Curfewed Night

The doctor who treated a sixteen year old boy
Recently released from an interrogation centre asked,
'Why didn't the fortune tellers predict
The lines in his palms would be cut by a knife?'

Basharat Peer quotes Agha Shahid Ali in his book Curfewed Night. 

The book has been haunting me since I finished - it is searingly honest and reading it also underlined how one sided a view we get of Kashmir. It reminded me of my time in the valley - all too short and almost five and a half years ago now (where has time flown?).  I visited in December, when the chinaar trees were naked, the skies dull and the beauty heart aching. Tourists hadn't yet started going back then and almost everywhere we went it was like discovering a land that had been lost, forgotten, abandoned. 

Kashmir, known to so many of my generation from old Hindi movie songs. Actually being there was like opening an old photo album - those familiar images tumbled out, except they were no longer bright and new, rather, dusty and faded. Perhaps that made the place more poignant, perhaps I am romanticizing. There were also army personnel, bunkers, guns - sights all too stark and ones I would like to remove from my memory of the place, but can't. 

The stories of torture and destruction Peer chronicles are ghastly. It's an India - brute force, blind vengeance, absolute power - which, those of us who haven't, are lucky not to have seen. But one that raises its head all too often and which I have, shockingly, heard people defend glibly - after all, aren't we as a nation too laid back,  too soft, utterly indecisive? People like S.A.R Geelani, Binayak Sen and countless others are just collateral damage in the struggle to maintain power.

I feel strange writing such a cynical(?), unhappy post when every one is gushing over the election results. I am very happy not to be living in a BJP ruled India, what with their venomous campaigns and agendas. Indeed the Congress is the only party I was actively supporting, but the last five years of Congress rule haven't been much to write about, and I really, really hope that with the mandate they have, the next five are better.

Revenge

At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!
*
But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.
*
Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school ...
asking about him
and sending him regards.
*
But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

- Taha Muhammad Ali
Translated from the Arabic by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin. (From)

The City

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.

C.P. Cavafy
Translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

Note: Quoting out of context, I know. The poem in full here.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941- 2008)

Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 - 9 August 2008)

Stunned and saddened immensely to hear of Mahmoud Darwish's untimely death. What a great loss. Darwish was probably my favourite of all the contemporary poets I have read and one of my all time favourites. Along with Faiz and Hikmet, one of the poets to have affected me most deeply. At this point, the great man's words themselves seem the most apt. RIP.

'One of the manifestations of a Palestinian poet's freedom is that he will not be tied down by the conditions placed by the Israelis. It's a sensitive issue and I might even be misunderstood saying this: that I can write a love poem and it is a form of resistance; that I can write about a tree or a beautiful morning and that too is a form of resistance.'

Below, lines from the Jidariyya:

Mine

Is what used to be mine: my yesterday, and what will be mine

My far away tomorrow, the return of the lost soul

As if nothing ever was

As if nothing ever was

A small wound in the arms of the absurd present...

And History mocks its victims

And its heroes...

He throws a glance on them and passes...

This sea is mine

This humid air is mine

And my name –

Even if I misspell it on my coffin –Is mine.

As for me — full as I am

Of all the reasons for parting

I am not mine.

I am not mine

I am not mine...

One can miss mountains

and pine. One

can dismiss
a whisper’s

revelations
and go on as

before as if
everything were

perfectly fine.
One does. One

loses wonder
among stores

of things.
One can even miss

the basso boom
of the ocean’s

rumpus room
and its rhythm.

A man can leave
this earth

and take nothing
—not even

longing—along
with him.

Todd Boss
(From The New Yorker)

Monet's Giverny

Monet's Waterlilies

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

Robert Hayden
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I couldn't help but marvel at the timeliness of 3QD posting this poem by Hayden. I had been meaning to post pictures of Monet's garden in Giverny in any case, but reading the poem, I guess, precipitated that. The poem wonderfully describes the joy of looking at Monet's beautiful paintings but reading it I felt, not surprisingly, that it wonderfully described the experience of seeing his gardens (still beautifully maintained) at Giverny. The experience was almost like being inside one of those wonderful canvases he painted.

When I visited, it wasn't water lily season quite yet. The flowers were just coming into bloom and small lily buds dotted the pond. It was somehow, not very strangely, a familiar sight. But there was also the mad riot of colours, fragrances, reflections. It was a completely different world. Beautiful, comforting, strangely pristine.

There's nothing I can say to give a sense of what it is like to be there. Here Monet's words themselves seem apt. "Non, je ne suis pas un grand peintre, grand poète. Je sais seulement que je fais ce que je peux pour exprimer ce que j'éprouve devant la nature." I am not a great painter, great poet. I just know that I do what I can to express what I feel in front of nature.

Let Them Snuff Out the Moon

A Prison Evening

Each star a rung,
night comes down the spiral
staircase of the evening.
The breeze passes by so very close
as if someone just happened to speak of love.
In the courtyard,
the trees are absorbed refugees
embroidering maps of return on the sky.
On the roof,
the moon - lovingly, generously -
is turning the stars
into a dust of sheen.
From every corner, dark-green shadows,
in ripples, come towards me.
At any moment they may break over me,
like the waves of pain each time I remember
this separation from my lover.

This thought keeps consoling me:
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today,
nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed,
no poison of torture make me bitter,
if just one evening in prison
can be so strangely sweet,
if just one moment anywhere on this earth.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Translated from the Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali

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Another translation I like, by Ted Genoways (from this excellent article on Faiz in the Annual of Urdu Studies) below. It is, I feel, more faithful to the original. I haven't been a ble to find a transliterated version of the poem online and I don't trust my Urdu reading skills enough to do so myself from the original Urdu script (I don't have the poem in Devanagiri). If any one can help out here please do!

A Prison Nightfall

Rung by rung, night descends
its spiral staircase of stars.
A breeze passes gently by,
as if words of love had been whispered.
Trees in the prison courtyard, like exiles
with heads bowed, are absorbed
in embroidering arabesques on the skirt of the sky.
On the crested roof are glittering
the beautiful fingers of moonlight,
dissolving star-shine into dust
and washing the blue sky into white.
In the green corners, dark shadows collide
as if the ache of separation
might eddy and fill my mind.

But one thought keeps running through my heart—
how sweet these moments are. Though
there are those who may concoct tyranny’s poisons,
they will have no victories, not today or tomorrow.
So what if they douse the candles in rooms
where lovers meet? If they’re so mighty,
let them snuff out the moon.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Translated from the Urdu by Ted Genoways

Strange Times, My Dear

As you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other people's living rooms, into their nurseries and studies, into their bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family joys, into their dreams.

Which is why I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagining the other will make you not only a better businessperson or a better lover but even a better person.

Over the past few days I have been reading Strange Times, My Dear – The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature and its no surprise then that these lines by Amos Oz have been coming back to me time and again. The importance of what Oz says can’t be overstated and these lines hold especially true when you are reading about a country that is (in general) so misrepresented, so caricaturized and to a large extent so cut off from public knowledge and imagination.

When PEN and Arcade Publishing contracted to publish this anthology, they found out that to do so could subject them to a possible fine of $1,000,000 and ten years in prison. Reason being, no writers from the “Axis of Evil” countries could publish books in America without applying for a permit by the Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). (It was this inane rule that prevented Shirin Ebadi from publishing her memoirs in the States as well.) So, Arcade went to court, the OFAC backed down and it’s our good fortune that we can now read about people in these rogue states and know that their sorrows, joys and dreams are not all that different from ours.

I am still making my way through the collection. There are many pieces I haven’t read at all and some that I have gone back to again and again. Among those that I have returned to are Ahmad Shamlu’s gorgeous poems – they have stayed with me all week, the images beautiful and heartbreaking. What strange times indeed.

In This Blind Alley

They smell your breath
lest you have said: I love you,
They smell your heart:
These are strange times, my dear.

They flog love
at the roadblock.
Let’s hide love in the larder.

In this crooked blind alley, as the chill descends,
they feed fires
with logs of song and poetry.
Hazard not a thought:
These are strange times, my dear.

The man who knocks at your door in the noon of the night
has come to kill the light.
Let’s hide light in the larder.

There, butchers
are posted in passageways
with bloody chopping blocks and cleavers:
These are strange times, my dear.

They chop smiles off lips,
and songs off the mouth:
Let’s hide joy in the larder.

Canaries barbecued
on the flames of lilies and jasmines:
These are strange times, my dear.

Satan, drunk on victory,
squats at the feast of our undoing.
Let’s hide God in the larder.

Ahmad Shamlu
Translated from the Persian by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak

To say "I Lived"

Türkçe'de

III
Bu dünya soğuyacak,
yıldızların arasında bir yıldız,
hem de en ufacıklarından,
mavi kadifede bir yaldız zerresi yani,
yani bu koskocaman dünyamız.

Bu dünya soğuyacak günün birinde,
hatta bir buz yığını
yahut ölü bir bulut gibi de değil,
boş bir ceviz gibi yuvarlanacak
zifiri karanlıkta uçsuz bucaksız.

Şimdiden çekilecek acısı bunun,
duyulacak mahzunluğu şimdiden.
Böylesine sevilecek bu dünya
"yaşadım" diyebilmen için...

Nazim Hikmet, Şubat 1948

In English

III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet -
I mean this, our great earth.

This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space...

You must grieve for this right now
- you have to feel this sorrow now -
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived"...

Nazim Hikmet, February 1948
Translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

The poem in full here.
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There is much that I want to write...half written posts are all around, but I haven't had the time or space to clear my head and actually organize my thoughts. Faiz has been a constant every single night (and during the day - all I seem to be listening to these days is a mix of Nayyara Noor and Iqbal Bano). In between there have been bits of Hikmet.

I do mean to finish my half written post on (my struggle with) reading Faiz in Urdu, but till then Nayyara Noor singing Aaiye Haath Uthayen.

Two Poems

Haven't had much time to read anything. My Name is Red in starts and stops and last week, Agha Shahid Ali and Faiz. This week has been a mix of Darwish and Hikmet. Two poems I love very much here. Falstaff, still no Darwish on Poitre ... you really should have some ...
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And We Have a Land

And we have a land without borders, like our idea
of the unknown, narrow and wide. A land …
when we walk in its map it becomes narrow with us,
and takes us to an ashen tunnel, so we shout
in its labyrinth: And we still love you, our love
is a hereditary illness. A land … when
it banishes us to the unknown … it grows. And
the willows and adjectives grow. And its grass grows
and its blue mountains. The lake widens
in the soul’s north. Wheat rises in the soul’s
south. The lemon fruit gleams like a lantern
in the emigrant’s night. Geography glistens
like a holy book. And the chain of hills
becomes an ascension place to higher … to higher.
“If I were a bird I would have burned my wings,” someone says
to his exiled self. The scent of autumn becomes
the image of what I love … The light rain leaks
into the heart’s drought, and the imagination opens up
to its sources, and becomes place, the only
real one. And everything from the faraway
returns as a primitive countryside, as if earth
were still creating itself to meet Adam, descending
to the ground floor from his paradise. Then I say:
That’s our land over there pregnant with us … When was it
that we were born? Did Adam get married twice? Or will we
be born a second time
to forget sin?

- Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly’s Burden
(Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah)

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The Strangest Creature on Earth

You're like a scorpion, my brother,
you live in cowardly darkness
like a scorpion.
You're like a sparrow, my brother,
always in a sparrow's flutter.
You're like a clam, my brother,
closed like a clam, content,
And you're frightening, my brother,
like the mouth of an extinct volcano.

Not one,
not five --
unfortunately, you number millions.
You're like a sheep, my brother:
when the cloaked drover raises his stick,
you quickly join the flock
and run, almost proudly, to the slaughterhouse.
I mean you're strangest creature on earth --
even stranger than the fish
that couldn't see the ocean for the water.
And the oppression in this world
is thanks to you.
And if we're hungry, tired, covered with blood,
and still being crushed like grapes for our wine,
the fault is yours --
I can hardly bring myself to say it,
but most of the fault, my dear brother, is yours.

- Nazim Hikmet, 1947
(Translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk)

Around the world

Thessaloniki

Delhi

Vienna

Florence

Istanbul

Vienna

Venice

Istanbul

Siem Reap

Dachau

Delhi

Venice

Angkor Thom

Am contemplating buying a new camera. Have shortened it down to the Panasonic Lumix FZ18 and the Canon S5 IS (though I am leaning more toward the former). Any input is welcome.

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Columbia Magazine has an interview with Pamuk (via 3QD). His new book Masumiyet Muzesi (The Museum of Innocence) will be out in Turkey in December. He has said earlier it’s his most ambitious project to date and I am really looking forward to it. So, here’s hoping the English translation comes out soon!

Another interview (quite an old but interesting one) talks about the trouble he has had with publishers and translators. “Guneli’s translation of The New Life in England received The London Times award for the worst translation of the year, while the American Translators Association gave her the prize for the best translation, which made only more confusion for me.”

I didn’t enjoy Gun’s translation of The Black Book and left it midway to pick up Maureen Freely’s new translation of the book that is now one of my favourites. I keep hoping a new version of The New Life comes out. It’s such a bizarre book I still don’t know what to make of it.

Pamuk was also on The Charlie Rose show a couple of months back and I really loved the interview. He is just completely adorable. You can watch it here.
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After a post on the intermingling of food cultures, it’s perhaps apt that I should write about dance cultures. A couple of weeks ago at a seminar and dinner gathering I was attending on ‘Islam and the Arts’, the roots of the Malay Zapin dance were traced back to the Muslim missionaries who came to the region from Hadramut in Yemen. Though traditionally performed only by males during religious functions the many variants of Zapin are now part of the secular artistic heritage of the area, with women dancers a common sight too.

I found a video of a dance that is very similar to the one I had the pleasure of watching except that the boys (in their late teens I would guess) wore lose jeans, tight shirts and looked strangely like docile punks dancing away to the wonderful music of the oud. One particular young man had the entire female population in the audience drooling including the very elderly lady sitting next to me who turned to me and said “Isn’t he beautiful?” the moment he started dancing. My friend later found out he was half Arab and a quarter Malay and Chinese each. “Ah, clearly he’s taken the best features of each,” she commented knowingly.
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Have been listening to a lot of Abida Parveen of late and by default a lot of Faiz and Bulleh Shah as well. And as much as I love Tere Ishq Nachaya [1] what I have been listening to most has been Abida singing in praise of Shahbaz Qalandar in Lal Meri Pat Rakhiyon..[2]. All this of course makes you feel even more crappy about the shit that is happening across the border.

Strangely enough the NYT had a profile of Aitzaz Ahsan, who is currently in jail, a few days back. Strange because I had just borrowed his book The Indus Saga – From Patliputra to Partition from the library. I haven’t read it yet, only the introduction, but it will be my companion on the metro this week.

All of this reminds of another favourite, Hikmet, and his apt and beautiful words:

Ne devlet ne para

insanın emrinde dünya

belki yüz yıl sonra

olsun

mutlaka bu böyle olacak ama

The world is not run by governments or money

but people rule

a hundred years from now

maybe

but it will be for sure [3]
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[1] I didn’t know till about a year back that Chaiyya Chaiyya (and also of course Thaiyya Thaiyya) were inspired by Bulleh Shahs famous poem. I did however know that Rabbi Shergill was singing Baba Bulleh Shah in his lovely song Bullah Ki Jaana. (Translation here.)

[2] I need to mention that Faiz more than anyone makes me cry. Last week I wept just listening to his ghazals and I do not know why. I just remember hugging my pillow and sobbing away. With some of his poems its even worse - I remember reading a thin little volume in the library and before I realised it tears were streaming down my cheeks. So there is only so much Faiz I can take at a time and I think listening to Dam Mast Qalandar has been one way of not getting overly depressed.

[3] The poem in full

İyimserlik
Şiirler yazarım
basılmaz
basılacaklar ama

Bir mektup beklerim müjdeli
belki de öldüğüm gün gelir
mutlaka gelir ama

Ne devlet ne para
insanın emrinde dünya
belki yüz yıl sonra
olsun
mutlaka bu böyle olacak ama

Optimism
I write poems
they don't get published
but they will

I'm waiting for a letter with good news
maybe it will arrive the day I die
but it will come for sure

The world is not run by governments or money
but people rule
a hundred years from now
maybe
but it will be for sure

Nazim Hikmet, 12 September 1957
The American Poetry Review, Jan/Feb 2002

I get thrilled when I can read Turkish and understand it. The downside is that translations somehow don’t match up to the original then. But, well, they bring their own perspective.