“Katherine Boo’s debut about the vertiginousness of existence in a “Mumbai slum” is the antidote to mainstream books and films on the subject from the English-speaking world.”

Issue 143 November-December 2011 

The Country of the Blind and Other Stories Installation shots CAMP with GM-A Folkestone Triennial [ongoing]

CAMPuter.org now has a good page on the film here with cat. text, shot-lists, stills, credits… There’s also a link here to pad.ma where the film is archived…

But I strongly recommend heading down to Folkestone, not only to see the film in situ where it’s installed beautifully and offers optimised-viewing, but also to see all the other art on show throughout a fascinating town. The harbour tastes irresistible and in the pubs on the water  front a version of the film is always looping…

Folkestone Triennial’s page is here and they have weekend tours conducted by some high calibre guides not least this weekend with Achim Borchardt Hume here. It takes 53 minutes to get there…

Thanks everyone for the positive feedback.

]]> http://notesfromafruitstore.net/2011/06/27/on-the-country-of-the-blind-and-other-stories-first-art-critical-response/ Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:18:47 +0000 guy mannes-abbott http://notesfromafruitstore.net/2011/06/27/on-the-country-of-the-blind-and-other-stories-first-art-critical-response/

In the Country of the Blind and Other Stories Installation NCI Folkestone [Ph. Guy Mannes-Abbott]

Adrian Searle’s review in The Guardian is so generous about the film I’ve been working on with Shaina, Ashok and Iyesha [CAMP] that I can’t help but post it.

“In the National Coastwatch Institution cabin, perched on a cliff above Folkestone, the volunteer guards scan the sea. Mumbai-based collective CAMP recorded the view, the constant traffic plying the Channel, and the volunteers’ casual commentary The result is an almost hour-long film recorded over a year. French church spires break the horizon, seen through a telescope. We follow tankers and canoes, ferries and fishing boats – and there’s the archbishop of Canterbury, helping out at an archeological dig along the coast, his hair a white, fluffy windsock in the distance. The artists in Mumbai recorded the observations and anecdotes of the volunteers via broadband. It’s a case of the watchers watched, and we watch too, following near-collisions out at sea, and blokes hauling up lobster pots. “Lobsters are giant Jurassic insects,” someone says. I’d happily stay all day.”

Read the piece here.

AS’s warm words had a warm affect, though I would only point out that it’s not a documentary and say no more -other than that Fruit Store loyalists and Dostoyevskians shouldn’t need me to!

Read the letter from the man, jocularly referred to as the ‘archbish’ on the soundtrack, here! And beware similar assumptions!

Probably should resist saying that I agree with him about the ill-judged mermaid too… I was too involved to see very much else other than Zineb Sedira’s very beautiful and complex film installation Lighthouse in the Sea of Time. I’ll post on what I think might well be her best work so far in time and definitely take the 57 minute train back for more of the Triennial and more of Folkestone itself too…

PV Friday 24th 8-Late
Opens to public Saturday 25th June – 25th September

ARTISTS

Don’t miss this at the NCI on the east cliff [best view in and of the town]:

CAMP (Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, Iyesha Geeth Abbas, with Guy Mannes-Abbott)

Title: The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories

VISITING INFO

go, go , go…

The Varne is a mid channel sandbank, slightly closer to the French coast than the coast at Folkestone. If I stood on it, you might see my hand waving above the water. This is where the Varne Lightship Automatic of radio legend is permanently anchored, where massive ships can and do run aground. A place that obtains peculiar potency when watched from the shore.

Everything that goes on in the world’s water, as observed and imagined from the NCI at Folkestone, is the subject of the film I’ve been working on with CAMP -during intensive bursts in Brussels and Folkestone itself. The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories will be installed in a bunker-like room at the back of the NCI Folkestone, high up on the cliffs overlooking the industrial scaled port of Folkestone and English Channel during the Triennial. It will be worth the walk…

Folkestone Triennial opens on Friday 24th June and to the public on the 25th June until 25th September. CAMP were commissioned and worked on this film for almost a year before inviting me to collaborate by writing the script; drawing the recorded material together, adding dimension and depth to it. I hope that’s a faithful way of describing a very intimate investment in the film [credited to CAMP [Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran and Iyesha Geeth Abbas with Guy Mannes-Abbott].

It was a fascinating and demanding process of working with visual anecdotes in ways that remained faithful to their peculiarly potent quality. A lot of structural work, drafts of complete scripts and spontaneous interventions ensued, the recording of which was a lot of fun and fascinating for a writer like me -even as tortuously exact lines dropped away!

I’ve always refused to countenance script writing per se, though I did a bit of script-doctoring very many yrs back and worked on mainstream movies. I more or less detest the zone in mainstream culture where books become films, films become books and there is a really uninteresting hinterland of monied interchangeability between them.

This was not a conventional scripting process obviously, but actually it did require the capture and invention of voice and everything is necessarily carried in those voices. The art for me was in arriving at that apparently simple and essentially crafted end point…

I’m obviously going to give nothing away, but the film embodies many of the ambiguities of the place and the things, lives and locations looking back at it. However, on a personal level, I was happy to ‘discover’ Folkestone as a place. Though many of its land, rail and sea connections have been severed in the recent past [and what stories therein!], it is accessible on the fast train from St. Pancras International…

]]> http://notesfromafruitstore.net/2011/06/10/on-the-living-of-patrick-leigh-fermor/ Fri, 10 Jun 2011 22:10:52 +0000 guy mannes-abbott http://notesfromafruitstore.net/2011/06/10/on-the-living-of-patrick-leigh-fermor/ Patrick Leigh Fermor – still from BBC film 2008

Ninety six is a good age to have lived. Both my grandmothers lived into their mid-90s, one of them to 96, a pivotal experience in my own life. Why am I telling you this?! Well PLF is such a vivid presence to me, principally from his writing and words and their conjuring of his feet and ‘heart’, that the news of his death is sad and yet the confirmation that he lived until today makes me happy.

Peter Levi wrote an obit before he died himself, as is the way with obit writers, and describes PLF as a poet. It’s obviously the case in many ways, but also in quite a specific one I think. In our age, an art documentary which once would have been at the treasurable end of national television, wins the Turner Prize -while there’s no place for such things on TV. This is more or less the case, and implies no qualitative judgement of the maker but it says something about us, doesn’t it?

We live in an age where the kind of prose that climbed those slopes in the Mani really is more or less as dense and allusive as poetry [incontrovertibly 'bad', almost scandalous!], whereas poetry [in the UK] is often what? Jingles. Worse; dried-up jingles. I’m a zealous pursuer of the substantively new, and am certain that it is not inevitable -especially/despite the technological forms it takes- that it cannot exude breadths and depths, complexity, even difficulty.

One of the joys of meeting and then working with Shaina and Ashok of CAMP [on a film for Folkestone Triennial], has been the discovery of pad.ma, which I realised offered me something like the depths and complex potentials of a real book -or real bookishness. That this is not only possible but actual. That shimmer and superficiality is only what it was always, even if it seems so much more definitive of things now. There were and there are exceptions…

So, anyway. Don’t go to the Mani but do go and read the books and think about how you experience a new hill, valley, port, bay, in a place you’ve only just arrived at and then think again about how he did…

Quite like this from The Guardian’s Obit;

“Among his casual attainments, he climbed a peak in the Andes with the mountaineer Robin Fedden and the Duke of Devonshire (who beat the others to the top), and he swam the Hellespont, where he encountered a Russian submarine. In the 1980s he underwent treatment for cancer, which proved successful. Yet his life was distinctly bookish and scholarly: he was a discoverer of obscure and new writers, he translated poetry, and was at some deep level essentially a poet.”

Anne Carson Iceland 2009 [Photo Einar Falur Ingolfsson]

[Notes on Carson's London reading of Nox, a couple of years after the last advertised event -in the wake of Decreation and also at SBC- was cancelled. They posted themselves raw a few days ago, here they are at least spell-checked...]

The first and easy thing to say about my obvious need to catch Anne Carson reading in London [Southbank Centre Poetry International Festival opening event Tuesday Nov 3] is that having gone only to see/hear the most significant poet in the English language actually read, perform, be in public the whole event was an instructive delight.

Carson was the last on of 6 poets, all of whom were worth seeing/hearing -if not memorable as such or as yet- but notable for me were Mimi Khalvati; the poems, the range of forms including a very relaxed form of ghazal and the performance which was practised but bound up with the character, rhythm presence of the work; a rare thing actually. I realised that I’d thought of her [forgive me!] as establishment; sturdy and unspecial, and was wrong.

Kristiina Ehin from Tallinn in Estonia [as she kept on remarking as if it were the last surviving Indus Valley village in the middle of the Great Rann of Kachchh] was a fascinating and harder to weigh performance. Striking in appearance, with a lovely steely quiet, her work trawls deeply in the Baltic and specifically Estonian culture, language mythology and custom. There was a strangeness about it all that was affecting, though it’s possible that without the peculiar pronunciation which chimed so well with the peculiar sources, references and innocent passion within the work it might not read like much.

I was surprised too by Bill Manhire, whose work I didn’t know though he has a dim, too dim, familiarity to me. So it was a real surprise and pleasure to watch and listen to work I’d read only with reluctance come alive in the poet; who managed a nice physical twist and rhythm that is not something you affect in public. Great! I hate poet’s anecdotes but his were good, and were outdone by the poems in the end. Tight little things, sharp witted, but a long one built cleverly from a peculiarly expressed notice about fire alarms in a hotel in Copenhagen into something of compelling insistence.

Carson trumped all of this, of course. She’s something quite else; a different order of poet. Watching her I know she knows it somewhere in her body, but appears both to know and not to know. I guess that is precisely the tone of the work isn’t it? -knowingness and otherwise.

Nox I already admire greatly and treasure someone even aspiring to write work like this in our time. She read a selection from it; a peculiarly difficult thing to arrive at I would think -though there is not so much to choose from in fact. There were some, two I recall [I’ve not played back my recording of it yet] of the words from Catullus’ epitaph [101] for his brother which run through the ‘book’ on the left page, with their full etymological being running to some length. She read these as if they were poems in themselves; another example of a casually effective radicalism.

She also read some of the very moving segments that mourn the life and death [in 2000] of her own brother -another epitaph. At the end [as in the poem] she offered her own translation of the Catullus and it rang deep bells in me as she did so. Throughout I couldn’t avoid the obvious fact that here she was reading a real epitaph to a real brother, missed, loved, unable to leave alone -despite having not seen him for 30 years since he ran away from home and the law in Canada and began an initially India-centred wandering before the death of an adored girl broke him down.

If you’ve not read the poem, stop reading this and go right now to a place where you can; shelf, bookshop, library… I’m not going to critique it here nor, I realised as I walked out into a balmy early Winter night by the river and back to my Fruit Store, will it inspire any work of my own.

I say that because I wrote a very different but highly singular, urgent and condensed epitaph to a long lost brother myself, ten or eleven years ago. He was a brother of choice; by marriage not blood -the beautiful uncanniness of fraternal love. It’s a more convoluted story but I wrote my poem -an e.thing actually- after he also disappeared for 13 years, what now seems like quite a brief interlude! All the same elements were in play; he lived in my mind and I realised that it might be the only place he lived. I also actively wanted him to remain there, it was another choice, a wound but not one tended with self-pity or misery. No, it was a beautiful scar…

Anyway, I know how powerful that text can be from readings I’ve given of it and Carson was having that same effect on me. I was shaken by it and by this association, unable to pretend to dissociation, realising that I’m destined to return to the subject if not the object, who was recovered to life by means of that poem of mine a year later. A very tentative recovery by correspondence, followed by a return to the gloom of silence. A different silence, one almost as long now but different, as I say.

I left thinking that I would be reading something similar [it’s necessary that I inject some form of widely recognised modesty at this juncture right? There] in a similar hall in 10, 20 years. The same story, a banal one. As I walked, caught my hands on some hard green holly upon which the gold leaves of [Canadian Maple?] winter were predictably now mounted, I realised not only that I didn’t want to do that but that I’m spared it. That these poets’ epitaphs, which I’ve already written much earlier in my life than at least one of them [C. was nearly 30 when he wrote his, died soon after], are definitively endgames, afterwords, conclusive.

I realised that there was something I wanted to write, and walked composing out loud before reaching the Fruit Store and starting again over midnight to arrive at a precise and clear e.thing which is very different to the great poets’ epitaphs. It is about -and about isn’t really a fitting word- my access to the prefaratory, the pre- a word [or prefix] linked uncannily to the preposition per- [itself linked to the Sanskrit para- which GN Devy defines as a movement out, towards the other] which my young friend and Entertainer and I had searched for recently and formed a list that I then found only slightly more fully articulated in Carson’s Nox. I dwell there, with this pre-ness, this preface, beginning and future, the rhythm of that not one of endings, epitaphs and after-lifes [the ones constructed from this life; I'm all for the after-life of an exceptional line.].

It would be fair, decent, humble, generous to post that text in here wouldn’t it? But I’m not going to, certainly not now or yet. I suppose I’m thanking Anne Carson, not only for the poem she had written and the intense pleasure, inspiration and relief that it gives me that something so singular exists in the world but also because her reading of it was such a generous act. It’s explosive material and explodes within as it’s read and explosivity of this kind is unpredictable. It looked to me as if it was in her mind more than once during the reading that she didn’t really want to be doing it -and wondered how or why she was. That she might even recognise it as the mourning that it enacts, a kind of other-wordly or -timely ritual.

Mainly I’m thanking her for showing me the very end of that particular road, one I’ve travelled in my own way a long time ago, the absolutely emptied out mine of gold there. A sighting that allowed me to flash back and start another pathway towards the infinite or more specifically to a place where the centrality of death or mortality in life is one where life’s centrality to mortality is evident too. Do you see? -and why not think of it in Devendran terms? “We’ve known, we’ve known, we had a choice, we chose rejoice.” Why not think of it in Dhammapadan terms? “Fore-run by mind are mental states, Ruled by mind, made of mind.”

I hit those epitaphs hard and rebounded all the way to the prefaratory in a very concentrated period of time. That is how good Anne Carson’s writing is, this is the realm of condensed, crystalline absolutes. Everything is starkly clear when writing or poetry is this good. It is done. She has done it with finality. Which frees up the rest for the rest of us.

> Nox is available [again] here or the usual places…

> A good interview piece around Nox from Publisher’s Weekly, here.

“I guess it’s a memoir because it’s about memory, but I kept calling it an epitaph, which seems a more dignified form to me, because memoirs tend to be mostly about the memoirist and their salvation from some calamity or suffering. I didn’t want this to be about me mainly.”

“After pitching the idea to Knopf and realizing that the huge trade house “just didn’t get it,” Carson returned to New Directions, her earlier publisher, and to editor Declan Spring, who was game for trying the scanning-and-copying method … The result is breathtaking, evidence of visionary publishing at a moment when the book business is increasingly cynical.”

> ND editor Declan Spring’s blog on Carson [including James Laughlin's first words; "I may have a book for you to work on, it’s by Anne Carson who writes like no other."] and the making of Nox, here.

> Kristiina Ehin is published by Arc here.

> The Great Rann of Kachchh is in Gujarat; India’s most interesting and vital state and nowadays a secret beyond its shores, though hopefully not for too much longer…

Dirk Stewen untitled [Bronx Monkey II] at Maureen Paley

I’ve been enjoying quite a few shows recently which are likely to be blown out of the water by the imminent frieze fair and so with mighty respect to the latter I thought I’d flag them up as alternatives…

Future Movements Jerusalem at Liverpool Biennial [18 Sept-28 Nov 2010] is an essential exhibition of work from and about Palestine. I posted on Raouf Haj Yihya’s Meter Square here, the New Statesman bravely ran a rather muted piece here and my own review will run at Babelmed shortly. Surprise yourself if you can get to it, or wait for it to travel south as I know it is scheduled to do. But be sure to see it.

Otherwise, Liverpool is a far better Biennial than scarce notice of it by lazy old journos suggests; everyone rightly notes the almost painfully compelling acid-Warhol-mashup-vids of Ryan Trecartin’s but there’s much else, including NS Harsha’s very nice installation [right] at 52 Renshaw Street and not least at Tate Liverpool -where a dubiously conceived but actually nicely put together show called The Sculpture of Language by Carol Anne Duffy exhibits some great and rarely aired works.

Dirk Stewen at Maureen Paley [08 October — 14 November 2010] is the most winning new work in town for me. If you do make it to the frieze jamboree then add this show to your bottom-line schedule otherwise you’ll have failed yourself and London. If you’re not friezing it then take advantage and spend some time in a show spread over two floors, beautifully arranged/hung works combining utopian gesture with extraordinary concentration, tentativeness and beauty. The work seems hardly there at all and yet surprises/delights with a precision that makes for indelibility. It’s Stewen’s first show in London, I’d never seen the work before and this exhibition made me happy to be alive; don’t miss it!

Also in London, well when you hit the Turner Prize show, take time out or go instead to the recently hung room on the British Constructivist Group; Victor Pasmore, Anthony Hill, etc. It’s a few pieces and a vitrine kind of room on the ground floor eastside, which you won’t regret reminding yourself or encountering it for the first time. Pasmore’s beardiness belies the refined work on display…

[Of the Turner Prize show? Well, somehow it should be better than it is, the work that is most made-for-me [on both Turner and Booker lists] falls pretty flat perhaps because it’s almost a pastiche of things done and seen 20 years-plus ago when they were new, contentious, even ‘demanding’! [There was a comparable moment in pop music recently, now transformed I think. Let's hope art and lit can get themselves out of rehab/sh mode too. I mean where were people when Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective were alive -pre-artboom- for example? Age, in this case, is no excuse. If you want a Marker-inspired trajectory, then you could be watching the films of Zineb Sedira, for example, recently short-listed for the Jarman Award. And theory-infused fiction? I don't know whether it's worse to have been a dumb refusenik then and since or to pretend the old stuff has bite or package it as 'new' now?] Otherwise, some of Dexter Dalwood’s canvases are wonderful-weird, but the work I’d missed and which is worth not-missing most is Angela De La Cruz’ peculiarly broken canvases.]

Linked in a small way to Pasmore is the second show in a series that revisits, revives and re-archives the extraordinary work of Pakistani artist Amran Jalal Shemza at the brilliant Green Cardamom [10 Sept-22 Oct 2010]. Shemza taught alongside Pasmore in London for a while, influenced that most influential of Pakistani artists Zahoor ul Akhlaq, himself such a key influence on the current generation of artists from Lahore and Karachi, including Imran Qureishi and Aisha Khalid [whose book Name, Class, Subject was recognised at the London Artbook fair recently] as well as further afield in the work of Nasreen Mohamedi. Green Cardamom have published two pamphlets [Iftikhar Dadi here, Rachel Garfield here] on the artist who has finally been allowed into the Tate’s collection but the show is one you must see if the art of the last century holds any interest for you.

Speaking of Nasreen Mohamedi, Stuart Shave’s Modern Art [who represent the notable Katy Moran too] are presenting her first one person show in London [13 Oct-13 Nov 2010] which is yet another chance to enjoy, recognise/realise her brilliance and importance. Don’t miss it this time!

I was delighted by the modest scaled but insistent work of Mahmoud Bakshi who is showing at Delfina Foundation an early part of a short season of Iranian art there; The Knowledge – Stop 2: Tehran. Bahman Cinema [2010] consists of four mini cardboard cinemas showing short films on loops laid out on a carpet on the floor there; that’s all. Miss it at your peril.

I recommend you catch Klara Lidén at The Serpentine Gallery [7 Oct-7 Nov 2010], a very strong announcement show of early work but this is an artist to watch. It reminded me that much as I love it, The Serpentine is quite a difficult space to succeed in. I can think of some favourite artists of mine who have shown unhappily there, it pains me too much to give examples. Whereas, for example the show I remember most vividly from recent years was Paul Chan who made the place his own. Lidén achieves something similar, with a range of videos, installations and canvases of layered billboard posters that look better than they sound. There is lo-fi angst, sweet and muscular, aplenty here.

Finally, two shows in Cambridge, one at the Fitzwilliam is a mesmerising exhibition of illustrated manuscripts from the Shahnameh [11 Sept-9 Jan 2011]. It’s worth journeying to Cambridge for this alone, it’s near the station! It’s free! You may not have the chance again [check out the link above to the very rich page at the Fitzwilliam too]. The show ranges over centuries and a wide geography, it contains exquisite pages, is lightly but well noted so that, for example, the arrival of a key edition of the work in India in the hands of Babur [left] can be seen to have brought tremendous influence there in terms of the subsequent flourishing of ‘miniature’ painting. Go along, see what you recognise -I liked one characteristically annoted volume from Gujarat- and trust yourself with it…

John Cage Every Day is a Good Day at Kettle’s Yard is the other show in Cambridge [25 Sept - 14 Nov 2010]; a Haywood Touring show [curated by Roger Malbert and Jeremy Millar] which began at BALTIC. It will keep moving without stopping in London which makes this the best chance for Londoners to catch it. Catch it you must, if only because there’s so much Cage in the air and behind so many conversations and yet the show is also a re-archiving job. I was as surprised by the academic necessity of it as I was by the work in the show by Cage’s hand. His art is not tokenistic but for me was both a revelation in itself and then resonated much more deeply the more I looked and learnt about it. Much of what is on show is too lightly impressed by a range of pencils to reproduce very well, indeed the entire collection has been rephotographed to put together an essential catalogue of the art for the show. Altogether this is it, The Time, one time. Go! [More on this to come...]

Then just to add two more notes; one of my favourite art projects/spaces in London, Wolfgang Tillmans’ Between Bridges on Cambridge Heath Road is back in business with an opening of the work of Gerd Arntz and Isotope this week. It’s quickly followed by an archiving show of the archival artist Walid Raad at the lively, engaging but unfriendly Whitechapel Gallery; another must-see…

I will update on the itinerary of Future Movements and my review of it -as well as a not entirely unrelated show I’ve just agreed to contribute to in the New Year in London, soon.

I enjoy unlikeliness and it seemed unlikely to me that Candia McWilliam would find herself in Edward Said’s memoir of his early life; Out of Place: A Memoir [Granta 1999]. That she does so in her own memoir [What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness Cape 2010] is one of many endearing things about it and its author. Also a high recommendation for Said and his own memoir.

I spent a number of mornings in June this year running past one end of Edward Sa’id Street in Ramallah, actualising the way he and his work feature near the beginning of my adult life and have been returned to repeatedly ever since. I’m posting an old review I did for The Independent of his collection of pieces The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and after [Granta 1999] [BELOW]. Read almost anything of Said’s [especially on the question of Palestine] and the absence of a voice like his today makes you weep.

I’m one of those who thought that when Palestinians -massacred, dispossessed, brutalised- reached a stage in 1987 of throwing what they had left; the dust at their feet, back at the ogre the ogre would understand that the game was up. It would realise that even if it restored all the Palestinians are due it would still represent a substantial success for its project -despite having then to embrace human law, secularism and actual democracy. I thought it would recognise that it held all the cards, that it was time to deal from a position of strength and recover some civility -whatever else one thinks. I assumed it would seize the day unhesitatingly, even if only strategically.

So I’m shocked still by the despotic depths, mortifying violence and delusion that built through the 1990s post-Oslo and out-peaks itself almost daily. I’m one whose gradual realisation/recognition of the unique depravity [not mere political/philosophical wrongness] of the Zionist project in actuality exposed my own elemental but extravagantly stupid scale of good faith towards Israelis, i.e. the people who elect and embody, arm and fight for, believe and believe in this state of Israel and what it has done in their name. I was wrong to allow a general empathy and personal affections to bloom into faith at that juncture, as has long been obvious.

I confess this as someone who lost their student union because we sent money to the PLO, marched, cheered on the first intifada and marched again, for example, in memory of Abu Jihad in April 1989, a particularly signficant victim of a mass murdering machine. But my error  is also why I can speak clearly and cleanly now and voice my repulsion and contempt when critics of Israel are ranted at by apparently insatiable murderous racists. So much blind self-righteousness/-immersal combined with so many pulverised bodies and dwellings of  the repeatedly dispossessed over such a sustained period of time embodies the most terrifying abyss.

There are other things to say about the state of Israel but the last two decades alone make them worthless, collaborative even. Israelis will have to take responsibility for what they have pursued so relentlessly first. In this piece I tried to find a form of words and a way to say these things as gently as possible because indirection on this subject was and still is more or less the only way in Britain. One of the things that my recent Residency in Ramallah, in which I ran as well as walked the wadis and hills in every direction as far as the prison walls allowed, made starkly clear is that a two-state ‘solution’ is untenable. If it ever had life, and perhaps it did when the PLO first offered it, it has none now. The Occupation has seen to that.

No, there is only a single state solution to come in one of two forms; a violently racist dictatorship, or a brand new secular democracy of the peoples of Palestine. That is, there’s a single solution, it is a matter of how long it takes and how much it will cost. The little circus of a ‘peaceprocess’ that will play out this year is inconsequential [as all players know] in this shameful tragedy. The only real question is how much more would have been achieved if, instead of offering compromise, Arafat, the PLO and the Palestinians had maintained the original intifada -whatever the cost- until achieving the perfectly reasonable goal of a single secular state of equal citizens. Only those full of racist delusions now would require Hamas to repeat the PLO’s fateful errors -and they do. They do!

Meanwhile, yes I had the privilege of brief email exchanges with Edward Said and spoke on the phone too. We were due to meet, he called me to finalise arrangements, offering two dates. I knew how hard he was to pin down from some of those close to him and my own previous experience. I knew that now is always better than later. I also knew how extremely ill he was. However, I was forced to postpone meeting because -and here I have to be discreet- of a very unusual set of circumstances which kept me poised that day/week to fly to India at any minute on a real emergency which was resolved too late in even more unlikely ways. We’d laugh together if I could explain, but the result is that I never did meet with Edward Said.

There are very few modern regimes or states who seriously pretend to any sacred/eternal link between a set of ‘pure’ [!?] genes and a particular piece of the earth’s crust. In India the previous government was formed by the BJP which is the acceptable face of groups that claim India is both ‘Fatherland’ and ‘Holyland’. In Gujarat, these people -whom, so far as science can tell, descend from immigrant ‘Aryans’- led state sponsored pogroms or “mass massacres” in which thousands of Muslims were butchered and hundreds of thousands displaced in the early part of this decade. Their idealogues claimed direct inspiration from Nazism and its notion of an eternal Reich -and of course Zionism and its eternal gift/priority. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is one of their principle inspirations.

Before you accuse me of anything I’d like to hear you accusing the murderous racists of India’s sangh parivar first and then perhaps you might, for example, go and read up on the history/archeology of Ariha/Jericho and oh, say, Eliot Weinberger’s early writing, like The Falls in his Karmic Traces. Whatever. But mainly understand that there can be no justification for the scale of what Israel has done, even if there was a time when it was important to understand [even sympathise with] how and why it had become such a monster. All of which is now and forever more academic.

I prefer the various uses Palestinians make of the ground which has sustained them continuously for generations and centuries, ground in which they have long been buried [in graves that Israel even now is bulldozing in the name of 'tolerance' -literally!]. Even the use made of the ground in near final despair; to throw it at their merciless oppressors with defiant resistance. So here is another stone thrown with them; with Edward Said and all other clear-sighted brave and humble souls of all ethnicities and none who stand on this earth.

I write this in the week that Tony Blair’s laughably vulgar foundations for his notion of humanitarian intervention emerged from a Steven Spielberg movie. It wouldn’t be so pitiful if he’d learnt the actual lesson in any profound way [Never Again was a universal credo or it was nothing...] and instead of watching, cheering on and facilitating the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, he’d voiced opposition to the uniquely chronic array of what we now call Crimes against Humanity when it might have made a difference -and it always makes a difference.

I realise how generous and lenient a punishment it would be, but I’d like the multitudinous Blairs of this world and our time -who always go with the flow because ‘it works’, for them- to be sentenced to a lifetime of perpetually re-reading all of the works of Edward Said. That’s my idea of justice anyway; temporal please note, not eternal. It also rehearses my principal point which is not to outrage you with bald truths rarely voiced but to get you to turn or turn back to the richly urgent, exact and exacting words of Edward Said.

Given the neurotic disingenuity on this subject in the UK I ought to distance both ES and especially Candia McWilliam from the views I express which are of course entirely my own. I don’t think CM mentions Palestine as such in her brilliant-in-parts memoir* [though she does mention Gujarat, where I witnessed those "mass massacres", Parsis and Karachi as well as sharing love poems to Edinburgh and the Western Isles. See? You do need to read it!] which, if it won’t be perceived as a curse, I heartily and headily recommend to you.

Some of ES’s work and the writings about him is still available online in his old archive here.

*Candia McWilliam is capable of writing, sheer writing, that surpasses anyone else alive in Britain. You may need to put aside some prejudices of your own to read and experience it but you should do so. My ‘brilliant-in-parts’ remark diminishes little; she is a writer of prose not poetry, however richly dimensioned, condensed and poetically agile her prose is in its brilliant parts.

At last, a genuine Palestinian authority

The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and after by Edward W Said (Granta, £15)

By Guy Mannes-Abbott

Wednesday, 4 October 2000

What exactly is an intellectual nowadays, and do we need them? Edward Said recently described meeting Jean-Paul Sartre a year before Sartre died in 1980. Sartre’s stance on Israel disappointed Said, but he remained a “great intellectual hero” to Said’s generation because he invested his “insight and intellectual gifts” in the service of “nearly every progressive cause of our time”.

Sartre’s notion of an intellectual, someone whose learning and achievement in one field is applied elsewhere, describes Said himself. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Colombia University, and the author of influential works such as Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. But he has also been active in Palestinian politics and a prolific analyst of dispossession in books likeThe Question of Palestine.

So, although Said updates this definition, the question remains whether we need such intellectuals in the 21st century. It’s one that this collection of essays answers unequivocally.

The End of the Peace Process contains 50 polemical articles written between May 1995 and January 1999. Most are re-publications of his columns in Al-Hayat and Al-Ahram, periodicals based in London and Cairo respectively. Other pieces have also been published across the Middle East and Europe and even, occasionally, in the US. The distribution is important, because Said remains almost the only sceptical commentator on the territorial negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians in the Western media.

Just as every acre is contested by overlapping claims, so are many of the terms used in these essays. Just as the facts on the ground change, so has Said’s position moved. It is a decade since he broke with Arafat, opposing what he regarded as the PLO’s embrace of defeat in the Oslo deal which gave Palestinians some authority over the West Bank and the Gaza strip. But Said also regards a Palestinian state as unworkable, and these essays chart his shift towards an alternative.

Said’s alternative would be a single, secular state for Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs that guaranteed equality for all its citizens. That this initially sounds wilfully irresponsible demonstrates the peculiarity of the situation. That it seems eminently viable by the end of this collection testifies to Said’s rigorous intellectual effort to see beyond the cruel absurdities of a messy “peace process”.

One notable piece, “On Visiting Wadie”, is about his son’s work for an NGO based in Ramallah. Wadie, a “New York City kid”, reveals himself to be at home in Arabic, and among a new generation of Palestinians. Said invests his hope with them after discovering their shared impatience with the Palestinian Authority and Arafat’s security forces. Throughout, he is at least as scathing about the Palestinians’ corrupt incompetence and self-betrayal as he is of the Israelis’ brutal exploitation of that “sloppiness”.

Said’s reporting here is acute and affecting as he carefully assembles anecdotes and facts towards a larger picture. It exemplifies all those yardsticks for cultural criticism established in his early work, The World, the Text and the Critic. Criticism should be “situated… sceptical, secular, reflectively open to its own failings”. It should remain concrete and focused on “existential actualities” and resist the political configurations that incorporate us by origin or affiliation.

Said’s writing enacts this complexity with style. These essays are brilliant displays of rigorous perspective, relentless concentration and impassioned dedication. He is uniquely impressive in the way that he combines appeals to the largest of categories – justice, humanity, civility – with attentiveness to detail.

Said avoids infantile loyalties in order to shore up truths, and emerges from this collection as a vital ethical thinker. The important thing, he writes, is “to think new thoughts and open lines of reflection that convention and orthodoxy have closed to us”. The End of the Peace Process is the work of the kind of non-aligned intellectual that we need more than ever today.

BIDOUN WINTER 2009 #19 NOISE

by Guy Mannes-Abbott

A previous post on Mohamedi referred to my catalogue text from 2001. Now I’m posting my short review of her recent retrospective exhibition as it appeared in the UK. I was pleased and proud to write something on a show that went almost unnoticed -and was certainly not engaged with- in the UK [again], but there’s much more to be written about her work and its contexts.

For now, here are scans of the pages in Bidoun [below; click to enlarge]. Let me repeat that it’s essential wherever you are in the world to see the work itself -to stand in front of the drawings in particular- whenever the opportunity arises. Until you do you will have missed an important 20th Century artist and maker of our new world.

I’ll return to Nasreen Mohamedi at greater, speculative and more definitive length in the future…

A 16th Century manuscript page in the hand of Pir Wajihuddin courtesy of the Pir Muhammad Shah Library in the centre of the old city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. His pyramidal notes beguiled me on many happy days and ‘look’ like my memory; the heat, peace, civility and airs of the place. I often stayed within earshot of his dargah in Khanpur while this page rests within earshot of the Juma masjid. It’s true that it was an image to me, then. I’m posting it while it still is partially, because now I can read the words…

James & Kay Salter         –         Osip Mandelshtam

THE SIX SENSES

One cannot think well, love well, slep well, if one has not dined well

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Brillat-Savarin recognised the five basic senses -taste, touch, hearing, sight and smell- but he  believed there was a sixth sense: physical desire, a unique and distinctly French idea.

Everything subtle and ingenious about the first five senses, he wrote, was due to this sixth, “to the desire, the hope, the gratitude that spring from sexual union.”

Well, call me Anglo-Saxon, but BS is a bore if he doesn’t understand the mutual implication of desire in the five senses. Desire uncompromised and desire realised.

I prefer Osip Mandelshtam’s notion of a sixth sense, mooted during his journeying to Mount Ararat:

Ashtarak. “I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an “Ararat” sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.

Now, no matter where fate carry me, this sense already has a speculative existence and will remain with me.”

[p. 57 Journey to Armenia Next Editions 1980. Orig. Puteshestviye v Armeniyu Zvezda 1933.]

Do we have to choose? Does a mountain sense include desire etc. or desire include “the sense of attraction to a mountain”? Then again, what is it with mediators and authorisation?

A mountain sense is my candidate because it adds something distinct and dimensional to the core senses in ways that desire doesn’t. I write that having climbed Shatrunjaya, ‘the mount that realises all desires’, more than once…

NB See my Note ‘js; reader’s revenge & last night 2006′ on the entanglements and ambivalence of these things.

while baroda burns

by Guy Mannes-Abbott

In 2004 TANK reprinted extracts from my extensive notebooks on Gujarat in western India.  They’re taken from the days of “mass massacres” when I was locked up under curfew in my room on the 4th floor of a hotel, forbidden to leave the building or even to go as low as the 1st floor.

The whole story of witnessing state-sponsored pogroms while trapped with Bhupen Khakhar in his car on the outskirts of Gujarat’s second city and its various contexts form part of my forthcoming book A Gram of Gujarat. A part, but only a part. A part along with many other equally vivid, penetrating and suggestive parts! Taken together they provide a unique insight into Gujarat and contemporary India which enables a proper grasp of these signal events.

These particular extracts reflect something of the raw experience of being trapped in a room [tall building, complicit city and bone-shaking witness] looking out of a window onto a building usually only ever animated by women. I watched discretely as the traditional rhythms of everyday life went on in an abstracted way. Above rose black impressions of the terror being inflicted on Baroda’s old city; common, abstract again [literally framed by my window] but presumably at least as intense as those I’d been caught in. Otherwise; silence.

After two or three days it occurred to me to take photographs [some of which are poorly repro'd here], as the oddity of life in the building and the realisation that the smoky evidence was likely to stop if or when the army eventually took control of the city dawned. Obviously I was as visible as the people opposite and didn’t want to impose on them, so each image was snatched and for me condenses hours of the life it captures. Similarly, I only took one image of the smoke at the end and with confused reluctance; a feeble effort all around.

The politicians and authorities responsible for the massacres believe that the subcontinent is both Fatherland and Holyland; that the very dust is bound up forever with the dharma/spirit of each and every Hindu. Hindutva is a terrifying ideology, drawn from European fascism and Nazism specifically and these “mass massacres” a direct and logical result of it. Followers believe that a Hindu never loses their dharma and so India’s 150 million Muslims must recover theirs and renounce Islam -or they can ‘leave’.

Press PDFS to Enlarge

This is the same India that has a secular constitution and which was once the proud centre of the Non-Alignment movement but which has never reconciled itself fully with several centuries of Islamic dominance and conquest. Not even though a consequently rich Islamic heritage forms just one part of the subcontinent’s definitively syncretic culture. This is part of the specificity of hindutva, and why it’s worth reading VD Savarkar on the subject and understanding what there is of substance beyond the shudderingly crude race hatred that so corrupted his mind and thought.

The same India where some of the nicest people I met, seasoned secularists of various stripes, were the most complacent/deluded about the pressing actuality. It’s distressing to listen to someone making fun of their own Muslim upbringing, poo-pooing any intimacy with Islam or its wider culture, laughing at the notion that they would have any insight into such a subject when their own work, memoirs and even academic cv contradicts them. Frustrating when the point is simple; ‘they’ perceive you to be Muslim whatever your self-image. This is the nature of racism, fascism and lest we forget Nazism specifically.

Any conversation of that kind contains the unmistakable presumption that as a Foreigner I can’t possibly understand. It’s all a very complex, internal affair and only one of us can really appreciate it. In such instances they were clearly mistaken. In one exemplary case, when politely listening to an excited account of brief passage through a ‘secret’ outpost on the edge of the Rann of Kutch, I kept to myself the knowledge that I’d ridden out to the same particular outpost four times, found a floor to stay on inside its walls, a cave to sleep in beyond them.

Such an intense, ‘deep’ encounter with place and people was the yardstick I developed , which is why I was able to contextualize just how much or little right-minded, out of touch secularists of this kind understood about their neighbours [and to contextualise their insulting and short-sighted presumptions]. It’s for this reason that what happened to that particular individual and to other Muslims [religious or otherwise] across the State was profoundly shocking to me, but not a surprise. This is why it all made a horrible kind of ‘sense’.

Whilst ‘Metro’ secularists disown, deny and delude themselves about what “mass massacres” meant for India, I’d been encountering it in mud and urban kitchens, chai stops in deserts and forests, main roads, side streets and camel tracks, mandirs, dharamsalas and masjids, chellahs, tirths and tuks, Bohra wads, mohallas/pols and Societies, forts, havelis, universities and cool alleyways across the state. I listened to barots and charans, dalits and Brahmins, shia and sunni, professors and ‘local’ historians, ram sewaks and their Big Men financiers, MPs and MLAs, victims and perpetrators, writers and architects. I’d witnessed what it meant for months before this discreet horror and for months afterwards.

Understanding requires a real engagement with a wide range of things, places, peoples and times. It requires the articulation of distinct and interrelated elements in an authoritative portrait of a people and their place. Such a portrait would enable understanding of these particular events but also a much wider context. If it succeeded it would reveal the interiors of  Gujarat as a whole and provide a unique insight into subcontinental India. This is what I’ve attempted to do with A Gram of Gujarat.

]]> http://notesfromafruitstore.net/2010/03/12/gujarat-on-silence-and-massacres-raj-kamal-jha-fireproof-2007/ Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:15:04 +0000 guy mannes-abbott http://notesfromafruitstore.net/2010/03/12/gujarat-on-silence-and-massacres-raj-kamal-jha-fireproof-2007/ On Silence and Massacres.

Raj Kamal Jha is one of the most interesting and risk-embracing of his generation of Indian writers of fiction in English. His report on the mass murders and vast internal displacement of Muslims in the state of Gujarat in the spring of 2002 was brave in the context; a nuked up hyper-Nationalist government led by the same party which ruled in Gujarat at the time, the Nazi-inspired BJP.

When he came down from Delhi -albeit two months later- he ‘joined’ those of us not targeted by the officially sanctioned killers but trapped in extended curfews, in my case for days on the 4th floor of a building in central Baroda. Jha wrote a stunned and peculiarly angular piece for The Indian Express, a cutting from which I’ve scanned and posted. His discoveries as a “riot tourist” ['riot' is a common euphemism in India for racist massacres or ethnic cleansing, like 'conflict' elsewhere] inspired the novel Fireproof, which I reviewed for The Independent below.

Jha reprimanded his readers [urban, majority-community, new-India class] in the mildest of terms; imagine the surreal boot on the other foot. He was addressing those who quietly allowed this to happen, however, and if you won’t credit him with bravery at least understand the relative unusualness of his addressing a class of readers impatient with older Indian verities like those espoused by Nehru -let alone Gandhi! [both of whom happily allied themselves with the chauvinist Vallabhai Patel, India's 'Iron Man' from Gujarat.]

Elsewhere, the hero of the day was Siddharth Varadarajan who expressed his visceral horror in regular reports for the Times of India, while the heroine was Dionne Bunsha reporting for Frontline magazine, [see her site/blog]. Varadarajan also edited the first and still best book on the massacres; Gujarat; The Making of a Tragedy [Penguin India 2002] [look inside] drawing in part on an excellent issue of Seminar ['Society Under Siege' from May 2002 is online but not link-to-able] and has a blog here.

What happened in Gujarat is not a matter of substantive dispute [though it's ostensible trigger, the fire in a train carriage outside Godhra is, even though extensive investigations concluded that the fire which began within the carriage was a tragic accident], there are plentiful witness reports, accounts, proofs, burnt out buildings and neighbourhoods, bodies, refugees and subsequent changes across the state. What happened persuaded urban Gujaratis in particular to reward the government of the day with two further election victories.

So despite what happened no-one has been held to account: Narendra Modi remains Chief Minister of Gujarat. He is the BJP’s only current ‘star’ and commands a state that is India’s real powerhouse once more. A state that is as ever leading the way in new India, for good and ill, and rehearsing what the coming global power will look like. Modi’s mentor, LK Advani, is also a Gujarati MP and the octogenarian leader of a much humbled BJP. However, India’s national elections are three years or so away -if the present Congress administration lasts out its second term- and everybody loves a ‘winner’.

I witnessed some of what happened in Gujarat; I saw armed policemen in uniform holding one end of a street that was being systematically ‘cleansed’ for the second time in 24 hours by a group of 25-30 neatly dressed men, vehicles used to block the various roads and escapes routes and set on fire, as remaining stores, shacks, gadis/trolleys and possession of the neighbourhood Muslims were being dragged out onto the road within sight and smell of the same uniformed accomplices and set on fire.

I witnessed it from inside Bhupen Khakhar’s car as we were trapped by these same men in a near-deserted Manjalpura, Baroda, during a one-day bandh or shut-down. They weren’t after us at that time [though BK's paintings and sexuality had been the focus of their maddened hatred] and we managed to escape through a series of already laid road blocks and away from the scene before the neighbourhood mosque was burnt down with three men trapped inside it. I was close enough to look hard into their faces as they indulged their fantasies and it’s a sight I’ll never be able to forget.

Then I witnessed the silence, the smoke stacks and discomfort at my front-row presence on the few faces I glimpsed in the coming week locked away [anger, too, once the curfew relaxed]. A silence indistinguishable from the way that such a massacre is possible in India, because what the black milk rising from the eery quiet of Baroda beyond my window proved was that this was long coming and represented something that didn’t need words.

Gujarat’s “mass massacres” only needed silence;  official permission, wider complicity, neatly printed official records of who lived where, who exactly owned what and enabling nods … ram ram…

NB Incidentally, I don’t relish criticising India from afar; my view is simply that Modi should face justice in his own country. However, Indian justice is staggeringly slow and precedent  suggests that even if it catches up with Modi before he dies it won’t have any bite. Indeed, it is as likely that he might be the next PM or PM-maker. Things do change however; the case is very much live at this very moment [see here for example].

I support universal jurisdiction; if Modi wants to travel he should be willing to face trial wherever he lands, just like Pinochet and forces’ sweetheart Tsipi Livni and gang. Meanwhile, though, he rule’s India’s most interesting state and is free to roam a subcontinent of bottomless marvels. I remind you that Modi’s BJP forged alliances with the US and Israel when in power: sometimes it’s necessary to tell the truth whatever the distance…

Fireproof, by Raj Kamal Jha

The perpetrators of Gujarat’s holocaust escape unscathed – as they did in life

By Guy Mannes-Abbott

Wednesday, 11 April 2007

Raj Kamal Jha’s third novel is based on the “mass massacres” that began on 28 February 2002 in the Indian state of Gujarat. Jha visited a smouldering Ahmedabad in May 2002, and wrote a taboo-breaking article for The Indian Express.

He found Gujarat’s old capital with 80,000 Muslim refugees, a thousand dead and many thousands of homes and businesses burnt. This “remarkable restraint” was applauded by Gujarat’s Chief Minister after the “grave provocation” of an unexplained fire on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, in which 59 people died.

I read Jha’s article gratefully in the disturbing quiet following Gujarat’s pogroms. I had witnessed armed police smiling as clean-shaven men sent their neighbours’ livelihoods – and later their lives – skyward in blackening towers. Five years later, Fireproof disrupts another silence: just 10 convictions have resulted from 4,252 cases filed with police.

Fireproof focuses on three killings, elaborating on the article with statements from dead characters, a playlet, footnotes and talking street-fixtures. Jha’s narrator, Jay, is awaiting the birth of a child in Ahmedabad. The hospitals choke with charred bodies as the city burns; a malformed baby, which Jay believes is his own, forces him to confront events and himself. As the truth looms, the sky rains bodies, and he loses all bearings.

Fireproof is written in Jha’s signature style; elliptical fragments accumulate sense while incidental things and words are mined for effect. This worked well in his debut The Blue Bedspread, rooted in a modernist Bengali literature. But Fireproof’s problem is dramatised in the word “betrayal”, used by a credible Indian critic. The betrayal is twofold. Jha’s novel obtains substance by revisiting the notorious rape and murder of a pregnant woman. He pays witness to this horror in accomplished passages before losing its import in a gratuitously distended novel.

He also betrays himself, as acts of ethnic cleansing by Nazi-inspired Hindus become human tragedies. Jha folds responsibility for events into individual excess and the power of “the mob”: the banality of evil minus the Nuremberg trials. He has lost sight of any original outrage.

The story in Fireproof began in Islamophobia and led to Gujarat’s ovens. Its perpetrators were not “hangers-on”, but “confident and educated”: I saw this myself. In Jha’s novel, these men and their allies emerge fireproof – as in life.

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