An unlimited idea of freedom and precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us we have to put aside....To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.-Richard Bach
Friday, 24 March 2023
Creation and Criticism
ISSN: 2455-9687
(A Quarterly International Peer-reviewed Refereed e-Journal
Devoted to English Language and Literature)
24. March 2023
Vol. 07, Joint Issue 26 & 27: July-Oct 2022
Book Review
Mirror from the Indus: Essays, Tributes and Memoirs by Nibir K. Ghosh
Nibir K. Ghosh. Mirror from the Indus: Essays, Tributes and Memoirs. New Delhi: Authorspress, 2020. Pages: 208. Price: Rs. 800/- ISBN: 978-93-90155-24-8.
Reviewed by Shanker Ashish Dutt
As an academic, Dr. Nibir Ghosh is singularly free from the guilt of not writing enough. While the global contagion dislocated and altered quotidian schedules, for him it served as an antidote to what Eric Hyot terms ‘virtuous procrastination’. Mirror from the Indus: Essays, Tributes and Memoires published by AuthorsPress (2020) bears testimony to Ghosh’s, energy and diligence and scholarly recapitalisation.
The opening essay on Tagore as an ambassador for universal understanding sets the tenor, as the prophet of literature without borders bequeathed to humanity an intellectual and spiritual legacy of freedom, pluralism and peace in his writings. The India of his imagination emphasised the spiritual virtues of a sustainable civilisation based on mutual respect and understanding among peoples and nations.
Kipling comes next in which Ghosh attempts to balance the pejorative image of an imperialist who advertise the White Man’s Burden as ‘benevolent humanism’ and a positive one that provides an algorithm for the struggles of life that needs to be faced with resilience, equanimity and grace. The poem ‘If ’is addressed to one half of humanity since the notions of gender inclusion probably enter his consciousness much like the masculinist imperial project. It is rather interesting to observe Kipling strategically sandwiched between Tagore and Gandhi, the two apostles of non-violent, anti-colonialism. Ghosh unequivocally valorises Gandhi’s contemporary ethical relevance. However, the offices of privilege and profit seem to have cynical disregard for the Seven Social Sins enumerated in Young India in 1925:
Politics without principles
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
These tenets for an endurable polity germinated from Gandhi’s experiments with truth to become universal codes of human worth.
The vocational trajectory of Sri Aurobindo from being a member of the Lotus and Dagger Society, a committed revolutionary to a spiritual philosopher is a journey of ascending civilisational pursuits. On returning from England, Aurobindo was distressed by the material and spiritual poverty, irrationality, bigotry: ‘baser ideas underlying the degenerate perversions of the original caste system, the mental attitude which bases them on a false foundation of caste, pride and arrogance, of a divinely ordained superiority depending on the accident of birth’. Ghosh writes, as a nationalist, Aurobindo knew that Purna Swaraj could be achieved through the participation of each constituency of Indian society and that its heterogeneity was its strength that could be the driving force of the freedom movement.
Among the other essays that would be of interest to the readers are Subramania Bharati and Indian Independence, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. The Quest for the Good Place in the Essays of W. H. Auden, History in the Future Tense; Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq and Dom Moraes’: The Disenchanted Voyager. Each one of these essays is crafted with a design to focus on relevance and cultural progress in our times.
This contemporary relevance has been incisively articulated by Subramanya Bharati who wrote: ‘In ancient times, do you think that there was not the ignorant, and the shallow minded? And why after all should you embrace so fondly a carcass of dead thoughts. Live in the present and shape the future, do not cast lingering looks to the distant past for the past has passed away, never again to return'.
Mirror from the Indus bears testimony to Ghosh’s multidisciplinary scholarship that has a purpose to build a good place in the manner of Auden: ‘tell them particular stories of particular people with whom they may voluntarily identify themselves, and from which they voluntarily draw conclusions’.
About the Reviewer:
Shanker Ashish Dutt is Professor and Former Head, Department of English, Patna University & Former Chairman, Bihar Sangeet Natak Akademi. As writer and editor, his publications are in areas of Cultural Studies and Liberation literature. He has been a theatre actor and director, a debater and a columnist.
Dr. Véronique
Tadjois a writer, artist and professor of French and Francophone
Literature. Born in France and raised in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), she did
most of her studies in Abidjan before earning a doctorate in Black American
Literature and Civilization at the Sorbonne, Paris IV. In 1983, she went to
Howard University in Washington, D.C. on a Fulbright research scholarship.
Writing in multiple genres in both French and English, she has distinguished
herself in whatever she has turned her inspiration to. Her internationally
acclaimed publications include novels and poetry collections entitled Queen
Pokou, As the Crow Flies, The Shadow of Imana, The Blind Kingdom, Latérite/Red
Earth, besides books for young people: The
Lucky Grain of Corn, Talking Drums, Lord of the Dance among others. Her
work has been translated in many languages. She is the recipient of numerous awards like the Los Angeles Times Book Award for
Fiction, the Commandeur des Arts et des lettres medal by the
French ministry of Culture, Le Prix d’Excellence du
président de la République de Côte d’Ivoire, Writing residency at The Rockefeller Bellagio Centre
in Italy, Carnegie Sandwich
Grant from the University of the Witwatersrand Trans-formation program, the
Iowa International Writing Program residency in Iowa, USA, Writer in residence and Equity
Scholar, Carnegie Transformation Grant at the Writing Centre, University of the
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and Le Grand Prix Littéraire
d’Afrique Noire in Paris, France. Currently, she is Visiting
Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (South Africa)
and shares
her time between London and Abidjan.
Véronique Tadjo’s works
amply display the spirit behind Tennyson’s poem wherein Ulysses says, “I am a part of all that I have met.” Widely travelled,
she admits she has “an aversion to telling a story in a linear form,”
probably reminding one of T. S. Eliot’s line, “I must borrow every
changing shape/ To find expression.” The immensity of the power
of her writing can be gauged from the following lines taken from two of her
poems that were featured in A World Assembly of Poets, published by Re-Markings
as a special number in November 2017 and guest-edited by Dr. Tijan M. Sallah:
What burden do you bear
In this foul world
Heavier than the city
Dying of its wounds?
What power
Links you to this frigid earth
That births twins
Only to separate them?
That raises buildings
Only to crush you
Under tons of cement
And steaming asphalt? (RED
EARTH/LATERITE).
Bound by strong affinity
for the “wretched of the Earth,” the writer in her asserts with conviction:
In truth, loneliness has no
name, since it hides in the recesses of your body. It hides following the path
of your veins, the curve of your spine and the dense swamp of your waking
spirit. Interrogate the cracked mirror, the fragments of your soul that tell
you the truth. Interrogate the fracture, the dispersion. Interrogate,
interrogate to the point of exhaustion” (HALF-WAY/À MI CHEMIN).
In this conversation, the
author spares no effort to discuss various facets of her life and work with
simplicity and frankness that are the hallmarks of her personality.
----------------------------------
Ghosh: You combine within you
multi-dimensional attributes of a novelist, poet,
author of books for young people, illustrator and painter. How do you manage to
strike a balance among so many artistic engagements?
Tadjo: For me it is equivalent to speaking different
languages or simply using various modes of expression. I lost a lot of time
thinking that when you build a career, whatever the field, you must concentrate
on only one thing. But at the end of the day, I realized that what mattered to
me was being in a creative process. And this can take different forms. Most of
the time, the writing process takes precedence but I also like to explore other
avenues. For example, I believe that I am a better writer when I paint.
Ghosh:When did you discover your urge and flair for writing? What were the
influences that shaped your sensibilities as a writer? Do you remember your
first composition?
Tadjo: Poetry was my first calling. I owe a lot to the Négritude
movement. I read Léopold Sédar Senghor, Birago Diop, Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran
Damas. They opened my eyes and my heart to what was happening around me. I was
also touched by French poets like Arthur Rimbaud, Jacques Prévert and Charles Beaudelaire. At a later stage, I
discovered Raymond Carver and Sylvia Plath as well as Japanese Haikus. I would
write poems on bits of paper dotted all around the house. Then I used notebooks
and I never stopped writing. My first published collection of poems, Laterite (1983) was conceived after I
crossed the Sahara desert and ended my trip in the north of Côte d’Ivoire where
I taught English in a school for three years. I fell in love with the region
and the Senoufo people.
Ghosh:What academic training went into the shaping of your career as a
writer? What encouragement did you receive from your parents?
Tadjo: I took a BA (licence) at the English department of
the National university of Abidjan. Then I went on to the Sorbonne to further
my studies in African American Literature and Civilization. I also took African
Literature as a second degree. Although I had started writing when I was young,
I really developed my skills when I had already left home. Right from the
beginning my parents were very supportive. It gave me a lot of confidence to
choose two careers: academic and literary.
Ghosh:Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, it appears you “cannot rest from travel.”
Considering the many countries you have straddled in your academic and creative
career, how have such frequent sojourns impacted your writing?
Tadjo: I am the product of travel. My parents met when my
father left Côte d’Ivoire to further his studies in Economics and Law in
France. My mother left her small hometown in Bourgogne to study Arts in Paris.
Thereafter, my life was again defined by travelling as we would spend many
holidays going back and forth between Côte d’Ivoire and France. I married a
journalist and the travelling intensified even more. I can almost put a little
flag on each of my novels as the various countries where I have lived have had
an impact on my writing. I draw inspiration from what I observe, feel and
learn. Travelling helps me to see the world in its complexity.
Ghosh:W. E. B. Dubois had declared way back in 1903 that "the problem
of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” A century and
twenty years later, what is your perception of the “color line” that Dubois
referred to? From the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights’ movement to the
Black Lives Matter initiative, what changes, if any, do you visualize?
Tadjo: I am saddened by the fact that the problem of the “color
line” is still so prevalent today. One would have thought that a lot had
changed since the Civil Rights movement and all the struggles against
discrimination but unfortunately, Black Lives Matter protests have
demonstrated that there is still more that needs to be done. Police brutality
is a symptom of institutionalracism.
Yet the paradox is that on November 4, 2008, Barack Obama became the first
African American to be elected President of the United States. And there are many more high profile Black and African personalities
who have risen to the fore. However, an exception is not the rule. You can’t
take any gain for granted. The fight for justice and equal opportunities for
all has never been more relevant.
Ghosh: What occasioned your
interest in Black American Literature and Civilization as the subject of your
doctorate degree?Who are your favorite
African American male/female authors?
Tadjo: The subject of my doctorate thesis was: “The process of
acculturation of Black Americans through slavery.” I was interested in looking
at the change that occurred in African slaves when they arrived in the
plantations. They first had to shed their former cultural identity before they
were able to acquire a new and hybrid one at first. Through adversity, they
overcame many obstacles to survive and find their rightful place in American
society. Cultural syncretism is a fascinating phenomenon that comes from the clash
of cultures. It is the fusion of different beliefs and practices to create a
new culture.It is something that occurs
everywhere in the world. So I thought that looking at Black Americans would
help me better understand the changes taking place on the continent as through
the violence of colonization, Africans have had to abandon many of their
traditions to adopt a more “modern” way of life. It is undeniable that Black
Americans have influenced the world with their achievements on many fronts; literature,
the arts, politics and theoretical thinking. Toni Morrison is at the top of my
list with James Baldwin and many other authors.
Ghosh:You worked on
“The Black Church and Black Theology” for your Fulbright project at Howard
University, Washington, D.C. What initiated you into this particular area of
research? What were your primary findings?
Tadjo: I was interested in Black theology and its powerful
message of change. The Black Church in America has been instrumental in the
birth of the Civil Rights movement. At its heart is the idea of social justice
and its transformative force. God is on the side of the Oppressed. It is a
message of resistance and hope as opposed to the usual perception of religion
as “the opium of the people.”
Ghosh:You have been the recipient of the prestigious Fulbright
scholarship. Please narrate your experiences as a Fulbright
scholar. To what extent were you able to meet Senator Fulbright’s ideal of
“humanizing international relations and turning nations into people” through
the scholarships he initiated? Does the spirit of the Fulbright program enter
somewhere in your writings?
Tadjo: Being a Fulbright scholar was very important for me
because it gave me the opportunity to study at Howard University and to immerse
myself in Black American civilization. I lived with a Black American family in
Washington, D.C. and learnt a lot. I was also able to consult key documents in
the many libraries on campus. I had a research director at the Divinity School.
In two of my novels (As the Crow Flies and The Blind Kingdom) you
can find markers of my time during the Fulbright scholarship period. Not
directly but definitively linked to it.
Ghosh:
What similarities and/or differences do you find in your views of African
American and Francophone African writers?
Tadjo: I rarely compare because American and Francophone
writers operate in very different linguistic and cultural spheres. I am glad
that there are more and more translations from English into French and vice
versa. We have common themes of course. They mainly centre on questions of
oppression and identity. Moreover, we share the feeling of black consciousness.
Ghosh: Two of your novels – The
Shadow of Imana (2000) and In the Company of Men (2017) – have for
their subject matter two major crises on the African continent. What motivated
you to undertake a creative journey to fathom apocalyptic realities like the
genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the recurring outbreak of the Ebola
epidemic? Can these two works be called political novels?
Tadjo: There are lots of events happening in the world, some
good, and some bad. We live in a world that is in permanent crisis and within
this situation; Africa has its own challenges. When a specific issue occurs on
the continent, I want to understand the why and how. As I am emotionally
involved (rather than just intellectually involved), it pushes me towards a
creative project. For me, writing is an exploration of pain and a desire to
exorcise it. As an author, I feel a responsibility to record key moments in our
history. It is a privilege to be able to write and to be published. I do not
self-censor myself. It is not because I have talked about the genocide in
Rwanda that I will not speak about environmental degradation and the emergence
of the Ebola epidemic. Yes, you could say that both The Shadow of Imana and In
the Company of Men are political novels. However, I would prefer to qualify
them as “Committed literature” or what is called “Littérature engagée” in
French.
Ghosh: The Rwanda genocide of
1994, termed by the BBC as “100 days of slaughter,” saw the extermination of
800,000 people from the minority Tutsi community by the demographically
dominant Hutus. How did you manage to capture the graphic details of the grim
tragedy in The Shadow of Imana: “These dead are screaming still. The
chaos remains palpable. The events are too recent. This is not a memorial but
death laid bare, exposed in all its rawness. … The bones of the skeleton-corpse
are disintegrating before our very eyes. The stench infects our nostrils and
settles inside our lungs, contaminates our flesh, lingers in our bodies and our
minds"?
Tadjo: I wrote The Shadow
of Imana as part of a project called “Rwanda, writing as a duty to memory”
that took place in 1998. It was set up by Fest’Africa, a festival of African
literatures and cultures based in Lille, France and founded by Nocky Djedanoum
(Tchad) and Maïmouna Coulibaly (Côte d’Ivoire). The project involved a dozen
African writers from different countries. We went together to Kigali to observe
life in post genocide Rwanda. Each one of us wrote a book from our experience.
Being physically present in Rwanda and having the opportunity to talk to
survivors helped us to capture some of the graphic details. It was essential
for me to be among Rwandese. You must also take into account that the genocide
took place in 1994 and our trip to Rwanda took place four years later. The
country was still reeling from the tragedy; a lot of things were still raw and
unprocessed. We wanted to tell it as we saw it.
Ghosh: You appear to mix, what
T. S. Eliot would call, “memory and desire” when you lyrically say in The
Shadow of Imana: “May my eyes see, may my ears hear, may my mouth speak. I
am not afraid of knowing. But may my mind never lose sight of what must grow
with us: hope and respect for life." What are the sources of your “hope
and respect for life” in a world ruled by tyrants, despots and power-hungry
fundamentalists? What is the significance of the presiding tribal deity “Imana”
in the title of the novel?
Tadjo: We cannot give up. Wanting a better world may sound like
a hopeless quest but it is the only one worth fighting for. I am a writer so
that’s what I do. Silence is no option. The respect for life is part of the survival
of humanity; from the fight against violence and extremism to the preservation
of the Earth and the need to reverse the destructive effects of climate change.
Each gene-ration has its part to play. “Imana” is the name of God in
Kinyarwanda. Therefore, the title refers to the erasure of traditional
spirituality that took place during the various periods of colonization from Germany
and Belgium followed by France’s involvement in its affairs. It created a
vacuum that was filled by a superficial understanding of Christianity. The
breakdown of ancient cultural references may have caused a trauma of unknown
proportion.
Ghosh: You published your
epoch-making novel, In the Company of Men, in 2017. What inspired you to
write about the Ebola epidemic that originated in 1976 near the Ebola river in
Congo and continued to make its presence felt with its outspread becoming more
severe in 2014 with over eleven thousand people losing their lives in Guinea,
Liberia, and Sierra Leone?
Tadjo: When we talk about Ebola today, it is usually in
reference to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. This is because it was by
far the deadliest. It also received intense media coverage. The previous
epidemics were minor in comparison and therefore engendered little attention
from the world. Small villages being stricken by the disease did not make news.
Diseases like malaria among others did not make news either, until recently (as
they are starting to cross borders). My aim was to take the 2014 Ebola epidemic
as a defining moment. It showed Africa and the world the terrible state of our
health systems and the urgent need to reform them. A catastrophe remains a catastrophe
if it is not followed by qualitative change. The book is a call for such a
change made more urgent because of environmental degradation.
Ghosh: Did you have to undertake
extensive research into various manifestations of the cause-effect
relationship pertaining to the Ebola crisis? How did you go about writing the
novel?
Tadjo: I would say that from
2014 when the Ebola epidemic became a prime concern, all the way up to the
writing of the book I was busy gathering information. And the more I researched
the subject, the more it strengthened my resolve to continue with my project. I
learnt that there had been at least ten previous Ebola epidemics that occurred
in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the virus was first identified and
that there were different types of Ebola viruses known to be present in Sudan,
Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, and even Asia with various degrees of lethality. Very
recently, an outbreak was declared on 20 September 2022 in the Western Region
and Central Region of Uganda. It is Uganda's fifth Ebola outbreak.The problem is not over.
Being
an academic helped me tremendously (in terms of the methodology to adopt) when
doing the research because the same skills can be applied to creative writing.
When producing an academic article, it is said that you have to withdraw behind
“neutrality” and stay on the ‘rational’ path. On the other hand, when you
write creatively, you tend to put the emphasis on emotional knowledge. You are
appealing to the readers’ sense of identification with the characters because
you want to break the cycle of indifference. To a certain extent, this
multidimensional form opens up new possibilities.
Ghosh: There is a 1997 film In
the Company of Men on a totally different theme. Is it a mere
coincidence?
Tadjo: Yes, there is absolutely no link with this film. The
title of my book refers to a change of gaze. Non-humans and nature are “in the
company of humans” because they share the same territorial space, the Earth.
Ghosh: Do you have any plans of
rendering into fiction how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world like never
before? If yes, what lessons, according to you, would you like to share with
your readers?
Tadjo: I am sure that the COVID-19 pandemic will feature in my
writing. I have already written several short pieces of the subject. It has
deeply affected every one of us. It was devastating in Latin America, India and
Brazil for example. But the pandemic has not been experienced with the same
intensity all around the world. What shocked me was the injustice in the access
to treatment. Vaccine nationalism was a low moment for humanity as too many
Western countries kept more vaccines than they needed. I think that we will
talk about the pandemic for a long time to come, looking at its various
ramifications. Viruses know no borders, race, faith or political affiliation.
As a human species, we will keep the world safe only through solidarity.
Ghosh: Is your remark, “I follow
the African tradition of storytelling which gives me a great freedom of
interpretation of our myths and legends. I am interested in preserving the
richness of our cultural heritage for the generations to come,” an extension of
the legacy of writers like Chinua Achebe? Also, how did you get to acquire
significant insights into the African oral tradition with its myths and
legends?
Tadjo: I was raised in Côte d’Ivoire. I grew up with oral
traditions which have played an important part in the fabric of society. They
are very resilient and are still alive in people’s imaginary landscape even
though we have lost so much. I am fascinated by myths and legends. Many people
tend to think that they are irrelevant in today’s world. I tend to disagree; I
think that they continue to shape our vision of the world and our place in it. Writers
like Chinua Achebe knew their power and his writing is an exploration of the
encounter between tradition and modernity. On the francophone side, the great
Malian writer and historian, Amadou Hampâté Bâ has had a strong influence on my
work.
Ghosh: You mention that you
chose English as your scholarly profession with French as your creative
profession. What led you to such a decision? Which language do you use
frequently while communicating with your family and friends in Côte d'Ivoire?
Tadjo: Having lived in several Anglophone countries and in
particular in South Africa where I headed the French and Francophone department
for seven years as a professor at the university of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, English has imposed itself as an academic language for me.
Emotionally, I am attached to French. It is my main creative medium, although I
do also write creatively in English. In Côte d’Ivoire, we have our own French
which has been influenced by the various local languages spoken in the country
(a kind of creole). We immediately switch to it when we are among family and
friends.
Ghosh: What motivated you to
take up painting? You have designated your art work as "magic
realism." Do you find this technique of mixing myth, magic and memories
useful in unravelling the mysteries of contemporary realities? Is Gabriel
Garcia Marquez an influence?
Tadjo: My mother was a painter and she became a sculptor towards
the end of her life. She gave me the passion for visual art. I started with
illustration because I was abroad and wanted pictures to go with my books for
young people. I then ventured into painting on canvas. She encouraged me to
find my “voice”. She used to say, “Just do it, go ahead.” I have adopted the
literary term coined by Gabriel Garcia Marquez because it is the closest to
what I try to do visually. I start painting something that is recognizable, and
then I distance myself from it in order to enter another realm.
Ghosh: How would you describe
your experiences as a professor of Literature at various universities? In terms
of teaching and learning methods how would you compare teaching in Africa with
that in the USA?
Tadjo: There is a big discrepancy between Western and African
universities in terms of academic resources. Even in South Africa where you
find some of the best universities on the continent, funds are limited and
cannot cover the great educational needs of a country coming out of the
oppression of the Apartheid regime. In West Africa, most educational systems
would benefit from reforms. Education needs to become again “the priority of
priorities” as it was thought at independence. There is a great desire to learn
and a lot of talent.
Ghosh: What response did the
anthology Talking Drums: A Selection of Poems from Africa south of
the Sahara evoke from African as well as Western audiences? Do the diverse
new voices in the collection signal a bright future of poetry from the said
region?
Tadjo: I conceived the anthology as an initiation to African
poetry. It starts with traditional poems and moves to contemporary ones. My
intention was to tell the story of the continent through poetry. It was very
well received. Poetry is alive and well on the continent. There are many
diverse voices. The Spoken Word movement for example has taken poetry into the
open again thanks to an oral art that is based on performance.
Ghosh: You have made an
impressive mark in the domain of Children’s literature. What ideas and
approaches do you bring into play when you are writing for children? Who would
you consider a role model in writing stories for children?
Tadjo: Today, children living in cities do not have access
to stories easily. I
started writing albums with pictures because I wanted to bring my contribution
to the development of literature for young people in Côte d’Ivoire. In the 80’s
in collaboration with my publisher we started several collections. I enjoy
writing for different age groups. When I wrote my book on Nelson Mandela, No
to Apartheid! it was to celebrate the life of an icon of the liberation, to
keep his memory alive. I am attracted by stories from all over the world and by
traditional storytelling.
Ghosh: In recent parlance what
is your take as a writer on the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Tadjo: I am a believer in non-violence as a citizen and as a
writer. For me the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the on-going conflict that
followed has had a profound negative impact on the world. We see an escalation
of violence with a call for more and more weapons and a terrifying threat of
nuclear disaster. I would have wanted more emphasis on negotiation and
diplomacy. This is the very opposite of weakness. As we stand now, the
possibility of a World War III has become less remote. We need peace to come
back quickly. We are living in dangerous times. I wonder what Mahatma Gandhi,
Martin Luther King, Jr. or Nelson Mandela would have made of our dire
situation.
Ghosh: In the context of
protests in Iran over the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody, what is your
message to young women writers across nations and cultures?
Tadjo: The death of Mahsa Amini on 16 September 2022 in police
custody, after she was arrested by morality police officers for allegedly
wearing her hijab too loosely,is absolutely incomprehensible.
It is absurd and it shows the level of oppression and the denial of fundamental
human dignity suffered by Iranian women living under the Islamic republic.
The protests that continue to spread in spite of the severe repression are
about ending religious extre-mism. They have grown into a broad movement
against the theocracy that has ruled Iran since the 1979 revolution. What we
must retain from this is that fighting for your rights is an on-going battle
that requires collective consciousness and action.
Ghosh: Many thanks Dr. Tadjo for
this engagingly enlightening conversation.
·
Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh is UGC Emeritus Professor, Agra College,
Agra. A Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA
during 2003-04), he has authored/edited 15 widely acclaimed books. He has
interviewed till date 35 celebrity writers, statesmen, historians and poets
from around the world that have been published in two collections entitled Multicultural
America: Conversations with Contemporary Authors (2005) and Republic of
Words: Conversations with Creative Minds from Around the Globe (2021).
v
This conversation was featured in Vol. 22 No. 1 March 2023 issue of RE-MARKINGS (www.re-markings.com) pp. 21-30.
It might be almost a year since the
quarter-century of the passing of a major poet but Rock & the Beat
Generation is still delighted to run a memorial from a significant counterculture
scholar
AN AMERICAN literary academic of note and the author of the much
valorised American Scream: Allen
Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation recently released an essay
reflecting on the poet’s death in 1997.
Jonah Raskin’s tribute appears in the March 2023 issue of the
journal Re-Markings, published in Agra, India. The
San Francisco-based writer tells us: ‘Agra is home of the Taj Mahal, where Beat
literature is widely read and appreciated especially Ginsberg's poetry.’
We are pleased, indeed honoured, to
share this slightly belated account with the readership of this website…
‘Allen Ginsberg revisited: An appraisal on the 25th anniversary
of the poet’s death’
By Jonah Raskin
----------------------------------
Allen Ginsberg published his own confessional and
autobiographical poetry for half-a century, beginning in the 1940s and
continuing until his death in 1997. An extraordinary performer, and a
peripatetic poet he also helped create the Beat Generation literary movement
with his publicity savvy. This essay, written on the 25th anniversary of his
death, looks back at his life, his work and the times that shaped him and that
he also had a hand in shaping. The author offers insights into ‘Howl’ and
‘Kaddish’, which he argues are his two best poems. He also points to Ginsberg's
flaws and suggests how readers today might appreciate his body of work, which
has been translated into dozens of languages and read around the world.
----------------------------------
When I’m in the company of poets, poetry lovers and fans of the
literature of the Beat Generation, and the conversation turns to Allen
Ginsberg, I’m asked, invariably, ‘Did you know him?’ I suppose that question
reflects the power of celebrities and the celebrity culture to which Ginsberg
belonged. For decades, he rubbed shoulders with Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Mick
Jagger, Patti Smith and the members of the Clash, the 1980s rock ‘n’ roll band
and its star Joe Strummer. Maybe also, those who want to know if I knew
Ginsberg hope I might share gossip. I do have gossip, but this isn’t a gossip
column so I’ll refrain from broadcasting it. Sam Kushner has juicy gossip in
his book, When I Was Cool.
I did know Allen Ginsberg and I do have
stories to tell. I met him at a party at Patty Oldenburg's apartment in 1972
when we learned that Nixon had defeated George McGovern and yet another nail
was driven into the coffin of the Sixties. Years later, I heard ‘Ginzy’, as
friends called him, perform at College of Marin, north of San Francisco and
invited him to read at Sonoma State University, where I taught literature and
law, including the laws of obscenity. I used his poetry to illustrate how the
law worked and didn’t work. Actually, he asked me to invite him to read. I did.
The University paid him $2,000 for a day's work.
Ever since I was teenager growing up on Long Island, about 45
miles from New York City, I had been a Ginsberg fan. I bought Howl and Other Poems at a bookstore in
Manhattan in 1956, read it from cover to cover and especially liked the poem
‘America’ which includes the line – one of the best known in 20th century
poetry – ‘Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.’ Ginsberg was rarely shy about
using obscenities. They show up repeatedly in ‘Howl’ and landed his publisher
in trouble with the law. The last line in ‘America’ is also a classic: ‘America
I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.’ That was his way of coming out of
the closet and announcing, too, that he meant to be a good citizen in the
democracy he loved and lamented its passing.
Thirty-five or so years after I first
read ‘Howl’ as a teenager, I visited Ginsberg at his apartment in New York and
enjoyed a meal with him in a vegetarian restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East
Side, the neighborhood where he lived for decades. When he said something I
thought was brilliant, but didn’t hear every single word, I asked him to repeat
what he said. He refused. ‘It will come back around again,’ he said. It didn’t.
I regret not pressuring him.
Spending time with Ginsberg and getting to know him helped when
I wrote American Scream: Allen
Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation, which is a biography of the
poet’s most famous work. Like Ginsberg himself, his poem has parents, origins,
an evolution, a birth and crucial events during its post-partum existence.
Because I interviewed him, observed him and watched him on stage, I came to
know the sound of Ginsberg’s spoken words, his body language and his ways of
interacting with audiences. He's a living presence in my bank of memories.
American Scream is all about ‘Howl’, which means that it’s also all about
Allen Ginsberg. It’s about the sources of the poem, the time and place in which
it was written – in San Francisco, away from New York and New Yorkers – its
publication history, its reception and why I think it’s a classic, using T. S.
Eliot’s essay, ‘What is a Classic?’ (1944), to guide me. ‘Every great work of
poetry tends to make impossible the production of equally great works of the
same kind,’ Eliot wrote. ‘Every supreme poet, classic or not, tends to exhaust
the ground he cultivates.’ That’s as true of Ginsberg as it is of Eliot. Both
had imitators. Both were parodied and both of them put the competition to shame.
Most of what I know about Ginsberg and
‘Howl’ does not come directly from the author, though I interviewed him and
taped him on several occasions in New York and in California. Perhaps this
sounds humdrum, but I obtained the most valuable information for my book by
conducting research in the Green Library on the campus of Stanford University,
which purchased a big chunk of his archives for $1 million while he was alive.
Who said poetry doesn’t pay? If you’re
famous enough and you’re truly scribacious, as Ginsberg was, you can make a
fortune selling your manuscripts, letters and notebooks to the highest bidder.
I did not find a long lost letter or a secret diary in the Green Library. There
was no ‘smoking gun’, so to speak, but there were revealing comments by
Ginsberg all along the way.
Rather, it was the accumulation of dozens and dozens of details,
some of them obscure, that helped me understand what made Ginsberg tick, how
and why he came to write ‘Howl’, the ways it changed him and altered the course
of American poetry in the mid-twentieth century, just three decades after T. S.
Eliot wrote and published The Waste Land (1922), which might aptly
be described as a forerunner of ‘Howl’.
They are, after all, both poems about
madness and about the crack up of a society, in Eliot’s case during a critical
stage in the decline and fall of the British Empire after WWI, and in
Ginsberg’s case the aftermath of WWII, the rise of the US as a superpower and
the birth of the nuclear age.
In 2003, when I recognized the obvious –
that the 50th anniversary of Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl, in 1955, was
fast approaching – I knew that I’d have to focus on ‘Howl’, and put aside much
of the material I had gathered which took me into the 1960s.
Now, more than a decade after the publication of American Scream, I think I would begin a talk
or an essay about Ginsberg by saying that ‘the inevitable’ followed him around
with much the same force that fame pursued him. Coincidentally or perhaps not,
the word ‘inevitability’ shows up near the start of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (2008). An occasionally
snarky work, albeit carefully researched and beautifully written by Deborah
Baker, it uncovers and describes a largely unknown chapter of Ginsberg’s life,
when he lived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) among Indian poets and intellectuals.
It meant a lot to them that he came to their world and recognized its beauty as
well as its poverty.
‘What held Allen Ginsberg together and would hold him for the
rest of his life,’ Baker writes, ‘was the sweetness and sympathy he found in
the company of India’s sadhus, charlatans, poets, and saints.’ A longtime
resident of Calcutta, a writer for the Calcutta Statesman, and married to the Indian
writer, Amitav Ghosh, Baker knows whereof she speaks. Along with Jane Kramer’s Ginsberg in America (1968), one of the
earliest books about the poet, Baker’s A Blue Hand is one of the most moving
books about the man who waged cultural warfare against the American academic
world and its favorite poets and poems and acted surprised when that same world
treated him as a bad boy who ought to be put him in his place.
Born into a secular Jewish family and
aware of the genocidal war launched by the Nazis against European Jews, he
aimed to remain true to his Jewish roots even as he reached out to Buddhism and
the Hindu religion.
The son of Louis, a poet and a teacher,
and Naomi, a Russian émigré, a painter and a member of the American Communist
Party, who spent much of her life in mental institutions, Allen assumed from an
early age that he would grow up and become a renowned poet. Precious, arrogant
and supremely self- confident, he was also deeply insecure about his own
identity in part because he knew as a boy that he was attracted to other boys
and that homosexuality was regarded as a disease which could be cured by
medical doctors. Also, he thought he had inherited his mother’s ‘madness’.
His psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks,
talked him out of that idea in San Francisco in the mid-1950 at Langley Porter,
a hospital where he was an outpatient. Dr. Hicks helped him accept his
homosexuality, overcome his writer’s block and begin work on ‘Howl’. According
to Dr. Hicks, Ginsberg arrived at therapy sessions with a handwritten draft of
‘Howl’. Ginsberg always insisted that he typed the earliest version. I tend to
believe Hicks.
By the time he was 30, Ginsberg was notorious as the author of
‘Howl’, his long, epic poem about himself and his own generation of
‘angelheaded hipsters’, as he called them. When City Lights first published Howl and Other Poems in 1956 in the Pocket
Poets Series there was no Beat Generation literary movement and there were no
Beat writers, though there were bohemians, bohemian enclaves, and hipsters, who
enjoyed jazz, smoked marijuana and tangled with the police in San Francisco and
elsewhere.
City Lights made Ginsberg and he in turn
made City Lights. Theirs was a marriage made in poetry heaven. Lawrence
Ferlinghetti had co-founded City Lights Books in 1953 with Peter Martin, a New
Yorker who soon left San Francisco and returned to the East. City Lights
publishing followed hard on the heels of the opening of the store, a proverbial
hole-in-the wall that soon became a destination for the bookish, and for lovers
of literature, including the avant-garde.
Ferlinghetti’s first book, Pictures of the Gone World (1955), was the first
volume to be published in the Pocket Poets Series by City Lights. Howl and Other Poems, with an Introduction by the
modernist poet, William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor and early Ginsberg
mentor, was number four in the series which has grown over the decades.
Curiously, Ferlinghetti never considered himself a Beat writer – he belonged to
a literary tradition far older than the Beats, he insisted – though he would go
on to publish the major writers of the Beat Generation – Jack Kerouac, Gregory
Corso, William Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip
Lamantia and others, as well as book after book by Ginsberg, including Planet News (1968), one of my
favorites. His long antiwar poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra, appears in Planet News. When
he died in 2021 at the age of 101, Ferlinghetti left behind a vast body of
work, including A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), one of the
hippest and the most popular poetry books published in the 20th century.
Ginsberg didn’t age as well as his longtime publisher, though
when he died in 1997 at the age of 70, his work had been translated into dozens
of languages and read around the world. HarperCollins had published his Collected Poems, 1947-1980, an 837-page volume with
photographs and footnotes. Since his death, more of his poetry has appeared in
print, including Death and Fame.
Indeed, both death and fame haunted him his whole life. In 2006, Collected Poems was republished with new
material and with the dates in the title changed to 1947-1997 to reflect the
expanded body of work.
Twenty-five years after Ginsberg’s
death, his poetry is still read, studied and enjoyed, though probably not as
widely or as enthusiastically as it was when he was alive and when he performed
hundreds of times a year, promoting himself and his books and making converts
of the misfits to the Beat religion. In 1970, he testified for the defense on
the witness stand during the ‘conspiracy’ trial in a federal courtroom of the
Chicago 8, which included long time fans such as Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman.
The American counterculture of sex,
drugs, communes, rock ‘n’ roll and protests against conventionality was near
its peak in 1970 and in many ways Ginsberg was its embodiment and a flesh and
blood link between the Beats of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
In recent years, work by younger poets and by women and people
of color, has in part supplanted Ginsberg’s poetry, though it’s not out of
print or difficult to find. City Lights continues to publish Howl and Other Poems, which has sold nearly one
million copies in the Pocket Poet Series. Kaddish and Other Poems was republished on its
50th anniversary with an afterword by Ginsberg’s long time archivist and
biographer, Bill Morgan, the author of I Celebrate Myself: The
Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (2006) and The Typewriter is Holy: the
Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (2010).
Morgan’s work has helped to make
Ginsberg’s life widely known, though it’s probably safe to say that not
everything about that life has come to light, much as it’s probably safe to say
that the complete and uncensored history of the Best Generation has not yet
been written and published, either.
Myths and legends do diehard. Indeed,
the myths and legends, many of them generated by Ginsberg himself, will
probably never be completely disentangled from the facts, or from his biography
and Beat history. Many readers assume that he did not revise his work. He
boasted that he didn’t edit, though the many different manuscript versions of
‘Howl’ offer a far different story. He revised as much as Eliot revised which
means that he cared about the craft of poetry.
Ginsberg’s final resting place in the
pantheon of American literature has not yet been determined. Is he a major
poet, a minor poet, or a ‘major minor poet’?, as one critic suggested.
Controversy will surely continue to swirl around him and his work.
My own opinion, based on decades of
study, reflection and the long process of writing about him and his work, is
that Ginsberg peaked early in life and that ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, which he
began to write soon after he finished ‘Howl’, are his two best works, and the
two works that most fully represent his mode of expression. (Kaddish is a
traditional Jewish prayer recited in synagogues that ends with a plea for
universal peace. Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ ends, ‘Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord
Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord.’ ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, both of which are deeply
spiritual poems, belong to the same phase of Ginsberg’s creativity.
In a way, ‘Kaddish’ is an extension of the style and the form of
‘Howl’, though it’s about his mother, Naomi, and her generation of European
immigrants who came to America, retained much of their ‘Old World’ identities
and never fully assimilated. Some of Ginsberg’s critics, including David
Remnick, the editor at The New Yorker, regard ‘Howl’ as ‘adolescent’
and ‘Kaddish’ as a much more mature work.
They see ‘Howl’ as a poem in which he is
a show-off. Perhaps he is, though many of the surrealistic phrases and images
are truly memorable. They include: ‘hydrogen jukebox’, ‘the scholars of war’,
‘the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality’, as well as the opening lines ‘I saw
the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving/ hysterical
naked.’ When Ginsberg gave a poetry-writing workshop at Sonoma State University
he talked about these phrases and invited students to create some of their own
vivid and explosive images.
In the 1970s, Ginsberg got into a poetic
rut from which he could not easily extricate himself. Talismanic words like
‘madness’, ‘naked’ and ‘nakedness’, which play a crucial part in ‘Howl’, appear
again and again in later work. Eager to write poems as popular and as powerful
as ‘Howl', he sometimes became a cliché of himself, though near the end of his
life he wrote short descriptive, and sometimes confessional poems, that reveal
his life as an aging poet.
In ‘Autumn Leaves’, he writes, ‘At 66,
just learning to take care of my body/ Wake cheerful 8 AM & write in a
notebook/ rising from bedside naked leaving a naked boy asleep by the wall/ mix
miso mushroom leeks & winter squash breakfast/...happy not yet to be a
corpse.’
Near the end of his life, he held on to
his notion of himself as a sexual charged human being attracted to boys. A
Member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), he wrote in his
own defense, ‘I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too – everybody does,
who has a little humanity.’ He aimed to be candid, even if it damaged his
reputation.
One can find elements of misogyny in
Ginsberg’s poetry, especially in ‘Howl’. ‘Who lost their loveboys to the three
old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar,’ he wrote.
Sexism infuses the long section on Neal Cassady, referred to as
“N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the
memory of his innumerable lays of girls.’ He’s the playboy and the Casanova of
‘Howl’, which was published soon after Playboy magazine was born in 1953
and honored men like Cassady. Also, Ginsberg’s images of Blacks tend to be
stereotypes, sometimes associated with drugs and addiction. ‘Dragging them-
selves through the negro [sic] streets at dawn looking to an angry/ fix,’ he
wrote of his beloved ‘angelheaded hipsters’.
In his Introduction to ‘Howl’, William
Carlos Williams wrote, ‘When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know
Allen Ginsberg.’ He added, ‘He disturbed me.’ He disturbed a great many people,
including his teachers at Columbia who came to his aid when he was arrested and
faced time in prison. Williams went on: 'I never thought he’d live to grow up
and write a book of poems.’
His ability to survive, travel and go on
writing astonishes me. Twenty-five years after Ginsberg’s death at the age of
70, it’s still astonishing to me that he survived the trauma of his early
years, his mother’s mental illness, which impacted him profoundly, and his
ability to survive anti-Semitism and the cultural climate of the Cold War,
which negatively affected the arts and creativity in the US.
While at Columbia in the 1940s, no
teacher taught Walt Whitman’s poetry. That's still shocking. In fact, poetry
was relegated to the bottom rung on the ladder of creativity. The novel reigned
supreme. In the 1940s, for an American man to want to become a poet was to go
against the American grain.
‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’ look and sound to
me like artifacts of the era in which they were born, though I know that they
are also more than artifacts. They speak to readers today who are living
through and surviving the crises of the twenty- first century. Ginsberg’s great
teacher, Walt Whitman, wrote,
I am with you, you men and women of a
generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it
is. Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt; Just as any of you is one of a
living crowd, I was one of a crowd.
So, too, Ginsberg was one of a living
crowd. Like Whitman, he projected himself into the future and into generations
beyond his own. ‘Howl’ lives and so does ‘Kaddish’. Readers who are not willing
or ready to dive into Ginsberg's long poems might begin by reading the short
poems he wrote in the mid- and late 1950s, including ‘America’, ‘A Supermarket
in California’, ‘Sunflower Sutra’ and ‘A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley’. They
all provide insights into his state of mind and his art when he was near one of
the peaks of his creativity.
Bibliography
Baker, Deborah. A Blue Hand: The Beats in India.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947-1980.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947-1997.
Ginsberg, Allen. Indian Journals.
Ginsberg, Allen. Planet News.
Kramer, Jane. Allen Ginsberg in America.
Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The
Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.
Morgan, Bill. The Typewriter is Holy: the
Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation.
Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen
Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass.
Biography
Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to Re-Markings, is the author of 15 books,
including literary criticism, reporting, memoir and biography. His new book is Dark Past, Dark Future. He has taught journalism,
media law and the theory of communication at Sonoma State University, USA. He
guest-edited the special section on Doris Lessing (the Literature Nobel
laureate) for the March 2008 issue of Re-Markings. Doris Lessing’s endorsement
on Raskin’s The Mythology of Imperialism: ‘I wish someone like Jonah
Raskin had been around to teach me when I was young’. It is a rich tribute to
Raskin’s attributes as a teacher and internationally acclaimed writer, poet and journalist.
