Rains, lands, memory and exile

Zizek makes an interesting observation about poets. Nationalist poets, patriotic poets, poets in general, I guess. He compares it to the baby and the bath water. The practice is to retain the baby and throw away the water. He says, what we should rather do is to throw away the baby, and then look at the bath water, to see it in all its obscenity. The baby here would mean the idea – of nationalism, patriotism, even democracy as a concept, in general the stuff of poetry; and the bath water would be all that as it is put into practice. People tend to cling on to the idea – “yeah, it is practised so and so, but you know, that is just the idiosyncrasy of those who put it into practice. Actually it should have been...”

Zizek is definitely to the point.

Nevertheless, there is a sublimity to ideology, and poetry expresses it quite so well for the romantics (and that is exactly the bathwater when put into practice). Like rain. I read this piece by Shahina (we worked under the same supervisors for our M.Phil), on the agony of the Malayalee women when they stay in Kerala, and the relative freedom they enjoy elsewhere in India. ‘Elsewhere’ can be misleading here. What they mean is, the metros – Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, etc. The articles are published in Nalamidam, an online Malayalam magazine. Coming back to Shahina’s piece, I was quick enough to notice that what made her writing so beautiful was the constant reference to rain. It starts raining, like a good Bollywood movie, at the most beautiful of situations, situations of freedom, situations of longing, of agony, of pain, of nostalgia...

Strange, for here itself is the baby and bathwater situation. A bashing of “reality” and a love for the “conceptual”.

Rain is so for the Malayalee. Especially for the one who is away, like Kamala Das speaking to the nocturnal rain (rathrimazha). In fact, I recently read this beautiful poem by K. Srilata, which again begins and ends with the rain. What was even more fascinating was that she condensed my entire PhD project in a few lines:

But land is memory, dream, belonging.
Land is rains arriving,
Drowning in their wake a million struggling black ants
(“Land is Rains Arriving” from
Arriving Shortly; Rs.200)

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Reading Hour, a bi-monthly published from Bangalore (and available in all metros) published my short story: “Coils of a Desert Sky”. It is the story of a variety shop owner Abdu, who was formerly a theology teacher. The story tries to chronicle the last few months of his life when he has to battle between knowledge that is obvious and the hidden one. It touches upon a not much discussed aspect of the Qur’an.


I thank the publishers for the green signal (pun intended).

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Read The Sense of an Ending recently. Quite a compact book, with recurring images. I read that it is not his great work, but that the Man Booker was just a recognition before it gets too late. It will make a good movie. The novel is about a man's memory, as it confuses itself, caught in a maze of pure fabrication, misperception,and misrepresentation. Quite a counter point. I can already see the movie in my head!

Tariq Ali’s Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, which chronicles the everyday life of the family of Hudayl. The novel, which is conceived of as an alternative history, and is the first part of the Islam Quintet, starts with the incident of the Spanish invasion of Granada. The author starts with the incident of the Spanish army burning at stake the books from the one hundred and ninety five libraries in Granada. That is an interesting starting for an alternative history, considering how the allegations on Islam have always been riddled with the stories of Arabs soldiers burning down books of the old world wisdom, in North Africa and elsewhere.

Similarly serving the alternative history is Ali's decision to refer to all places as they were called before the invasion. Thus Granada is Gharnata, Seville is Ishbiliyya, etc.

However, the repeated use of the imagery of the burning books could have been better used than by the rambling soliloquies of the characters constantly in anguish over the incident. That little subtlety is missing in this book. That is not to say that the book is a litany of complaints. It definitely is not. It captures the lighter moments of Hudayl household, the many domestic dramas, the tales of promiscuity. It also gives a very contemporary critique of the Islamic society, for its feudal ways and its entrenchedness in the class order (in India, the caste order, the Ashraf-Ajlaf divide, etc).

Tariq Ali is to be appreciated as he makes the in-your-face connection between the conquest of Islamic Europe and that of South America. Subtlety remains his weaker point.

Shadows is to be read along with Amin Maalouf’s Leo the African. Maalouf chronicles the story of Leo, a Muslim and then a convert to Christianity and then back again. Leo is again from Granada, but one who chose exile rather than live under the invaders’ regime.

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