My Literary London

London was full of literary bliss this summer.

First of all, I was staying just down the road from London Fields, the city park with a bucolic name where the homonymous novel by Martin Amis is NOT set. M.A. in fact decided that West London, and Notting Hill in particular, was a better place for Nicola, Keith and Guy to live. Of course, while you wander around Hackney you may find some remedies for your “Amis disappointment”, such as bookshops on a boat on Regent's Canal or... reading lanes.

For a radical change, I climbed the stylish neighbourhoods of Highgate and Hampstead, both on the hills in the north of the city. In Highgate there is a famous cemetery, where among other people George Eliot and Karl Marx are buried. 

While wild grass grew on Eliot’s modest grave and not a single flower was in sight, people stop by Marx’s majestic grave all the time, leaving flowers and starting interesting discussions on philosophy. I read about one such discussion  that eventually conflated into Ian Buruma’s famous book “Occidentalism”, a counterpart to Edward Said’s seminal book on the orientalist discourse. I stopped on Eliot’s grave and I felt sorry for her, even though I haven’t read a single line of her. This is only a temporary impediment, because on the aforementioned bookshop on a boat I bought her most famous work, “Middlemarch”. It took some time before I (or the friendly bookseller) could find a copy of it inside the boat, but after five minutes of intense search I was rewarded with a hardback edition of Eliot’s famous book. By the way, during my holiday I also had a trip to this small place just outside London where I used to be an Italian language assistant. The building that hosts the school once was George Eliot’s summer house and she may have written parts of her novels there!

Highgate Cemetery is next to Waterlow Park, which is really a lovely place if you want to have a break from London’s chaotic and intense life. I sat under a tree, with children playing on the lawn and people sunbathing, with my copy of “War and Peace” and a couple of books of poetry (not exactly the kind of reading you would do on the tube).

 

Hampstead, with its beautiful, picturesque (and incredibly expensive) houses, can boast a population of artists and intellectuals. This is also where John Keats’ house stands, only nobody seemed to know where it was, causing me to wander around the neighbourhood for more than one hour. His house is rather modest: he only rented a room and a parlour. It’s thrilling to know that there he wrote his “Ode to a Nightingale”, one of his most famous poems. Dear John, buried in Rome, who died at 26 years of age. What I was surprised to learn during my visit was that his friend called him ‘Junkies’. John Keats came from East London, from Moorgate to be precise, not far from where I was staying. Apparently he introduced himself as ‘Junkies’, with a distinguishable Cockney accent. Hilarious! During his lifetime they used to call him ‘a Cockney poet’, which when I think of his poetry sounds preposterous.

I wonder if he wrote "Ode to a Nightingale" here...

Part of my literary tour involved the British Library, where I was doing some research. The central pillar is called the King’s Library, because it’s a donation of King George IV. People who need old books and manuscripts go there and you can see them searching through the shelves from outside. The exhibitions included the Magna Carta, old editions of several classics such as “Jane Eyre” or Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and a room dedicated to science fiction, displaying volumes by George Orwell, H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov.

Punting in Cambridge

Among my trips outside of London there was Cambridge and Stratford-upon-Avon. The first is of course famous for its university and the second for being the hometown of William Shakespeare, but the atmosphere was similar: very relaxed but stimulating.  In Cambridge I visited King’s College, the most prestigious and photographed of Cambridge’s many colleges. Because the building that hosts the college was finished under Henry VIII, you can see magnificent statues of him, and in the majestic college’s chapel there are his initials intertwined with Anne Bolyen’s. This obviously reminded me of the books I have recently read about King Henry VIII and his wives, but it was also a history lesson (not to mention the notions of history of art I gobbled while I was there). An incredible number of famous writers studied at King’s College in Cambridge, among which my favourites are E.M. Forster, Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie. It was strange to think that they walked the same streets, maybe stopping by at the same café or sitting somewhere on a bench scribbling some lines.

In Stratford-upon-Avon, everything revolved around the bard. His birthplace is a stunningly well-preserved house in the centre of the small town. Of course you can visit it (and you’ll have a taste of that peculiarly British obsession for fake meat or plastic eggs on display in the kitchen). In the garden some of the staff is in costume and improvises fragments of Shakespeare’s plays. While I walked on the garden I spotted a bust of Indian poet and playwright Tagore, who was a great admirer of the bard. I wonder why him, with all the admirers Shakespeare has had!

The marvellous cottage of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, is another place that enchanted me, with its garden full of herbs and flowers, its orchard and its maze. The tour guides love to explain how the house passed on one generation after the other in the Hathaway family and how many expressions we use in English, such as ‘raining cats and dogs’ or ‘one over the eight’, originated in the Tudor period, when life conditions were notoriously very different from ours. The atmosphere here was simply peaceful and romantic. Together with Shakespeare's grave in the small, beautiful church of the town and the Shakespeare Royal Company, it made my day!

Anne Hathaway's cottage

In this almost unintentional literary tour, Westminster Abbey was of course included. Together with the burial monuments of Queen Elizabeth I and much of the Tudor dynasty, the abbey is famous for its Poets' Corner, where writers  such as Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer (that my Italian-speaking audioguide called Goffredo!), Rudyard Kipling and Thomas buried are buried. The problem is that sometimes you cannot distinguish the burials from the memorials, so the visitor is led to think that also the Brontes's sisters, W.H. Auden or Jane Austen are buried here, but they are not.

Well, I'm sure I have forgotten some of the many things I have seen (ops, Pinter's play!) and I could write about things I have visited in my previous visits to the UK (Virginia Woolf's house in Bloomsbury or Walter Scott's munument in Edinburgh, not to mention Deacon Brodie's tavern which inspired Stevenson to write one of his most famous novels), but I'm sure you've heard enough for now... 

"The Ramayana" by R.K. Narayan

As the back cover points out, “The Ramayana” ‘is, quite simply, the greatest of Indian epics’. It was first put in writing between 1500 and the fourth century B.C., but it has been adapted and retold many times, each storyteller offering a slightly different version in the intent to accommodate the tale to one’s demands and preferences. This version, told by R.K. Narayan, is based on the Tamil version written by Kamban (the original is in Sanskrit, instead). Narayan (1906 – 2001) has been one of the greatest Indian writers in English and he is still one of the country’s favourites. His contribution to the Indian novel in English  predates Salman Rushdie by almost fifty years, his first novel “Swami and Friends” being written in 1935. He has written books on Indian legends and epic sagas that are still wildly read and offer a decent introduction to a story that is larger than life. Narayan’s book is a shortened prose adaptation and those who are looking for a rich version of the story with all its strands and descriptions should look somewhere else. His writing is not without charms, however.

The story is well known: Rama, the favourite son of the King of Ayodhya and an incarnation of the god Vishnu, is married to Sita, whom he has conquered by managing to wield the incredibly heavy bow of god Shiva owned by her father, the King of Mithila. Rama is destined not to live in peace, however. In fact, his stepmother plots against him and manages to send him into exile in the woods for twelve years. The forest being a rather dangerous place, the couple, accompanied by Rama’s brother Lakshmana, have a hideous encounter with a demon, a rakshasa woman who tries to seduce Rama and is disfigured by Rama’s brother in punishment. As a consequence, her brother Ravana plots to abduct Sita, by sending another demon disguised as a golden deer to distract Rama and his brother. Ravana tries to conquer Sita’s heart, but she sternly waits for her husband to set her free. Rama in the meantime has formed an alliance with Hanuman, a monkey hero. Rama learns from a vulture that Sita is in the island of Lanka, so Hanuman crosses the sea and spies on Ravana. After a war between Ravana and Rama’s forces, Sita is freed. Her trials are not ended, though, because her husband seems cold and distant. This is because he is not sure that Ravana has not touched her, therefore she proposes to undergo a trail by fire. Sita, eager to prove her innocence, steps into the fire and is protected by Agni, the god of fire. Narayan’s adaptation ends with Rama and Sita going back to Ayodhya after the end of their period of exile, thus omitting a part of the tale that the author considers not popular enough and, always according to him, a later addition to the story.

The most interesting and controversial part of the epic, the trial by fire, is dealt with rather briskly, whereas other parts are described at length with evident gusto. Sometimes I found Sita annoying, for example when she insists that her husband should catch the golden deer for her, even though he suspects that it is just a trick from s demon, as golden deer notoriously don’t exist. I guess that the whole concept of duty (dharma actually) is explored in the epic, but for a “modern”, western mind it is not easy to grasp.

Another thing that I noticed and that puzzled me is that when Sita offers to prove her purity by entering the fire, Narayan considers that Rama was wrong in not stopping her. The author, in this case, enters the epic tale and makes his own corrections and comments, as many tellers of the story have done in the past. Narayan justifies Rama by claiming that in that moment he didn’t remember he was an avatar of Vishnu. Errare humanum est, Narayan seems to tell us. It is often said that “The Ramayana” is a somehow male chauvinist text, but if we take Narayan’s version for granted it is not so.

I also find Hanuman, the king of the monkey people, an interesting character. I like the parallels between the monkeys’ virtues and values with those same qualities in the human people. These qualities are often highlighted and contrasted with the prejudice and low esteem of the monkey people. As for the prejudices, one clear example is when Ravana is furious because he did not manage to kill “the monkey”, whereas the low esteem of Hanuman and his peers is evident when his army needs someone else (Sampathi, brother to the eagle Jatayu) to tell them that they can take any form they want, thus finding a way to cross the sea to rescue Sita. Some people even suggest that Hamunan and its people are a mythological version of the indigenous inhabitants of the south of India, as a contrast with the northern people of Aryan descent (Rama’s people). This is a fascinated hypothesis, but I wonder if it is a correct interpretation or just some gibberish talk.   

Although I already knew bits and pieces of the story, I enjoyed Narayan’s short book. It is an extreme summary for a complex story and the writing is sometimes too stiff for my taste, but it was altogether a pleasant reading experience. 

London is an ... "Art of Pariahs"

I have been studying in the British Library for the past two weeks and I will for the following weeks. I have been working on an essay on transnationality and as London inspires me I have been very busy writing.

I'll post here one of my favourite poems from Meena Alexander's book "The Shock of Arrival".

Art of Pariahs

Back against the kitchen stove

Draupadi sings:

In my head Beirut still burns.*

The Queen of Nubia, of God's Upper Kingdom,

the Rani of Jhansi, transfigured, raising her sword,

are players too. They have entered with me

into North America and share these walls.

We make up an art of pariahs:

Two black children spray painted white,

their eyes burning, 

a white child raped in a car

for her pale skin's sake,

an Indian child stoned by a bus shelter,

they thought her white in twilight.

Someone is knocking and knocking

but Draupadi will not let him in.

She squats by the stove and sings:

The Rani shall not sheathe her sword

nor Nubia's queen restrain her elephants

till tongues of fire wrap a tender blue,

a second skin, a solace to our children.

Come walk with me toward a broken wall

- Beirut still burns - carved into its face.

Outcastes all, let's conjure honey scraped from stones,

an underground railroad stacked with rainbow skin,

Manhattan's mixed rivers rising.

London Fields...

... where the homonymous Martin Amis's novel is NOT set.













Greetings from London! I'll be also covering the literary London...

“Because of India. Selected Poems and Fables” by Suniti Namjoshi

Rated among the best Indian contemporary poets, Suniti Namjoshi has published several books of verse. In spite of this, her best achievement are nonetheless prose pieces: unusual fables, “Feminsit Fables” (also the title of one of her books) of which there are a couple of examples in this  collection published in 1989. Being fables, Nanjoshi’s fragments – I cannot but call them such, as they are merely one page each in length – feature animals rather than humans and have a moral lesson.

My favourite fable of this book is “The One-Eyed Monkey Goes into Print”, where the monkey wants to have its book published, but she is been told that, as they are not many one-eyed monkeys, she should write about humans if she expects humans to read her book (or about crocodiles if she expects them to read her book). Consequently, the monkey leaves a blank space every time the expression ‘one-eyed monkey’ appears in her manuscript, but she is been told by the editor that it is not clear who is talking to who, therefore it is not possible to publish the book. Tired and frustrated, the monkey fills the gaps with the original words and tries with a small publishing house. Her book is accepted, but because there is no audience for such a book, she is asked to contribute with some money for the publication. At the end of the story, the monkey decides to rewrite her book with the help of her crocodile friends and she publishes it with the title ‘The Amorous Adventures of a One-Eyed Minx’.

This story tells of how the publishing world works, of course, but is also a metaphor for the situations which people like the author have to face every day. Suniti Namjoshi is in fact an Indian lesbian feminist writer, hence the choice of a one-eyed monkey as the protagonist of her fable: they are not very common, they can even be called exceptions in the natural world, as lesbians and, even more, Indian lesbians are. Yet, the monkey would like to be published and the reader clearly wants the monkey to achieve its goal. Sadly, there is hardly any audience for third-world lesbian poets. Suniti Namjoshi uses animals as a metaphor for gender and for a different sexual orientation that makes her Other. She writes in the preface to a section of poems called “The Jackass and the Lady”: ‘It’s apparent to many women that in a humanist universe, which has been male-centred historically, women are “the other”, together with the birds and the beasts and the rest of creation. And identification with the rest of creation, possibly with the whole of it, would only be logical” (pg. 29). Now I’m curious to read more of these fables and that is what I will do when I’ll look for another of Namjoshi’s books. In my opinion, they are so much better than her poetry: more original and fresh, funny and immediate, but also deep and wise.

Through the words of Suniti Namjoshi (in this book there are poems, but also short introductions to every section) the reader learns of the steps the author took before reaching a feminist and lesbian conscience. It is interesting and puzzling to learn that at the beginning, she did not even included the word ‘lesbian’ in her vocabulary, resorting to a ‘“Well, all right, do what you like, but BE DISCREET”’ (p.9) kind of attitude.

Her poetry is simple and linear (she uses everyday words exclusively), but the result is sometimes stilted. Luckily, when her poetry is more relaxed (this collection spans twenty years, with ups and downs) some interesting images come out (an upside swan, for example, has me thinking since I read that poem). In her work she often expresses the difficulty and fear of facing a real love affair and not imagined, unnreal ones (‘And if I spoke to you, what would I say? / That there’s a change? That I can still feel the ground / Shifting and giving under my feet?’), but also tackles issues such as cultural clash, or the bundle of languages spoken in contemporary India (‘The government official / speaks in English with friends, / in Hindi with servants, / and reserves his mother tongue / for his 2 Alsatian dogs’) and the role of poetry in a world of violence (‘Next time a battery / of poets will be ready’).

She often resorts to mythology – ‘Homage to Circe’, for instance, is one of my favourite poems in the collection – or literature: “Alice in Wonderland”, a book congenial to her because of ‘the sense of the absurd, the satirical devices, the effective alteration of perspective ad the subversive skills of “the outsider”’ (p.103), but also Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, attractive perhaps because of its exotic location (‘in English, things Indian became exotic’, p.42) and of course because of the presence of Caliban, a perfect Other.

All in all, it is a nice introduction to this little known poet. It provides a lot of information on how, when and where her single books were written. It is not exhaustive and one feels that a couple more fables would have been appropriate, but for that you have her other books anyway. There are some interesting ideas in the poems as well, but it is not the kind of poetry I enjoy the most: no word plays, no lyrical moments, almost no verses that stick to your mind, only down-to-earth evocations of the most common images of poetry (the mermaid, the moon, the rose). The fables are so much better: who can resist a fragment called 'The Saurian Chronicles'?

"La Linea d'Ombra" di Joseph Conrad

La mia recensione di questo libro è uscita su Paperstreet ed è disponibile a questo link. In più, vorrei suggerirvi di leggere l'introduzione al libro scritta da Roberto Saviano, scritta per l'edizione  della Biblioteca di Repubblica. Tra le varie cose che dice su questa novella (o romanzo breve?), c'è questo passaggio che vorrei riportare, non perché sia una cosa che non è stata mai detta su "La Linea d'Ombra", ma perché riassume in poche righe qual è il succo di questo testo:

Alcune narrazioni sembrano dei romanzi per l'anima. Ti spiegano come affrontare delle situazioni esistenziali, come smontare e rimontare le idee che ti sei fatto a proposito. "La Linea d'Ombra" è uno di questi: un capolavoro della letteratura che può divenire strumento pratico di consapevolezza del proprio essere e agire nel mondo. Perché racconta di un'esperienza universale, la gioventù e il passaggio all'età adulta, dalla quale però - come spiega Conrad nel libro - "ci si attende una sensazione particolare e personale: un po' di se stessi".

-- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
          In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
          What peaches and what penumbras!  Whole families
shopping at night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

          I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
          I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops?  What price bananas?  Are you my Angel?
          I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
          We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

          Where are we going, Walt Whitman?  The doors close in
an hour.  Which way does your beard point tonight?
          (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
          Will we walk all night through solitary streets?  The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

          Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
          Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Berkeley, 1955
Allen Ginsberg