Defamation, you say?

A week ago, a letter from the books editor at Caravan said that Arindam Chaudhuri (remember him?) has slapped a Rs. 500 million lawsuit against Siddhartha Deb, Caravan, Penguin India and Google India. I wanted to blog about it but was caught up.

Caravan's press release can be found here. And the article that Chaudhuri has had removed from their website can be found on Google cache here.

But hey - this may already be old news for some of you. Not sure what one can do to show support; maybe circulate the cached link widely? See how nice Deb has actually been in his piece? He's not in the business of writing hagiographies after all.

to all that

Woke up with the most terrible nightmare. It's been years since I woke up crying but two coffees later, I realised that the sum of my nightmares was death by smoke. An old woman surrounded by loved ones waiting for her to die. There are incense sticks, as around a dead body, but in this instance, the body is alive and we are waiting for her to die. Presumably, by inhaling incense. One time, she coughed but someone gave her water. That diluted the poison.

I shouldn't have watched Pratchett's documentary on assisted dying. I shouldn't have mentally signed off a note I was composing, with the words exit, pursued by luggage nightmares.

It is time for me to leave. When I arrive, I hope the rains will be a conveyor belt that took me from here to there without my having noticed. It is a slow leaving and a slow arrival. All things are possible.

rote

I want to own words. I read something I like and I want to possess it.

What do I mean by it? The physical object that is the book? This version? A copy? Transcribed onto the screen painstakingly, or into a notebook whose pages I never revisit?

This is why I mourn the loss of of memory. My incapacity to soak up words so they're indelible once they've entered my mind.

Think of all the poems I could have farenheited into myself. Who would I introduce myself as? Which poem would you be? What would exchange make of us as people?

[coming up, in a day or two, a post on the library at Innerpeffrey].

China Miéville's Embassytown

I had a title for this, but I can't find it.

This review appeared in The Sunday Guardian last Sunday.

**

Embassytown
China Miéville
Pan Macmillan, pp 495; £17.99

Avice Benner Cho is a human who has been turned by the Ariekei into a simile. While you take a moment to recall instances where this is possible, imagine a language where it is impossible to lie or describe that which doesn’t exist. One where the word ‘imagine’ has no place. This is the Language of the Ariekei for whom there is no difference between the word and its referent. When comparisons are necessary they must have humans enact an action in order to allow themselves a simile. When the Ariekei speak, they speak with two mouths.

China Miéville’s ninth novel, Embassytown, is set on the distant world of Arieka on the edge of the universe. The beings native to the planet – the Ariekei – are, interestingly enough, unimaginable despite all the tricks of language at Miéville’s disposal: and that is perhaps part of the point in a book that is entirely about language and often about the politics of it.

When Avice – who is an ‘immerser’ or space traveller – returns to Embassytown with her linguist husband Scile, the place is on the cusp of immense and disastrous change. The colony’s leaders are the Ambassadors, who are humans genetically modified in order to be able to communicate with the Ariekei. They are clones, speaking simultaneously, which is the only way the Ariekei understand humans when they speak Language. A new Ambassador has been sent by Bremen – the empire Embassytown nominally represents – whose effect on the Ariekei is catastrophic. What follows is the collapse of a language, of communication and of a whole society.

Via Plato, Saussure, and Wittgenstein, Miéville examines the nature of language, how it is spoken and understood, and what its relationship with power is. Embassytown is full of arguments and theory but this fuels the story rather than distracts from it, because Miéville does what he began to do in his previous book, Kraken: he literalises abstractions. So the Immer is both an actual medium through which to navigate space and a metaphor for language itself: “Immer is what underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is a parole”, Avice explains.

So also the idea that the Ariekene Language is not-two – sound and sense not separate – finds an analogue in the double-voiced Ariekei (who, though equi-vocal, cannot lie) and the Ambassadors who try to mimic their forms of speech: they also are not-two. Even the Ambassador’s names – CalVin, EzRa – conveys the more complex idea of non-duality. If, like Scile, you admit the presence of a soul, the Ariekei could be the whole beings of Plato’s Symposium whose cleaving is at once disastrous and a kind of freedom.

The process of untethering the language from its pristine state of non-duality is one that Scile sees as an act of evil. “That’s what we do. That’s what we call ‘reason’, that exchange, metaphor. That lying. The world becomes a lie.”

This urge of the outsider to preserve or change, exploit or encourage, is what takes the novel into an examination of imperialism. In the beginning, the residents of Embassytown are respectful of the Ariekei, whom they call Hosts. By the end, the Embassytowners have become the source of the Ariekei’s resentful sustenance and have managed to command their obedience whilst infantilising them.

One of the most discomfiting things about the book is Avice’s apparent complicity in the actions of the Embassytowners as they take it upon themselves to bring order into the chaos their Ambassador has wrought. When one Ambassador orders tests to be conducted on a captured Ariekei, Avice says, “They gave us a dirty hope. It was one of the most selfless things I’ve ever seen.” But Avice’s presence as committee member gives us a ringside view of the workings of a hungry empire, and its justifications for its actions. It also makes her later choices more satisfying as narrative.

Avice is a self-conscious narrator, occasionally addressing the reader directly. This could become a tricky device with which to navigate the story, but Miéville just manages to pull it off because he gives his narrator the awareness that structure, metaphor, language, is necessary to the telling of a good story, whether true or not. It is the ‘equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth’ but it is also the medium through which the world can be thought about differently and be reshaped, a way to ‘tell the truth best by becoming lies’.

I sometimes found myself wishing, though, that Miéville himself had found a finer balance between language as the engine of the plot and language used for the sheer joy of it. To use his own metaphor, he could have immersed himself in the language more while continuing to navigate with it.

All the same, it should no longer be necessary to describe China Miéville as a writer to watch, as if his talent and ingenuity were in doubt. Call him, rather, a writer to whose work one looks forward with anticipation and reads with pleasure when it arrives.

**

I was going to be a longer version of this review for the blog but it didn't happen. Instead, let me point you to the interview I did with China last year, which, somehow, seems to anticipate a number of things this book talks about.

There was also this strange moment, while reading this book, when things seemed so familiar, and then I remembered my story, Wordsmith. The keywords are either 'great minds' or 'fools'; you decide which.

Dastan-e-Sedition

Mahmood Farooqui & Danish Husain have uploaded two parts of their performace, Dastan-e-Sedition, on YouTube. Though, as the note says, the performance is actually longer, the two parts work excellently well.

Here they are:

Part 1

Part 2

For a context to what, where etc, read this piece on Kafila.

**

It occurred to me while watching this, how much one's appreciation depends not just on one's having previously watched other danstangoi performances, but also on a general awareness of contemporary politics, poetry and modes of speech (that very sarkari, sanskritised declamation dropped in the middle of what is usually a chastely urdu performance is one instance).

Arul Mani on P.G. Wodehouse

Arul Mani writes divinely about Wodehouse in Caravan:

Who reads Wodehouse in India and why?

For a long time, I knew nobody who did actually read Wodehouse. Undergraduate boredom caused me to insert myself into Bangalore’s quizzing scene in the late 1980s, and that is where I came across live Wodehouse fans for the first time. Their conversations began unexceptionably—which book was their favourite, Wooster or Blandings, and so on—but deteriorated rapidly after that into mantric call-and-response routines. I remember very clearly an exchange between two grizzled veterans where one raised his snout to the sky to bellow the words, “Forty- five minutes if it lasted a second?” and received in no time the response, “Heppenstall’s sermon on Brotherly Love!” I don’t know if this has anything to do with anything, but both men were Bengalis. The former respondent then assumed the same quivering-nostrils attitude to deliver the even more puzzling phrase, “Begins in a low minor of two quarter-notes in four-four time, and ends in a shower of accidental grace-notes?” upon which the other smote himself in the chest and decimated all eardrums in the vicinity with a lusty rendition of “Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey”, the infallible pig-calling formula that Lord Emsworth is taught by a kind soul. Their exchanges were punctuated with bursts of shrill laughter that began as fairly domestic whinnies before tailing off into hyena-sounds.

The Wodehousian in India is typically either some archaic monster that causes terror each time it digs its dactyls deep into a shuffle-bag of plum metaphors and phrases, or it is a pip-pipsqueak, an accumulator of period mannerisms and verbal tics.

Gil Scott-Heron, RIP

Gil Scott-Heron. RIP.

Where Did The Night Go

Long ago the clock washed midnight away


Bringing the dawn

Oh God, I must be dreaming

Time to get up again

And time to start up again

Pulling on my socks again

Should have been asleep

When I was sitting there drinking beer

And trying to start another letter to you

Don't know how many times I dreamed to write again last night

Should've been asleep when I turned the stack of records over and over

So I wouldn't be up by myself

Where did the night go?

Should go to sleep now

And say fuck a job and money

Because I spend it all on unlined paper and can't get past

"Dear baby, how are you?"

Brush my teeth and shave

Look outside, sky is dark

Think it may rain

Where did

Where did

Where did


From I'm New Here. XL Recordings. Feb. 2010.

Also, the Guardian obit.

The Fifth Face/ Letters

Given that I have never held a job down for more than a year; that I've never even done the same kind of job for too long; that I never know what the next week holds for me, let alone what my plans are for the next year, five years is a commitment I never thought I could make.

Maybe the lack of thought or planning is what kept this blog running for so long. Yes: it's been five years and it's not just a face I'm going through. Let's call it several faces. The blog has crossed the enthusiasm of infancy and is probably settling down into a late middle-age of scattered thoughts and conversations that are held more with oneself than with anything recognisably person-like. This, despite the comments I still get that I sometimes forget or just don't respond to.

But I want to talk about is letters. Letters have always been something everyone in my family has looked forward to with pleasure. My grandfather stayed in touch with a friend in Canada until one of them died. My mother used to write letters to people she'd never met, c/o the names of their own or city, or some absurd approximation of an address. And she'd get replies from them. It was astonishing and joy-giving. The letters were always kind and warm; sometime long and delighted. And these letters were from strangers.

I know what it's like to receive these letters because I didn't have to infer the contents from the expression on the face of my mother; I was allowed to read the letters for myself.

Letters were public property.

Family letters - some of them artfully and well-written - were also public property. They spoke about other people, they asked after everyone, they gave news about happenings. They were not private.

I am wondering where and when I got the notion that letters were intensely private things meant only for the mutual knowledge of sender and receiver. Given that I had never in my life experienced a 'private' letter, one that the receiver would rather not share with everyone, I have no idea when it became clear to me that letters were also a kind of very private and confidential conversation, and to share these kinds of letters wouldbe to betray a confidence or inadvertently give even close family members a glimpse into aspects of your own character that you wanted to protect from their gaze or scrutiny.

School? Possibly, but I can't imagine how. School was where I wrote letters home and of course they were both public and private, in that I knew that the only people who would read them would be my parents, and so I could say things to them without worrying about who else might read my confidences (there weren't many of those, I admit).

Of course, the reverse didn't apply. One didn't allow even one's closest friends to read letters from home, though one might occasionally read out particularly funny bits to them. The letters were put away, under the mattress or in a locker and forgotten about until end of term.

Back home, of course, during vacations, letters came that were no longer public. When the postman rang, I would run to get my letters before anyone else got hold of them. My parents never did open my letters but I was convinced they might. (Though I did have to train famiy in general to not read my letters once I'd finished with them, because, really, even thoughI'd read it first it didn't mean they could read it now.)

I have no idea if this seemed strange to my parents. It must have. As far asI know, they didn't correspond with friends, who are probably the only kind of people who commit confidences to paper. Family was business, sociologically speaking, and letters from any member of family was common property - even the most hysterical, harsh, intemperate or savage letters. And there were a few of those over the years.

Passing lightly over the kind of letters I wrote and received from people who I met every day, and with whom I exchanged letter-notes (sometimes in particularly exigent situations, one posted letters locally), I found myself in a place of letter drought. The only letters I got were unpleasant official communications or impersonal requests for something-or-the-other. Once a year or more infrequently, there might be a letter or poastcard from someone I wanted to hear from.

All private conversation had shifted online. These were necessarily truly private, because my parents were useless with the computer and I got online long after I need have worried about shared or discovered passwords.

There was no room for the inadvertently read letter. Until a few days ago, I had no way of knowing what my feeling on the matter would likely be. Recently, though, a friend wrote to me back home and my mother - perhaps inadvertently - opened it. I found out about it and, because there was no immediate sense of outrage, I sat down to examine what it meant.

Perhaps I no longer have my earlier sense of inviolate privacy with regard to my letters. Perhaps I knew that whatever the letter contained, I wouldn't mind my mother reading it. Perhaps, that it would contain nothing private? Or that - of everyone I know who misses the pleasure of receiving and reading letters - my mother's joy in opening a letter, the ritual of it, would be the most acute and I wouldn't/couldn't deny her that, especially since she abhors emails?

Or maybe I've grown used to airing the most private thoughts in public  knowing they're both always available and quickly forgotten. Like everything else, this also is practice.

Zong! M. NourbeSe Philip

All this week, I've been doing everything else I can in order not to write. Coming across this extract from M NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, I can't help but feel I'm not entirely wasting my time if I'm reading new things and instead of just producing a lot of decontextualised and slightly sterile shit.

Here's an explanation of how Philip worked with the text of the Zong judgement:

The text of the legal decision of the Zong case, Gregson v. Gilbert, runs to some five hundred words. Relying entirely on the words of the reported text, but through a variety of techniques such as whiting and/or blacking out words, fragmentation and reversals, I use this word store to create the manuscript, Zong! Fragmenting and mutilating the text mirror the fragmentation and mutilation that slavery perpetrated on Africans and African customs and life. In deliberately changing the story of the legal text, I engage in a similar duplicity that the actors in the Zong case engaged in to convince themselves that it was perfectly allowable to murder Africans in order to collect insurance monies. Further, in dropping below the objective legal text as given, to search out the emotions: “negroes want sustenance...negroes want water,” I subvert the rationality–the murderous rationality, if you will–on which the law is based.

In its potent ability to decree what is is not, as in a person being no longer human but thing, the law approaches the realm of magic and religion. The conversion of human into chattel can be considered an act the equal of transubstantiation which converts the eucharistic bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

I'm sure it's a technique that's been used before, but the results - as they must be in each case - are startling and incredibly moving. The repetitions, the stuttering pronouncements spaced out across the page, are painful even if you don't know what erasures have had to be committed in order to produce this text. Only the knowledge that violence has been done upon a text - even if it is only a text - gives some sense of redress.

This text and others appears in Fascicle, where I can see I will have to spend a lot of time.

'Jean-Paul Belmondo' by Valzhyna Mort

Jean-Paul Belmondo*

Valzhyna Mort

it begins with your face of a stone
where lips repose like two seals

in a coastal mist of cigarette smoke

you move through the streets—

listing them

is as useless as naming waves.

                            (that city is so handsome for a reason—)you whisper:

                        it was made out of your rib)

it continues with my

          skidmarked by a dress

body. i stand on the border

on heels like my sixth toes

and show you

where to park.

that very night

lying together

                        in the dogs yard

       —flowers are biting my back!—
you whisper:

          the longer i look on the coins of your nipples

          the clearer i see the Queen’s profile.

for you, body and money are the same

as the chicken and the egg.

the metaphor of “a woman’s purse”

escapes you.

stealing, you like to mumble:

a purse is a purse is a purse is a purse.

also:

a real purse in your hand is worth

two metaphorical purses over your mouth.

they tell me

          you are a body

                        anchored to the shore by its rusting blood.

your wound darkens on your chest like a crow.

i tell them—as agreed—that you are my youth.

an apple that bit into me to forget its own knowledge.

death hands you every new day like a golden coin.

as the bribe grows

it gets harder to turn it down.

your heart of gold gets heavier to carry.

your hands know that a car has a waist

and a gun—a lobe.

you take me where the river once lifted its skirts

and God, abashed with that view,

ordered to cover that shame with a city.

its dance square

shrank by the darkness to the size

of a sleeping infant’s slightly open mouth.

i cannot tell between beggars’ stretched hands

and dogs’ dripping tongues.

you cannot tell between legs—

                    mine—tables’—chairs’—others’.

that dance square is a cage

where accordions grin at dismembered violin torsos.

beggars lick thin air off their lips.

women whirling in salsa slash you

across the chest with the blades

of their skirts soiled with peonies.

Poetry (December 2009).

[image from]
Also read 'crossword', from Poetry.

**

Sometimes I underestimate serendipity. Reading these two poems this morning just when I was asking myself what I was doing on a campus an hour from any city, with only two towns nearby, where the nothing that happens might be the subject of any one of a hundred East European films from the 70s, my day becomes more bearable.

__

*Update; this post has nothing to do with the fact that the man was awarded the Palme d'Or . Just coincidence.