James Yee came to Vassar today and spoke about his work, till his arrest in 2003, as a military chaplain in the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Yee’s visit provided the occasion for me to cajole my Urban Studies colleague Lisa Brawley to come to my class and share with us her unpublished piece “The Airstrip and the Cage.” An excerpt from Lisa’s report on the boomtown that is Guantanamo:

“If it weren’t for Camp Delta beside the sea, and the enormous iguanas, Guantanamo would seem very much like a small, typical American town.” It has, at least, the predictable strip: McDonalds, Subway, Pizza hut, KFC. Thursdays are karaoke night at one of the base’s two bars. The base maintains its own schools, its own water supply, its own power system, which includes the recent addition of four wind-powered turbines (Gitmo goes green). A second gym is being built, as are stucco-ed townhouses that cluster along curvilinear streets. On Chapel Hill, one can now attend a four-year college; classes began in January 2004. There is a grassless golf course, a bowling alley, and an outdoor movie theater. There are forty-five cable channels, including HBO. Flush times on Guantanamo were signaled by the arrival of Starbucks. Asked about the recent upsurge in amenities, a base commander remarked, “Everyone wants to feel like they are going home after work.” … Work to upgrade and expand Joint Task Force housing and other base facilities is ongoing. Finally, managing the regime of labor on Guantanmo includes rendering the labor of torture routine–not only for those who have chosen to make a career of interrogation, but also for an all-volunteer military comprised, increasingly, of the casualties of neoliberalization. (In the base newsletter, a Gitmo naval officer explains her choice to join the Navy: “I joined when I’d had enough of Dunkin’ Donuts and Kmart.”) The American suburb being built on Cuban soil helps to ensure that staffing the U.S. global war prison remains an acceptable alternative to working in Walmart.

Photo: Brennan Linsley/AP

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Jeff Wall, whom I had linked on this site before, after reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, has an article devoted to him in last Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. These are MOMA images by Wall: “A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)” (above) and “After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue” (below).

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I’ve just been sent the cover for Home Products. Andy and Shruti worked hard on it. It also had to be approved by Raj and Sujata. Here’s the jacket-copy:

A film director asks Binod, who is a journalist in Bombay, to produce a portrait of a murdered girl, a poet killed by a politician by whom she is pregnant. The director wants a script about small towns, desire, compromise and intrigue. Probably he wants masala. Subtle and articulate, his sensibility shaped by the classic films of a high-minded and austere boyhood, Binod undertakes to draught a Bollywood story. Unlike Binod is his cousin Rabinder, in Hajipur jail and full of plans. Arrested for turning his cybercafe into a porn parlour, Rabinder is a doer, with dreams of entering films.

Home Products is the story of Binod and Rabinder, brought up as brothers, one a man of hope, the other of appetite, whose ambitions unexpectedly intertwine. As it unfolds, a complex world comes to throbbing life, moving from Motihari where Binod was born, and George Orwell before him; to the Bombay of film, imitation and enterprise; via Delhi, its calm shattered by an assassination and riots.

In the broad sweep of this stunning first novel, acclaimed non-fiction writer Amitava Kumar charts a tale of sexual anxiety and anarchic impulses in a society steeped in crime. Detailing the search among its members for order and artistic brilliance, written with extraordinary inventiveness, Home Products brings aglow the struggle against small-town beginnings. It reminds us gently, and incisively, of our anxieties as middle-class individuals in a middle-class nation.

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Just out from the New Press. The much-awaited work of our own Frantz Fanon. Only sweeter.

“Europe” is morally, spiritually indefensible. And today the indictment is brought against it . . . by tens and tens of thousands of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.
—AIMÉ CÉSAIRE, DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM

Here, from a brilliant young writer, is a paradigm-shifting history of both a utopian concept and global movement—the idea of the Third World. The Darker Nations traces the intellectual origins and the political history of the twentieth century attempt to knit together the world’s impoverished countries in opposition to the United States and Soviet spheres of influence in the decades following World War II.

Spanning every continent of the global South, Vijay Prashad’s fascinating narrative takes us from the birth of postcolonial nations after World War II to the downfall and corruption of nationalist regimes. A breakthrough book of cutting-edge scholarship, it includes vivid portraits of Third World giants like India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, and Indonesia’s Sukarno—as well as scores of extraordinary but now-forgotten intellectuals, artists, and freedom fighters. The Darker Nations restores to memory the vibrant though flawed idea of the Third World, whose demise, Prashad ultimately argues, has produced a much impoverished international political arena.

Vijay Prashad’s previous books include The Karma of Brown Folk and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting. He is on the board of the Center for Third World Organizing and a co-founder of the Forum of Indian Leftists. He teaches at Trinity College, Connecticut, and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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As the Kitab Book Festival gets underway in Mumbai, Time Out carries a piece by me on the city and its literature. Here’s an excerpt:

All I knew of Bombay during those early years were the Juhu hotels and drunken Goans shown in Hindi films – and the beginning chapter of VS Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness: “As soon as our quarantine flag came down and the last of the barefooted, blue-uniformed policemen of the Bombay Port Health Authority had left the ship, Coelho the Goan came aboard and, luring me with a long beckoning finger into the saloon, whispered, ‘You have any cheez?’”

A few more years, and everything would change. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children evoked, with a migrant’s ardent recall, the Bombay suburbs of his childhood. The novel began with the declaration: “I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time.” In Saleem Sinai’s fevered imagination, Shivaji’s equestrian statue came to life at night and the horse’s “grey, stone hooves” galloped past Bombay’s landmarks, their names faithfully recorded in the pages of the novel. Saleem’s home was located in Methwold’s Estate – and he described, with a lump in his throat, the road turning off Warden Road between a bus-stop and a little row of shops.

That turn of the narrow road past small shops and the confectioner’s, leading to large and crumbling, overpopulated villas – this was a turn also in the world of Indian writing in English. That same road from Midnight’s Children ran past Rohinton Mistry’s Firozsha Baag, and Au Revoir Exports, and Pleasant Villa. And the Central Works Department No 17 chawl in which Kiran Nagakar’s Ravan and Eddie lived. It went past the apartment building, where under the curving stairway, Manil Suri’s Vishnu lay dying. And young Altaf Tyrewala’s Flat 1203, 1302, 1401, and Flat 1602, 1503, 1404.

These writers had mapped an urban world of familiar places and people, or perhaps a world made familiar only by being thus named. What also made this city real was that, starting with Rushdie, writers had begun making use of Bambaiyya English, a mixed-up argot, street-smart and as infectious as conjunctivitis. But in the time that has passed since the publication of Midnight’s Children more decisive changes were to occur in Mumbai’s literary landscape.

That narrow road from Rushdie’s childhood would join a busier street and, with suitable special effects, explode into the teeming pages of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. Like Naipaul in an extended part of A Million Mutinies Now, Mehta would show that a city is more than a sum of its parts because of its individual inhabitants and their unappeasable energies. Naipaul, Mehta, and even Chandra – unlike Rushdie, their writing about Mumbai has been based on a diligent search for material. These are works of reportage. It is crucial to grasp this break from Rushdie’s magical realism. The map that these writers unfold for us is not so much of a remembered place as of real people in real places.

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Colson Whitehead read from Apex Hides the Hurt at Vassar today. He also came to my non-fiction class earlier in the afternoon. We had read The Colossus of New York. For forty minutes or so Colson spoke about how the book came to be written and he answered questions about specific sections, and then, in the second part of class, he responded to my students’ ideas about what they were going to write about New York City. (Despite a cold and the presence of large quantities of drowsiness-inducing medicine in his veins, the man performed with admirable cheerfulness and generosity.) He had finished four of what became the eventual thirteen chapters of Colossus when September 11 happened, and then, he wrote the rest in the aftermath. The book reflects but only subtly the loss of the Twin Towers: their absence, and what the attacks meant, is present more like a mood. I liked that about Colossus, and the rhythm of its sentences, intimate but also seeking a broader, more public and universal, language of recognition.

From the opening page of Colossus:

No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet café plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

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At least sixty-six people died today when two cars of the train running between India and Pakistan caught fire. This train has never run on time; in fact, sometimes it doesn’t run for months and years. It has followed another sense of time or history altogether, its movements charting the moods of our leaders and the sad fate of two neighboring nations. Today’s fire was a result of bomb explosions. A friend wrote in an email: “A mother from Faisalabad lost five of her children.” What can be said about this–who will explain to that woman why this continues to happen? And the poverty of my own sociological response … that in countries of the West death comes by airplane but that in poor places it is only a train-ride away.

Express photo by Praveen Jain. Also read.

Here is Sagarika Ghose writing about the Samjhauta Express when it had, once again, resumed running:

Through the fog, with a chill wind clattering at the windows, a train leaps through the night, constantly hooting. The decorated Samjhauta Express, complete with coloured buntings at the windows, arrived here this evening to screaming children and flashing cameras. But the mood on board was neither syrupy nor sentimental.

Shrugs Syed Yakoob, a telemarketing operator based in New York and Burhanpur, on his way to visit relatives in Karachi, ‘‘Politician ka mijaz kab thanda or kab garam ho jaye, ye kisi ko nahin maloom.’’ (No one knows when politicians turn the heat on or off).

Shouts of khuda hafiz followed the Lahore-bound train as it pulled out of Delhi. As wafts of smoke from Bidi No. 30 (‘‘They crave this bidi in Pakistan,’’ boasted Haji Abdul Salam, a mill worker) drifted through the compartments, the travellers settled down for the gruelling journey ahead.

Arrival at Attari at 4.30 am, a six-hour wait for visas and Customs, then onto Wagah, another six-hour battle with immigration and Customs, finally, pulling into Lahore early evening.

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My friend and colleague Joshua Harmon has a book out soon! May he be blessed–nay, kissed–by the goddess of first novels!

Set in a region of northern New Hampshire that for several years in the 1830s declared itself an independent nation, Joshua Harmon’s debut novel traces the real and imagined travels of Martha Hennessy, a girl wishing for a life beyond her family’s farm. In language as varied and musical as the Connecticut River the title invokes, Quinnehtukqut interweaves Martha’s story with those of the dreamers and drifters whose lives intersect hers: an American soldier scarred by the first World War, a mythical and murderous tramp seeking lost Indian gold, a man haunted by his memories of Byrd’s expeditions to Antarctica, an industrialist longing to become a woodsman, and an old woman forced to leave her home due to the planned flooding of a valley. Elegiac and lyrical, evocative and visionary, Quinnehtukqut reveals how people inhabit place and how place inhabits people through its vivid study of the New England landscape.

“Joshua Harmon has written a wonderful first novel, austere and beautiful, daringly original, and deeply mysterious, like history itself.” —David Means

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I have a piece in today’s Business Standard about my hometown in literature and Hindi film. An excerpt:

In recent decades several films have been made which cast light on Bihar’s poverty or corruption (Damul, Mrityudand, Shool, Paar, Calcutta Mail, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi) but none moved me as much as Rituparno Ghosh’s Raincoat.

The other films had greater authenticity in their settings, and they were all made by film-makers I very much admire, but it was in Raincoat that I found bits of my middle-class past and the anxieties of my downwardly mobile cousins. What made it even more poignant was that the disappointments and fears of that setting were put in a delicate love-story, offering the consolation of caring while the cracks in the walls grew wider.

The former lovers in Raincoat, who are both, unknown to each other, in straitened circumstances, meet in a crumbling house in Kolkata. The two of them, Manoj and Neeru, are from Bhagalpur in Bihar.

To keep their spirits up, they lie to each other. Neeru is pretending to be the wife of a tycoon. Manoj claims he produces television serials. At one point, Neeru, played by Aishwarya Rai, tells Manoj, the Ajay Devgan character, about the sort of serial she’d like to watch.

“A serial about girls like me… A village girl comes to a new town after marriage … with a dream that … she’ll love her husband very much … look after him … But he’s always on tour … She’s always waiting … Suddenly waking up from sleep, thinking … ‘Did the door bell ring?’”

When she pauses, Manoj begins to speak. “And then one day the bell rings. She opens the door and sees it’s not her husband, but someone else. Someone she used to know but can’t recognise anymore. He’s turned dark, his hair is thinning.”

I was moved by this because even without wanting to, the two were at last telling the story that they had hidden from each other. And that is perhaps the point I have been making about stories from places like Patna.

These are places whose stories we have not told yet, and it is a matter of time before they will come tumbling out of us.

More.

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Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, The Law and Poetry (2006) By Paul Chan | Running time 17:30

On February 10, 2005, Lynne Stewart was convicted of providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy. She is the first lawyer to be convicted of aiding terrorism in the United States. Stewart faces thirty years of prison and will be sentenced in September 2006.

Untitled… is a video portrait of Stewart. The video focuses on the relationship between the language of poetry and the language of the law.

Stewart speaks both languages, and employs poetry as a “knotting point” to connect ideas of beauty and justice for juries and judges alike. The film takes Stewart’s understanding of poetry and the law as a departure point to explore the possibilities of a poetics capable of articulating the pressures of terror and justice.

The film [simply] shows Ms. Stewart talking; in a sense it is a self-portrait. She talks about her trial, about her career as an activist lawyer and about a personal politics that sounds instinctual rather than ideological. She also reads poetry.

One of the poems she reads is William Blake’s “On Another’s Sorrow” from “Songs of Innocence”. It isn’t “political” in any overt way. It is filled with both questions and answers. While she reads, Mr. Chan turns the screen into a field of changing colors, so that we concentrate on the music of the words, the activism of the soul that poetry is, the power outlet that art can be. It’s a simple device, and like any effective political action, right or wrong, brilliant because it works.

–Holland-Cotter, New York Times, January 17th 2006

What a wonderful idea–to speak to a lawyer about poetry, to have her explain law through love of language. I’m going to meet Paul Chan next week, and want to ask him about this video, how he found out that Lynne Stewart loves poetry, and how he devised the poetic structure of presentation in his own video. Poetry being the way through which words are shown to refer not to a readily recognizable reality but a difficulty. The difficulty of making sense of other words, other realities, including the words and realities shaped for us by a punitive State.

For more on Lynne Stewart.

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