pattern and that the standard form is a rule imposed on English by grammarians in the 18^th century. The attack against cultural deprivation in the ghettos is overtly directed at family structures typical of lower-class families. The family structures of many black American households are female headed. The absent father figure is an unfortunate reality. Before emancipation the slaves were not even allowed to marry. But they were allowed to reproduce so that cheap labour was available for Whites. Thus the idea of a integrated family structure never was imbibed in the Black sensibility. The absent father figure remained an illusive influence on the Black American Children.

In the field of visual arts, the Black artists sought to create a balance between realism and abstraction. During the Word War II years the shift was from dominant Black figure portrayal to abstraction. The abstract and expressionist art at times had references to Africa, Black America and to the Civil Rights Movement. But basically the art was predominantly non-figurative and abstract.

Aaron Douglas’ paintings has strong presence of African motifs. The figures in the paintings would tend to break free. He was a Harlem painter and Harlem had a strong influence in his works. He uses images of Black myth and tradition. Sargent Claude Johnson’s sculptures like “Forever Free” is heavily influenced by Africa. He not only uses Egyptian motifs but also Egyptian method of preserving wood. Similarly Paul Hayden uses African motifs like masks but also juxtapose them with western symbols like cigarettes and chains. But other artists show a deliberate shift from the figures to the complete absence of them. Charles White shifted from figures to African signs and symbols. Artists started converting everyday incidents into abstractions. Mary Edmonia Lewis’ figures bears no resemblance of belonging to any particular race. Thus rather than the presence of the figure, the absence was portrayed on the canvas. They indulged in the absence and celebrated the absence. They removed themselves from the landscape. But abstraction made people uncomfortable and not just the Whites. The Blacks would search for Black American motifs in the paintings and the sculptures but would not be able to locate themselves in them. These artists celebrated a presence that need not be a physical one but beyond it. Many Harlem artists chose to speak through their works.

Harlem failed to bring the revolution it was credited with because it became too real and too present in the Black consciousness. Harlem became a physical reality. It became a symbol that was exploited by both the Whites and the Blacks. Blacks invested too much expectations out of Harlem. Harlem became over populated. Property rates reached sky high. The crime rate increased. Authors and thinkers became disenchanted with Harlem. The Whites found Harlem to be a convenient absence. The whole of Harlem became a ghetto that could be a mass segregation of the Blacks. It became a symbol that could be attacked and thus Harlem failed to realize the equality for all.

A recent controversy regarding an American newspaper cartoon raised the issue of racism. Barack Obama as the president of United States of America has become a symbol of power of Black America. He has become a convenient symbol of racial harmony. But by becoming a symbol of a community within the nation, it became a symbol that could be attacked. He has become a visible presence of a symbolic important stage in America. His presence will be exploited by both the Whites and the blacks.

I would conclude with the first paragraph of the prologue of Invisible Man:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side shows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed, everything and anything except me.

[this paper was presented at the American Center, New Delhi during the celebration week marking the visit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to India]

We all know that story. God told Mr. Adam not to eat the forbidden fruit. Nevertheless, he eventually did. Well, this Mr. Adam was the first student of Jawaharlal Nehru University (technical not but ideologically yes). Nested in a thousand-acre campus, JNU forms a world of its own. The walls of the administrative block, the schools and the hostels are covered with graffiti and political posters. People sit for hours at different dhabas and debate. Questioning is the favourite pastime of JNUites. So what is fashionable here? Being a rebel.

The university has fashioned its own kind of rebels. The Left ones. They are the popular rebels here. The ones who shun the globalization. The ones who despise the Capitalist world. The ones who wear kurta with jeans, chappals, shawls and a red jhola. They are not the much romanticized ‘leather jacket and Harley Davidson’ rebels of the movies. They are the lanky young intellectuals who find it ‘in’ to go on strikes and midnight mashal julus (torchlight processions). The fad is to debate issues over cups of tea and cigarettes. They spend hours debating. The issues vary from the US nuclear deal (which according to them is the saddest moment of free India) to the water problem in the hostels (incidentally all the hostels are named after rivers). They resent the Capitalist fashion companies (which sadly mean no Reebok or Puma). Their fashion is the one that undercuts the fashion itself.

In this temporal and spatial milieu where patiala is combined with kurti and jhola to give ‘the’ communist look, who is the style icon ? None other than Che Guevera. JNU’s romance with communism continues with its omniscient fascination with the Latin American revolutionary. You will find Che (the photo that Alberto Corda immortalized) on the walls, on innumerable t-shirts and even on cigarette cases. Arguably, JNU boasts of the largest number of Che tees in the whole of India (or so they say).

The slow and rhythmic pace of the lifestyle sets you in trance when suddenly the air is impregnated with the sound of Royal Enfield bikes as few students ride by the Ganga dhaba for their evening round of the campus. Dressed in black jackets, jeans, Aviators and matched with stubble and long hair; they await the sun to set when the day would start at JNU. When asked about JNU fashion, Farbod Vasighi, an Iranian national replied in one word: utilitarian.

Numerous events take place during the night. Film shows, plays, public talks and political meetings takes place regularly. Moreover, People who prefer to spend time differently sit around bonfires during winters and sing songs or stroll around the campus. Checkered print shoes are teemed with casual jackets. Girls dress up in Fisher-man pants with Converse keds.

JNU is not a cultural melting pot but rather a cultural mosaic. The style remains largely individualist. The different influence of different cultures is vividly seen in the dressing sense of the students. The clothes portray not only the different cultural impacts but also individual political leanings (a red jhola is always associated with the communists). JNU has a large number of foreign students. Many combine their respective national clothing with the usual tees and jeans. They also prefer to assimilate their sense of style with Indian fashion. Often teeming up scarves with pajamas and Kolapuri chappals. Harlem pants are matched with Osho chappals. Many foreign students cannot let go off their oriental fascination and often turn out in churidars and saris during special occasions. When asked about his personal style, Walid Bandhoo, a Mauritian national said, “Fashion is about being comfortable with ones own clothes and not about show off.” However, he adds mischievously that sometimes his style is just “fashion to attract attention”.

Unlike the minimalist dressing of the Left-oriented students, many particularly the student from north-east prefer to follow the trend of the outside world. The fashion among them are more western influenced. They prefer to stay together in groups. A game of basketball near the 24*7 dhaba is always on during the evenings. Boys wearing sneakers with sports baggies and sports jackets is a common sight here. Many wear gladiator sandals, waist belts and A-line skirts. Pencil jeans are also very popular. Others sport Nagaland craft cloth bags. Oversized shades and bags are popular too.

The Priya shopping complex with its branded stores is just round the corner from JNU and even Sarojini Nagar market is nearby. Many students regularly visit these places to pick up their clothes and accessories. The relatively cheaper market of Sarojini Nagar is a favourite haunt for the forever cash-strapped JNU students. Priya shopping complex is good for shopping for boys accessories. Dog tags, rings and large buckled belts are easily available here. While the girls shop for their earrings and hair-bands at Sarojini Nagar. Many political parties arrange for different people from other states to put up clothes stalls in the campus. Clothes at fair prices are sold in these stalls. Many times they also sell handcrafted clothes too.

Different centres at different schools have their own printed t-shirts and jackets. ‘Jawaharlal Nehru University’ tees are very popular. The different catch-phrases on these tees and jackets are both amusing and witty. The jacket of the Centre for English Studies at the School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies reads: ‘Mostly Harmless’ (from Douglas Adams’s series Hickhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). The winters bring out the overcoats and colourful mufflers. The environment becomes all the more colourful. Multi-coloured scarves, different woolen caps, earmuffs and gloves become mandatory to beat the chilly winters. The checkered mufflers are also popular. Girls wear stockings and boots. They also wear big colourful earrings teaming them with wooden bangles.

According to Indrani Roy, a Masters student who hails from West Bengal one big difference between the Calcutta University and JNU is “girls back home wear more salwar than jeans. It’s more common to find guys with long hair and girls with short in JNU rather than CU”. Not just the students even the professors maintain their sense of fashion. With few PhDs under their belts, many professors seem fit for the mosh-pit rather than the classroom. Dressed in khadi kurta, jeans and boots, they look suave and immaculate. Others prefer formal shirts and trousers. While still others decide to make their own style statements.

Guys with unkempt beard and horn-rimmed glasses will give you an hour long lecture on how American fashion houses are selling us dreams that is not our own and girls with short hair and nose-pins will lecture you on the attempts by the fashion magazines to objectify women. JNU is not ready to shed its dichotomy. One must be uncertain of our certainties as Mark Tully once lectured at JNU and students here believe that with all their hearts. Therefore, to find a comprehensive answer to what is JNU fashion is futile. Few prefer to follow the trend while others decide to create their own. JNU (the intellectual hub as some would have us believe) has place for both.

We all know that story <!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>

JNU is caught between the spectrums. The lal jhola-walas and the Enfield riders. The harem pants and the kurtis. The Converse keds and the Bata chappals. Between anti-imperialism graffiti and cups of Nescafe tea.

[as published in the Sportswear International (India) in november, 08]

Surprise the wolves got the prize

At the sudden summer eve

Dressed in sheeps’ robe and all

The bird did they deceive

And for the prize they came

Riding on the horse

Cry a little. Gentle into the ear. Years mocking go by. Cry a little. Along the path. The beggars took you there. Cry a little. Feed a little. The hollow heart beats so clear. Cry a little. Die a little. Wouldn’t be time to fear. Cry a little. Die a little. Blood dripped. Smeared. Smeared. Smeared.

The quest for immortality as the act of writing has always pushed the writer to re/ create a

World that will always be infused with his or her own smell. The God of Small Things

becomes synonymous with Arundhati Roy and Invisible Man with Ralph Ellison. The act

of writing has taken up many colours throughout the ages. It became an evocative means

of speaking up (proving ones very existence) during the American Civil Rights

Movement. It became a way to educate the masses during the different revolutions. And

in other times it became an equally effective in brainwashing. But writing has always

been the one sure way to achieve immortality. It became one human action that may not

die. And this is the human action that may not die. This human wish for eternal life, if not

for themselves but at least to their voices, their words and their books.

But what voice, what words and most importantly which portrayal of which world

deserves immortality. Would it be the portrayal of a world gone berserk? Would it be a

perfect world? Or would it be the real world with its happy/ sordid realities? Each writer

with his/ her own views of the world would draw a portray of themselves. But then no

work of art can be created in a vacuum (an oft repeated phrase). The socio- political and

economic milieu necessarily effects the work of art.

This paper Intends to read Khushwant Singh’s The Company of Women and Anita

Desai’s parallelly (for lack of a better word; ‘with’ would have been very different from

what I intend by writing ‘parallelly’). In their quest for immortality how does both the

writers portray their immediate worlds. (I have refrained from using feminist theory.)

Both were published in successive years yet symbolically in different centuries. The

socio- political and economic environments were similar in both. But the portrayal varies

different indeed.

Fasting, Feasting has been praised by the critics for being one of the ‘propounders’ of

feminist writing in Indian wring in English. The Company of Women has also got its fair

bit of attention. But mostly critics did not like his interpretation of sexuality. M. K. Naik

and Shyamala A. Narayan have noted in their book Indian English Literature: A critical

Survey, “There Is a half- hearted attempt to project a philosophy of lust, which is

declared to be superior to mere love; but it is clearly not on the same plane as D. H.

Lawrence’s apotheosis of the body and sex, because it merely trivializes both.”

This paper does not intends to judge. This paper is a cannibalistic reading of the novels

which tries to decipher the portrayal of the structure and the narrative in both of them.

This paper tries to find how different voices make up the common consciousness. Thus

proving that writing as an act of immortality is an individual act and not an output of

social quagmire.

Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting is as the title proclaims, a conflict between the two

opposites. Two cultures namely the Indian and the American are pitted against each

other. Desai deftly paints the Indian family with its rather sordid reality. The narrative

unveils through Uma in India and Arun in America. They are both entrapped by their

own parents, MamaPapa in their own culture and enveloping environment. They remain

nameless throughout the novel. Yet, this namelessness their universality and not their

anonymity. Anita Desai is recognized as the first Indian author writing in English who

addresses feminist themes seriously, focusing on the condition of women in India. The

woman figure is central to the narrative in the first half. Living under the demanding rule

of Mama Papa, Uma is repressed, suppressed and is imprisoned at home. The first part of

the novel tells us in a flashback as how she became a reluctant victim of entrapment at

home. The second part of the novel shows how her brother Arun, who leaves his home

for higher studies, but feels trapped by the very education that is meant to liberate him.

Desai show the Indian family in its bleakest and its best. Uma is the subject in the first

half and her repressed and suppressed life is portrayed well. The reader empathizes with

the protagonist in her wish to escape from the repressive life. The story in itself is told

from the perspective of the protagonist, Uma, who starts out as a wide-eyed child at a

convent who shows an enthusiasm for education but with the birth of her brother Arun,

Uma takes on the role of nanny. Here, one encounters the distinct preference parents have

for the male child.

Desai next explores the conventional belief that ties a woman’s worth to her physical

appearance. A woman who lacks beauty is often rushed into the first marital offer she

receives, only to pay a heavy price later on. Desai shows the challenges a single woman

faces regardless of how successful she is. By contrast, Uma’s cousin is portrayed as the

ultimate success because she is able to marry well thanks to her looks. She makes the

reader wonder how happy she truly is, when she eventually takes her own life.

Her father feels that Uma is incapable of fending for herself, as she is too clumsy,

uncoordinated and proves a failure in almost everything she does. Uma fails in school, in

the kitchen and she even fails to find anyone worthwhile to get married to.

Khushwant Singh’s The Company of Women unlike Fasting, Feasting objectifies women.

Woman is in the centre of this novel too but not as the subject rather as the object. Right

from the very beginning, in the author’s note, Singh alienates himself from the narrative.

The author excuses himself out of the novel by calling his characters as “figments of

(my) senile fantasies”. He justifies the novel as an imaginary fulfillment of his youthful

fantasies. From the very beginning Singh’s novel is pitted against Desai’s realist

depiction of the woman in an Indian family.

The Company of Women is divided into three parts. The first part and the third part is

narrated by the author while the second part is narrated by the protagonist himself,

namely Mohan Kumar. This shift in the narrative is an interesting technique used by the

author. In the first part, the author introduces the protagonist as this womanizer who gets

a divorce from his wife. The first person omniscient narrator indulges the reader in the

life of Mohan Kumar as an all pervading eye. This narrative eye changes to the narrative

I when Mohan Kumar himself become the narrator in the second part. In the third part,

the author narrates the death of Mohan Kumar due to AIDS.

While Desai shows the sordid reality, Singh indulges in the candid reality.

“‘Nigger is regarded as a very rude word by educated Americans. They say coloured or

African- Americans.’

‘That’s not the point,’ she snapped back, ‘I know you don’t call niggers that to their

faces. Behind their backs whites still call them niggers.’”

The Company of Women was published in 1999 while Fasting, Feasting was published in

2000. Desai’s portrayal is a moving tale of Uma which paints the reality of the Indian

family. The reality is dexterously painted by Desai. Women are treated as burdens that

have to be married off. Treating women as a commodity prevails in the society and Desai

show that in the novel. Singh’s novel portrays women as the very object. The content

itself reads like a list of achievement for Mohan Kumar. The various name of the women

that Mohan Kumar had had sex with forms the content. But from the very beginning the

novel is pitted as a fantastic tale of Mohan Kumar. Company of Women brings out the

hypocrisy of the society.

After having sex with Yasmeen, Mohan Kumar asks whether that is sin according to

Islam.

“‘What I did was sinful,’ she admitted.

‘You are right. But Shariat law requires two Muslim eye- witnesses to see an act

of adultery. Nobody can prove it against me. You, not being Muslim, don’t count

in a Shariat court.’”

The same milieu of the end of 20^th century and the beginning of the next is the ground for

both the novels. Fasting, Feasting shows the quagmire of the family structure for the

woman protagonist while The Company of Woman portrays the rather fantastic depiction

of the sexual relationships between Mohan Kumar and different women. In this apparent

objectification of women, what Singh does is that he puts the women in the centre. The

women portrayed are no longer hidden under the purdah but rather are outright about

their sexual desires.

Reading Singh alongside Desai is a peculiar experience yet they portray the same motives

probably but in very different ways. The world is not portrayed in the same way rather

the quest for immortality remains an individual quest. Desai proclaims the survivor

woman as the ‘hero’ of the tale while Singh designs the dying man as the ‘hero’ of his

tale.

Works cited:

Anita Desai, Fasting, Feasting. London: Vintage, 1999

Naik, M.K, Narayan, Shyamala A. Indian English Literature: a Critical Survey. New Delhi, 2004

Ravichandran. T. Entrapments at Home and Abroad in Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur

Singh, Khushwant. The Company of Women. New Delhi: Penguin Book, 1999

Volná, Ludmila. Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting and the Condition of Women, Volume 7 Issue 3 (September 2005) Article 6

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The task of reading Wordsworth and Colridge suits me perfectly. Little bits of fragmented rendering, signifying nothing. Both Master William and Master Samuel have greatly influenced my paper (surprisingly…huh?). Particularly Master Samuel. “Biographia Literaria” is an autobiography in discourse. But it is not a straightforward or linear autobiography. It is loosely structured and fragmented at parts. ‘It presents Samuel’s theories of the creative imagination, but its debt to other writers, notably the German idealist philosophers, is often so heavy that the line between legitimate borrowing and plagiarism becomes blurred.’ And yes Mr. Samuel and I pray to the same muse too. I will cut my preface to the paper short.

In many ways, “The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” embodies the poetic manifesto of Romanticism. Mr. William brought the marginalized to the centre stage. He was a revolutionary (don’t we love that word at JNU) who broke free from the strictness and rigidity of the eighteenth century where only the exalted and the glorious could be the subject of poetry. The strictness of the head and reason ruled the poetic diction. Mr. William revolted against the authoritarian subject-language-matter and stressed on the ‘real’ rather than the archaic. His emphasis on emotions was his reaction against the eighteenth century poetry that was intellectual, devoid of feelings and appealed to the head rather than the heart. The aam admi found a voice and an existence in the poetry. The common-man became the subject matter. His language became the language of Romantic poetry.

“All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility.” – Mr. William

This statement shows the importance of ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’ to him as against reason. But taken separately the two lines may portray a dichotomy in the thought. If poetry is the ‘spontaneous overflow’ then it can have no scope of pre-mediation. The reaction has to be instantaneous and not reasoned out. While the second sentence says that poetry is emotions ‘recollected in tranquility’, thereby evidently an act that requires deliberate thinking. But Mr. William had his reasons. According to him, our thoughts are the representatives of our past feelings and our feelings are modified and directed by our thoughts. ‘The poet is a man of great sensibility whose mentality has already been shaped.’

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive moods,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude.

And then my heart with pleasure fills

And dances with the daffodils.

Mr. William notes the four stages of the process of writing poetry, namely, recollection, contemplation, recrudescence and composition. The revision of “The Prelude” is in keeping with this process. He firmly believed that the immediate object of the poet is to give pleasure. Poetry should create a feeling of delight in the readers. The poet has great capacity to perceive and feel. (Mr. Samuel accepts the first as ‘primary imagination’ but refutes the later.) A poet must have the ability to express himself in verse. In ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ T.S. Eliot criticized Mr. William’s theory of poetry by saying that “Poetry is neither emotion, nor recollection nor tranquility, nor spontaneity”. It is “concentrated” or what he calls “a deliberate process”.

Mr. William chose the incidents and situations from humble and rustic life and adopted the language of the common people to communicate his ideas. According to him, the rural language is permanent and philosophic because it is “less under the influence of social vanity”. The purpose of the poet is to imitate and adopt the very language of men.

“Men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.” –Wordsworth

Unlike the idealistic Mr. William, Mr. Samuel is more rational/ practical. (I use the words ‘rational’ and ‘practical’ with no positive or negative connotations.) He found the use of the “low and rustic life” as inadequate substance for creating poetry. According to him, a reader must be familiar with the rustic life in order to empathize with the poetry. The reader need to relate to the language but people such as from the urban middle class would find it difficult to understand that language that is in tune with the rural lifestyle. He also criticizes the theory on the count that many rustics were uneducated and as such incapable of using language to portray feelings. Therefore the language used by the rustics were not suitable for poetic diction.

Mr. Samuel was a theologian and a philosopher. According to him, only the philosophical language was capable of portraying the “processes and results of imagination”. The philosophical language contained the thoughts of universal truth and not specific to any locality as unlike the rustic language. This language alone can provoke deep inner thoughts and reflections. He also criticizes Mr. William’s use of the word ‘real’ to describe language. The language would differ from people to people and from place to place depending on their intelligence and knowledge. Thus Mr. Samuel suggests the use of the word ‘ordinary’ instead of ‘real’.

According to him, poetry is not meant to create passion but to increase the reader’s mental activity. While reading poetry the imagery provokes emotions and thoughts. He upholds intellect over emotion.

“there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” –Wordsworth

Mr. Samuel maintains that there are certain modes of expression, a construction, and an order of sentences which are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition but would be inappropriate to metrical poetry. He goes on to say that in the language of a serious poem, this may be an arrangement of words and sentences; and the use of figure of speech would be inappropriate. He says that when a poet writes in metre, he means to differ from prose.

Shelley calls the poets as “unacknowledged legislators of the mankind”; whereas Carlyle refers to poet as a ‘prophet’ and ‘hero’. According to Mr. William, the poet is “a rock of defence” for human nature. He binds together the human society.

Mr. Samuel defines the primary imagination as “the living and prime agent of all human perception”. It is the human consciousness in its purest form that allows us to perceive the world around us. Perception whether conscious or unconscious, identifies and gives meaning to something.

Through perception, we are able to utilize the secondary imagination in order to reconstruction what we perceive. The secondary poetic imagination dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate. This helps in creating a relationship between the subjects of perception and ones own world. It brings an order out of chaos. According I him, imagination is vital to creation. Fancy, “on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definite.” Fancy does nor create meaning out of things and an order out of chaos.

Aristotle, I have been told, has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so; its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony… The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude; the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.

-Wordsworth

]]> http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/04/18/an-overview-of-mr-william-wordsworth%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cpreface-to-lyrical-ballads%e2%80%9d-and-mr-samuel-coleridge%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cbiographia-literaria%e2%80%9d/feed/ 0 may7black http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/scarecrow/ http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/scarecrow/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:07:00 +0000 may7black http://may7black.wordpress.com/?p=258 ]]>

A ray crossed into my room

And green went the snooty black dark

Crept into the red corner

And snarled and said

Weathering I will to shed

Some broken tears

With mocking words of the scarecrow

And take nest in your heart’s narrow nightmares.

Below the green surface of tranquility

The un-nature-al breeds

Tender may be to the unseen eyes

But the white patches bleach

The hollow gums of the baby’s innocence

Forgets the larger graver real-ity.

busy went the bee.. scribbling and scratching…
silly went the bee,,,,
buzzing and humming…

from morn to night
from might to morn

wasnt the darkness in the day a matter
nor the lost light in the darkness.

busy went the bee.

the smell of the mist
the flowers of the yeast.

diseased and decayed
boiled and starched

the honey dew fell on the leaves

silly went the bee

bright and shadow
from the mist of the yeast

the mirror looked into thw mirror
and finding herself gone
wwent searching for herself
in the reflected image of a mirror-ed lie.
tie
shy
my why die bye die cry fly
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
busy busy busy busy went the silly silly silly bee.
scribbling and scribbling and scratching and scratching
diseased and decayed and boiled and starched
the yellow of the yeast of the mist

and then they laughed and sang and laughed and sang:

busy went the bee.. scribbling and scratching…
silly went the bee…
buzzing and humming…
busy busy busy busy went the silly silly silly bee.

sometimes the roosters forgets to crow at the dawn

and late at the night when the moon comes out

the rooster would yawn

why why why, he would say

why did the day end

All civilizations set rules concerning what is “real” and what is not. They set rules regarding what is “true” and what is “false”. All societies select data that would help declare the “real world”. Each one of these artificial constructed worlds is to some degree idiosyncratic and unique. Our perceptions are guided by concepts and interpretations. What is commonly thought of as “reality”, that which “exists”, or simply “is”, is a set of concepts, assumptions, suppositions, justification that are used to channel each individual’s perception in a specific and distinct direction. These rules governing the general perception of the world is more or less arbitrary. Very society establishes what Erich Goode calls an “epistemological methodology”.

Marijuana also known as Grass or Ganja does not find itself a place in this “real world”. It became a ‘stain’ in the very fabric of the society. It has to be hidden. It has to be tagged as subversive and thereby illegalized. It never could and never can occupy a position in the centre. Right from the very beginning marijuana has occupied its position as the marginalized. It has been a voice of the rebel. It has been the voice of the change. The questions that I am raising are not whether marijuana is safe or not, whether it should be legalized or not [though one can find passionate arguments supporting both side of the spectrum]. This paper is trying to look into the structure of marijuana use. Why is smoking marijuana banned? Is it because the society tries to play the authority that decides what is right and what is not or is the real reason elsewhere? Why doesn’t marijuana find a place in the ‘real’ world and is coloured as “false”? Is the political and social alienation that is associated with smoking marijuana a product of the substance or the society itself? This paper tries to raise certain questions regarding the use and effects of smoking marijuana and though is unable to find coherent answers; this paper happily submits itself as a problematic study of the ‘pot’.

The ‘real’ world consists of law-abiding citizens who believe in the values and principles of life. They work hard, earn money and live a happy life. They have faith in the central fabric of the society that needs to be protected all the time. They believe in discipline in their day-to-day lives. They believe in uniforms in schools. They believe in assembly lines in nursery. They believe that they have a right to remain silent. And who decides what is virtues, what is principles? The society itself decides that. Power is not governed through cohesion. Power is governed through consent. Laws are made so that the marginal can never break through the centre. Rolling a joint doesn’t fit in the “real world”. It is a destructive act. It tries to break free from all that that is held sacred by the society. Marijuana cannot be allowed within the social construction of reality.

Even societies with powerful scientific and empirical traditions contain subcultures, which have less faith in the logic of the senses than others. The subculture may have a different mode of reasoning than the main culture. These subcultures that refuse to follow the reasoning of the dominant culture are tagged the subversive cultures. Marijuana find itself submerged in such a ‘niche’ subculture.

To raise empirical questions concerning marijuana use is a problematic issue. Even the fundamental question of the effects of the drug on the human mind and body is hotly disputed.

“Is marijuana a drug of “psychic dependence”? Or is it meaningless to speak of dependency in regard to marijuana? Does marijuana cause organic damage to brain? Are its effects criminogenic? How does it influence the over0all output of activity-in popular terms, does it produce “lethargy” and “sloth”? Does it precipitate is its impact on artistic creativity? What is the drug’s influence on mechanical skills, such as the ability to drive an automobile? Does the use of marijuana “lead to” heroin addiction?”

Erich Goode raises these questions in the essay “Marijuana and the Politics of Reality”. These questions, he writes can be answered within the scope of empirical sociological, psychological and pharmacological scientific techniques. He further states that these questions are occasionally answered but “the zones of widespread agreement are narrow indeed.”

There are both empirical and theoretical reasons to suspect that drug use (particularly marijuana) and drug-use attitudes may be related to overall sociopolitical ideology, notably attitudes in such spheres as authority, social differences, conventionality, social change, and social deviance.

Researchers have related drug use to positions on a variety of sociopolitical issues, including opposition to Vietnam war and identification with the civil-rights movement; a rejection or questioning of “the contemporary social establishment”; possible resistance to authority and youthful protests towards parental generation; unconventionality in terms of orientation, social relationship, and achievements; blaming a purportedly bad and hypocritical society for one’s problems; despair of achieving progressive social, political and economic change; and general rejection of what drug users regard as “an increasing oppressive interference in their private lives by government of all ideological complexions. (Paul M. Kohn and G.W. Mercer ; Drug Use, Drug-use Attitude, and the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Dimension )

In studies done on the relationship between drug use and sociopolitical ideology by R. H. Blum and E. A. Suchman, Blum reported that, in comparison to their non-using peers, students using illicit drugs were more in opposition to their parents, more left-wing politically, and more likely to perceive the political right-wing as dangerous to society. Sachman found that drug use was related to behaviour, attitudes, and self-images that constitute a “hang-loose ethic.” In general, this is a pattern marked by irreverence, questioning, or rejection of conventional values, and opposition to the traditional established order. Specific acts referred to by Suchman include the reading of underground newspapers; participation in mass protests; antagonism to the education system; and a perception of oneself as “rebellious, cynical, anti-establishment, ‘hippie’, and apathetic.”

Smoking marijuana is illegal, and therefore self-reported use of marijuana could be used as an indicator of rebelliousness. At the same time, however, it must be kept in mind that if a behavior-even an illegal one-becomes normative, then it may indicate conformity with one’s peers more than it reflects rebellion against the status quo.

Marijuana can be thought of as a kind of symbol for a complex of other positions, beliefs and activities which are correlated with and compatible with its use. In other words, those who disapprove of marijuana use often feel that he who smokes must, of necessity, also be a political radical, en- gage in “loose” (from his point of view) sexual practices, and have a somewhat dim view of patriotism. Marijuana use is seen (whether rightly or wrongly) to sum up innumerable facts about the individual, facts which can clearly place him along the liberal-radical dimension in a number of areas of social and political life.

(-Erich Goode)

Goode has observed elsewhere that marijuana use has a “sociogenic” quality in that marijuana is usually smoked with others and less frequently alone. As a consequence of this, Goode suggests that:

. . . marijuana users form a kind of sub community. This does not mean that a powerful bond of identity holds all users together in a closely-knit social group. But it does mean that users are more to identify and interact with other users than with someone who does not smoke marijuana.

Moreover,

. . . a certain degree of value consensus will obtain . . . [and] a value convergence will occur as a result of progressive group involvement…

Most of the literature on youth and marijuana use is impressionistic. A great deal has been written about the potential risks involved in smoking marijuana, the laws needed to control its use, and the life styles of users, but there has been very little systematic empirical research on the topic.

Edward A. Suchman, in a survey of 600 students at an American university, found that drug use was most common among those students who were dissatisfied with their education and unhappy with their parents. In contrast to Richard Brotman, however, marijuana use was more closely associated with attitudes that reflect more immediate personal life-style concerns rather than larger social or political ideals. That is, marijuana use is most closely associated with more permissive attitudes on drug use, sex, and to a lesser degree, alcohol. It is also closely associated with more favorable views of the hippie subculture, keeping abreast of underground opinion and participating in underground events rather than in civic affairs. These attitudes are pictured as part of a youth-related “hang loose” ethic that is essentially irreverent and anti-establishment. It is important to note, however, that Suchman found no relationship between marijuana use and an index that appears to measure confidence in people. He concludes, “While it [the 'hang loose' ethic] may represent antagonism to the conventional world, [it] does not appear to create apathy and withdrawal.

According to another study, marijuana users were less likely to be involved in more conventional activities of church, school, and community. The authors conclude that marijuana users were more likely than non-users “to prefer . . . activities which are somewhat unconventional and allow broader scope for youth initiative.”

A national survey of 2,000 college seniors revealed that along with a general dissatisfaction with the status quo there was a trend toward “‘privatism” or a primary emphasis on self-related concerns rather than social idealism.? David Riesman has commented on this phenomenon labeling it a “cult of intimacy.” In Writing from the perspective of his experiences with youthful psychiatric patients, Seymour Halleck has also observed a growing concern with “style” and “immediacy” which is similar to these other conceptions of privatism and youth-related concerns. Halleck suggests that drugs are becoming popular with these young people because they create “a sense of timelessness and reinforce tendencies to live in the present.” A more limited survey of college students in New England revealed that marijuana smokers could be contrasted to nonusers in that they are “more opposed to external control” than non- users. Although this objection specifically applies to control over marijuana use, this attitude also is generalized to possible additional controls over more private or personal concerns such as cigarette smoking, regulating parietal hours for undergraduates in college, and regulations concerning premarital sexual behaviours.

A large number of young and avant-garde artists– film-makers, poets, painters, musicians, novelists, photographers– used the drug and were influenced by the marijuana “high” (in Goode). Some of the results seem to be : an increasing irrelevance to realism; the loss of interest in plot in films and novels; a glorification of the irrational and the seemingly nonsensical; an increased faith in the logic of the viscera, rather than in the intellect; a heightened sense for the absurd; an abandonment of traditional and “linear” reasoning sequences, and the substitution of “mosaic” and fragmentary lines of attack; connective relying on internal relevance, rather than a common understood and widely accepted succession of events and thoughts; love of the paradoxical, the perverse, the contradictory, the unique rather than the general and the universal.

Those with conventional, traditional and “classic” tastes in art will view these results in a dim light.

What is “real” is the world as the un-drugged person perceives it. Any alteration of the “normal” state of consciousness is destructive and inherently distorting. Drug use, it is claimed, is “a way to shut out the real world or enter a world of unreality”. As with every issue relating to marijuana, the construction of reality itself is problematic with both sides staking their claim to what is considered as “reality”. Perception changes the reality.

So is there a definite answer to the problematic aspects of use of marijuana? Is there a certainty that can be proclaimed? Or is the answer in the fuzzy lines?

Civilizations have their different ways of validating reality. The reality will never be uniform or comprehensive. The way a given culture chooses to view the material world is both arbitrary and conventional. Yet the arbitrary decisions of the culture are accorded a semi-sacred status. The decisions and the rules formulated cannot be questioned. Empirical and scientific rules and status becomes the basic arbiters of the reality. Yet different subcultures in the same society vary in their conception of what is real. The access to power and legitimacy is denied to these subcultures because they would undercut the very authority and legitimacy of the centre, the ‘stable’ society. He who dominates in an given society tries to enforce his views and vision of the reality on the rest of the society, both in terms of legitimacy (moral hegemony) and making sure that others do not go against him. He generally believes that he does it for the benefit of the society. He believes that the individuals should be restricted for their own moral and scientific well-being. The society is not a combination of individuals who have equal voice in everything. However, society is ruled by an identity that can enforce and impose their own unique versions of reality and what is right on others.

Imposing a dominant mode of thinking about reality and controlling the behaviors of the people require strategy. Thus, the scientific status of one or another reality becomes a political and tactical issue. The non-rational beliefs shape perceptions of empirical testable assumptions. He who thinks of marijuana use as wrong is likely to exaggerate its criminogenic effects; he who thinks of it as beneficial will minimize its impact.

The line between what can and cannot be tested empirically is fuzzy, nonexistent and irrelevant to most people. Therefore, anyone who does not agree with me on the scientific matters is wrong and those who do not agree with me on matters of taste and style are wrong. Marijuana can be seen as a kind of symbol for a complex of other positions, beliefs and activities that are correlated with and comparable with its use. In other words, those who disapprove of marijuana use often feel that people who smoke must also be a political radical, engage in “loose” sexual practices, and have a somewhat dim view of patriotism. Erich Goode notes that marijuana use is seen (whether rightly or wrongly) to sum up innumerable facts about the individual, facts which can clearly place him along the conservative-liberal-radical dimension in a number of areas of social and political life.

Marijuana is a problematic issue that is not going to get any answers any time soon and therefore I come back to the same questions:

Is marijuana use a response to social or political alienation? Or since marijuana use increases the probability of a negative reaction from authorities, does this reaction create and reinforce the alienation of the young?

Bibliography:

E. A. schman, The hang-loose ethics and the spirit of drug use in “Journal of Health and Social Behavior”, 1968, pp. 146-155.

Erich Goode, Marijuana and the Politics of Reality, “Journal of Health and Social Behavior”, American Sociological Association , 1969, pp. 83-94

Richard Brotman, Irving Silverman, and Fred Suffet, Drug Use Among Affluent High School Youth in Erich Goode (ed.), “Marijuana”, New York: Atherton Press, 1969, pp. 128-136.

James W. Clarke and E. Lester Levine, Marijuana Use, Social Discontent and Political Alienation: A Study of High School Youth, “The American Political Science Review”, American Political Science Association, 1971, pp. 120-130.

Paul M. Kohn and G. W. Mercer, Drug Use, Drug-Use Attitudes, and the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Dimension, “Journal of Health and Social Behavior”, American Sociological Association, 1971, pp. 125-131

R. C. Knight, J. P. Sheposh, J. B. Bryson, College Student Marijuana Use and Societal Alienation, “Journal of Health and Social Behavior”, American Sociological Association, 1974, pp. 28-35

R. H. Blum, “Student and drugs”, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969.

Richard L. Zweigenhaft, Birth Order Effects and Rebelliousness: Political Activism and Involvement with Marijuana, “Political Psychology”, International Society of Political Psychology, 2002, pp. 219-233

]]> http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/the-grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side-the-politics-of-marijuana-socio-political-alienation-identity-and-construction-of-reality/feed/ 0 may7black http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/translating-from-bangla-to-english-sarat-chandra-chattopadyay%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cabhagir-sorgo%e2%80%9d-recreated-as-%e2%80%9cthe-heaven-of-the-wretched%e2%80%9d/ http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/translating-from-bangla-to-english-sarat-chandra-chattopadyay%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cabhagir-sorgo%e2%80%9d-recreated-as-%e2%80%9cthe-heaven-of-the-wretched%e2%80%9d/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:18:32 +0000 may7black http://may7black.wordpress.com/?p=238 ]]>

Translation is confusing or to use a word that is always in vogue in literature: problematic. Translation is problematic.

All literary works are an act of translation. When a writer creates a text, he translates the abstract images in his/her mind into definite language. Thereby the writer indulges in translations that change from one form to another. The creation of a text is in itself an act of translation. The act of recreating an image from the nature into a text is also an act of translation.

No literary work can be completely translated. The language is an arbitrary means of symbolizing an image or thought. The mental process of a writer can never be conveyed exactly through language. Thereby the translation fails to convey the exact meaning or even‘equivalence’. Even at the level of inter-linguistic, translation fails to find equivalence. A particular language is deeply rooted in its culture and history. Different feelings and emotions have different ways of being expressed. Certain cultures may not even have words for images that do not exist in their cultural imagination or their historical heritage.

Yet (or therefore) translation is interesting. Translation can be best described as a process. The process is constantly under attack in order to reined it (referring to the act of building up theories to ‘explain’ or to criticize translations.)

“Building up a theory of translation, specially a theory of literary translation, it is often said, is futile exercise, and yet attempts at theory-building are constantly being made by linguistics, literary scholars, comparativists and translatologists.”

(R. S. Gupta; Translation: A Sociolinguistic Perspective)

For me translation is a process. One can formulate theories while working on a particular text and those theories holds true only for that particular translation and only for that particular time. The attempt to find a universal set of theories that can guide all acts of translation is PROBLEMATIC.

During one of the class discussions, one of my classmates talked about how the act of translation is an exact word-for-word translation of a text and any other acts are not translation. She said other acts are not translation but transcreation. I have problem understanding so many fancy words. She also said that any adaptation or any change done in translation is not ethical. But can a translation work at all using such a narrow definition of the term. My answer is a vehement no. My translation from Bengali to English is a proof that word-to-word translation is near impossible to achieve. My reasons for deliberately steering away from such an attempt lies in two basic facts: the readers should understand the text in English and there are no equivalences for so many phases and words of Bengali in English. The act of translation in itself is an act of violence. It is an act of creation. It reconstitutes, restructures and recreates the text from the source language to the receptor language. It liberates the original text from its bondage of the source language.

…[O]ne could quite legitimately rephrase Fishman’s classic formulation of the central concern of socio-linguistics as a study of “who speaks what to whom, where and why.”

The central concern of translation studies could be defined as a study and analysis of “who translates what for whom, where and why”.

(R. S. Gupta; Translation: A Sociolinguistic Perspective)

The above-mentioned quote raises few questions. Who is the translator? What nationality or regionality does s/he belong to? What is his/her socio-cultural background? Who is the writer of the source text? Which language is the source text written in? What are its thematic and/ or ideological content and what is its genre? Who is the implied reader for whom the translation is produced? What is the spatio-temporal and socio-cultural location of the translator and the reader? What is the rationale and motivation for the translation and what are the functions it is intended to perform?

I intend to answer the above questions in order to show how my translation works.

The translator is (I am) a masters student of English literature at a prestigious university which is located on the left of Munirka (and the world). Born in a Bengali family but raised in Bihar, the socio-cultural background was not fertile for an indepth Bengali sensibility. Socio-cultural background creates a sensibility that cannot be created otherwise. Yet belonging to a Bengali family and not ‘de-centered’ too far away from the hub (West Bengal), I infused many nuances of Bengali culture. However, the sensibility was more language oriented rather than society oriented. The main influences for such infusion were Bengali books and movies.

The source text, “Abhagir Sorgo” (a short story) is written by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (1876-1938). His short stories deftly show the true pictures of the rural Bengal. His own life finds voice in these tales. His empathy for the downtrodden and the oppressed people of the society is depicted in his works. The story is written in Bengali. At the time when the story was written, the language Bengali could be broadly divided into two parts: Shadhu and Cholti. Shadhu was the elitist version of the language that was spoken mostly by the rich and the upper castes while cholti was the version used by the poor and the lower castes. The Shadhu bhasha (language) was flowery and was formally structured while the cholti bhasha was earthly and colloquial. At that time, the literary works were generally written in shadhu bhasha and for the elite reading class. Today Shadhu bhasha has been rendered completely archaic.

Sarat Chandra Chattopadhay’s works have a unique dichotomy. Though written for an elite readership, the subjects of his works were mainly the poor and the downtrodden. Therefore, to keep the balance he uses a delicate parity of both Shadhu Bhasha and Cholti Bhasha. The narration is done in shadhu bhasha while the dialogues are in Cholti Bhasha. Thereby he refrains from putting a foreign language into the mouths of the commoners. Translating such a dual form in the source language into the receptor language is problematic (again). A line in Shadhu Bhasha: “Ma aar protibaad korilo naa”, when translated word-to-word would read as “Protest, Ma did not do any more”. The Shadhu word “korilo”(did) is elite form of the Chalti word “korlo”(did). If the line is translated in Cholti Bhasha it would read as “Ma aar protibaad korlo naa”, which when translated would mean: Ma did not protest any more. Though this dichotomy in the language is an important thematic aspect of the work, yet I have refrained from word-to-word translation of the Shadhu Bhasha. According to me, that translation should bring out the poignant meaning of the tale rather than become a conscious effort to render it archaic and remind the readers with every sentence that the work is a translation of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. Yet I have tried to keep up the queerness of the language to some extend but mainly due to the sentence construction and use of the language rather than the Shadhu and Cholti dichotomy.

Every translator has a choice as to which aspects of the work s/he wants to prioritise. For me the more important aspects of the work were the human emotions as portrayed in the story, the depiction of the mire in the society, the use of the language (irrespective of the shadhu and cholti dichotomy) and the culture.

It is near impossible to translate the culture bound emotions into English. English language is twice removed from the cultural implications of the Bengali culture (which I have earlier called as the Bengali sensibility). The non-Bengali Indians languages are once removed. Languages are charted with signs of culture and vice versa. The concept of burning pyre would be very strange for a non-Indian English reader. And even more the concept of happiness that the Hindu parents feel in knowing that their pyre would be lit by their son. Kangali’s mother’s wish for the funeral rites is almost a death wish (a way of life that is so deeply rooted in the Hindu philosophy). But knowing that the primary reader of my translation is an Indian (Prof. G. J. V. Prasad) some how eases my task. The actual line reads, “cheler haater aagun”, which when translated literarily means “fire from a son’s hand”. I changed the line to “fire lit by a son’s hands” (keeping the word-to-word translation might have taken the story to the realm of superheroes namely the ‘Fantastic Four’).

I deliberately tried to create problems for my reader by not translating certain Bengali terms into English and refrained from giving a footnote or a glossary. However, these words are important cultural markers that chart a map through the story and helps to (I hope so) to further the thematic aspect of the story (an attempt to rope in the readers into the act of translation). The terms alta (the crimson coloured liquid used to apply on the feet of Bengalee women), singur (vermillion), dhuno(holy smoke used during religious occasions), hari bol(the gods name, that is chanted during the funeral procession), ghat(eg. Burning ghat, bank of a river, bank of a pond) are deeply rooted in the culture and as such to find an equivalent term in English is near impossible and according to me even futile and unnecessary. These particular terms also follow a specific pattern to heighten poignancy of the story.

Sarat Chandra frequently uses very long sentences often bringing together a whole gamut of feelings together. I have tried to stick to this form as much as possible but often the sentences in English tend to sound idiotic. I feel I should have refrained from direct translation of Sarat Chandra’s construction of sentence in Bengali into English. Yet probably this aspect of the translation keeps alive the queerness of the language and the difference. The writer also uses poetic construction of the sentences. Describing the chariot, Sarat Chandra writes, “gaaye taar kotoh naa chobi aaka, choraye taar kotoh naa lotapata jorano”. I translated it to “The body was covered with many sketches; the top was covered with many tendrils.” Notice the repetition of the words “taar kotoh naa”. This gives it a sense of continuation that I too have tried to indulge in the translation.

“Forgetting her planned trip, forgetting about her brinjals, wiping her tears, she reached the cremation ground following the crowd.”

This sense of continuation is also used by often repeating the same words twice. It gives a more immediate sense or even a heightened sense of the words. These repetition works like magic in Bengali but cannot be used in English. The words, Kaditeh kaditeh(crying crying), in Bengali heightens the poignancy of the situation but in English would sound like a nursery rhyme. The words, muchiteh muchiteh (wiping wiping) in Bengali refer to a sense of decision along with wiping ones tears but in English I could find no equivalence. Other phases like ghuriya ghuriya, songe songe, dekh dekh, and mone mone are used in the text.

The literal translation of the line “Arekti prani ektu doore thakiya aei doler songi hoelo” would mean, ‘another person who was standing aloof also became a part of this group’. Technically the word ‘prani’ means creature, which includes both humans and animals. However, the English word ‘creature’ is a cruder word with a general non-human connotation. The word ‘prani’ could refer to either human or animal in a very benign way. But Sarat Chandra does not use the word in a benign way, he uses it as an instrument of social criticism. Kangali’s mother was referred to as the ‘prani’. She belonged to a low caste and therefore the society treated her more as a non-human being. Therefore, I use the word “being” as against a straightforward word like ‘creature’.

The title of the story in bengali reads as “Abhagir Sorgo”, which literally means the heaven (sorgo) of abhagi. The dictionary meaning of the word ‘abhagi’ is an ‘unfortunate female’. Well I used my creative license and re-named it “The Heaven of the Wretched”. It is “The Heaven of the Wretched”, the translation of sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s “abhagir sorgo”.

I would like to conclude by answering one question of Mr. R. S. Gupta that I missed.

What is the spatio-temporal and socio-cultural location of the translator and the reader?

Located at room number 59 at Tapti hostel and it is two at night, my socio-cultural location is just about to collapse out of fatigue. What about the reader? Please reply.

The Heaven of the Wretched

ONE

The aged wife of Thakurdas Mukherjee died after seven days of fever. Old mister Mukhopadhyay was a wealthy grain merchant. His four sons, three daughters (their own children as well), sons-in-law, neighbours, servants –it became a festival. All the villagers gathered to watch the much-hyped funeral. Weeping, the daughters applied thick layers alta on both the feet of Ma and smeared sindur on her head. After smearing the forehead with sandalwood, the daughter-in-laws draped Ma in an expensive sari and with the end of the sari wiped her feet. With the flower and the leaves and the fragrance and the garlands and the chaos, it didn’t seem like a mourning- as if the bride of the House was re-entering the abode of her husband once again, after fifty years. Old Mukhopadhyay bade his life partner goodbye for the last time with a calm disposition. Drying his tears, he started consoling the aggrieved daughters and daughters-in-law. Stirring up the morning sky with cries of hari bol, the whole villager marched ahead with the family. Another being who was standing aloof also became a part of this group. She was Kangali’s mother. She was walking towards the village market carrying some of her homegrown brinjals. She couldn’t move seeing the scenario. Forgetting her planned trip, forgetting about her brinjals, wiping her tears, she reached the cremation ground following the crowd. On the banks of the Garur river near the edge of the village laid the cremation ground. Wooden logs, pieces of sandalwood, ghee, honey, incense sticks and dhuno were already collected there beforehand. Being the daughter of a dule, a low caste, Kangali’s mother did not dare to go near. Standing on a heap from a distance, she started watching the funeral rites from the beginning till the end curiously. When the body was laid on the wide and copious pyre, she was moved by seeing the crimson-coloured feet and wished she could run and take a little bit of the alta off the feet to bless herself. Along with many voiced cries of hari bol , when the fire lit by the son and blessed with the chants was added to the pyre, tears came pouring out of here eyes and she kept repeating in her mind, “Fortunate Ma, you are going to heaven-bless me also that I too receive fire from Kangali’s hand in this fashion. Fire lit by the hands of a son! It is not an easy achievement. Seeing this journey to heaven after having taken good care of husband, son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, servant, maid and relative; her heart inflated with pride,- she couldn’t believe Ma’s good fortune. The recently lit pyre’s abundant smoke was winding up the sky leaving behind a blue hued shadow; Kangali’s mother could see an image of a small little chariot in it. The body was covered with many sketches; the top was covered with many tendrils. It seemed someone was sitting inside- the face couldn’t be recognized, but the parting in her hair had the mark of the sindur, feet coloured crimson. Kangali’s mother was looking heaven-wards with tears running down her cheeks when a fourteen-fifteen year old boy pulling at her sari’s end said, “You are standing here mother. Will you not prepare rice?”

Startled, Ma looked back and said, “I shall cook.” Pointing upwards with her finger, she eagerly said, “Look child, Brahmin-Ma is going to heaven on that chariot.”

Surprised, the boy looked up and said, “Where?” After watching for a while, he said, “Have you gone crazy? It is just smoke!” Getting angry, he said, “It is afternoon, don’t I feel hungry?” And at the same time noticing his mother’s tears, he asked, “why are crying over the death of a Brahmin’s wife?”

Kangali’s mother came to her senses finally. She felt embarrassed realizing that she was crying at the cremation ground for a stranger and fearing bad omen for her son; she instantly wiped her tears away. She tried to smile and said, “Why would I cry? Smoke got into my eyes.”

“Yeah- smoke got into your eyes. You were crying.”

Ma did not protest any more. Holding her son’s hand, she stepped down to the ghat and she herself took a bath and giving Kangali a bath, returned home- observing the funeral rites till the end was not in her destiny.

TWO

Watching the foolishness of the parents during the naming ceremony of a child, God does not only rest himself but also protests vehemently. For that reason, their lives frown at their very names until death. The life history of Kangali’s Ma is short but it her life was spared of the burden of God’s mockery. Her mother died giving birth to her. Annoyed her father named her Abhagi. No mother to take care of; her father caught fish from the river- he had no sense of day or night. Nevertheless, it was astonishing how the puny Abhagi survived to become Kangali’s Ma. The person she was married to was Rasik Bagh who had another wife. He went and settled with the other wife in another village. Abhagi was left behind in the village with her misery and the baby boy, Kangali.

That baby boy of her, Kangali was now fifteen year old. Recently he had started learning bamboo work. Abhagi hoped after struggling with ill luck for another year or so, her misery would be gone. Other than the person who had bestowed this on her, no one could understand her misery.

Coming from the pond, Kangali saw his mother storing the remaining food in a clay plate. Surprised, he asked, “Why did not you eat Ma?”

“It has become too late son. I am not feeling hungry any longer.”

Son did not believe. He said, “No, you are not hungry! Then let me see your pot.”

Kangali’s Ma had eluded Kangali many times in this manner. He let her free after inspecting the pot. There was sufficient rice for one person. Then he went and sat on his mother’s lap. A boy of his age would nit do such a thing. Since he was very lean from childhood, he did not have the chance to mix with other boys leaving his mother’s lap. He had to satisfy himself with playing in her lap. Embracing her with one arm, keeping his face close to hers, Kangali asked her, startled, “Ma your body is hot. Why did you watch the funeral rites standing under the scorching sun ? Why did you bathe after that? Was the funeral rites…”

Ma hurriedly put her hand on his mouth and said, “No, child. Do not say funeral rites. You will commit a crime then. The pious mathakarun went to heaven riding a chariot.”

Son asked doubtfully, “What nonsense are you speaking Ma! Does any body go to heaven riding a chariot?”

Ma said, “I saw with my very own eyes, bamun-ma went to heaven ridding a chariot. Every body saw her crimson coloured feet.”

“Everyone saw?”

“Everyone saw.”

Resting himself on his mother’s chest, Kangali started thinking. It was his habit to believe his mother. He had learnt to believe her since childhood. Is she was assuring every body had observed the incident; he had no room for disbelieve. After a while he slowly asked, “Will you go to heaven too, Ma? Bindi’s mother was saying to Rakhal’s aunt that day, ‘no body is as pious as Kangali’s mother.’”

Kangali’s mother remained silent. Kangali continued saying slowly, “When father left you many advised you to remarry. But you said, ‘No’. You said, ‘Kangali survives, my misery will end. Why do I have to remarry again?’ Ma, if you had remarried, where would I have been? I would have died out of hunger by now.”

Mother hugged him tightly. Actually, almost everyone had given her that advice and when she did not agree to it, no less problem was inflicted on her. Remembering that, Abhagi’s eyes filled with tears. Wiping that off son asked her, “Should I spread the quilt Ma; will you sleep?”

Ma continued to remain silent. Kangali spread the mat, spread the quilt. “Ma said after he brought down the pillow from the shelf and pulled her to bed, “You do not have go to work today.”

The idea of skipping work seemed very inviting to Kangali. Nevertheless, he said, “They would not give the stipend Ma.”

“Never mind. Let me relate to you a fairy tale.”

Abhagi started telling stories of a prince, a son of a sentry, and a winged horse. These stories were much heard from and narrated to others. Nevertheless after some moments, there was no trace of the prince and the son of the sentry. She started relating a story that was not learnt from others. It was her own creation. The more feverish she became, the fasted the hot blood rushed towards the brain, she came up with more thrilling tales. There was no rest, no gap in between. Kangali’s lean body shook with excitement. Afraid, surprised, pleased, he held her tightly wanting to drown in his mother’s chest.

Outside the day ended; the sun went down; evening’s faint shadow deepened to overwhelm the horizon. Nevertheless, no body lit the lamp inside the room; no one rose to perform the last duty of the household; in the deep darkness only the unrestricted hum of a sick mother continued pouring sweetly into the son’s ear. It was the tale of the cremation ground and the journey. The same chariot, the same crimson coloured feet, the same journey of her to heaven. How the grieved husband bade a teary farewell, how the son’s carried their mother crying hari bol. Then, the fire received from a son’s hand. “That is not a just a simple fire Kangali; that is Hari ! The all encompassing smoke is not just a mere smoke; that is the chariot to heaven. Kangali-charan, my child !”

“What happened Ma?”

“If I receive fire from your hand, I could too go to heaven like Bamun-Ma.”

Choking, Kangali said, “Do not say that!”

It seemed mother could not even her it. Exhaling hot breath, she said, “No one could then hate us for our caste. No one could prevent us for being miserable. Ah! The fire received from a son’s hand- the chariot has to come.”

Ma said, “And, yeah, Kangali, you have to call upon your father. He would bid me farewell, blessing me in the same manner. By applying the alta, the sindur in the similar way. But who would even do that? You would do that, would not you Kangali? You are my son, you are my daughter; you mean everything to me!” Saying this she hugged her son.

THREE

The last scene in the drama of Abhagi’s life was going to end. The span was not much but little. It seemed not even thirty years were crossed. It ended in a simple manner. There was no ayurvedic practitioner in the village; he lived in a different one. Kangali cried, submitted himself in front of him; lastly, he mortgaged the metal water pot and paid him a rupee. He did not come; gave four medicine globules. The preparation was huge- khole, honey, juice of ginger, the juice of basil’s leaves. Annoyed with her son, Kangali’s Ma said, “Why did you mortgage the pot without consulting me?” Taking the pills in her hand she touched it to her forehead then throwing them into the oven she said, “If I recover I would recover in this way itself. No one has ever survived in the household of a low caste by taking medicine.”

Two or three days went in the same condition. Hearing the news, the neighbours came to inspect. Whatever quack remedies they knew- water rubbed with horns of a deer, et cetera- were advised after which they went to attend their own work. Seeing young Kangali being harassed, Ma pulled him close and said, “If the practitioner’s medicine did not work, how would their medicines work? I would get well without any assistance.”

Weeping, Kangali said, “You did not take the pills. You threw them in the oven. Does any one recover like this?”

“I would. Nevertheless, prepare meal by boiling rice and vegetables and eat. Let me see that.”

For the first time Kangali started preparing rice with his incompetent hands. Neither could he extract the water properly, nor could he serve it properly. His oven would not lit up. The water splashed inside to create just a smoke. While serving rice, it spread everywhere. Tears came into Ma’s eyes. She tried to rise up from bed but could not straighten her head; she rolled onto the bed.

On finishing the meal, she tried to give her son advice on how to do what but her faint voice stopped. Only tears flowed out uncontrollably from her eyes.

In the village, Ishwar, the barber, knew how to feel the pulse. Next morning he felt her pulse and in her very presense he became grave, heaved a sigh and got up shaking his head. Kangali’s Ma understood the meaning but she was not scared. After everybody had gone, she said to her son, “Could you call him once?”

“Whom Ma?”

“The person who went and settled in the other village.”

Kangali understood and asked, “Father?”

Abhagi remained quiet.

Kangali asked, “Why would he come Ma?”

Abhagi herself had doubts about it, yet she said slowly, “Go and say Ma only wants your blessings.”

He was about to go just then when she pulled him by the arm and said, “Do cry a bit, child. Say Ma is dying.”

Stopping for a while, she said, “While coming back, ask for some alta from the barber’s wife. She would give you as soon as you mention my name. She loves me too much.”

Many loved her indeed. After the onset of fever, he had heard these few things from her so much in so many ways that he set out for the journey crying.

FOUR

The next day when Rasik dule appeared on time, Abhagi did not have much sense. The shadow of death was visible on her face. The eyes had done away with this mortal world and left for another. Crying, Kangali said, “Ma, father has come- you are to take blessings from him.”

She might have understood or might not. It might be that her deeply stored desire like tradition had nudged her subconscious mind. She forwarded her numb hand to receive the blessings.

Rasik stood there dumbfounded. His blessings were necessary and that anybody could ask for them- these very notions were beyond his dreams. Bindi’s aunt was standing there. She said, “Give her your blessings.”

Rasik came forward. The wife whom he did not love, did not provide food nor clothing, did not enquire after her well-being, at the time of her death, he started crying while giving his blessings.

Rakhal’s mother commented, “Being such a pious and pure woman, why is she born amongst us instead of in the family of a Brahmin or Kshtriya. Just to receive the fire from Kangali’s hand, she had forsaken her life.”

I do not know what the god of Abhagi’s misery thought invisible but these words pierced the heart of young Kangali like an arrow.

The morning passed, the first hour of the night too passed, but Kangali’s Ma could not wait for the dawn. I do not know whether there were any arrangements of a chariot for such a low caste, or whether they had to journey on their feet. Nevertheless, this was comprehendible that no sooner, the night died out, she left this world.

There was a wood-apple tree in the courtyard of the cottage. Borrowing an axe, no sooner did Rasik hit it, the zaminder’s darwan ran towards him out of no where and placed a resounding slap on his cheek. Snatching the axe, he snapped, “Was that your father’s tree that you were cutting it down?”

Rasik started rubbing his cheek. Almost weeping, Kangali complained, “This tree was planted by my mother. What did you hurt my father for?”

The Hindustani darwan was also thinking of thrashing after verbally abusing him but he had touched his mother’s corpse. For fear of getting impure, he did not touch him. Because of such a chaos, a crowd formed. No body denied that it was not good on Rasik’s part to start cutting down the tree without permission. Again, they themselves tried to convince darwan so he gave the permission. Because whoever came to see her in the time of fever, Kangali’s Ma eagerly told that person her last wish.

Darwan would not be convinced. Moving his limbs, he announced this sort of tricks could not be applied on him.

Zaminder was not a local man. He had a cutcherry in the village. The revenue collector, Adhar Roy was the manager of it. When the people were vainly requesting the darwan, Kangali ran breathlessly towards the cutcherry. He had heard from people’s mouth that the employees took bribes. He believed it for certain that if he could report about this highly unjustified oppression to the manager, he would not stop from taking a step. O, the inexperienced child! He did not know the Bangladesh zaminders and their employees. In confusion and excitement of recently losing his mother, he straightaway went upstairs. Adhar Roy was coming out after the evening prayer and an adequate meal. Astonished and angry, he asked, “Who is it?”

“I am Kangali. Darwan thrashed my father.”

“He has done the right thing! The rogue must not have paid the revenue, didn’t he?”

Kangali said, “No babumoshai, my father was cutting down a tree; my mother has died…” While reporting this he could not suppress his tears.

Adhar became very irritated by this weeping in the morning itself. “The boy has come here touching a dead body. I wish he has not touched anything here!” He snapped and said, “Your mother has died; then go downstairs and stand. Hallos, whoever is there, sprinkle some holy cow dung water over here. What caste are you?”

Afraid, he descended to the courtyard and said, “We are dule.”

Adhar said, “Dule? Why do you need wood for the corpse of a dule?”

Kangali said, “Ma has told me to apply fire in her pyre. You ask babu moshai, ma has told everyone; every single person has head of it. Talking about Ma’s wishes, reminded shortly of all her requests, his voice seemed to burst out of emotions.

Adhar said, “If you want to burn your ma’s body, bring five rupees for that tree. Could you?”

Kangali knew it was impossible. He had seen with his very own eyes that Bindi’s aunt had gone to mortgage the brass metal plate used for eating food for a rupee in order to buy a stole. He shook his head and said, “No.”

Adhar frowned twisting his face and said, “If you cannot go and bury your ma in the sand-bank of the river. On whose father’s tree has your father touched the axe? Scoundrel, wretched, shameless!”

Kangali said, “Bu that is the tree in our courtyard, babu moshai! That tree has been planted by my mother!”

“Planted by my mother! Padhe, hold this fellow by the collar and push him out!”

Padhe held him by the collar and pushed him out. Moreover, uttered such profane words that only employes of a zaminder would dare.

Kangali brushing off the dust, stood up. Then slowly went out. Why he was thrashed, what his fault was, he could not understand. Not a scratch fell in the heart of the indifferent revenue collector. Had it been so, he would not have got the job. He ordered, “Paresh, see whether this fellow has failed to pay the revenues. If there is, snatch a net or so from him. The bastard might escape.”

It was the day for funeral ceremony in the Mukherjee household. The arrangement of the pomp was made at par with her level in the house. Old Thakurdas was returning after superintending the work when Kangali went and stood in front of him. He said, “Thakurmoshai, my Ma has died.”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“I am Kangali. Ma has ordered me to burn her body with own hand.”

“Then go and do it.”

The news of the cutcherry incident was spread verbally. A person said, “Perhaps he wants a tree.” Saying thus, he revealed the incident by narrating it.

Astonished and irritated, Mukherjee said, “Just listen to his demand! I myself need a whole lot of woods! The work is day after tomorrow. Go away! You will get nothing form here- nothing at all!” Saying thus, he went away elsewhere.

Bhattacharya was making a list sitting close by. He remarked, “Who has ever burnt the dead bodies in your caste? Go, lighting a grass inside the mouth, bury her in the sand-bank of the river.”

Mukherjee’s eldest son was going somewhere through that way was in a great hurry. Listening to the conversation intently, he said, “Did you notice Bhattacharya, all want to be brahmins and kshtriyas!” Saying thus, he went away somewhere in the mood of his work.

Kangali did not request any more. With the experience of these two hours, he had grown too old for this world. Quietly and slowly, he went away and stood near his dead Ma.

Digging a grave in the bank of the river, Abhagi was laid. Lighting up a straw faggot in his hand, holding and touching that to his mother’s mouth, Rakhal’s nother threw it away. Then everyone wiped off the last sign of Kangali’s Ma burying her.

Everyone got busy with his work. Only Kangali stared upward at the slight smoke winding up the sky from the burnt straw faggot without blinking.

]]> http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/translating-from-bangla-to-english-sarat-chandra-chattopadyay%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cabhagir-sorgo%e2%80%9d-recreated-as-%e2%80%9cthe-heaven-of-the-wretched%e2%80%9d/feed/ 0 may7black http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/history-as-a-colonizing-and-de-colonizing-tool-alternative-history-of-black-americans/ http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/history-as-a-colonizing-and-de-colonizing-tool-alternative-history-of-black-americans/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:12:08 +0000 may7black http://may7black.wordpress.com/?p=235 ]]>

History ceased to be something for historians alone. Instead, it is become both a public issue and an instrument of politics. Written histories rely on a willing complicity between author and audience. Being subject to the narrative and descriptive strategies of language, which unfold sequentially, they require the active collaboration of the reader in construing the story not only in its linear and chronological but also in its spatial and geographical dimensions.

In describing cultures, for example, histories may seek to evoke the aura of place and of the social environment as well as to articulate a certain sequence or density of “significant” events. They may attempt not only to document external actions, but also to reconstruct the experiential realities of the people whose lives they study. Indeed, it could be argued that the whole discourse of cultural difference is rooted in precisely such an awareness of mind-sets and attitudes, rather than in technical or factual criteria, indispensable as these are to the historical project. One of the many difficulties of cultural interpretation is to do equal justice to the demands of facts and events, on the one hand, and of perceived values and “felt life,” on the other. Ideally, a written history needs to be structured by its author, and construed by its reader, around a flexible model that can accommodate a diversity of information and facilitate its inspection in terms of both fac- tual status and epistemological perspective. The model exists to promote rather than to confine observation: meanings and insights are not predetermined by its frame of reference, but flow from it.

Colonial structures of governance often ignored the alternative realms- ties of locality and kinship often articulated in religious terms – which, emerged, opposed and even were antagonistic to the idea of a national identity.

Creation of history then became an important tool in the hands of the colonizers. One of the main streams of Post-colonial studies is the concept of power. Power does not rule by physical subjugation. It uses consensus as its weapon. It colonizes the mind. History then becomes the most important way to create such a consensus. The creation of a false history is ordered to hide the real one.

History is written by the victorious. Those who wield the sword wield the pen. The powerful paint the pictures in their colours. What is left then is a plethora of images combined together to form a collage that depicts a tale

that the powerful wants to portray. History is not narrated but re-created.

Alain Locke writes in “The New Negro” that the Blacks were treated as a ‘formala’ rather than a human being. Blacks were something to be “argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down’, or ‘in his place’, or ‘helped up’, to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden”. The Black had become more of a myth than a man. Arthur A. Schomburg in his essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past” argues for the necessity of having and preserving a sense of one’s history, especially when one belongs to a group whose history and humanity were routinely denied under slavery and segregation. What was missing from the history was an “accurate observations of things as they exist” (to quote David Walker).

This paper is the alternate history, one that shows how Blacks were not objects. This paper is a chronicle of few great Black personalities who rose and showed their worth in the world as against what the white history wanted to portray and believe.

James Durham was born in 1762. He was the first recognized Black physician in the United States.

Born a slave in Philadelphia, his early masters taught him the fundamentals of reading and writing. Durham was owned by a number of doctors, ending up in New Orleans with a Scottish physician, who hired him in 1783 to perform medical services. When he was 21, he bought his freedom and went to New Orleans where he set up his own medical practice. He was a popular and distinguished doctor in New Orleans, at least in part for his knowledge of English, French, and Spanish.

He was invited to Philadelphia in 1788 to meet Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Rush was so impressed with Dunham’s success in treating diphtheria patients, that he read Durham’s paper on the subject before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

In 1789, Durham returned to New Orleans, where he saved more yellow fever victims than any other physician in colonial Philadelphia. During an epidemic that killed thousands, he lost only 11 of 64 patients. He moved back to New Orleans and was lauded by prominent local doctors.

Despite his skill, his ability to save so many lives, and his flourishing practice, his practice was restricted in 1801 by new city regulations because he did not have a formal medical degree.

He disappeared after 1802. The idea that Black people were incapable of understanding medicine remained widespread for decades.

Charles P. Adams, Sr. was born in 1873. He was an African-American educator and administrator.

He was born in Brusly, Louisiana, and worked his way through Tuskegee Institute. During this time he became a committed student of Booker T. Washington. In 1901, the North Louisiana Farmers’ Relief Association (NLFRA) asked the now- graduated Adams to return to Louisiana. The group had asked Tuskegee’s Booker T. Washington to find a man capable of setting up an agricultural and industrial school in North Louisiana. Adams was that man and that school eventually became Grambling University.

On acreage two miles west of the school’s present site, Adams established what was known as the Colored Industrial and Agricultural School. The first student body of this little school totaled 105 students, most of them from the immediate community. Room and board was five dollars a month, most often paid with home-cured meat, chickens, syrup, meal, flour, and potatoes. In 1904, he married Martha N. Adams.

He lectured in nearby communities, and through his connection with Washington, he secured some financial assistance from the northern states and from Canada to keep the struggling institution alive. The school’s first faculty consisted of three people: Adams, as principal and teacher, his wife, Martha, co-founder as well as domestic science teacher, and A. C. Welcher, a farm instructor.

In 1905, Adams left Grambling because its NLFRA Baptist membership wanted a church-centered school and the Tuskegee-trained Adams wanted a school devoted to training people for making a good living on their farms, improving health conditions, and living more efficiently in groups. Soon after, seven Negro men in the Grambling community, Adams among them, pledged $25 dollars each for a new school site and a 200-acre plot five miles west of Ruston, LA, was purchased for $800. For 35 years, Adams headed the school, now officially known as Grambling State University of Louisiana. Most of those years were very difficult ones, but Adams and Grambling perservered.

Charles Phillip Adams Sr., one of the last of the chain of pioneer educators, died on June 27, 1961.

Alexander Thomas Augusta was born in 1825. He was a black physician and educator.

From Norfolk, Virginia, as a young man he first made his way to Baltimore, Maryland, where he worked as a barber. He began his study of medicine with private tutors and next applied for admission to the University of Pennsylvania. Though access was denied, a Professor William Gibson was impressed with Augusta and brought him under his guidance.

In 1856, Augusta was accepted to the College of the University of Toronto. His Bachelors of Medicine degree was awarded by Trinity Medical College. After establishing a successful private practice in Canada, in 1862 Dr. Augusta returned to an America on the verge of Civil War. Pressed into service in 1863, Augusta became the first Black surgeon in the U.S. Army. He was commissioned a major in the Seventh U.S. Colored Troops as the (then) highest ranking Black officer. Soon two white assistant surgeons complained to President Lincoln about having to report to a Black officer. Lincoln then forced Augusta to transfer to Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Augusta petitioned Senator Henry Wilson for payroll assistance. He successfully argued that as a medical examiner he deserved more than the $7.00 per month normally given to a Black enlisted man. Senator Wilson agreed and pressured the Army paymaster in Baltimore to apply the appropriate pay rate for his rank. In March of 1865, Augusta received the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, the first Black ever to gain this stature.

After discharge in 1866, Augusta continued private practice in Washington, D.C., and taught in the newly founded Howard University Medical Department. He retired from Howard University in 1877 and continued to practice medicine until his death. Lieutenant Colonel Augusta received full military honors with burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The life of Alexander Thomas Augusta can be summed in a single word, determination. He died in 1890.

J.P. Ball was born in 1825. He was an African-American Abolitionist, free Black man, photographer and businessman.

From Virginia, in 1845 James Presley Ball opened a one-room studio in Cincinnati, Ohio. One year later Ball returned to Richmond, Virginia and had a more successful business in a rented studio located near the State Capital building. Ball returned to Ohio in 1847, as a traveling daguerrotypist, (a special field of photography) and settled in Cincinnati. There he hired his brother (Thomas) as a studio operator. In 1852 his brother-in-law (Alexander Thomas) became a partner in the studio; and the Ball and Thomas Gallery opened for business

In 1855, he published a pamphlet addressing the misery of slavery from capture in Africa, through the Middle Passage, and then to bondage. He also held photo exhibitions on the experience of slavery. During the 1850’s displays of Ball’s daguerreotypes were shown at the Ohio State Fair and at the Ohio Mechanics Annual Exhibition. In May of 1860, the Ball and Thomas Photographic Art Gallery was destroyed by tornado; however it was rebuilt with help from the community.

During the 1870s Ball dissolved his partnership with Thomas and moved to Minneapolis, opening another studio. In 1887, he was the official photographer of the 25th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation held in Minneapolis. During October of that year, Presley relocated to Helena, Montana where between 1887-1894, he produced hundreds of photographs of the White, Black and Chinese community. In 1900, he moved to Seattle and opened another studio under the firm name of Globe Photo Studio. James Presley Ball died in 1904.

Bridget “Biddy” Mason was born in 1818. She was a once illiterate African-American slave woman who worked as a nurse/midwife and then walked from Mississippi to California to become a successful entrepreneur and a generous contributor to social causes.

From Mississippi, she was born on a plantation owned by Robert Marion Smith and Rebbecca (Crosby) Smith. In 1847, Smith became a Mormon convert and decided to move to the Utah Territory with his household and slaves where Brigham Young was starting a Mormon community. In this strenuous two-thousand-mile cross-country trek, Mason was responsible for herding the cattle. She also prepared meals, acted as a midwife and took care of her children. In 1851, Smith moved his household again, this time to San Bernardino, California. Smith probably did not know that California had been admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state and that slavery was forbidden there.

At this time she had made friends in the L. A. black community and one of them (Charles Owens) helped Mason petition the court and in 1856 won freedom for herself and for her daughters. She moved to Los Angeles and found employment as a nurse and midwife. Hard work and her nursing skills allowed her to become economically independent. She became a domestic to Dr. John S. Griffin who served most of the Los Angeles area. Mason was also very frugal and only ten years after gaining her freedom, she bought a site on Spring Street for $250 becoming one of the first black women to own land in Los Angeles.

This site is now in the center of the commercial district in the heart of the city. In 1884, she sold a parcel of the land for $1500 and built a commercial building with spaces for rental on the remaining land. She continued making wise decisions in her business and real estate transactions and her financial fortunes continued to increase until she accumulated a fortune of almost $300,000. Her grandson, Robert Curry Owens, a real estate developer and politician, was the richest African-American in Los Angeles at one time.

Mason was a founding member of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1872. She also gave generously to various charities and provided food and shelter for the poor of all races and she never forgot the jail inmates whom she visited often. In 1872 she and her son-in-law, Charles Owens, founded and financed the Los Angeles branch of the First African Methodist Episcopal church, L. A.’s first black church. Biddy Mason died January 15, 1891 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Evergreen cemetery in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles. Nearly a century later, on March 27, 1988 a tombstone was unveiled which marked her grave for the first time in a ceremony attended by Mayor Tom Bradley and about three thousand members of the First African Methodist Episcopal church.

Thursday, November 16, 1989 was declared Biddy Mason Day and a memorial of her achievements was unveiled at the Broadway Spring Center located between Spring Street and Broadway at Third Street in Los Angeles.

Ignatius Sancho, a Black writer was born in 1729. He was born on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean from the West African nation of Guinea. After the ship reached the Caribbean port of Cartagena, in what is now Colombia, his mother died and his father committed suicide.

He was baptized “Ignatius.” After several years, Sancho was taken to Greenwich, England, where he was given to three unmarried women. They gave him the surname “Sancho” because he reminded them of the squire in Don Quixote. He later ran away and became butler to the Duchess of Montagu. Sancho later ran a grocery shop in Westminster. Self educated, he composed music, appeared on the stage, and wrote numerous letters, published in 1782, after his death. Ignatius Sancho died in 1780.

Austin Stewart was born in 1793. He was a Black slave, businessman, administrator and biographer of his life as a slave in America.

Steward was born in Prince William County, Virginia where his master, William Helm, owned over a hundred slaves. When Steward was eight years old he became a house servant at Helm’s mansion. His master sold his plantation and slaves and moved to Bath in Steuben County. In financial difficulties, Helm also hired his slaves out to local farmers. Some of these men treated Stewart horrifically, which defined his reason to escape. Steward reached Canada in 1815 where he joined the Wilberforce Colony that had been established by the Society of Friends. It was there that he was chosen the settlements president.

In 1817, he created a successful business in Rochester. 9 years later he delivered an oration at the celebration of the New York emancipation act, and in 1830 he was elected vice-president of the National convention of Negroes in Philadelphia. While in Wilberforce, he used his own funds to carry on the affairs of the colony but in 1837, with no more land to be sold to the colonists by the Canada Company, Stewart returned to Rochester. He afterward opened a school in Canada, and after two years became an agent for the “Anti-Slavery Standard.”

As an elder he wrote of his experiences in his autobiography, Twenty-Two Years a Slave which appeared in 1857. As an American reference it is considered one of the best slave narratives published. Austin Steward died in 1860.

]]> http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/history-as-a-colonizing-and-de-colonizing-tool-alternative-history-of-black-americans/feed/ 0 may7black http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/poetry-and-fiction-of-d-h-lawrence/ http://may7black.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/poetry-and-fiction-of-d-h-lawrence/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:02:18 +0000 may7black http://may7black.wordpress.com/?p=228 ]]>

I am that I am
from the sun,
and people are not my measure.

(“Aristocracy of the Sun“)

In Lawrence’s poetry, more than in his prose, we see frequently the spontaneous discovering of Being. To Lawrence the beauty of the universe is a perpetual creation. The universe is not an abstraction, not an intellectual discovery or deduction. Though to him the novel remained the one “bright book of life” because of its dramatic rendering of the complex interrelatedness of life, it is in his poetry that his ability to show the unique beauty of the passing moment. Even the passing psychological moment is most clearly illustrated in his poetry.

Lawrence’s poems are blunt, exasperating, and gives the readers a feeling of fragmentation. The poems are a part of the whole which is too vast to be envisioned. They are meant to be spontaneous works, spontaneously experienced; they are not meant to give us the sense of grandeur or permanence that other poems attempt, the fallacious sense of immortality that is an extension of the poet’s ego. Yet they achieve a kind of immortality precisely in this: that they transcend the temporal, the intellectual. They are ways of experiencing the ineffable “still point” that Eliot could approach only through abstract language.

For Lawrence life predates art, and art predates any traditional form. He was fascinated by the protean nature of reality, the various possibilities of the ego. Throughout his poems, there is a deep, unshakable faith in the transformable quality of all life. Even the elegiac “The Ship of Death” ends with a renewal, in typically Lawrentian words: “. . . and the whole thing starts again.” He says, “No poetry, not even the best, should be judged as if it existed in the absolute, in the vacuum of the absolute. Even the best poetry, when it is at all personal, needs the penumbra of its own time and place and circumstance to make it full and whole.”

Lawrence says coldly in the poem “Blank”:

At present l am a blank and I admit it.
. . . So I am just going to go on being a blank, till some-
thing nudges me from within,
and makes me know I am not blank any longer.

The poems themselves are nudges, some sharp and cruel and memorable indeed, most of them a structured streams of consciousness. They are fragments of a total self that could not always keep up the strain of totality. Sometimes Lawrence was anguished over this, but most of the time he believed that in his poetry, as in life itself, what must be valued is the springing forth of the natural, forcing its own organic shape, not being forced into a preordained structure. He is much more fluid and inventive than the imagists, whose work resembles some of his cooler, shorter poems, in his absolute commitment to the honoring of his own creative processes. Lawrence utilized and valued spontaneity. He says:

Ours is the universe of the unfolded rose,
The explicit,
The candid revelation.

(“Grapes”)

For Lawrence it is the beauty and mystery of flux, of “Becoming,” that enchants us; not permanence, not “Being.” Permanence exists only in the conscious mind and is a structure erected to perfection, therefore airless and stultifying.

Lawrence loves the true marriage of heaven and hell, illusory opposites; he loves to exalt the apparently unbeautiful. For instance, in the poem “Medlars and Sorb-Apples” from his best single volume of poems, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), he says:

I love you, rotten,
Delicious rottenness
I love to suck you out from your skins
So brown and soft and coming suave,
So morbid. . . .

He sees these fruits as “autumnal excrementa” and they please him very much. Earlier, in the poem called “Craving for Spring,” he has declared that he is sick of the flowers of earliest spring—the snowdrops, the jonquils, the “chill Lent lilies” because of their “faint-bloodedness, /slow-blooded, icy-fleshed” purity. He would like to trample them underfoot. (What is remarkable in Lawrence’s “nature” poems is his fierce, combative, occasionally peevish relationship with birds, beasts, and flowers-he does them the honor, as the romantic poets rarely did, of taking them seriously.) It is with a very different emotion that he approaches the sorbs-apples, a kind of worship, a dread:

Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels,
Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant
As if with sweat,
And drenched with mystery.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,
Orphic, delicate
Dionysus of the Underworld.

A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture,
Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.
And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,
A new gasp of farther isolation. . . .

These poems are remarkable in that they refuse to state, with the kind of godly arrogance we take for granted in Shakespeare, that they will confer any immortality on their subjects. As Lawrence says in his short essay ‘Poetry of the Present” (1918), he is not attempting the “treasured, gemlike lyrics of Shelley and Keats,” though he values them. His poetry is like Whitman’s, a poetry of the “pulsating, carnal self,” and therefore Lawrence celebrates the falling away, the rotting, the transient, even the slightly sinister, and above all his own proud isolation, “Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,” until hell itself is somehow made exquisite:

Each soul departing with its own isolation,
Strangest of all strange companions,
And best.

(“Medlars and Sorb-Apples”)

In 1929, Lawrence says in his introduction to Pansies: “A flower passes, and that perhaps is the best of it. If we can take it in its transience, its breath, its maybe Mephistophelian, maybe palely ophelian face, the look it gives, the gesture of its full bloom, and the way it turns upon us to depart. . .” we will have been faithful to it, and not simply to our own projected egos. Immortality, he says, can give us nothing to compare with this. The poems that make up Pansies are “merely the breath of the moment, and one eternal moment easily contradicting the next eternal moment.” The extraordinary word is eternal. Lawrence reveals himself as a mystic by this casual, offhand critical commentary on his own work as much as he does in the work itself. He can experience the eternal in the temporal, and he realizes, as few people do, that the temporal is eternal by its very nature: as if a piece of colored glass were held up to the sun, becoming sacred as it is illuminated by the sun, but also making the sun itself sacred. To Lawrence the sun is a symbol of the ferocious externality of nature, the uncontrollable, savage Otherness of nature, which must be recognized, honored, but not subdued—as if man could subdue it, except by deceiving himself. The sun is “hostile,” yet a mystic recognizes the peculiar dependency of the eternal upon the temporal; the eternal being is made “real” or realized only through the temporal. Someday it may be taken for granted that the “mystical vision” and “common sense” are not opposed, that one is simply an extension of the other, but, because the mystical vision represents a natural development not actually realized by most people, it is said to be opposed to logical thought.

There is a rhythmic, vital relationship between the eternal and the temporal, the one pressing dose upon the other, not remote and cold, but mysteriously close. Lawrence says in “Mutilation”:

I think I could alter the frame of things in my agony.
I think I could break the System with my heart.
I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break.

Inner and outer reality are confused, rush together, making up a pattern of harmony and discord, which is Lawrence’s basic vision of the universe and the controlling aesthetics behind his poetry. It is significant that when Lawrence seems to us at his very worst—in The Plumed Serpent, Kangaroo, much of Apocalypse, nearly all of the poems in Nettles and More Pansies—he is stridently dogmatic, authoritative, speaking without ambiguity or mystery, stating and not suggesting, as if attempting to usurp the position of the Infinite (and unknowable), putting everything into packaged forms. When he seems to us most himself, he is more fragmentary, more spontaneous, inspired to write because of something he has encountered in the outside world—a “nudge” to his blankness, a stimulus he is startled by, as he is by the hummingbird in the poem with that title, imagining it as a jabbing prehistorical monster, now seen through the wrong end of the telescope; or as he is by a doe in “A Doe at Evening,” when he thinks:

Ah yes, being male, is not my head hard-balanced, antlered?
Are not my haunches light?
Has she not fled on the same wind with me?
Does not my fear cover her fear?

Questions, and not answers, are Lawrence’s real technique, just as the process of thinking is his subject matter, not any formalized structures of “art.” Because of this he is one of the most vital of all poets in his presentation of himself as the man who wonders, who asks questions, who feels emotions of joy or misery or fury, the man who reacts, coming up hard against things in a real world, both the creator of poems and the involuntary creation of the stimuli he has encountered—that is, he is so nudged by life that he must react, he must be altered, scorning the protection of any walls of “reason” or “tradition” that might make experience any less painful.

In Lawrence we experience the paradox—made dramatic by his genius—of a brilliant man trying to resist his own brilliance, his own faculty for dividing, categorizing, assessing, making clear and conscious and therefore finite. It seems almost a dark angel of his, this dreaded “consciousness,” and he wrestles with it throughout his life, stating repeatedly that we are “godless” when we are “full of thought,” that consciousness leads to mechanical evil, to self-consciousness, to nullity. He yearned for the separateness of an individual isolation, somehow in conjunction with another human being—a woman—but not dependent upon this person, mysteriously absolved of any corrupting “personal” bond. It is the “pulsating, carnal self” he wants to isolate, not the rational self, the activity of the personality-bound ego he came to call, in a late poem entitled “Only Mao,” the “self-apart-from-God”—his only projection of a real hell, a fathomless fall into the abyss:

For the knowledge of the self-apart-from-God
is an abyss down which the soul can slip
writhing and twisting in all the revolutions
of the unfinished plunge
of self-awareness, now apart from God, falling
fathomless, fathomless, self-consciousness wriggling
writhing deeper and deeper in all the minutiae of self-knowledge, downwards, exhaustive,
yet never, never coming to the bottom. . . .

He uses his intellect not to demolish the mind’s attempts at order, as David flume did, but to insist upon the limits of any activity of ‘pure” reason-to retain the sacred, unknowable part of the self that Kant called the Transcendental Ego, the Ego above the personal, which is purely mental and sterile. So intent is he upon subjecting the “personal” to the “impersonal” that he speaks impatiently of tragedy, which is predicated upon an assumption of the extraordinary worth of certain individuals, and there is in his mind a curious and probably unique equation between the exalted pretensions of tragedy and the rationalizing, decasualizing process he sensed in operation everywhere around him: in scientific method, in education, in industry, in the financial network of nations, even in new methods of war that resulted not in killing but in commonplace murder. Where to many people tragedy as an art form or an attitude toward life might be dying because belief in God is dying, to Lawrence tragedy is impure, representative of a distorted claim to prominence in the universe, a usurpation of the sacredness of the Other, the Infinite. Throughout his life he exhibits a fascination with the drama of the self and its totally Other, not an Anti-Self, to use Yeats’s vocabulary, but a truly foreign life force, symbolized by the sun in its healthy hostility to man. It is a remarkable battle, fought for decades, Lawrence the abrasive, vitally alive individual for some reason absorbed in a struggle to deny the primacy of the individual, the “catastrophe” of personal feeling.

(“Climb Down, O Lordly Mind”)—

The blood knows in darkness, and forever dark,
in touch, by intuition, instinctively.
The blood also knows religiously,
and of this the mind is incapable.
The mind is non-religious.

To my dark heart, gods are.
In my dark heart, love is and is not.
But to my white mind
gods and love alike are but an idea,
a kind of fiction.

Calvin Bedient in a brilliant study of Lawrence argues that his flight from personality had been, in part, an effort to “keep himself separate from others so as to be free to face toward the ‘beyond’ where his mother had become ‘intermingled.’” Because of this, his mysticism is “somewhat morbid.” However, the mystic in Lawrence is fierce to insist upon salvation, even in the face of madness and dissolution, when the merely mental might give way. It is significant that the delirious fever Ursula suffers at the very end of The Rainbow brings her to a mystic certainty of her strength, her unbreakable self; if it is deathly—she evidently suffers a miscarriage—it is not her death, not Lawrence’s idea of death at all. Ursula’s real or hallucinatory terror of the horses (that attempt to run her down in a field) is the means by which she is “saved,” absolved of Skrebensky’s child, which is to her and to Lawrence hardly more than a symbol of the finite, the deathly personal and limited. Nothing in Lawrence is without ambiguity, but it is possible that much that seems to us morbid is really Lawrence’s brutal insistence upon the separation of one part of the self from the other, the conscious self from the unconscious, and both from the truly external, the unknown and unknowable Infinite.

In the cycle of confessional poems called Look! We Have Come Through! (1917) the most important poem is the very mysterious, yet explicit “New Heaven and Earth,” which invites reading in a simplistic manner, as another of the love poems—indeed, Lawrence does more harm than good with his prefatory foreword and “argument” when he suggests that the sequence of poems is about a young man who “marries and comes into himself. . . .” Certainly the spiritual crisis Lawrence suffered at this time had something to do with his private life, with the circumstances of his elopement, but not all marriage is attended by such a radical convulsion of the soul. Lawrence’s marriage, like everything else in his life, must he considered epiphenomenal in relationship to the deeper, less personal emotions he attempts to comprehend. This poem bears a curious resemblance to the very beautiful late poem “The Ship of Death,” though it is about a mystical reaffirmation of life.

Lawrence betrayed no moral, aesthetic, or intellectual timidity in experiencing the unknown or the forbidden. His novels are a proof of that. Sexual conventions in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to his fictional rendering of other characters probe into the human psyche. He insists on leveling conventions, overturning expectations, and unsettling complacency. The essential starting point for new readers of Lawrence is his early novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), in which conflicts force the protagonist, Paul Morel, toward a complicated struggle for an identity of his own. This autobiographical fiction reveals the many powers that compete for the young hero’s soul. The novel unmasks a husband battling a wife, a son rebelling against a father, a mother scorning her son’s lovers, a son pulling away from the bonds of possessive early loves, a lover confronting rivals, and finally the son fighting desperately against the soul-crushing force of his mother’s love and memory. Lawrence had grown up amid the mining-town society of the English midlands, and in Sons and Lovers he subtly analyzes tensions and family politics in his working-class background. Sons and Lovers is an eminently readable novel for perceptive high school students. Its intense, complex portraits of Paul and Gertrude Morel remain some of the most forceful character studies in modern fiction. Students recognize the psychological tensions and the moral problems faced by Paul, and discussion usually produces insights into larger questions about the relationship between autobiography and art.

In “The Fox” (1923) and Women in Love (1920), we recognize the uneasy balance that gives love such power in human lives. “The Fox” presents a simple struggle between a man and a woman for the possession of another woman they both love and want. Even when one has triumphed, by literally killing the rival, the love object cannot be easily possessed. While others fight to possess her, she struggles to re- main free, but the temptation to submit to love, security, and peace always lurks

The Rainbow (1915) details three penetrating studies of loves within a single family. The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lady Chatterley’s Lover, St. Mawr (1925), The Virgin and the Gypsy (posthumously published 1930), and “The Princess” (1925) study a favorite subject-lovers of different nationalities, races, and social classes. “The Prussian Officer” (1914) and Kangaroo (1923) analyze the temptations of power, authority, and politics as substitutes for wholesome love relationships. From these varied portraits of love’s dominion, we get Lawrence’s message: the force of love is beyond the consciousness of even the most sensitive of lovers.

Lawrence’s writings are characterized by his primitivism and pantheism, his criticism of “civilized” bourgeois culture, his sensitive, reverential attitude toward animals, his vatic stance as a poet who knows with certainty the pure truth, his outrage at all individuals or ideas that disagree with his convictions, and his deep and sincere insights into himself.

Bibliography:

Harry T. Moore, “Lawrence from All Sides”, The Kenyon Review, Kenyon College, 1963, pg. 555-558.

J. Charles Mullen, “D. H. Lawrence”, The English Journal, National Council of Teachers of English, 1982, pg. 69-70.

Joyce Carol Oates, “Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung: The Apocalyptic Vision of Women in Love”, Critical Inquiry, 1978.

Joyce Carol Oates, “The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence”, American Poetry Review, 1972, The Massachusetts Review, 1973, Black Sparrow Press, reprinted in New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature.

Vincent Mahon, “Review of Acts of Attention. The Poems of D. H. Lawrence”, The Review of English Studies, Oxford University Press, 1975, pg. 244-246.

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they sang to me

a dreamer they said

and i believed

long after that

after the trees fell and the tiles rusted away.

they asked me..

do not believe..

where am i?

Light white
Sun rays
Green leaves

Winged ants
Pressing of balls
Wired fans
Beeping temple

Dusty dusk
Iron rails
Moving blades
Starched shirts

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