It was the first day of class and to honor Grace Paley’s memory I gave the students copies of “A Conversation with My Father.” The writer tells a story to her dying father; he wants a different story, and in light of his comments, the daughter changes her story. (For those who don’t know the line “everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” is a line from that story. It is a comment about people, but also about stories.) All writing is rewriting but this rewriting also involves writing for or against the voices and expectations of others. I guess that was the pedagogical lesson I had in mind but what amazed me was the ways in which different students, even within the space of a few minutes I gave them to do the exercise in class, quickly settled down to write, often with powerful feelings of injury and love, brief letters to their fathers.

Go here for a discussion between Grace and Ann Charters about the above story. The photo above is from here, and is a fine reminder of which particular fathers the writer had in her sights. Here’s a poem by Grace Paley that I found in the obituary that Katha Pollitt wrote in her memory (via):

The Poet’s Occasional Alternative

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor
everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one
this does not happen with poems
because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

The Guardian has a piece by V.S. Naipaul looking back more than fifty years when, as a young Caribbean writer, he discovered the success of another writer who was only a few years older than him. The story of the discovery is affecting, as are the cutting remarks at the article’s end, about Walcott but also the desires and fantasies of people in American universities:

And now, when I went to the Walcott, I was overwhelmed. The poems I could enter most easily were the shorter poems in the collection. They were the ones whose argument I could manage. I lost my way in the longer poems; I thought what was being said prosy and difficult and I stumbled over the poetic diction. I left those poems to one side and concentrated on the ones I liked; the poet and his book, short as it was, did not suffer.

It seemed to me quite wonderful that in 1949 and 1948 and doubtless for some years before there had been, in what I had thought of as the barrenness of the islands, this talent among us, this eye, this sensitivity, this gift of language, ennobling many of the ordinary things we knew. The fishermen rowing homeward in the dusk are not aware of the stillness through which they move. We lived in Trinidad on the all but shut-in Gulf of Paria, between the island and Venezuela; that sight of fishermen, silhouettes in the fast-fading dusk, so precisely done, detail added to detail, was something we all knew. Reading these poems in London in 1955, I thought I could understand how important Pushkin was to the Russians, doing for them what hadn’t been done before. I put the Walcott as high as that.

(Thanks, Tunku)

The image above is a painting by Walcott, “Gauguin in Martinique”

v.s.naipaul-derek-walcott-guardian

“The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed down to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags–onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffleos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the DumDum pops, the Mystic mints.”

first-week-semester-white-noise-first-paragraph

Quarratulain Hyder, author of Aag Ka Darya, which she herself translated as River of Fire, has passed away. Uma at Indian Writing has provided a link to a Kumkum Sangari article on Hyder. And Outlook magazine has linked its obituary to a piece by C.M. Naim.

Photo by Prashant Panjiar.

Grace Paley has died.

More.

Hear her read from her work. And this obituary with this wonderful line: “In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.”

Here are the opening lines from a Paley story called “Friends” that I’m never able to put out of my mind:

To put us at our ease, to quiet our hearts as she lay dying, our dear friend Selena said, Life, after all, has not been an unrelieved horror–you know, I did have many wonderful years with her.

She pointed to a child who leaned out of a portrait on the wall–long brown hair, white pinafore, head and shoulders forward.

Eagerness, said Susan. Ann closed her eyes.

On the same wall three little girls were photographed in a schoolyard. They were in a furious discussion; they were holding hands. Right in the middle of the coffee table, framed in autumn colors, a handsome young woman of eighteen sat on an enormous horse–aloof, disinterested, a rider. One night this young woman, Selena’s child, was found in a rooming house in a distant city, dead. The police called. They said, Do you have a daughter named Abby?

And with him, too, our friend Selena said. We had good times, Max and I. You know that.

There were no photographs of him. He was married to another woman and had a new, stalwart girl of about six, to whom no had would ever come, her mother believed.

Our dear Selena had gotten out of bed. Heavily but with a comic dance, she soft-shoed to the bathroom, singing “Those were the days, my friend…”

Later that evening, Ann, Susan, and I were enduring our five-hour train ride home. After one hour of silence and one hour of coffee and the sandwiches Selena had given us (she actually stood, leaned her big excavated body against the kitchen table to make those sandwiches), Ann said, Well, we’ll never see her again.

Who says? Anyway, listen, said Susan. Think of it. Abby isn’t the only kid who died. What about that great guy, remember Bill Dalrymple–he was a noncooperator or a deserter? And Bob Simon. They were killed in automobile accidents. Matthew, Jeannie, Mike. Remember Al Lurie–he was murdered on Sixth Street–and that little kid Brenda, who O.D.’d on your roof, Ann? The tendency, I suppose, is to forget. You people don’t remember them.

grace-paley

Thanks to Robin Varghese’s recommendation, I’ve been watching Ray’s documentary on Tagore. I’m no fan of dramatized documentary, but there is no simple illustrative function being performed here. All the poetry of Ray’s film-making is present in these frames!

Elsewhere, Kamila Shamsie has been wordering why Pakistani writers haven’t kept pace with their Indian counterparts. (The phenomenon can be explained, according to my man Mohsin Hamid, by the presence of fast bowlers in Pakistan.)

The above two links were linked to August celebrations of independence in India and Pakistan. Thanks to Indian Writing, I read about 15 August in flooded Bihar.

I found this review of a book of poems by Guantanamo detainees a real pleasure to read–at every turn, the reviewer Dan Chiasson asks the right questions and in the right tone. Bravo.

All of which is to say, reading “Poems From Guantánamo” is a bizarre experience. “The Detainees Speak” is this book’s subtitle: but putting aside the real question of whether lyric poets ever “speak” through their art, in the sense of revealing a historical person’s actual life story (they have rarely done so through poetry’s long history, and often poets “speak” least revealingly precisely when they claim to be telling the truth), in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by “linguists with secret-level security clearance” but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale — “speak”?

Given these constraints, a better subtitle might have been “The Detainees Do Not Speak” or perhaps “The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak.” But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been “The Pentagon Speaks.” To be sure, it’s hard to imagine a straightforward propagandistic use for the lines “America sucks, America chills, / While d’ blood of d’ Muslims is forever getting spilled”; but you can’t help suspecting that this entire production is some kind of public relations psych-out, “proof” that dissent thrives even in the cells of Guantánamo. (Does that sound paranoid? Can you think of another good reason the Pentagon would have selected these lines out of thousands for publication?)

(Photo: India-Pakistan bus)

Here’s what I wrote for Rave Out on India Uncut yesterday:

I’m writing this on August 15. It is our Independence Day. A young Kashmiri Muslim told me in Srinagar a few months ago that this is the day on which everyone there tries to stay indoors. This is not because the people support Pakistan, but because they are most suspect on August 15. You are questioned, searched, and locked. If any of the readers have had a chance to view Sanjay Kak’s powerful documentary Jashn-e-Azadi (How We Celebrate Freedom) you’ll see how Sanjay, coming in to Srinagar for a visit around Independence Day, is struck by the fact that the only people present for the ceremony are the cops and members of the armed forces. (That’s Rave Out #1. For Jashn-e-Azadi.)

Last week’s announcement of the Indian Express-CNN/IBN poll, that an overwhelming majority of Kashmiris in the valley want azadi, also underlines the importance of a genuine rethinking on the question of independence rather than empty, nationalist sabre-rattling. (Anyway, that’s Rave Out #2. For Indian Express and CNN/IBN, as well as the good folk at CSDS who designed the poll.)

This is a good day for re-opening the pages of 13 December: A Reader, in which thirteen writers and journalists point out the injustice involved in the quick media-lynching of SAR Geelani and the denial of a fair trial to Afzal Guru. (This would be Rave Out #3, for the book, although wouldn’t it be great if the book weren’t needed?)

Station Road, by Sudhir Patwardhan

Read Ram Guha in today’s NY Times, and also Mohsin Hamid

Or death.