International Literature Today
Journal
Melanie Krupa
Week 3: September 10, 2007: Nagarkar, Bossi, and Epstein
Nagakar was a great speaker to begin with—very funny and very interesting. His “three biographies” were hilarious, particularly the one in which he was “one of the most prolific authors ever” whose works published under other names included the Shakespeare’s plays and the Bible. I was intrigued by his discussion of language in India—by the content of what he said, and also by the emotion with which he talked about it. His regret at being one of the few bilingual writers in India, where people “should have” conversed and written in 5 or 7 indigenous languages, but instead only aspired to the “colonizer’s language,” was striking. I liked how he didn’t blame people for this situation but acknowledged the reality behind it—how people’s lives literally depended on their having English—and explained that he was simply sad that they did.
I taught English in India briefly a long time ago, in a charity school for street children run by an Irishman, and found I myself remembering clearly the critical importance people attached to their children learning English above all else (as opposed to becoming more fluent and literate in their mother tongue) and also the unformed, vaguely troubling feeling (I was 19) that there was something amiss in this and that the enterprise I was involved in was somehow both eminently helpful and slightly sinister.
The excerpt from “A Meditation on Neighbors” which he read helped illuminate his selection from God’s Little Soldier a lot. I had read it and enjoyed it’s perceptive psychology—the wife’s jealousy at her husband’s infatuation being transferred into rage at the child he died saving, and the mother’s consternation at this and impulse to give her child an evil name in order to ward off bad fortune—but the cultural and linguistic tensions between the poor Catholic and Hindu residents of the housing projects came into much sharper focus after he explained how the Catholics were elevated above the Hindus by the English they received with their missionary educations. I thought his point about social stratification always being rooted in language was very good, as well. He explained how the ancient word for culture and tradition was sanskriti—in other words, if you spoke Sanskrit, you had it, if not, you didn’t.
In a more personal, whimsical approach to the problem of language, he read a wonderful piece about being set upon and savaged by his once beloved words. I was curious whether this piece had anything to do with the question of which language (they were after all English words) or whether it was purely about language itself. In response to an audience question, he explained how he was schooled in English but felt “so lucky” to have returned to his mother tongue of Maharati, despite the problems of a small readership. I wondered if Maharati words were capable of attacking in the same way?
Bossi’s discussion of monsters which followed was also quite interesting. I liked what she said about people being afraid to see certain characteristics in themselves, of seeking to demonize and then kill them. Her observation that everyone wants their children to be like them but doesn’t want to be like their parents was very apt. I was intrigued with her contention that monsters don’t have to be horrible, that for instance Eros’ very beauty makes him a monster, because people cannot see it without pain and her inclusion of Batman and other contemporary “heroes” as monsters.
Epstein, like Nagakar, also addressed language and the question of the “mother tongue,” saying in a sense that he had no mother tongue, having forgotten his native Russian when he moved to Israel at eight, so that he now can only speak, write, and dream in Hebrew. I was interested in his discussion of his own unique and personal form, the very short story. I really liked what he said about his litmus test to decide if the few lines he had written were actually a story: that there had to be a story “surrounding” what was printed on the page, a story the reader had to tell herself to understand it, a story he had to tell himself to write it. I realized that, indeed, with all his pieces I had told myself a story. I was fascinated by the idea that a part (even the major part) of a literary work can exist only in someone’s head but still be a legitimate part of the work. I suppose this is true in a sense with all literary work, but the peculiarity of Epstein’s form makes this aspect of writer/reader relationship especially evident.
Week 4: September 17, 2007: Lacuesta, Khalifa, Pierre and Miller
Lacuesta spoke very eloquently and wittily about the “indelible” influence of the West in the Philippines—the country was once “occupied” by the U.S. and was now “pre-occupied” with it. Somehow, however, the presentation lacked the passion of Nagarkar’s discussion of a similar subject and didn’t touch me in the same way. The long excerpt he read from White Elephants, about the many transformations of a U.S. military base in the Philippines, had a similar effect on me: it was interesting enough but the tone felt rather distant and removed, and my attention began to wander part way through.
I perked up more when he began to speak about the mechanics and philosophy of his own writing. I really liked what he said about how every story has its own psychology and the details included in the story are dictated by the psychology of the characters. That seems obvious once said, but I had never heard that put so succinctly or clearly. And it was perfectly illustrated by his story “Rest Stop” where, as he said, the narrator notes people’s clothes, the make of their cars, their clothing, now and in the past, but can barely remember his own marriage. I also agreed enthusiastically with him that a writer’s primary objective should be to make the writer disappear, so that all that remains is the story and the characters, and that anything else is authorial vanity.
The thing that most struck me about Khalifa’s presentation was his deep love for his form of the novel, apparently a very new form in the ancient tradition of Arabic literature—“the novel is my whole life, without the novel I’m nothing,” he said unselfconsciously. I also appreciated the honesty of his picture of the writer as a very strange man or woman, who perhaps comes to writing because they cannot succeed as a teacher or business man, and who is in for a very hard life. I thought the excerpt he read from In Praise of Hate, was beautiful but difficult to hear, the emotional effort it took to imagine a life so abandoned and lonely was very intense.
Week 5: September 24, 2007: Inguanez, El Ghazzar, Spahic, and Pun
Inquanez’ discourse on her native language of Maltese was very interesting and informative. I really didn’t know anything about Maltese, and had no idea that there was a language that included elements of Arabic, Italian, and English, or that it was the only Semitic language written from right to left in roman characters. She read a number of her poems in Maltese and it was beautiful spoken. Her evident pride in the language and its history was touching as well.
I was interested in what she said about often switching mood quickly in her poems, from playful to intense, happy to sad, because I had noticed and enjoyed that mercurial quality in her poems. She said in answer to a question that she liked to use the first person in her poems because it was a natural conversational stance. When I had read her work, though, it seemed as if the “I” was very fluid, in other words, it didn’t always represent the same being or persona, the poems spoke from many different points of view. I related this to the title Water, Fire, Earth, and I, which puts “I” in the place of “air,” an appropriately mercurial element. I wish I had a chance to ask her about this.
I wasn’t as impressed with her quotes from critics about her work. I felt a little like, what’s the point, I’d rather hear what she thinks. Presumably she quoted them because she agreed with their evaluation, but still, I’d prefer to hear the writer’s own words.
I had some trouble with El Ghazzar’s accent, especially at first, so I’m not sure I completely understood his presentation. He seemed to be saying at one point that he liked to write neither about politics or about the intimacies of everyday life—but then he seemed to contradict this when he answered questions by talking about writing as a force combating fundamentalism and the value of breaking the taboo against writing about sex. I think I was understanding him better by the time we got around to the questions. I found it interesting that he too, like Nagakar and Khalifa, took on the emotional difficulty of writing: “writing is painful, bitter in my mouth, a difficult, unbearably laborious activity,” and “the only one capable of writing my personal novel is another person.” I also liked his measured but straight-forward answer to the audience question, “What do Egyptians think about Americans since 9/11?” (I kind of hate it when someone asks this sort of question.) He said that Egyptians in general like Americans very much and have many friends in the states, but if you support war, you cannot expect friendship, and if you support hate, you can’t expect love in return.
Spahic’s description of the “critical moment” in his youth when he changed from a reader to a writer as “great feeling,” but also a “trauma,” like a change of sex or sexual orientation, was funny and also thought-provoking. He, like a number of the other writers, addressed the issue of writing from a very small nation (“the size of Yellowstone Park”!) in a language spoken by a relatively small number of speakers.
Pun’s multi-media presentation about Hong Kong, both in reality and in metaphors and images, was creative and fascinating. I loved the picture of the castle on the rock in the sky representing Hong Kong as a floating, disconnected city. His discussion of what it meant to have a “city identity” rather than a national identity was interesting, as were his comments on what it meant to choose between English and Chinese as mother tongues, in other words, between imperialism and nationalism. I was intrigued to learn that while mainland China speaks Mandarin and has adopted simplified characters, Hong Kong speaks Cantonese and uses traditional characters—thus actually retaining “Chinese” tradition in a more pure form than in China.
Week 6: October 1, 2007: Geher, Ra, Shakir, Golubovich
Missed—to be made up
Week 7: October 8, 2007: 40th anniversary conversation, Dryer Chrissopoulous.
Missed—to be made up
Make-Up Journal: Friday Public Library Panel: October 12, 2007:
Inguanez, Na, Dewanto, Khalifa, and Miller. Writing from Where I Stand: World Perspectives and Home Literatures.
It was interesting to hear the writers’ very different takes on this big and fertile topic. Inguanez spoke from a mostly personal perspective; I liked her dismay with the stationary verb standing: “I picture myself swimming or dancing. Each time I turn (to myself), I’ve just moved.” She made a lot of intriguing remarks in her presentation which I would have liked to hear her develop more. For instance, when she spoke about transitioning from girl to woman and back again in her poems, I wondered what exactly those states meant to her. Also I was curious about her statement “otherness and unity melt, particularly in poems about war, poverty and so on.” Why in that kind of poem specifically?
Na addressed the development of Chinese poetry in the Southeast Asia in general and specifically in the Philippines. As he said himself, it was such a large topic, that his remarks were of necessity abbreviated and general, so that I found them kind of hard to grasp on to. I also felt I needed more of a historical grounding in the status of the Chinese community in the Philippines to really understand what he was saying. What was the relationship of the Chinese community to the majority Filipino population in general, and to the Japanese occupiers and the Marcos regime particularly, which made it necessary for Chinese literature to go into “hibernation” during those periods?
Dewanto’s presentation was a nuanced deconstruction of the concept and critical study of “world literature.” I found it very provocative and insightful, although at times it was hard for me to follow all the twists and turns. He was decrying the inevitable Euro-centrism of the discipline, where literature in major European languages, whether from European countries or their former colonies, always takes precedence over writing in other “peripheral” languages. At the same time he seemed to be protesting what happened to writing and writers from the periphery when they did receive critical attention as world literature, often as an exemplars of “local color.”
He clarified his position for me when he said, in answer to an audience question that he “wants to open up world literature, but not in the manner of cultural studies.” He added there needed to be some sort of “formal standards” against which all works can be judged. Of course, to me it seems that that just begs the question, whose standards? Because standards are at least somewhat culturally determined, right? Which is why, as he pointed out, literature from Japan and China has long received critical attention from the West because it often happens to conform to certain Western aesthetics where as work from elsewhere may not. It seems there is no solution, and in any case I tend to feel that the problem of creating an equitable critical hierarchy for world literature is a flawed project anyway. I agree with the writer’s perspective as he states it: “We prefer to follow the tenets of Goethe’s world literature: reading is an unsystematic, open-minded effort, rather than a method of constituting as system.”
Khalifa’s presentation was quite different—a beautiful, even lyrical meditation on the power of art to confront human evil. “What can the defenseless art do in the face of all accumulated human errors?” It is a wonderful question. I was struck again by his love for his form, his confession of how the novel gave him the “power to be able to assemble my own life” and his description of it as “fragile and tender.” Indeed, “tenderness” came up a number of times in his presentation, enough that I would have liked to ask him what the word meant to him. I found his faith in the power of art as a tool against tyranny and darkness very inspiring. I also loved his statement that “The ancient question asked by all art may be death, but it is the question of life that continues to drive art forward with constant momentum,” although I think it will take me some more time to fully understand it. It seems intuitively right to me.
Miller took “standing” literally, and took on the cultural clash between “sit-down” or formal, literary poetry and “stand-up” or slam poetry. It was a witty, confessional talk about authorial vanity that made me laugh a lot. I also was interested in what he said in response to an audience question, that in the Caribbean, Walcott and Braithwaite were long considered the definitive examples of each “school” respectively, and Caribbean poets were expected to “choose” between them, but the current generation of poets is moving beyond this stark choice, so that they can both “stand up and sit down” now.