Parliamo di romanzi? D’amore, d’azione, brillanti, trash, pulp, postmoderni, classici o cos’altro ancora? Non proprio. “Se vogliamo portare a termine qualcosa, dobbiamo ignorare che, nonostante siano state prese tutte le precauzioni, la fine sarà inconcludente. Questo ignorare non è una dimenticanza attiva, ma piuttosto un’attiva marginalizzazione della materia paludosa e acquitrinosa, dell’assenza di una base solida nei margini, all’inizio e alla fine”. Così scrive la critica e intellettuale indo-statunitense Gayatri C. Spivak. I margini sono il luogo in cui si praticano discipline come la filosofia e la letteratura. Sono il luogo in cui avvengono i fatti più interessanti. Siamo parlando dei margini della nostra coscienza civile, della nostra società, della nostra economia, le aree torbide che non raggiungono mai la pubblica attenzione. Di questi acquitrini tratta il più importante libro della letteratura italiana degli anni 2000, Gomorra di Roberto Saviano. La palude che si estende da Napoli a Casal di Principe, fino a Roma e Milano, fino a Madrid e Londra, Pechino e New York. Saviano fa letteratura perché ci descrive la materia oscura di cui sono fatte le cose, esattamente come il Conrad di Cuore di tenebra. La tenebra non sta nelle giungle dell’Africa o della provincia casertana, come pure tutti credono; la tenebra sta nelle grandi capitali occidentali. Ammettiamo quindi che la letteratura non sia solo uno svago, ammettiamo che possa essere un mezzo per conoscere ciò che ancora non si conosce: la verità. Un termine alquanto svalutato oggigiorno, insieme a un altro, libertà. Cos’è la verità? Leonardo Sciascia ci viene incontro ne Il giorno della civetta: “La verità è nel fondo di un pozzo: lei guarda in un pozzo e vede il sole o la luna; ma se si butta giù non c’è più né sole né luna, c’è la verità”. Toccare la verità è estremamente spiacevole, anzi, è proprio un lavoraccio, una gran seccatura. Bisogna sporcarsi le mani e tanto. Spesso è preferibile fare finta di niente, in fondo si vive meglio. E questo lo sanno tutti, perché a tutti prima o poi succede di dover fare questo tipo di scelta. Ma ciò, secondo Niccolò Machiavelli, non è concesso al Principe. Chi vuole occuparsi della Repubblica, intesa come Cosa Pubblica (quanto suona diversa questa espressione rispetto a “Cosa Nostra”…) deve imparare a riconoscere ed accettare la verità, per quanto dura e spiacevole sia. E non stiamo parlando di politica. Il benessere della comunità e dei suoi vicini passa attraverso la ricerca e conoscenza della verità. Questo dovrebbe essere precisamente il lavoro dello scrittore. Scrivere e testimoniare la verità. Testimonianza, esattamente come fecero alcuni dei più grandi scrittori italiani, Galileo Galilei, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Testimoni, martiri, disposti all’estremo sacrificio, esposti al rischio di affondare nell’acquitrino. Parliamo di persone che si mettono, anche metaforicamente, in prima linea, di faccia alla realtà, rivolti alla faccia più nascosta ed estrema e marginale della realtà. Che hanno descritto l’oscurità, come lo statunitense Cormac McCarthy che ne La strada ha raccontato un mondo devastato e infernale: “Ce la caveremo, vero, papà? / Sì. Ce la caveremo. / E non ci succederà niente di male. / Esatto. / Perché noi portiamo il fuoco. / Sì. Perché noi portiamo il fuoco”. Oppure come l’anglo-indiano Salman Rushdie, che hanno riportato la sconvolgente complessità e ricchezza del mondo, il senso di sorpresa e di meraviglia di fronte a tutte le storie che è possibile raccontare, che è bello raccontare, che è importante raccontare: “La letteratura è dove vado per esplorare i luoghi più elevati e più infimi della società e dello spirito umano, dove spero di trovare non la verità assoluta, ma la verità del racconto, dell’immaginazione e del cuore”.

Pubblicato per la prima volta su “La Pagina” n° 9, Novembre 2009

In 1919, a famous case was brought against a man, Charles Schenck, in the United States. The case, farcically titled: ‘Schenck V. United States‘, came about as a result of the Defendant’s actions in distributing leaflets (in Yiddish, no less) attacking the draft in the 15,000 documents he printed – to persons either eligible for the draft or – get this – also opposed to the draft.

Anyone worth his salt has at least perused the history of the First World War, the unnecessary slaughter of some 40 million due to some inbred monarchical quibbling (the Kaiser and King George were first cousins – grandsons of Queen Victoria) It may not be said, after all, that there was some kind of nobility of justification for the war. With no Nazis or Holocaust on which to retrospectively rely when the necessity of the war was called into question, it remains an uncharged disgrace – the product of imperialist jingoism. It was unwarranted and thus contemptible. To have forced draft young men (having guilted them with propaganda and Uncle Sam’s accusatory finger in the States) is callous beyond belief. It is a war crime.

Anyway, so Schenck is hauled before the court and charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Where Schenck argued that the draft was ostensibly tantamount to slavery, the court countered by alluding (he was not charged with treason) that he was a spy. In his preposterous, unreasoned and unsound judgement, the famous (infamous?) Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr. speculated that Schenck’s crime had exempted itself from the protection of the First Amendment. Holmes posited that he could not be exculpated using the old ‘freedom of speech’ chestnut because, as he now infamously suggested, it was equivalent ‘to shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre’. Schenck posed a ‘clear and present danger’ (the source of the famous expression) that would precipitate ’substantive evils’ – he was sentenced to 6 months in prison and found dead shortly thereafter.

In 2005, David Irving, the controversial historian, was apprehended and sentenced to 3 years in solitary confinement for violation of the Austrian Verbotsgesetz law committed 16 years prior, in 1989. The Law’s specifics are ambiguous, it being an over-reactionary Stalinist-era piece of legislation – but essentially denying or diminishing the Holocaust (capital h?) is against the law. This is reminiscent of the German law, Volksverhetzung, where ’stirring up the populace’ is prohibited. Perhaps something is lost in translation. In 1992, Irving was convicted of this crime also – principally due to his ‘denial’ of the Holocaust.

Now I have just read an excellent book called ‘History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case’ by D.D. Guttenplan wherein he gives an account of the libel action brought by Irving on an American historian, Deborah Lipstadt – for labelling him a ‘Holocaust denier’ in her book ‘Denying the Holocaust‘. In the case, Irving forced Penguin (the Defendant – against the Claimant – not Plaintiff, a relic of old English law) to essentially prove or establish the literal veracity of the Holocaust (or really parts of it, as it was claimed that Irving had denied the Holocaust in his published works) Now I have not read Irving’s work, but from the transcript of the case, the term ‘Holocaust-denier’ is not one I would attribute to Irving. Anyway, I’m not defending Irving’s very controversial stance on history. The fact is that, for questioning, for example, the numbers involved in the Holocaust (or Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek etc) or questioning eye-witness testimony, or indeed Irving’s attempt to make Himmler, not Hitler as its sole architect – one can be thrown into prison.

Let me illustrate my point: If I were to wander around Grafton Street with a megaphone, and with ‘The Famine Never Happened’ or ‘The Famine Was Grossly Exaggerated’ emblazoned across a cardboard sign I was wearing, I would be heckled, ridiculed (like those religious fellows) or even assaulted. However, I would be allowed to express my revisionist view, despite its insensitivity to a probable majority. Notwithstanding the populace’s understandable objections, I retain the right to express my opinion. I revel in it. Hopefully, unlike the evidently featherweight U.S. constitution, Ireland’s courts will have the balls to stick to their guns should the occasion ask it of them.

Finally, I would just like to express my disgust at what I’m going to call ‘ecclesiatical-correctness’. Once again, as with a plethora of other issues, it is the Muslims who are at fault and are the bullseye in my metaphorical idealistic dartboard once again. When, in 1988, Salman Rushdie published his (from what I hear) literary masterpiece: the Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran (of whose literacy I am gravely skeptical), who claims to be a ‘Shi’a scholar’, issued a ‘fatwa’: a grotesque, antediluvian death-order. Now before I continue, I have researched the matter and yes, it is rare that the word ‘fatwa’ carries this meaning, but in this instance it most certainly DID. Thus began a murderous campaign that resulted in the death of the Japanese Publisher, Hitoshi Igarashi (stabbed multiple times) and three other foreign-language interpreters or publishers were stabbed repeatedly, but lived – just about. On the whim of a demagogue, a rabble, half-a-billion strong, was roused. If the common-sense view that fanaticism is correlated with lack of education is taken, it follows that the vast, vast majority of these ‘people’ were illiterate and could not possibly have understood/interpreted the book itself. It was based entirely on the supposition that the Ayatollah was the moral dictator (a man whose father lowered the marriage age to 9 years old)

in 2004, Danish cartoonists drew several hilarious strips depicting the prophet Mohammed in various hilarious situations (including the one about heaven running out of virgins) that I’m sure were the subject of hilarity to all those who read them. Except the barbarous cretins (the same is true of all religious people who believe in proselytism) who called for the death of the publishers as well as a kind of Danish Kristallnacht. This sordid behaviour was met with outrageous moral ambivalence. The mainstream media lamented the lack of sensitivity, and indeed, went as far as implying Rushdie was deserving of this Bronze-Age Muslim attack, being a Muslim himself.

An islamic troll/mullah in Pakistan offered $1,000,000 as a reward for the cartoonist’s head. Do you think this incitement to murder will be/was punished? Think again. It is incidents like these that cause the word ‘Muslim’ to be regarded as pejorative. That an obscure Danish magazine – expressing free speech, no less – could cause the muslim community to attack all things Danish with such acharnement beggars belief. It testifies to the Islamic contempt for free speech and deviation from the direct word of an illiterate Arabic merchant.

So, in closing, I believe that freedom of speech is all-to-often taken for granted. Those miscreants who oppose freedom of expression should be extirpated from social discourse, if not shunned from society all together. The allusion should not be wasted on you! Without seeming to state the obvious, remember that in the aforementioned cases, as recently as 2005, legislation exists that forbids free expression. This must stop.

Det är intressant att se hur en bok kan dela en läsekrets mitt itu, för att inte tala om kritikerkåren. Salman Rushdies bok Förtrollerskan från Florens verkar vara en sådan. Jag skrev om den i Aftonbladet i går och inledde med konstaterandet att den redan splittrat de internationella kritikerna i två läger. Jag tillhör dem som tycker att den är överlastad, irriterande mångordig och konturlös. Andra – Ingrid Elam i Dagens Nyheter till exempel – rycks däremot med av Rushies berättarkonst och ser i romanen en fest för alla sinnen.

Blickar man ut över världen är reaktionerna lika delade. Medan Joyce Carol Oates gör en lång och uppenbarligen beundrande utläggning i The New York Review of Books skåpar Peter Kemp ut den i The Sunday Times:

An interlude set among the flowerbeds of a sultan’s palace on the Bosphorus emphasises that he has 1,001 gardeners. It’s a device by which, as often in his fiction, Rushdie seeks to keep the reader aware that his guiding inspiration is The Thousand and One Nights. Sadly, by the time you reach the end of this novel with its garish banalities and depthless sensationalisms, what you’re most aware of are the 1,001 ways in which it would have been more profitable and enjoyable to pass the time.

Den här skillnaden i läsupplevelser verkar trotsa både kultur- och könsgränser. I Los Angeles Times är det den kvinnliga författaren Amy Wilentz som är kritisk:

The magical realism in “Enchantress” is all artifice and diversion. Its decorative beauty disguises truth, or avoids it, and keeps the reader pointlessly mystified. No style should be a substitute for a story. Plot is the hard work of novel-writing. Rather than dealing with difficult reality, which is the writer’s perhaps unpleasant but necessary duty, Rushdie forces Qara Köz from the Mughal Empire into Florence to make a few dubious points, distracting readers from the logistical plot problems in the book’s flabby middle. In magical realism as it is practiced by Rushdie, timelines are as naught. Simultaneity is all. This can make the work seem less like great literature and, at moments, more like automatic scribbling.

Nu har jag bara citerat bedömare som i stort sett delat min egen läsupplevelse. För rättvisans skull ska jag förstås också återge vad en av de många positiva recensenterna skrivit om boken. Det är Salil Tripath i New Statesman:

The Enchantress of Florence is a luxuriant triumph. The plot is complex, but then this is a Salman Rushdie novel. Dozens of characters bridge two old empires – Florence of the Medicis and India of the Mughals. A blond foreigner makes his way to Akbar’s freshly minted imperial capital, Fatehpur Sikri, carrying a secret that could rewrite history. He believes himself to be a Mughal, born of an affair, and the secret of his lineage has the potential to disrupt the dynasty’s complex tapestry.

Linking the two empires is a mysterious Mughal princess, Qara Koz, who becomes war booty. Her mesmerising spell – or Rushdie’s – permeates the novel, and the reader keeps turning the pages, no matter how long the sentences run. (Some exceed 70 words, but they grip you and pull you on towards the end point, leaving you fulfilled yet exasperated, wanting more when the sentence ends, like the novel itself).

Ja, så där låter det i engelskspråkig press. Ömsom vin, ömsom vatten. Likadant var det när Rushdies bok kom ut i tysk översättning. Recensenten i Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung var måttligt imponerad medan Süddeutsche Zeitung hade en mer positiv bild.

Förtrollerskan i tysk version

Jag hade förstås läst en hel del utländska texter om boken när jag skrev min egen (det har trots allt gått ett och ett halvt år innan den publicerats på svenska). Blir man påverkad av sånt? Naturligtvis; men i det här fallet var det en så uppenbar divergens mellan bedömningarna att man verkligen inte kunde bli förledd i någon bestämd riktning. Och jag kan någonstans avundas dem för vilka Rushdies bok tycks vara en stor läsupplevelse. De har uppenbarligen ett fantasi- och känsloliv som jag själv saknar.

V.S. Jayaschandran

Karunanidhi is most merciful. He has demanded Indian citizenship for Sri Lankan refugees in Tamil Nadu. Jayalalithaa says he is thereby “trivialising” the Tamil struggle in Lanka. But trivia is good for Alzheimer’s. It can irrigate brain cells.

Intellectuals feign contempt for trivia. Gossips love it. In modern politics, nothing can rival Churchill trivia. The prime minister walked about naked in his room and dictated letters in his bathtub. Franklin Roosevelt invited him to the White House in 1941. Churchill was dictating to his stenographer Patrick Kinna when the president knocked on the door. Churchill said, “Come in,” and Roosevelt entered and was dazzled by the pink pendant. “As you can see, Mr President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide from you.”

In a cartoon, Abu Abraham lampooned President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing away ordinances in his bathtub during the Emergency. If Churchill were alive, he might have sued the cartoonist for copyright. Kinna died this year at age 95.

Sri Lankans, too, treasure their political trivia. Sir John Kotelawala was the prime minister when Queen Elizabeth II visited Colombo in 1954. At a reception, her skirt flew up and mushroomed in a sudden gust, and the prime minister shouted in Sinhala to the official photographer: “Ganing, yokko, ganing (Shoot, you beggar, shoot.)” The loyal photographer did not miss Her Thighness.

Trivia wasn’t always trivial. Trivia was a junction of three paths—tri is three and via means way. It became associated with titbits because people who met at crossroads exchanged gossip. Hecate Trivia, the Greek goddess of three paths, was the protector of newborns, women and households. Male chauvinists reduced her to the patron of witches. Panchsheel was based on the Buddhist eight-fold path. It became Hindi-Chini border trivia.

Scholars in the Middle Ages were called trivialists. They studied trivium, the lower division of a university course comprising grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the basics of the seven liberal arts. The higher division, quadrivium, had mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy.

Kotelawala lost the election in 1956 to Solomon Bandaranaike thanks to Buddhist bhikkhus who supported the ‘Sinhala Only’ campaign. Bhikkhu is a Pali word related to the Sanskrit bhikshu. A bhikshu begs food (bhiksha). The Russian word for food is pischa, which is related to bhiksha and possibly to the Tamil pichai and pichaikkaran (beggar).

The Russian word for brother (Sanskrit bhrata) is brat. That is apt. Bog, the Russian word for God, could be related to Bhagwan. God help Bengal’s Buddha. He might face another Mamata-Maoist kolahal if he acquires land for a Russian nuclear plant at Haripur. He should watch Kolokol Chernobylya, the first film on the nuclear accident. Kolokol means warning bell in Russian.

Indians are suckers for nuclear deals. Sugar in Moscow is sakhar. Sanskrit sharkara khanda and Persian shakar kand became French sucre candi and English sugar candy. Actor Pia Glenn, jilted by sugar daddy Salman Rushdie, says she isn’t the kind of woman who would be his “arm candy”. She all but called him midnight baby, a euphemism for bastard. The title Midnight’s Children is subversive.

Karl Marx, the communist god, had a midnight baby. The boy’s mother, Helen Demuth, had joined Marx’s wife as a maidservant at age 8. Marx never paid the proletarian for a lifetime of slavery in his house. Helen became pregnant in 1850, two years after Marx and Engels gave the call, “Workers of the world, unite.” She gave the child—Henry Frederick Demuth—the first and middle names of Marx and Engels, and her surname. It was perhaps a three-way thing. Marx forced Engels to own up the kid, but Engels in deathbed blew the lid. “Freddy is Marx’s son,” he told Eleanor, a daughter of Marx. Labour problems never go away.

wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine the Week (www.the-week.com) in October 2009.

Readers glancing at page 3 of today’s Economic Times in search of some buxom delight will be disappointed by the full colour portrait of Indira Gandhi. To honour her “25th Martyrdom Day”, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry offers a half page tribute to the assassinated leader whose “courage, vision and unwavering commitment to a strong & united India continues to inspire us”. Whether or not it wants to, a “grateful nation” remembers.

Even the most devoted of her admirers must confess her picture is a little….witchy. Hooked nose, plum-coloured smirk and hooded eyes are topped by hair, parted at the centre and and half black, half white. Salman Rushdie took advantage of her appealingly villainous appearance to create the Widow in Midnight’s Children – a thinly veiled characterisation of Gandhi for which the author was sued. Though Rushdie exaggerated somewhat the horrors perpetrated by Gandhi and her family, it is certainly true that Gandhi choked a free press, jailed the opposition and oversaw a forced sterilisation programme during one of the most astonishing emergencies declared by any state. The cause was not any terrorist threat or natural disaster but a threat to Indira Gandhi’s power as she was unseated from the Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament) by a vote of no confidence. The subsequent power trip saw the mandatory vasectomy of thousands of men to curb overpopulation and the arrests of most of her opposition.

Despite some strengths – championing the poor, personal popularity and the 1971 Kashmir war, it is inexplicable that such a leader could be venerated as a “martyr” today. And it is not merely state propaganda; the Indira Gandhi memorial on Safdarjung Road is crowded not only with tourists but Indian nationals on a daily basis. The exhibits border on deification; Gandhi’s bloodstained saree is preserved with loving care, while the exact spot of assassination by her two Sikh bodyguards is marked out. It is generally claimed that the pair killed her in revenge for the destruction of the holiest Sikh temple in India, the Golden Temple in Punjab. Operation Blue Star, as it was known, resulted in the slaughter of thousands of civilians praying inside at the time while also smoking out the insurgents taking refuge there.

Gandhi’s subsequent assassination led to a bloody uprising against Sikhs across the nation, particularly in Delhi. Controversy over who incited the mobs continue to this day.

Commentary today has been ambivalent in its criticism at best and mostly focuses on her politics after her re-election in 1980. News coverage has been restricted to images of PM Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi commemorating the assassinated prime minister. Others show Indian citizens actually bursting into tears on seeing the bloodstains.  One blog notes that Kazakh girls ‘love to be named after Indira Gandhi’ after her state visit. Another attributes India’s 1991 economic boom to Gandhi, while a commenter fawns “she sacrificed her life for the country and in her death the country got united like never before”.

The Sikhs who survived the riots and masscres in 1984 may not agree, though little voice has been given to them. The son of one of the assassins spoke out about his father’s motives – indicating that some don’t count themselves among the grateful nation.

My father had killed Indira Gandhi neither at the behest of any organisation nor to make any Sikh ‘jathebandi’ (group) happy. This extreme step was the outcome of intense feelings that carried away my father, and under the circumstances we all respect his feelings…If we talk about justice for the 1984 Sikh massacre, then it was the duty of our Sikh leaders to make sure that justice was done, but unfortunately nothing substantial happened.

Some updates are in order.

A while back, I started to complain that my job at IBA wasn’t exactly paying enough; in fact, it was paying the miserly (and miserable) rate of 12 LE an hour for “lectures” — not counting out-of-class preparation time. On a good week, this amounted to about 250; totalling in about $200 a month. Needless to say, I needed a change. IBA’s been a good workshop for finding my feet in a classroom, but it’s not anything to live off of. One needs to eat, and if possible, eat well.

Heba’s contacts finally came through, and I’ve started a job with the Egyptian American Cultural Center in Rushdie; a cushy, air-conditioned joint with a garden and library of preparation materials. This past week’s been the probationary period, and I’ve been observing classes and taking it easy until 2 November, when my first classes start. They’ve got me booked for seven and a half hours a day, six days a week, at a wonderful rate that will leave me unworried for the rest of my days. This also says nothing of just being a few stops down the tramline, instead of all over God’s green creation: I won’t be booking it in a cab from Kafr Abdou to Stanley to Sidi Bishr to Azarita anymore. One place, set times. Hallelujah.

Quitting was not a fun affair, though; despite my efforts, my social graces in this linguistic area are still lacking. I end up saying, “I’m sorry, please excuse me, but I’ve got a better opportunity,” multiple times, trying to explain the benefits, but probably just coming across as a jerk in Arabic that’s greedy for more money. One of the bigger stigmas is attached to someone that is bakhiil (a word usually said with the thumb flicked from behind the front teeth, to signify that getting money from them is like pulling teeth). A person that is overly concerned with money is clearly not kariim, or generous, and I’ve found that it applies to many a situation that we would find simply as being careful.

One of the classes I’ve observed was an all-male group; most of my classes have only had a sprinkling of men in them, and they’ve always been the most disorderly of the group — they are always talking, it seems. But here, no. There was a kind of orderly chaos, and as soon as Ahmed (the teacher) said anything, there was instant silence. I sat next to a twenty-year student at the law college (his father is a judge in Kuwait, apparently), who had written a paper on Mein Kampf (extremely well-written, if the subject leaves something to be desired) and spoke nearly fluent English. He needed some correction with his grammar, but he seemed not have no trouble getting his words out, and the subject he chose to give a final presentation on was an ambitious one: love.

Mahmud seemed to be the alpha of the group; he commanded the room’s attention, and the other boys were silent when he spoke. He was very matter-of-fact presentational; he formally introduced himself (though doubtless everyone but I knew him) and addressed his subject one issue at a time, taking a moment to write it down on the white board at the front of the class. He first defined love: “a magnificent emotion that never ends, it fills you with light and happiness.”

It struck me at this point I was watching something rather unique: I’ve had a number of conversations with American women about the bizarre ideas that some Egyptian men have when it comes to dating women. I’ve speculated about Egyptian manliness, I’ve criticized. I’ve listened to men objectify their wives, sisters, and daughters, and I’ve heard the reverse — where women are almost meant to be feared (think of the terrifying matriarch). Yet here was a young man from the shabaab codifying the male side of relationships. Good golly.

He went on to explain how men should call their “lovers” all the time (he insisted on using that word, which I think is product of mistranslation), let them know how they feel, send flowers, hold hands, watch movies together, and, remarkably, feel jealous. Jealousy, he noted, was a way of expressing love — all kinds of possession were a way of showing the beloved how much you wanted her. This, combined with his advice on how to “enforce” your relationship (I think he meant reinforce), raised my eyebrows somewhat.

There were points when the other boys objected. Mahmud had the audacity to suggest that hugs were a good way of showing love. There was an uproar: “Not in this country!” one boy shouted. Instant objections were raised: what was he saying? How was this advice? You couldn’t hug a girl you weren’t married to in Egypt! He conceded and went on to advice on breakups, which made me snicker: “Cry as much as you can. Feel the pain.” More objections: How does crying solve anything? It won’t bring her back!

These objections and concessions led me to eventually think that this was a somewhat representative projection of male values. The rest of the class did object to the things they though didn’t quite pass muster. But as a student of medieval literature, the values expressed in the classroom a few days ago echoed to me of the melancholy lover of Petrarch’s era: with letters and lovesongs replacing sonnets and distant glances. I wonder if this is a result of a religious society? Perhaps not.

I know it’s Orientalist of me to say so, but some days I really do feel like I’ve stepped back into the 1950s at least. I’m not saying it’s backward, just that it echoes of something familiar and past.

Asalaam o alykum

This is just an excuse to write something in October. I just realized that after Ramadan I didn’t post anything so I felt a bit bad and so here I am!!

I thought of what to write about, and the first thing that came to my mind was why atheists believe what they believe, but that topic requires a lot of work so I’ll leave that on a later date inshAllah. In fact I just asked some people why they believe in Allah swt, through which I just want to know the opinion of a lot of people out there. So if even you are interested then please email me your response.

Another reason why I want to discuss that topic is that I’ve come across a lot of articles and books written by ex-Muslims. Their work is provocative and blasphemous and I intend through my article to make them realize that we as practicing Muslims do not live in a bubble and keep to ourselves, we reach out to others in a very positive manner.

Their allegations and stances have to be dealt with precaution but in the end if they deny the truth, it’s up to them, my or rather our duty is just to give them our opinion…Bus and we can leave the rest on Allah swt. But the thing that always comes back to my mind is the verse of surah al baqarah which says that some people are deaf, dumb and blind and they will not pay heed. So all that is in our power is to convey the message of truth and leave the rest on Allah swt.

I see Dr Zakir Naik on Peace TV, he is brilliant mashAllah, the way he refutes the arguments of atheists and the like… mashAllah, sunhanALlah his method is impeccable

ok another thing… there are many Rushdie’s out there, there are many devils out there who believe that freedom of speech gives them a blanket immunity to express their feelings in whatever way they want. When we talk about freedom of speech, the thing that comes to my mind is our religion Islam. SubahALlah how flawless it is. The primary sources of Islam are the Quran (the revealed Book of Allah swt) and the Hadith\ Sunnah (the sayings and the habits of the Holy Prophet Muhammed pbuh). Our sources cover everything from marriage, criminal law, contract law to behaving in a society with neighbors, parents, family and even animals etc. Islam is a complete way of life, it’s just amazing how Allah swt covers everything and the elaborations can be further derived from the Sunnah.

 So my point is, in Islam, we cannot curse anyone’s religion, we cannot insult anyone gods because if we curse them, our true Lord will be attacked and that we cannot bear.

We respect you so the least you can do is show the reciprocal.

I also condemn the cartoons made by all those people on the Holy Prophet Muhammed pbuh. How can you abuse someone, defame someone who throughout his life spread the truth, was the most truthful, honest, trustworthy person and the best lawmaker the world has ever seen??

Please people stop watching fox news and the like, instead if you want to learn and know the truth about Islam, go to the primary sources, get hold of a Quran. Or if you cannot do that then at least watch some Peace TV.

Ok .. the hardest thing about writing blogs is choosing the title, I have decided to call this one ‘Why Allah?’… why not Allah you tell me… I was just eating a banana and you see its structure.. how intricate how beautiful, the skin so yellow and beautiful, the shape, the taste, the qualities it possesses sunhanALlah.. Indeed all praise is Allah’s. so you see there is a God, and He is the one and only, He has no partner, He begets not nor is HE begotten and there is no one that can be compared to Him.

I think that this is cogent enough for a beginning ….. lets just wait for the end ya?

Until then take care

salaam

Authors@Google has some interesting collection of talks. I enjoy watching on of those once in a while. This video where Rushdie’s talks chiefly about The Enchantress of Florence, is another charming exhibition by the man, who has a way with the words, love him or hate him.

Noteworthy is the long Q&A session at the end.

While talking about ambiguious characters in The Satanic Verses (which I haven’t read yet), he says (quick transcription by me, so not verbatim):

“… you have devilish angles, and angelic demons. I’m sounding like Dan Brown now … which i guess would be good for my bank balance but bad for me in every other way … but anyway, i did it first”

Watch it unless you hate him blindly (it’s an hour long video).

MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS OF THE MODERN AGE:

A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases and the Cure of Advanced Cancer. – Max Gerson. M.D.
Audition. - Michael Shurtleff.
Autobiography of a Yogi. – Paramhansa Yogananda.
Cosmic Voyage. – Courtney Brown. Ph.D.
Hands of Light: A Guide To Healing Through The Human Energy Field. – Barbara Ann Brennan.
Hatha Yoga Pradipika: Light on Hatha Yoga. - Swami Satyananda Saraswati.
Hero With A Thousand Faces. – Joseph Campbell.
Man’s Search For Meaning. - Viktor E. Frankl.
Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. – Abraham Maslow.
Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing. – Jed McKenna.
Stranger in a Strange Land. – Robert A. Heinlein.
Tantric Quest. – Daniel Odier.
The Bible Code. - Michael Drosnin.
The Holographic Universe. – Michael Talbot.
The Lost Teachings of Atlantis. – Jon Peniel.
The Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space. - Phyllis V. Schlemmer.
The Starseed Transmissions. – Ken Carey.
Who Am I. – Ramana Maharishi.

SOME FAVOURITES (An introduction to the Author):

A Man For All Seasons (A Play) - Robert Bolt.
Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown.
Duino Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke.
I Am Jackie Chan - Jackie Chan.
Illusions – Richard Bach.
Life of Pi – Yann Martel.
Lion of Macedon & Dark Prince - David Gemmell.
Microcosmic God – Theodore Sturgeon.
Perfume – Patrick Suskind.
Rainmaker – John Grisham.
Red Dwarf & Better Than Life – Grant Naylor.
Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie.
Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts.
Siva – Ramesh Menon.
Switch Bitch – Roald Dahl.
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho.
The Bourne Identity – Robert Ludlum.
The Celestine Prophecies – James Redfield.
The Doomsday Conspiracy – Sidney Sheldon.
The Godfather – Mario Puzo.
The Lost World – Michael Crichton.
The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett.
Twelve Angry Men (A Play) - Reginald Rose.

Salman Rushdie & Dredg Collaborate for Spin Magazine's the "Liner Note" Series in NYC

Salman Rushdie sat between the members of Dredg sharing the spotlight of an unprecedented event hosted by Spin Magazine at Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe in New York City.  “Liner Notes” was created to bring various artists from different mediums of art together in a showcase presenting one artist whose art has influenced another artist who shares an equal yet unique perspective of that art piece.  The event Spin Magazine created allows a in-depth look at how one artist can express and manipulate another artist’s creation.  In tonight’s round, Salman Rushdie’s “Imagine There’s No Heaven: A Letter to the 6 Billionth Citizen” was the feature of the evening which influenced the Band Dredg to write their best recorded album to date “The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion.”

The guests sat in anticipation with no idea of what to expect and not fully understanding how two totally different voices could be combined in agreeable terms.  Would these two artists put their views to the side and get through an hour long session together without the threat of artistic differences was a burning question in my mind which was answered and quickly subdued when Mr. Rushdie took center stage to read an except from his book “The Ground Beneath Her Feet.”  The book explores time and space in a conventional manner between two parallel universes.  The journey spans over forty years of pop culture and focuses on a gifted musician (Ormus Cama) and his soul’s mate, Vina Aspara, whose amber voice sings, lures, and traps her listeners instantly through a vocal canvas of color notes.  Despite earthquakes, heartbreaks, and a tare through a continuum of both time and space, the story happens to be Mr. Rushdie’s most optimistic book written yet.  The versus read this night pierced me deeply but the pain was soothing as I was able to find with in me a way to connect with my own soul’s mate who sits more then 1200 miles away from me.  If she could only know how I feel and how much experiencing this night would impact her own personal perceptions I know our 1200 plus miles apart would vanish to inches apart.

With my own idea of a book in the making I have written my love of loves one letter for each day since we met and the messages behind Mr. Rushdie’s writings have personally opened my eyes and made valid my theory of true love or what she has beautifully expressed to me my “soul’s mate.”  Salman Rushdie has inspired millions, perhaps billions across the world and now he can add one more to that list.  Thanks to the idea of synchronicity or that everything happens for a reason I have experienced my own personal light and understand with a new clarity as to the tests that have been put before me.  I understand why life has traveled up some of the highest mountains I ever had to climb and why I had to start in the lowest of valleys to reach this new insight as I perceive it today.  I understand now why I met Dredg and came to this latest event in my life and to witness this collaboration of artists goes well beyond the beauty of an album cover or chapters written by one man’s brilliant pen.

Dredg joined Rushdie on stage after the his reading to confirm their own claim as true music artists.  Dredg paints their shows with minimal glitz or glamour.  Going to a Dredg performance is allowing you to open up and listen to the roots of music without being distracted by flashy stage works.  The music is enough to draw the audience in and tonight I was even more impressed to listen to this particular performance by Dredg toned down to acoustic and electric instrumentation minus the percussion.  Loud music can deafen you when played at a lower level and being loud isn’t always best.  The blend of the music highlighted by Gavin Hayes’ vocals was tremendous.  The impression the band made was unholier than thou, if I may borrow the term, and it stole the air out of the old bookstore where the guests leaned forward in their chairs, drawn in tightly to the music Dredg exuded.  The set was a short and very sweet five song list.  “Pariah,” “Lightswitch,” “The Ornament,” “Information,” and “Cartoon Showroom.”

The night embraced the love of music with the importance of expression, but leave it to the last person you would think of in this story to break the serious tone of the evening with dark humor.  Rushdie managed to gather everyone in the room together with such amazing stories of his life and the collaboration attempt by Alex James of the acclaimed band “Blur.”  The eccentric Rushdie sat in his chair and impersonated a slob, alcohol driven, filthy mouthed Londoner ranting about a collaboration idea.  Another highlight came when one guest asked Rushdie if he meant for his controversial book “Satantic Verses” to be so affective to the believers that hunted him for a decade.  Rushdie sat back with a smile and said, “Being sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini really ruins your weekend.”

It’s 2009 and with so much energy going into two very impressionable pieces of written works, Salman Rushdie’s essay and Dredg’s latest album both surround a beautiful concept and view at humanity.  So how is it that the world we live in still finds the written word and the freedom of expression through music and books a threat to power?  Why do artists continue to create verbal and written ammunition knowing that odds are against them?  It is conceivable that the 6 billionth citizen could be in a country where he will never learn or hear about either Dredg or Salman Rushide and their life changing messages.

” This 6 billionth child could be in a country where such messages are censored which is sad.  A lot of the world now is like that now.  I don’t truthfully know the answer.  All I can do is put the message out there and hope that the message will reach this child somehow.  Another great thing about this musical collaboration is that it takes the message to another place where different people will hear it in different ways and it multiplies the message.  All you can do as an artist is put it out there.  None of us in this age can control the powers that say what we can listen to or what we can say.  All we can do is disregard them and do our work.  Maybe at the end it will find its audience.”

Orlando, Florida.  Vacation destination. Disney controlled and infiltrated with some of today’s most questionable members of society.  Not this night.  Downtown Orlando became the epicenter for American progressive and alternative rock band, “Dredg” to unleash the music from their latest album “The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion.”  This is the band’s fourth full album release and the first to be released completely independent from a label’s backing.  Dredg, like many bands today, is seeing the value of being independent from the labels in order to properly express their message as they see fit and to keep better control over their creative expression and what a message this album has is nothing less than intense and truly brilliant.  “The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion” is an aspiring anecdotal album aroused by the brilliance of author Salman Rushdie, whose book “The Satanic Verses” brought on controversy that sent the author into hiding for a decade.  The author also wrote and essay titled “Imagine There’s No Heaven: A Letter to the 6 Billionth Citizen” which became the backdrop to this latest Dredg album.

Dredg has been through a four album transmogrification in which has adapted a spectrum of sound and reclamation of artistry through music expression.  The detail of the production in this album is very conscientious and Dredg executed the recordings straightforward with their heart and soul.  The band has come a long way, but the effects of the economy and downfall to the music industry has put the band in a position to fend for itself.  Gavin Hayes (Lead Vocalist & Guitarist) and I sat off to the side stage and discussed his view of the bands approach to recording music in the state that our economy has fallen onto and the current pattern to music sales because with eighteen tracks to absorb off the latest album tracks need to be carefully written in order to attract dedicated fans and new fans to make their purchase online rather then in store like the “old days.”

“We haven’t really changed our approach so much from a writing stand point.  We are still focused when we are creating a record.  Our goal is still from the packaging to the songs to having a complete record under lined with theme and identity.  That’s always going to be important to us no matter which way the business turns.  We never think of the records as a song by song compilation.  We try to create something that is cohesive.  The only difference on this record is that we are independent now and partnered with ILG (Independent Label Group) which is mainly promotion and distribution.  I felt like a little weight was lifted and I feel we went more back to our roots on this record.”

The third release “Catch Without Arms” was viewed by Gavin as an album that was created on a song to song manner.  It was a record based on opposites and conflicting opinions.  The rebellious take on the record was emphasized instrumentally and felt a little more cohesive.  Dredg didn’t want to regurgitate the same record this time and it was a direct reaction to the touring of that album that brought them to dig deeper within their recordings.  They toured with a lot of rock bands over the years and at that time felt like their shows were coming off a little passive.  “We didn’t really write that record with touring live in mind.  Our last record was kind of how we wanted to write songs that better translated in our lives and I think this new record is a combination of the first two.  There are a lot of elements that could be on LCO and even on our first record with instrumental pieces.”

Leaving Interscope to become an independent music group wasn’t a surprise to anyone.  The business has completely changed over these last nine years and it were at the tail end of people buying CDs.  From there the business flipped itself upside down and Dredg really didn’t fit the label’s model anymore because the label had to adjust their business model so they could make money.  There were bands around Dredg who were selling more albums then they were at the time and those bands were getting dropped.  To go independent made sense

“Our manager approached us about working with ILG after ILG approached him.  It just felt like the right step to take because to distribute an album takes a lot of capital and we needed the backing to release our new album.  It was important to us to see the records on the shelves and to build a small budget to promote that record is now available.   Technically we are part owner of DCI on that level and we can be viewed as running our own label even though it’s just us on that label.  It’s not like we are going to be out there signing bands but it feels good and I feel more in charge.  It’s kind of similar to a distribution deal where we are running our label with them.  It just felt right and together we are going to increase our fan base.  If this was ten years ago it wouldn’t have been the right decision for us, but for where we are at in our career it’s like a perfect marriage.”

Once Dredg is about to recoup expenses from this last album they will be able to see gain unlike what they saw with Interscope.  As an true independent band they are supporting themselves on costs and anyway to save a dollar is money they need to invest back into the group.  This is what it means to be a struggling artist.  Their tours are increasing and it has taken them around the world.  It allows them to network with other bands and to create new tours with bands they have co-headlined with in the past.  Dredg submits the bands they have worked with to their booking agent and management and create the tour around what they want and not what a label wants.  One of those creative controls the band has as an independent is artistic control.  If you are a fan you understand what I mean just by viewing their album covers and colorful lyrics.  Gavin painted me a picture between the art and the music as it is created for Dredg.

“The arts are a big influence for the group.  Drew (bassist) and I met in art class where we were drawing and painting long before we were playing music and the other members add to our appreciation for art through cinema and even books.  This last album Drew and I painted a picture for each song and we created them to connect with our fans by adding images that evolved into a treasure hunt which allowed us to connect with our fans on a much deeper level.  Fans end up purchasing the paintings as well as the albums.  The clues to the treasure hunt go up on our website and the fans get really involved with the hunt.  Cinema became an avenue for me as well as Mark in which we separately scored different movies.  Film scoring is something we want to get into even on an Independent Film level.  There something behind that format that is cool because it’s behind the scenes.  I think aspects of our music blend in well and can transition over well to cinema.  The one movie that really stood out to me as the score of scores was Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey.  It’s visually stimulating and with minimal dialog supported by incredible music.  Overall it just works flawlessly.  I have read something that the creators were using some of the music just for screening and it worked out really well so I don’t know if it was a mistake that the music became the emphasis of the movie but what a great mistake if it was.”

Art has been a heavy influence to people on all levels and it is no surprise to see how a man’s essay such as Salman Rushdie’s “Imagine There’s No Heaven: A Letter to the 6 Billionth Citizen” would influence a band receptive to artistic expression to write an album influenced by another man’s written imagery.  Gavin views progress as an event that has always relied on strong efforts and courageous acts by individuals who are willing to chance themselves by drawing outside the lines so to speak.  To get away for the old traditions and to break away from old beliefs in order to make a better tomorrow.  Salman Rushdie is a beautiful representation of such courage and a major reason why the band chose to use his essay as the foundation of “The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion.”

This Thursday Dredg will be sharing the stage with the renowned author and believe me it’s not very often that an internationally acclaimed author will share a spotlight with a band from San Francisco, but the rockers have shown their sincerity and their dedication to writing music for the love of music.  Together Salman Rushdie and Dredg will come together at New York City’s Housing Works Bookstore Cafe for SPIN Magazine’s third installment of Liner Notes.  The event brings together musicians and authors as part of a continuous event to raise funds for the Housing Works non-profit group which was created to provide homeless and low-income people living with HIV/AIDS and their families with adequate housing, food, social support, drug treatment, health care, and employment.  Liner Notes has been a success thus far and I am truly excited to see what comes from the uniting of Salman Rushdie and Dredg.  The band is extremely excited and flattered to share an evening with such a talent.

I’m taking a seminar focused on Rushdie this upcoming semester, and back in May I got a pretty long reading list, so as to alleviate reading during the semester. Of course I waited until August to start working on it, and decided to begin with The Satanic Verses, as it seems to be his most heated work. I’m really enjoying it so far; it’s magical realism so a lot of crazy things occur throughout the story. For instance, two people fall from a plane’s height, and by flapping their arms, they are able to slow themselves down. Afterward, one of those two men turns into a demonic goat while the other acquires a halo that floats above his head.

There is also another character in the book who remains unnamed, and who is the subject of this post. He appears on page 292 of my edition, and then disappears forever. He is a “perfectly ordinary looking ‘accountant type,’” who goes home every night with a briefcase and a box of sweetmeats, and every day when he gets home he rearranges his sitting room furniture, placing chairs in two rows with an aisle in between. Then, for a half hour exactly, he pretends that he is the conductor of a single-decker bus bound for Bangladesh. Not only that, but his family is obliged to participate every night. “and after half an hour precisely he snaps out of it, and the rest of the time he’s the dullest guy you could meet.”

Now when I read this I was initially extremely amused (I certainly laughed out loud) but after that started wondering about a lot of things. First of all, what does his family think of this? Have they told him, “Hey daddy, it’s really strange that you pretend to be a bus conductor every evening,” or “We don’t really like pretending to be your passengers every single day, can this please not happen anymore?” or “Robert, buses can’t drive to Bangladesh. There’s water in the way.”

Or maybe they just go with it without complaint. Apparently the entire community knows about this habit, so I’m guessing the family has told everyone about how peculiar this man is? Or maybe people overheard fake horn blasts coming from the house, shouts of, “Next stop is Pakistan!” Does he know that he does this every night, or does he go into a trance during these episodes? And has he seen a pyschotherapist at all?

What I love is that he is incredibly dull otherwise. I mean, what could be more interesting than having a fantasy about driving a bus across the English Channel. And what’s with the sweetmeats? Does he bring home anything else other than sweetmeats? These are all questions I have, but alas he is only mentioned in passing, so I will never learn the answers.

But seriously, what a weirdo.

I left Miami last week after enjoying the university’s cheering contest, briefly passing by the town fiesta in Guam for dinner before flying over to Cebu early the next morning. It was a brief three-day stay with the family. I met some people and also visited the malls for, yes, window shopping.

There were yellow taxis (which are supposed to be less abusive than the ordinary white ones) in the airport already. My little sister has grown from a baby into a little girl who recited to me the poems she learned in preschool. I finally met my high school sister’s suitor, the same guy who ran away from the gate last Valentines’ Day when I went out to see who sent my sister a pink teddy bear.

And after more than half a decade of renting the house, the street that leads to our home was finally asphalted by the local government. The next local and national elections are just around the corner. An asphalt road’s supposed to be six inches thick but the one there was only two inches thin. Well, not much has changed. I’m expecting potholes and cracks the next time I visit home.

I also donated some books to Their Books, an event wherein the organizers collect books from writers, poets, editors and media practitioners, musicians, artists, book lovers, art lovers, and other prominent personalities in Cebu and put them on sale with the proceeds going to school children. There’s a list of the books they’re putting on sale at facebook. I’d like to get The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño for myself. Unfortunately, I’m not in Cebu for the event. So I guess I’d have to ask somebody to buy them for me.

Anyhow, I got myself a copy of Resil Mojares’s Origins and Rise of the Novel: A Generic Study of the Filipino Novel until 1940, a synchronic and diachronic investigation that seeks to chart the contours of the structures that underlie the Filipino novel while at the same time tracing the development of its various elements through history.

I have never been that much of an admirer of local literature, in part because my petty bourgeois habitus (the set of tastes characteristic of my class) is more inclined to consuming cultural artifacts coming from the west. Last year, this middle class colonial mentality was epitomized in a society columnist’s complaint over her daughter’s required high school class reading of Amado Hernandez’s Mga Ibong Mandaragit. Why not just let them read Hemingway, she asked?

But along with Soledad Reyes’s essays on the fictions of Filipino women writers, female characters in Filipino literary texts, and popular culture in Tellers of Tales, Singers of Songs: Selected Critical Essays, Mojares’s study has instilled in me a greater appreciation of the Philippine literary heritage. I’ve begun to see them in a new light.

I’m halfway through Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a thick tome inhabited by a hilariously unreliable narrator. It is written in a most garish style, perhaps much too colorful for my taste but still very much worth the effort to read.

After discontinuing my previous attempt at Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject (which I was gravely unprepared for when I began reading it last December), I decided to start over and began reading the Slovenian cultural theorist’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (his first book in English) to gain an understanding his Lacanian-informed critique of ideology.

There are too many texts to read and too little time, especially when one has other things to do too – like attending classes, talking with and organizing people, daydreaming about running after a girl, losing sleep, and writing all sorts of silly stuff like this. ■

Perhaps not the simplest book to start with on the great list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

I picked this book up at a local used bookstore. A crisp new paperback running around 500 pages. Oh yes, the Satanic Verses, I thought. I knew about fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie as well as the murders and attempted murders of various translators and publishers. I’ve read accounts of the book burnings. Alas, I really had no idea what the actual book was about.

Ends up, this book was a fantastic read. It took me much longer than most books, just because it was packed so full. Every chapter or so I was sidling up to my computer and imputing phrases, names and places into google.

I was live in North America and was brought up in a Christian household (not like crazy Christian, but we did go to church every Sunday). I didn’t take religious studies in school, so, aside from my obsession with current events, I know little about the history of Muhammad or the Qur’an.

Due to my lack of expertise, I’m not going to discuss the controversy or state an opinion. Instead, I’m going to focus on the prose of this novel. The subtle character traits and vivid colorful fantasies. This novel focuses on two main characters who move in and out of each others lives. Each representing an opposing force, they are brought together through mutual friends, loves and situations. The novel is broken up into different books. I couldn’t wait to start a new ‘book’ as the reader is instantly transported to a new place and time. There are new characters, some who will only be around for those few pages and some that will reappear later in the narrative.

Using a frame narrative, Rushdie interlaces the harsh realities of immigrants living in modern day England with angel-filled fantasies while searching for a delicate balance and a way for all these characters to survive.

Again, this was a pretty difficult book to begin this foray into my great reading list, but it was well worth it. Reading this book before bed ensured dreams of bollywood dancers, massive temples and magic lamps.

I had a revelation during Slumdog Millionaire: Danny Boyle, at some point in his life, either voluntarily or unwillingly fell into a toilet. Toilets, and people entering toilets, seem to have shaped much of Danny Boyle’s career as a filmmaker.

His apparent obsession with putting actors into commodes, however, doesn’t speak to the quality or overall content of his latest film in any way, shape, or form. Boyle’s Slumdog, is based on a novel titled Q & A, written by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup and published in 2005. The basic plot of the film and the novel remain the same– a young man goes on a quiz show and wins millions, only to find himself arrested and detained on suspicion of cheating.

While I have not read the novel (it seems like I’m running into this problem a lot lately, though I have since read the latter book), I can still safely say that beyond the basic plot, the two works part ways. The hero of Q & A, for one, recounts the story of how he came to know all the answers to his lawyer; Slumdog’s protagonist, Jamal (Dev Patal), finds himself persuading a police inspector of his innocence after being beaten and tortured in the movie’s opening. From here, the film begins to jump back and forth in time as Jamal tells the story of his life, and of how he subsequently came to know the answers, to his captors, and we learn that Jamal entered the game show in order to find the love of his life, Latika (Freida Pinto).

In flashing between past and present, Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle take their audience on a tour of an India rarely seen by American audiences, choosing to highlight the impecunious world from which our protagonists attempt to make exodus. In doing so they capture the poverty-stricken slums of Mumbai in vivid detail, turning a never-ending expanse of dulled tin roofs into a lush metal canopy aloft a winding urban jungle. Slumdog, if nothing else, looks fantastic, brimming with sumptuous imagery in each scene– every frame of the movie explodes with beauty, even when depicting the ugliness with which Jamal, his brother Salim, and the orphan Latika contend as children (such as the Hindu-Muslim riots, the event which ultimately sets Jamal on the path that leads him to enter the quiz show as a contestant). It would have been easy for Boyle and Mantle to consciously tone down the brutal reality the trio of kids, whose lives we follow for much of the film’s running time, live every day. Instead, they choose to give Slumdog real teeth, and as a result the film resonates and feels alive.

Much has been said about the movie’s faerie tale qualities, and comparisons have been drawn between it and the Bollywood movies which it references (most notably in the way young Jamal idolizes real life Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan). Truthfully, Slumdog falls into neither genre: It emphasizes the harshness of reality too much to be a faerie tale, and it lacks the melodrama that is so prevalent in many Bollywood films. There is no doubt that both of these elements are present (and in the case of the love story, prominent) in Slumdog, but neither defines it’s narrative. Primarily, the film is concerned with fate and coincidence, portraying how the structure of Jamal’s life enables him to not only correctly answer each question on the game show (even when he is fed incorrect answers), but also find and eventually reunite with Latika. The movie’s greatest strengths are it’s framework, and it’s precise organization of plot, which it favors over fully fleshed out characters. Even the protagonists are only drawn enough to give the audience the essentials of their personae. These are all traits of magic realism*, a genre that eschews “realistic” character development for the sake of original and captivating storytelling; even the masters of the genre, such as Marquez and Rushdie**, only developed their characters just enough to leave an impression, choosing instead to emphasize twists and turns in narrative and plot.

Some may argue that this is just an excuse for sloppy characterization, but those who do will also have to argue the same for other works in the genre Slumdog is operating within.

None of this is to say that the acting of Slumdog is disposable or an afterthought. While the structure is all important, it is the natural and emotional performances of the cast that give a hint of realism to a movie that by proxy operates outside of reality. Most notable are the performances of Patal and Pinto, whose minimal shared screen time makes the task of lending weight to their relationship more challenging. They are undoubtedly successful, though the achievement is as much due to their immediate and strong chemistry as it is due to the relationship established by the child actors portraying both characters at the youngest and middle phases of their lives. Patal and Pinto both are able to draw upon past interactions between their characters, and bring to the film’s surface a relationship that has slowly simmered beneath years of separation.

Perhaps, in the hands of another director, Slumdog would have given more time to develop and emphasize their relationship, which is undoubtedly central to the story. This would have served to better ground the film in reality, making it less beholden to magical realism, a genre that seems to have influenced Boyle’s film immensely. And perhaps for those who find the film’s time-spanning love story hard to swallow, the film would have worked better, but at the cost of what makes Slumdog unique and, ultimately, an utterly captivating piece of storytelling.

*A genre that, incidentally, has strong ties to India.
**Who I was somewhat surprised to learn did not particularly like the movie. Apparently it was too unbelievable for him.

In 1988 Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses and was forced into hiding soon after for enraging Islamic fundamentalists. This has been well-documented, if not over-documented, and now that Rushdie has come out of hiding and lost himself in the glitz and glamor of American celebrity he has been open about his time in hiding and its effects on his life. While much of the focus on his novel has been the sections that fundamentally pissed off the fundamentalists (the prophet Muhammed’s conversation with the devil, comparing Muhammed’s harem to a whorehouse, etc.), I continue to become more and more convinced that Rushdie’s overarching message– that the hybridity that comes with migrancy is pretty damn good– was aided a great deal by Islamic fundamentalism.

I’m feeling a little too lazy to flip through the novel right now and do a nice, neat literary analysis. That would be busy work as I’ve written something like three papers on the novel in the last year. But what I’d like to claim is this: fundamentalism and hybridity (read singularity and eclectism, or to be more hip, locality/ parochialism and globalization/ homogeneity) cannot do without one another. In fact, it seems to me that neither could survive in the current forms without the other.

Let’s take the most obvious example. Without fundamentalism, there could be no hybridity. Fundamentalism, whether manifested in extremely literal religious dogma or jingoism, is an assertion of identity. Yelling “Allah Akbar” prior to detonating oneself, or driving around in a pickup truck in Kentucky grumbling about the foreignness of Jews and Asian Americans in the name of white supremacy is essentially privileging one of many aspects of individual identity. Fundamentalism thrives on essentialism. It relies on an attempt to re-establish atavistic notions of identity, i.e. pure, unadulterated Islam or whiteness. However, hybridity is, in Rushdie’s words, predicated on “taking the best and leaving the rest.” To be hybrid is to mine what is considered essential identity categories (British, Christian, Cajun, hippy, mama’s boy, etc) and stitch them together to create a patchwork, melange individual. Could hybridity merely be the fusion of several fundamentalisms?

Let’s phrase it this way: could globalization merely mean the fusion of several localities? That is essentially what globalization is, an increased interconnectedness between hitherto relatively unconnected localities. I know, I know, it probably seems like I’m recklessly interchanging fundamentalism with locality and hybridity with globalization, but I’m not the only one. Read Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s Globalization and Culture or Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld. While one priveleges hybridity as a solution to what the other views as an unresolvable conflict between reactionary and leftist camps, both view locality as the locus for parochialism and fundamentalism.

Many movies and television series consist of a series what are called arcs, which are separate story lines not necessarily related.

One of the arcs in Crossing Over involves an Iranian family in which the father pressures a son to slay his sister in what is known as an “honor killing.” I was under the impression that honor killing were frequent in Pakistan and rare in Iran, but a Google search reveals that honor killings also occur in Iran.

I have read that honor killing are almost unknown in Indonesia which is one of the largest predominantly Islamic nations.

Here is a WordPress blog documenting an honor killing in Iran:

Honor Killings in Iran

The victim’s name was Fereshteh which means “angel” in Farsi and is comparable to the American name “Angela”. Ironically, the victim in the movie “Crossing Over” wore a bracelet engraved “little angel.”

The opening pages of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses describes two characters falling from the sky, one of whom is named Gibreel Farishta. I only realized the Farsi meaning of the word when I watched another movie featuring an Iranian store owner who attempts to shoot a locksmith with a gun which contained only blanks. The blacksmith’s child shield him with her body. When the shooter realizes that no harm has been done, he exclaims “Farishta!”

Crash (Movie Spoiler)

Honor Killings and the Law in Various Countries

Salman Rushdie

Wakacje były dobrym czasem na odklejenie się od Joyce’a i lżejszą lekturę. Wybrałem Czarodziejkę z Florencji Salmana Rushdiego. Okazało się, że trafiłem na znakomitą bajkę, w sam raz na urlop. Z pewnością daleko jej do Dzieci północy, czy Szatańskich wersetów, ale znakomity styl i poczucie humoru autora wciągają aż miło.

Czarodziejka dzieje się z jednej strony w Wenecji Machiavellego, a z drugiej w Indiach Akbara z dynastii Mogołów. Byłaby to prawie political fiction, autor włożył wiele wysiłku w oddanie klimatu epoki w obydwu szerokościach geograficznych, gdyby nie wątki baśniowe, nieprawdopodobieństwa i anachronizmy. Z jednej strony wszystkie te techniki są chakaterystyczne dla Rushdiego (może poza Śalimarem Klaunem), z drugiej trochę wygląda na to, że najpierw wpadł na koncept porównania kultury Wschodu i Zachodu na pięknych przykładach, potem postudiował historię epoki i musiał uciec w głębszą fikcję, żeby uzasadnić swoją wizję.

Tak czy inaczej polecam. Znakomite są przemyślenia Akbara na temat istoty władzy, co ciekawe, robią większe wrażenie niż uwagi Machiavellego. Dla miłośników rozpasania znajdą się opisy domów publicznych Wschodu i Zachodu, a z bibliografii wynika, że ten temat Rushdie przestudiował wyjątkowo dokładnie. Sporo tu też o religii (eksperymenty Akbara, Savonarola), ale ten temat Rushdie przerobił za bardzo.

Recently Emory University posted an extremely insightful interview with Salman Rushdie on YouTube. In the clip below, he talks about the influence Shakespeare has on him. What I love about it though, is that unlike most people who simply cite Shakespeare in a very general way and leave it at that, Rushdie goes more in depth and dissects Hamlet. And now I can grin a little bit, since Hamlet has always been my favourite Shakespeare play by far! I hadn’t realised exactly why before, but Rushdie pretty much nails it. Watch and listen…

Read more about Salman Rushdie and find out what he has to say about some of his other favourites: Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce, amongst others.

Viktor Frankl states (in “Man’s Search for Meaning”) that our final freedom, which no one can take from us, is how we choose to REGARD our circumstances. Freedom is a word which has many different meanings in various contexts, but does not imply absolute freedom. Sartre in the opening pages of “Being and Nothingness” basically says that we are doomed to be free, since to totally give up ones freedom would require an exercise of freedom. Read (or re-read) Camus’ novel “The Stranger”, and think about the limited freedom of choices which the protagonist Merseult has at each stage in the story.

Aristotle talks about “anangke” or necessity. For example, as a sphere increases in size, the surface area increases as a function of the SQUARE of the radius, while the VOLUME increases as a function of the CUBE of the radius, which means that a cell cannot grow to the size of Cleveland, because the ratio of cell mass to cell surface becomes at some point too great to allow for metabolism.

Curiously, the Qur’an finds the notion that God can be limited even by God’s own decrees to be unacceptable. Hence there is one verse (Surah 2:106) None of Our revelations do We abrogate or cause to be forgotten but We substitute something better or similar; knowest thou not that Allah hath power over all things?

One can see how this notion of an unlimited freedom of God can become a “sticky wicket”

By contrast, the Judaeo-Christian scriptures describe a Deity which chooses to be self-limiting (e.g. “for God cannot lie” and “I have sworn and shall not repent”, etc.)

“Freedom” suffers from the problem of “qualia.” For example, it is fine to speak of a red flower or a red wagon or a red sunset, but when we attempt to abstract to a notion of “red in itself”, or to further abstract to “color” then we run into philosophical problems.

Abraham Lincoln wisely observed that “in a conflict, each side asserts that they have God behind their cause, but they should rather ask whether they are on God’s side.”

I saw an “independent” movie (Indie) about a young German-American who decides to move to Germany after WWII to help with the reconstruction. He asks a Catholic priest there, “Each side prayed to God, but God cannot be on BOTH sides.” The priest mentioned that verse “ye are neither hot nor cold so therefore I spew you out of my mouth”, hinting that possible God views each soul’s motivation on an individual level, and not on the basis of Yankee/Confederate, Allied/Axis, etc.

The devil is in the DETAILS. There is a story about a man who is taken down to hell and given a vision of what hell is. He sees a long table loaded with delicious plates of food. People are tied to their chairs, each with a very long spoon tied to one arm. They are starving because they cannot put the food on the spoon and get it to their mouths. Then the same man is whisked up to heaven and given a vision of heaven. He sees the same long table and the same people tied to their chairs with the same long spoons. But each person is dipping his spoon and feeding the fellow across the table. Both heaven and hell have the same limitations, but heaven is more pleasant because the people there choose to work with the limitations in a less selfish fashion.

When the wise Solomon wrote “There are ways which seemeth good to a man, but the end thereof is death” he was speaking directly to YOU. When the Prophet Jeremiah wrote “all of your righteousness is as a filthy rag” he was writing directly to YOU. When Jesus said in that parable “go away, I never knew you” he is speaking to you.

Indie just means it was an artsy obscure movie with a kind of existential theme, so mainstream Hollywood would never touch it. And you would only see it on cable channels that feature such obscure films with existentialist type themes. You have probably seen “City of Angels” with Nicholas Cage, but you never saw what it was based on “Wings of Desire” (Himmel Uber Berlin) by German director Wim Wenders staring Peter Falk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire

Jallaludin Rumi said “There is a place beyond the notions of right doing and wrong doing. I shall meet you there.”

The first Sufi Martyr, Hallaj, as he was led to the gallows for execution, for blasphemy, said to his orthodox Sunni executioners, “If I had had YOUR experiences, I could do no other than condemn such as I to execution for blasphemy.”

But if you had had MY experiences, you would have no other choice than to exclaim as I did “I am one with Allah”.

if you had led my life, and had my experiences, you would see things as I do. If I had led your life and had your experiences, I would see things as you do.

Yet we are both, in a sense free, but at the same time, we are both in bondage.

Do you want to become as I am? If yes, then I ask,
Why?

Do you want me to become as you are?
If yes, then I ask again,
Why?

No two people share exactly the same belief in God. Jefferson wrote that in a letter to a friend. There are upwards of 1 billion Roman Catholics, which means that there are 1 billion different notions of what Roman Catholicism is. Many are troubled by notions of clean and unclean; right and wrong; them and us. And you are not alone. Many in America are troubled by the same thoughts, questions.

For an American were to read Salman Rushdie’s novel “Satanic Verses”, it is very unlikely that they would understand what Rushdie is trying to do, because you have not grown up in a culture of pluralism and syncretism where Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam have co-existed for millenia and have given rise to such hybridization as Sikhism and Sufism. Most Americans cannot understand such a book. They have not lived on a diet of Bollywood “theological” movies about the Hindu scriptures of the Ramayan and the Mahabharata. I have experienced all these things for years, and so I can understand Rushdie. If you did what was necessary to understand Rushdie as I do, it would involve transforming yourself into something totally alien to what you are, and perhaps something un-American (not in the sense of McCarthyism, not in a bad sense). The majority of the world is un-American in a way that Americans find difficult to understand or accept.

It is not a matter of finding all the answers (which is a vain Sisyphean task), but rather to stem the flood of questions. Don Quixote never slays the enemy or finds his Dulcinea, but yet reaches a point where he ceases his wanderings and quest. Every question conceals a quest, and quests often lead to violence and confrontations.

You have succeeded in provoking thought. This is just the sort of dialog I look for. And it is like a mental exercise for me, gymnastics if you will.

Notice how doctors and lawyers always speak of “the practice of medicine” and “the practice of law.”

Certain things are never a destination but are always a process or exercise.

What we are doing here is similar to Zen koan practice. There are many books on koans, but one in particular, “The Iron Cow of Zen”, by Albert Low (published by QUEST no less) is a very good illustration of what we are doing here, and how Eastern philosophy deals with the human problem in a very different fashion that Western philosophy.

It is good that you ask such questions, and that you are looking about, willing to consider unlikely answers from very different traditions in distant lands.

Your mind is open. Your openness to all these ideas is a tremendous freedom in itself.

If you take a look at Plato’s Republic, which is a long dialog, something like ours, which Socrates has with some friends, you will find what is called “Plato’s Cave Analogy” which is a sort of parable that Socrates tells to illustrate what is involved in the problem of comprehending reality. Many people are bound in the cave. They cannot turn about but must stair at a wall. There is a fire behind them which casts shadows on the wall. (Its sort of like that movie, Matrix). One fellow frees himself, and exits the cave into the sunlight, to see reality in itself, rather than the shadows of illusion. He feels compassion for those still in bondage, so he returns to the shadowy world of the cave, and attempts to free the others.