Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie

Having read only two of his books, I was eager to lay my hands on this one, a book, perhaps triggered as a reaction to the controversy that surrounded the author for good part of his life. His fault, he wrote a book about a religion he was born into, Satanic Verses. He had not pleased the fundamentalists. But since when the artistic expressions were made to merely please our senses? Its about raising difficult questions, investigating the unknown and pushing boundaries through struggle to understand our presence here a bit more. With the fatwa in place and bloodthirsty search for Rushdie by Jehadis, it was only one thing that was left to answer, what will one achieve by killing the artist? Because, art or its remnants will remain here forever. Or as Rushdie says,

Art was strong, artists less so. Art could perhaps take care of itself. Artists needed defenders.

Thus he defended himself and was defended by others. In doing so, he lost a great deal and gained a good deal as well. Rushdie is not the one to sit back and mourn about the lost years, he is about making it up for lost freedom, suppression of expression and a whole gamut of evolution that took place when he was presented with this unique tragedy and dealing with it. The book is a detailed one of the years before and during the fatwa years. It's detailed, nuanced but sprightly, nonetheless. Its an emotional journey of his upheavals of a literary life, personal both difficult and beautiful relationships with friends, two sons, four wives, sisters,  parents and through all that emergence of the person he was to become. Its a story told well. 

He has been accused elsewhere of being ostentatious of his literary world in this book. Quite honestly, that was his world too and he has written about people in it, with honesty and with humility. He perhaps doesn't need brownie points for moving in that circle, he was it too. He admits somewhere in the book that the greatest compliment he ever received was from Jorge Vargas Llosa, when he said that, outside spanish literature the two authors he always keeps a track of are- J.M.Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Precious.

His life was anything but linear and he painted many moving images of this being, of this migrated self. The uprooted existence that leaves you with the longing to belong in its most difficult form. 

The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogenous instead of homogenous, belonging to more than one place, multiple rather than singular, responding to more than one way of being, more than averagely mixed-up. Was it possible to be-to become good at being- not rootless, but multiply rooted?

With roughly 600 pages, book may seem fat, heavy, tiresome and laborious. It's none of those. It is stimulating, insightful, wise, moving and of course humorous in several places. 

The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. 

The soul had many dark corners and books sometimes illuminated them.

India was surrounded by unfree societies- Pakistan, China, Burma- but remained an open democracy; flawed, certainly, perhaps even deeply flawed but free.

And finally, its no defense but appropriate to ask, 

The Satanic Verses or any other book, no matter how wretched, what sort of Almighty could be shaken by the work of man?

Essential Rumi

I believe none of us are fully comfortable with words like soul, pure love and heart. And perhaps we never will be as we do not fully comprehend their workings. This could be, for all we know that there is something we do not know- something that we will never be able to fully know. Thus begins our spiritual journey, egotistical as it may sound, our quest to find serenity and beauty that comes from deeper exploration of our conflicts and confirmations. Essential Rumi can be an useful set of ideas that presents a philosophy which may ease one's strain and you actually experience inner walls of pre-held understanding crumbling, brick by brick. Leading you to recognize that our presence is perhaps a myth. And its left to us to unfold this myth,  our mystery away from rational. 

Look at this
just finishing candle stub
as someone who is finally safe
from virtue and vice
the pride and the shame
we claim from those.

Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now. 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
There is a field, I'll meet you there. 

Finally I know the freedom
of madness. 

No one who really loves,
loves existence.

And in that vein, Rumi suggests to dissolve your boundaries, pull and push and reach towards tenderness, of attempting to live beyond that may be undefined & unclear at this point, of sailing inside the inexplicable, drifting within your privacy.

The Misfits (1961)

While Steve Jobs had his version of misfits who thought differently, thinking of an older conversation with a friend, made me come back to the idea of misfits and understand it differently, perhaps. He had described a certain set of professional set-up as dusty, lawless, territorial. All those epithets that come to our mind when we think of Wild West. I had agreed with him wholeheartedly, then. But then,

Here is an excerpt from an essay by Coetzee on The Misfits that I ran into while reading Inner Workings:

The misfits (1961) was put together by a notable set of creative people. The film is based on an original screenplay by Arthur Miller. It was directed by John Huston; and it starred Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in what turned out to be their last big roles. The plot is simple. A woman, Roslyn, visiting Reno, Nevada, for a quick divorce, gets friendly with a group of part-time cowboys and goes off with them into the desert on a jaunt to trap wild horses. There she discovers that the horses will end up not as riding mounts but as pet food. The discovery precipitates a breakdown of trust between her and the men, a breakdown that film patches over only in the most uneasy and unconvincing of ways.

Aside from the ending, the script is a strong one. Miller is operating at the tail end of a long literary tradition of reflecting on the closing of America's western frontier, and the effects of that closing on the American psyche. Huckleberry Finn, at the end of the book about him by Mark Twain, still had the recourse of lighting out for the territories so as to escape civilization (and Nevada, in the 1840s of Huck's childhood, was one of the territories in question).

Miller's cowboys, a century or so later, are trapped in the States with nowhere to go. One of them, Gaye (Clark Gable), has become a gigolo preying on divorcees. Another, Perce (Montgomery Clift) scrapes together a living as a rodeo performer. The third, Guido (Eli Wallach), exhibits the dark side of the male homosociality of the frontier, namely a vicious misogyny.

These are Miller's misfits, men who have either failed to make the transition to the modern world or are making that transition in an ignominious way. The three are presented with a rounded ness that is rare in cinema, the result of Miller's deft professional stagecraft.

But of course Miller's title has a second ironic meaning. If the cowboys are misfits in Eisenhower's America, the Nevada mustangs are even more deeply so. There used to ten of thousands of them; now they are pitiful troops up in the hills, barely worth being exploited. From being an embodiment of the freedom of the frontier, they have become anachronism, creatures with no useful role in mechanized civilization. It is their lot to be herded and hunted from the air; if they are not actually being shot from the air, that is only because the flesh would spoil before the horse-butcher could arrive with his refrigerated truck.

 It dispelled my notion of our transition to mechanized civilization and our precarious origins, evolution and our current belonging and perception towards it.

Coetzee on Naipaul

Why might one be drawn to read a collection of the book reviews from a writer who himself is an accomplished fiction writer? In Inner Workings, J.M.Coetzee analyzes and penetrates few of the literary work by others and through his own voice, gives detailed reviews, explain nuances of work from his, sometimes, detached lens of understanding. In an essay on V.S.Naipaul he explains:

 One of the more consistent strains in the story Naipaul tells of his own life is that it was by a pure effort of will that he became a writer. He was not gifted with fantasy; he had only his childhood in paltry Port of Spain to call on, no larger historical memory (this was where Trinidad failed him, and, behind Trinidad, India); he seemed to have no subject. Only after a decades-long labour of writing did he finally come to the Proustian realization that he had known his true subject all along, and his subject was himself- himself and his efforts, as a colonial raised in a culture that did not (he was told) belong to him and without (he was told) a history, to find a way in the world.

Pamuk's PEN Speech

Bits from Pamuk's speech, in Other Colours:

Regardless of national circumstances, freedom of thought and expression are universal human rights. These freedoms, which modern people long for as the starving yearn for bread, can never justifiably be limited to nationalist sentiment, moral sensitivities, or hoped for international gain. Some of us have better understanding of the West, some of us have more affection for those who live in the East, and some like me, try to do the two things at the same time, but these attachments, this desire to understand, should never stand in the way of our respect for human rights. To change one's words, to package them in a way that will be acceptable to everyone, and to become skilled in that arena is bit like smuggling contraband through customs, and much the same way, even when successfully accomplished, it produces a feeling of shame and degradation.

Freedom of thought, the happiness that comes of the ability to express the anger deep inside us- we have already mentioned how honor and human dignity depend on it. Many writers we respect and value have chosen to take up forbidden topics purely because the very nature of the prohibition was an injury to their pride; I know this from my own experience. Because when another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.

Tread softly

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Full poem here.

...

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

~Rushdie in The Satanic Verses

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets

The book Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets aims to map the exclusions and negotiations that females of various age groups and economic classes encounter in their everyday lives in urban spaces in the city of Mumbai. Authors trio, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade have based this book on their 3 years of qualitative research and conclude that women’s presence and participation in public spaces and events has certainly increased but reserve that the city still does not offer equal claim into the realm of public safety in urban streets and spaces.

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets embarks on a significant journey on how a radically transforming city with respect to infrastructure and rapid construction, still continues to grant women only a status of secondary citizen by denying them complete safety at any time of the day. Provision of safety in urban spaces encompasses different understanding for women belonging to different economic classes. Woman travelling in a private vehicle from destination A to destination B has different safety level offered than another woman travelling from same destination A to B in a public transport.

As presented in the book, low visibility areas, poorly lit spaces, deserted streets and public transportation after sunset all consitute for unsafe environments. To counter, women alter their movement and restrict accessing urban spaces, maintaining a compromise. The book presents scenarios where this aspect of women in public spaces is so deeply entrenched that it becomes their second nature to modify their behavior. Examples like covering their chest with a book, file or dupatta, walking while gazing down and pretending to be on the phone while moving swiftly away into private spaces are common glimpses.

What is curious about the book is that investigates various economic and communal settings and how each is unique in providing different degree of freedom and social constraints. So a city, essentially an amalgam of various faiths and religion and cosmoplitan in its claim, provides a different level of freedom in varied communities. And women are not let loose from the clutches of moral policing in the name of safety. She can be letched, eve-teased, groped, stared and made to feel voilated, possibly anywhere. On the other hand, the same does not apply for men, as the authors point out. Men move about and expand their access to urban spaces more vigorously and more importantly any time of the day. Thus enabling more choices with respect to jobs they take up or engage in various social gestures.

This book presents scenarios of Mumbai’s changing landscape and how this emerging urban fabric could be flawed from equitable development and equal access to all citizens. And this is where I see authors blurring issues of gender humiliation to urban development. The two are distinct issues and a very organic development devoid of zoning has not been a solution either, as suggested by the researchers. Women’s safety in a city is not an unique Indian issue. Its rampant here could be a case of cultural baggage of gender hierarchy and its related perils.