Monday, December 24, 2012

A Poem for the Children of Sandy Hook Elementary School


A Poem for the Children of Sandy Hook Elementary School

Next time you shave
or put on lipstick, look beneath
that deepening mirror:

the wailing
of mothers half a world away
beneath the cries of this mother, bereaved,
the anguish of ragged children

beneath the smiling face
of  Emilie
who lies dead, slumped
over friends
in this little town, where the world
would live.

She was
to be
an artist, drawing
lives.

Artists. Teachers. Future worlds,
Unworlded.

And all that remains is words,

Pictures of the dead.
Drawn by children.

Their cries do not reach
the throne of God but are stuck in their throats.

Next time you trim your eyebrows
or apply your eye shadow, look deep into
your mirrors to find
not “evil” or God but selves into whom we've slid
--  undisciplined (screwed-up) kid,
Gun-loving (screwed-up) mum --

Who let this happen every single day
both here and half a world away;
Who pretend this disease is freedom.

Friday, December 7, 2012

Women of the Eastern Diaspora: Poetry Reading and Discussion of Exhibition


Ornament and Narrative: A Poetry Reading and Discussion of Art by Women of the Eastern Diaspora

M.A.R. Habib

Rutgers University, Stedman Art Gallery
December 6, 2012



             I’d like to begin by thanking my colleagues Martin Rosenberg and Cyril Reade in the Department of Fine Art for inviting me to read my poetry in the context of this splendid exhibition of art by “Women of the Eastern Diaspora” which includes female artists from Iran, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, and India. I would also like to thank the many students here for their interest. I will focus on two of the artists and read some poetry which I think might intersect with their concerns. Before doing that, I’d like to offer some initial observations on the exhibition as a whole.

            It seems to me that all these artists, often concerned with the boundaries imposed upon women, are also challenging the boundaries of representation. They seem to coerce the visual medium toward the conceptual, for example, by portraying writing as an image, by divesting it of its signifying power and reinvesting it with meanings absorbed from its new visual surroundings. One of Najla Arafa’s images uses repeated inscriptions of the Arabic word for “Arab,” whose initial legibility and ontical status as pure ideality, as pure sign, blends by degrees into the materiality, the very substance, of a hijab:
Roya Akhavan also appears to use pattern and repetition to evoke differences in meaning of the “same’ image, differences resting on spatial relation and metaphorically on relationality itself:
Naomi Safran-Hon’s images of deserted homes evoke the beauty and tragedy of a centuries’ old existence which has been exiled into the desert. Again, the images gesture beyond themselves, their visual nature betraying itself as it calls to philosophy and ethics for self-completion: the images invoke a dialectic of presence in absence, of time in space, of exile in the very cement of habitation (she actually uses a mixture of lace and cement):

I’d like to talk a little about the Moroccan feminist Muslim artist Lalla Essaydi, who once made the following statement: “In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses -- as artist, as Moroccan, as Saudi, as traditionalist, as Liberal, as Muslim. In short, I invite the viewer to resist stereotypes.”
Essaydi makes a poignant statement about her use of space: “The traditions of Islam exist within spatial boundaries. The presence of men defines public space, the streets, the meeting places. Women are confined to private spaces, the architecture of the homes. In these photographs, I am constraining women within space, confining them to their "proper" place, a place bounded by walls and controlled by men. Their confinement is a decorative one. The women, then, become literal with this visual confinement, I recall literal confinements.”

Essaydi then goes on to say how she subverts this confinement. Firstly, she subverts its silence; secondly, the use of calligraphic writing, a sacred art form strictly confined to men, is an act of rebellion; finally, to write with henna, traditionally a decorative form for women, heightens the subversive situation. She states that, while she carries that house of her childhood within her, she also carries an interior space of “converging territories, informed by the space she inhabits in the West, a space of independence and mobility. Yet she uses this very independence to undermine Western Orientalist perspectives. Significantly, the writing in her images is autobiographical.


What I see in this art is a female appropriation of writing, much like Christine de Pisan’s appropriation of the concept of reason for women. Traditionally, in Islamic theology, it is God who writes, God who inscribes the books of destiny. The religion of Islam was born with the word “Read” or Iqra’ and the very first verse of the Qur’an commands Muhammad to read or recite the verses from God who taught humankind “by the pen what it knew not.”  
Read, in the name
Of your Lord, Who created—
Created humankind, from
A clot of blood:
Read! And your Lord
Is Most Bountiful,
Who taught by the pen—
Taught humankind what
It knew not.

Writing then becomes the province of the male, both literally, as in the calligraphic tradition, and metaphorically, as in the inscription of laws and the various narratives that create the content of gender.

But in these photographs, the women are both writing and written upon; they bear the marks of a history of oppressive writing; and they are actively writing in their very confinement, actively redefining the very space imposed upon them; by inhabiting that space with letters and words, by bringing language within the space they are giving voice to the very habitation of silence, they are reconstituting the concept of silence from within its own unexplored depth in an inaugural inversion of inside and outside, female and male, imprisonment and freedom. This is silence calling from within itself, defying its own essence, whispering through the veils of an imposed absolute. This is silence walking in complicity with its shadowed self, pretending to be itself, emitting no voice yet flowing over into its constituting medium, that of writing.

We witness in these photographs by Lalla Essaydi a language being born, a new language, in the very medium of suppression. The language is new because it does not merely represent or embody what had gone before, whether external or psychological. It explores, it is still (always) being written but refuses to be read in any linear or conventional fashion. To read the words would require a bodily manipulation impossible to the viewer, an unraveling of sheets forever rendered impossible by their containment within art, a deciphering that would dirempt the words we see from their indelibly marked contexts; for example, certain words appear on hands or face and cannot be lifted into the requisite degree of ideality to facilitate intelligibility. Language itself is the statement, torn from meaning, reinscribed so as to be legible only in the most secret places. Where, on the bodies of these women, does the writing ever stop? No-one can know, except the women themselves, in the privacy of  what Nietzsche might call their Socratism. Hegel says that painting frees art from the spatiality of material things by restricting visibility to the dimensions of a plane surface. So we might add that the painting of writing re-embodies the word within the dimensions of spatiality, within, and upon, and flowing from, the body, which is a woman, now the supreme embodiment of writing. Here are three brief poems, the first about the mysterious authority of Qur’anic writing, the second relating to woman as writing, and the third to woman as harem:

                                               Veiled Letters

Alif. Lam. Ra. These are the
Letters that will not yield. They
Stand like before and after,
The unremitting, unreturning

Face of time. Inscribed in
Uncomprehending hearts,
Unyielding faces, they are
The traces of eternity, returning

To language, overshadowing
Viewpoint and perspective
With higher harmony, notes
From sacred spheres, intoning


Veiled letters, trailing an
Invisible journey, trace
Of Otherness, whose sign
We read but cannot know.
 

 Writing

This writing will go on forever, from
Mother through daughter and son,
It will always be begun again in
New minds, new tribes, always
Circling outward and inward,
Spiralling through eternities
Of beginnings and ends, etched
On papyrus, paper, marble, stone,
On memory and imagination,
In the very dimensions of sense,
Its letters never dead, always
Risen, always written
While being read.

Harem
It is no windswept
Cloak on a
Saint=s shoulder.
It was not built
Around you. You
Were born into it,
It grew from your
Bones, from inside
Your blood. And
Now you wear it,
Walk with it, stare
Through it. And
None can know how
To break it, for you
Too would  rend. None
Can show where
It begins. And
Where you end.


When I look at the work of the Iranian/American artist Soody Sharifi, one of the first words that strikes me is hybridity, and, as she tells us, she explores the seeming paradoxes of living between two cultures, especially for Muslim youth. She highlights the contrast between public and private spaces.

She of course welcomed the democratic movement in Iran because she always wanted to show the West what was really going on beneath the media stereotypes. Interesting, she credits the repressive measures of the Iranian government with generating much more art than usual. She states: “actually, when there’s a repressed government, there’s always much more art coming out. It’s like when I was studying Spain and Franco – how culturally and artistically they so flourished at that time. And you know, Iran’s art and film has been much more developed after the revolution, just because they were repressed. There’s something going on when you have to read between the lines and work against the government and show and express yourself. That is just amazing, and that’s what the artists are doing.”

A salient feature of Sharifi’s miniatures is the uniform or blank background, as in this image of women playing basketball:
But so imposing is this background and, like the Persian miniatures it is based on, so without depth or perspective, that it also offers itself as a foreground. The human figures appear to be abstracted from all context; but this abstraction, like the abstraction at the first stage of the Hegelian dialectic, draws overwhelming attention to itself as artificial and indeed unreal; indeed not real but ideal. And so this background, this abstract context, is fraught with the possibility contained in nothingness. The scene could be a park in America; but it could also be a park in the new Iran. We notice that the girl on the very left  is depicted by a photograph, whereas the other two figures are drawn upon traditional miniature paintings. Let us call the girl on the left Xena. Xena is wearing a hijab over conventional American clothes; she is laughing and enjoying herself; though she is not athletic in her appearance she is about to throw a definitively American ball. The two Persian women, traditionally dressed, are trying to stop her. Xena is naively real, inasmuch as photography can claim a naïve realism, and the basketball hoop, also captured in a photograph, has the same degree of reality. The two Persian girls are imported from a past tradition. What is the symbolism here?

Blankness embodies the abstraction of an entity from all context; yet one blankness is not the same as another; the choice of different colours by this artist indicates that the so-called starting point or beginning is itself retrospective, dependent on its own engendering of perspectives, its harbouring of the germ of reflection. Another painting adapts the story of the tragic love of Farhad for Shirin (told by the Persian poet Firdausi in his tenth-century poem Shah-Nameh); here, the potential lovers are dressed in modern attire, casually talking. And the background is light green, warmer and more convivial than the intense maroon landscape on which the basketball players move. I have travelled to many Muslim countries and it is noticeable that while young women wear the hijab in many distinctive ways, they always find ways to express their beauty, as this poem attempts to convey:

Hijab
It is all hidden, I know.
But it is not what you
Show to the world that
Shows you. It is the way
You show, the way you
Don’t quite hide beneath
Your scarf, your veil, a hair
Askew, hanging loose, as if
By accident or some hurried
Task or movement. And what
About those painted nails,
Both hands and feet, sometimes
Red and once dark green. And bangles
Too, and small gold anklets, as if
You were some fairy princess
About to dance, in some glass
Realm, where your nimble form
Could roam free. I won’t even
Talk of your lips, darkly rouged,
Perfectly poised, as if expecting
To open for some mythic visitor.


            Finally, here is a poem which depicts a traditional male in the act of worship, embodying a conventional relation to words and  the Word. I believe that this scenario embodies much of what the women of the Eastern diaspora are reacting against:

Vacancy

Piety clothes him as he rests his forehead
On the rug, in the deepest phase of prayer.
Since he was small, he was bowed in worship,
Not knowing what his words meant, or who was there.

And after all, they are not his words, passed
Down from ancient lines, family commands.
The moment of union, the focused love,
Drilled by submission, into vacant form.

There is a vacancy in his grey soul,
Greyer than the beard which marks his faith.
What one says no longer matters, mere rites
Through which we lose a right to speak.

It no longer matters, to him, if words
Which house ancient souls, ancient schools of law,
The thought of endless scholars and preachers,
Glide over his life, his deeds, like mist, like breeze.

Untouched, no word ever comes from his soul,
No thought to add to the old body of thought;
Just silence, as he breathes in, breathes out,
In rhyme, words that lived in another time.

And who will judge him if in his silence
He should mock the very Word he should love;
If, bound in the endless words of others,
His tongue cannot strive for the Word above.

The vacancy he has grown to live with,
Will die with: and the deeper emptiness,
The deadened fear that there is nothing, here or there,
Beneath words, rite, silence: night.



**********

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Postcolonial Studies


Review of Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Robert P. Marzec (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 480 pp.
                                M.A.R. Habib, Rutgers University

Postcolonial studies has a great to offer in a world still imperiled by war, cultural and military colonialism, and a persistent demonizing of other cultures and religions. Precisely in virtue of its potential importance, both theoretical and practical, its insights should not be marred – as are those of so much literary theory – by being couched in language that is needlessly convoluted and replete with jargon.  Postcolonial studies have a fraught connection with this problematic legacy of literary theory. As the editor of this anthology Robert Marzec points out, the essays gathered here – representing some of the important work published in Modern Fiction Studies over the last thirty years – both address this fraught connection and aim to illuminate the often obscured relation between fiction, interpretation, and the “arena of world politics” (2).

In his introduction, Marzec plausibly defines postcolonialism as theoretically confronting the expansionist activities of empire, widening cultural awareness, and challenging the identity politics that lead to separatism and exclusivism (2). The colonial legacy continues in multinational and transnational “entities” that generate uneven development in global capitalism. It extends to military investment and corporate privatizations of “third World spaces” (3). Resistance to colonialism, we are informed, originated outside the academy, and in the “pre-postcolonialist” scholarship of seminal figures such as Cesaire and Fanon.  As an academic field, postcolonialism originated in departments of literature. The discipline owes much to the varieties of poststructuralism that developed in the wake of the “linguistic turn,” which all viewed Western notions of identity and power as “social, cultural, and ontological constructions that had no real basis in any essential or indisputable reality” (whether any thinker ever believed in such a reality is another question). Postcolonialism broadened the endeavors of poststructuralism to speak to the “unequal distribution of power” (4). The most difficult battle faced by postcolonial scholars, urges Marzec, is general neglect of the role that fictions play in the construction of reality, as evident especially in “the lack of serious attention paid to literary scholarship in the academy today by policy makers and the general public” (11). Hence all of the essays in this volume foreground the importance of studying fiction (12). While Marzec’s introduction has value, some of its assumptions are questionable: surely the distinguishing feature of postcolonial studies is not a focus on power (which was already treated by many branches of theory); and it is surely commonplace by now, even in all forms of media, that “reality” is a construction – an insight pioneered not by modern literary theory but by major thinkers such as Locke, Hume, Hegel and Marx. And the “lack of serious attention” to literary scholarship rests, among other things, on its jargonizing language, a deficiency which this book, for all its other virtues, does not entirely escape.

Many essays explore valuably the connection between social struggles and the rise of new forms of literature, such as the “testimonio,” a genre distinctive to postcolonial literature. Other essays examine the kinship between colonial politics, nationalism, and aesthetics. Theresa Tensuan shows how the Iranian feminist Marjane Satrapi offers a novelistic critique of both Western imperialism and Iranian dictatorship and patriarchy. Barbara Harlow’s richly detailed essay “Narrative in Prison: Stories of the Palestinian Intifada” shows how the intifada or Palestinian uprising, which began in 1988 after twenty years of Israeli occupation, generated a variety of literary responses which problematized conventional genres. The intifada  forged a “biography of resistance” as exemplified by Raymonda Tawil’s Women Prisoners, which recounts the personal and political histories of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. Indeed, the documentary -- which might include personal stories, anecdotes, and the reports of human rights groups – became important as a literary genre, and contributed to a social narrative centered around prison rather than person or family.

In general, the Arab poetic tradition rallied around the intifada, and the role of the intellectual in political resistance became a widely discussed issue, together with the “inherited ideal” of literary autonomy (it is not clear how this ideal, formulated in Western traditions since Kant, was “inherited” in Arabic literature which, as Harlow acknowledges, has a tradition of political engagement). Poems by Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish became part of the transgressive narrative of the intifada, engaging not only literary critics but politicians and the media. Harlow also recounts the narratives emerging from Israel’s suppression of the newspaper Derech-Hanittzotz in February 1988 and even of the very notion of “childhood” (396).  Such was the power of this alternative narrative that the Israeli government, in the words of Walid al-Fahum, “fears that literary production of any sort might escape the cell” (397).

A further set of essays examines the connections between modernity and the process of colonization, as well as the impact of Western education and the globalization of English. In his essay entitled “Worldly English” (which was originally the introduction to an issue of MFS), Michael Bérubé points out that English World literature was too readily associated with postcolonial theory and its affiliations with cultural studies and postmodernism were unduly neglected. He cites various responses to Appiah’s raising the question of the analogies between post-colonialism and post-modernism (such as their critical attitude toward narratives of legitimation, itself ironically imbued with ethical universalism), and cites Andrew Hoberek’s view that postcolonial literatures have challenged the centrality and usefulness of the distinction between modern and postmodern. Bérubé  suggests that postmodernism and postcolonialism may both be epiphenomena of globalization itself (370). Bérubé’s essay deftly avoids commitment to any clearly articulated position or to the coherent exposition of any defined problem, as it identifies “critical tensions” in the rationale for a globalized English curriculum, tensions that center on nationalist tendencies which persist even as they are eroded by “global flows,” whereby Western discourse is already shaped by external discourses, as shown – problematically – by essays on novels by Rushdie and others which deal with themes of postcolonial migrancy, hybridity and various “spaces.”

A key issue faced by postcolonial studies is the articulation of a viable feminist program amid revolutions premised implicitly on patriarchal principles. The essays of Grant Farred and Katrak address this vexed question. In her essay “Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Postcolonial Women’s Texts,” Ketu H. Katrak rightfully indicts the obscurity (“often mistaken for profundity”) endemic to much literary theory and which infects certain postcolonial writers’ fashionable attempts to engage with it. She suggests that “social responsibility” must be the basis for any theory of postcolonial literature, which must respond to  “urgent” social issues. Katrak proposes to advance “lucid” theoretical models for the study of women writers (85). She questions the uninformed statements of Western intellectuals such as Fredric Jameson to the effect that “third world” [sic] literature is “necessarily allegorical.” Instead, Katrak draws on  Fanon and Gandhi for paradigms to interpret postcolonial writers.  These paradigms include assessing the psychological aspects of colonialism, alienation, levels of racism, and violent revolution, as well as Gandhi’s advocacy of satyagraha or non-violence. While she sees the values of Fanon’s paradigms in combating, for example, linguistic and cultural violence, and of Gandhi’s doctrines in empowering women through their participation in social protest, she points to the limitations of both sets of paradigms in their application to women’s struggle for liberation. The regressive aspects of culture which were detrimental to women persist through decolonization strategies.  And Gandhi’s ahistorical notions of truth and tradition – especially regarding women’s capacity for “silent suffering” – effectively reinforced women’s subordination (94). Katrak explains that women have been active in decolonizing culture and achieving a new self-definition through a number of strategies, including performing linguistic violence on the imperial language, using oral tradition, ritual, and folk forms. All of these, suggests Katrak, are effective tools of resistance against neocolonialism.

Other essays offer re-readings of seminal figures such as Thiong’o, accounts of the psychological and geographical legacies of colonial violence, and the re-reading of colonial texts from postcolonial perspectives, as in Clement Haws’ comparison of Midnight’s Children to Tristram Shandy. Pius Adesanmi reexamines the notions of diaspora in “Francophine African Migritude” writers who attempt to subvert the “Orientalizing gaze” and to affirm their own status as “diasporic subjects” rather than outsiders. While the volume contains comprehensive sections on postcolonial Africa and India, the Middle East and South East Asia are generally missing; as is any substantial discussion of the notion of “world literature” or the globalization of English. But overall, this is a useful and well-organized collection of essays, almost all of which remain politically pertinent.