post-colonial

Podcast • April 24, 2009

Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover: Speaking of Burma

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Amitav Ghosh and Robert Coover (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover Our conversation draws on the novelist Robert Coover’s exercise of conscience about freedom ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Amitav Ghosh and Robert Coover (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3)

Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover

Our conversation draws on the novelist Robert Coover’s exercise of conscience about freedom of expression in the world. Today. Burma was the focus this week of what’s become an annual International Writers’ Project teach-in at Brown.

Burma of the thin-skinned but immovable military regime in Rangoon. Burma of the Nobel Prize prisoner and non-violent point of resistance Aung San Suu Kyi. Burma of Kipling’s old “Road to Mandalay” (how we loved the Sinatra version) and the mahogany, jewels and oil that the British Empire stripped from the land between the 1820s and World War 2.

After our week with Burmese poets, artists and writers who’ve done hard time, some in solitary, in modern Burma, our conversation here is with Robert Coover about the artists’ predicament, and with the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, whose first big novel, The Glass Palace, retold the colonial story behind the “news” of Burma. Resonating around the conversation somewhere is the spreading scandal of official US torture of terror suspects after the 9.11 attack on New York, through the war in Iraq.

Amitav Ghosh makes a point of starting off with Burma’s colonial history. He’s driving much the same point that Mahmoom Mamdani posed against the American (typically “liberal”) reflex to moralize and racialize our stories of faraway people.

Burma experienced colonialism, perhaps, in the most extreme way, where it was almost completely ransacked. After 1885 it was, actually, strangely similar to Iraq. The British went in under the guise of freedom and so on. Shock and awe, tyranny, all those tropes were there. But then after that they were faced with this very long resistance, so the during the pacification campaign, thousands and thousands of Burmese were killed. And ever after the countryside was fairly unsettled, so there was a lot of brigandage and so on. So then after that, I think, what profoundly affected Burma was the Second World War. People don’t adequately recognize that in the Second World War, when the British were withdrawing from Burma against the Japanese attack, they adopted the “scorched earth” policy. They literally laid waste to all of the infrastructure that they themselves had built in Burma. All the bridges, all the railways, all the warehouses, all the oil pumps. Everything was just blown up. But then the Japanese did come in, and when the British were reinvading, the Japanese adopted the same policy. So Burma was flattened twice. You think of the sort of aid Europe got, the Marshall Plan and so on. After the Second World War, Burma got nothing. There it was, this really poor country, completely devastated, it had no way of really rebuilding itself. You know, what has happened in Burma is one of the great tragedies for which the whole world, in a sense, bears responsibility.

Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Robert Coover and Chris Lydon at the Brown’s International Writers Project, April 23, 2009.

Historical amnesia is Ghosh’s thread to Iraq and the furor today about the CIA’s “harsh interrogation techniques” in the Bush years.

You know, I must say, I sort of knew that the Iraq war would be a catastrophe. But since then, so much of what happened there, actually, is incomprehensible. Leaving aside the torture, do you remember, a couple of weeks after the fall of Baghdad, there was an Iraqi general who actually went to the American authorities and surrendered? He surrendered. His sons came with him. The next he was heard of he had been wrapped in a carpet and beaten so badly that he died. Now, can you imagine an American doing that to, say, a German general in the Second World War? It is inconceivable. Can you imagine the British doing that to a French general during the Napoleonic Wars? It is literally inconceivable. How is it possible that these deep, deep taboos, not just in global culture, but specifically in Western culture, come to be flouted so easily? This other thing, this torture business, you know, the Prussian state, of all, abolished torture as a method in the 18th century because Frederick the Great said that it doesn’t work. All the things that people are saying today, he said. And ever since it has been one of the rules of warfare and, you know, the rules of warfare basically decided what civilized conduct was… So it is strange to see these arguments being rehashed over two hundred years later.

Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Robert Coover and Chris Lydon at the Brown’s International Writers Project, April 23, 2009.

Amitav Ghosh in his public talk here relayed a subtle and fascinating piece of advice from Burma’s most famous resister, Aung San Suu Kyi. Resist politics, too, she has told her followers. That is: resist the post-modern tendency to locate morality in politics alone. This was the example of several Burmese artists at Brown this week, none more touching than the physician and writer Ma Thida, who said that she survived in prison by meditating 20 hours every day. The lesson for all of us seemed to be: remember also (quite apart from politics) the inner life, “laughter, love and joy,” as the last repositories of moral consciousness.

Robert Coover took the advice, first, with a grain of salt; and then as an embrace of art.

I have worked a lot on political issues and have always been disappointed at how few were alert to those issues and how many were sunning themselves on the green, enjoying their inner lives. But, I think that one of the roots here — it’s what we all pretend, anyway, is the root – is the thought that art itself has this function. The novel, the painting, and, now, digital art as well: all of our modes come into deep focus without having an external object at which that is aimed. So that you can be moved by music at the same time you are moved against American foreign policy. And I think that’s our hope as performers.

Robert Coover in conversation with Amitav Ghosh and Chris Lydon at the Brown’s International Writers Project, April 23, 2009.

Podcast • April 3, 2009

Mahmood Mamdani: You (and I) got Darfur Wrong

Who can imagine that a Save Darfur coalition vocally including Al Sharpton (“we know when America comes together, we can stop anything in the world”), Mia Farrow, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Elie Wiesel ...

Who can imagine that a Save Darfur coalition vocally including Al Sharpton (“we know when America comes together, we can stop anything in the world”), Mia Farrow, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Elie Wiesel (“Darfur today is the world’s capital of human suffering”), Nat Hentoff, Bob Geldof, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Harold Pinter, Oprah Winfrey, the gold-medal speed skater Joey Cheek, Tony Blair and Dario Fo might be profoundly shallow in its reading of the brutal warfare in Sudan five years ago… and just as wrong-headed in its drum beat for an American intervention?

Mahmood Mamdani: on the "pornography of evil"

Mahmood Mamdani: on the “pornography of evil”

Mahmood Mamdani can. We are talking here about his book Saviors and Survivors and his argument that the Darfur rescue campaign, which became a sacred cause of our civil religion, was not so much the moral alternative to Iraq, the Bush “war on terror,” and Cheney-think as it was a variation and extension of the same toolkit. I begin with a sort of confession that I may be a sample of Mamdani’s problem — having drenched myself in Nicholas Kristof‘s New York Times columns and largely absorbed the common framework that Darfur was about Arabs slaughtering Africans, and that somebody had to something about it.

If you represent my problem, then I think you also represent my solution. If you interviewed Nicholas Kristof, then you participated in shaping to some extent that audience which is the constituency of Save Darfur. I need to get to that audience because I need to turn a sermon into a debate and a discussion. I need to sow some seeds of doubt about what have been presumed to be simply goodwill gestures. I need to convince that audience that there is a politics around this — not simply good intentions and moralism and a fight against evil. I need to tell them that there is no such thing as a trans-historical evil in the world in which we live; that, in fact, all violence without exception has causes, and the causes are historical. And if you want to do something about the violence, we need to do something about the causes. The idea that violence is its own explanation is an idea which will take us nowhere except into a cycle of violence.

Mahmood Mamdani in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, April 2, 2009.

What held the Save Darfur campaign together? In his book, Mamdani concludes that inside the hyped numbers and moral spin was a sort of conspiracy of prejudices and neo-imperial impulses to head off the unity and independence of Africa.

The Save Darfur lobby in the United States has turned the tragedy of the people of Darfur into a knife with which to slice Africa by demonizing one group of Africans, African Arabs…

The Save Darfur lobby demands, above all else, justice, the right of the international community — really the big powers in the Security Council — to punish “failed” or “rogue” states, even if it be at the cost of more bloodshed and a diminished possibility of reconciliation. More than anything else, “the responsibility to protect” is a right to punish without being held accountable — a clarion call for the recolonization of “failed” states in Africa. In its present form, the call for justice is really a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.

Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror., p. 300. Pantheon, 2009.

Mahmoud Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman professor of government at Columbia, is a socio-historical anthropologist of Africa and also of American media and fashions in public wisdom. He is taking apart American attitudes that took hold around Iraq and the so-called “war on terror” and that will surely affect our path to Afghanistan and the Obama team’s reconception of our American place in the world.

I loved this conversation as a short course in how to think like an anthropologist — how to peel back events to find unwritten rules and unseen implications in a social order — Africa’s and ours.

Listen for the ideas here that reach beyond Africa, anger and accustion. The most challenging may be the argument that “survivors’ justice” (“inside” repairs, modeled on South Africa’s “truth and reconciliation” process) comes to seem much more promising than “victors’ justice” (“outside” punishment, as in the Nuremberg Trials, and de-Baathification in Iraq) as means of reforming politics and remaking broken societies.

Podcast • November 20, 2008

Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies

The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh brings the British Empire to life again — the other side of the story, so to speak, from the other side of the world. If we’d had his wondrous new ...

The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh brings the British Empire to life again — the other side of the story, so to speak, from the other side of the world. If we’d had his wondrous new novel, Sea of Poppies, six years ago, we might have saved ourselves the folly of Iraq. Instead, you could argue, we reenacted the cruel absurdities of superpower addiction and the illusions that weave themelves around it.

Sea of Poppies, the start of a projected trilogy on Britain’s Opium Wars against China, elaborates the premise that, as Ghosh says in conversation, “basically, it was opium revenues that made the British Raj in India possible. Indeed, it was silently acknowledged by the British who resisted all attempts to end the opium trade until the 1920s. In fact the British Empire didn’t long outlive the opium trade.”

Our own foreign-oil habit — yours and mine — suggests itself as the counterpart addiction that drives the American empire. Evangelical bullying and the theology of “freedom” are vital links. President Bush’s line, justifying the invasion of Iraq, has been: “I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom.” In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh’s kingpin Ben Burnham — closely modeled on historical figures from the Raj — has no trouble invoking his God in the service of opium.

“One of my countrymen has put the matter very simply,” as Burnham says in the novel. “‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.’ Truer words, I believe, were never spoken. If it is God’s will that opium be used as an instrument to open China to his teachings, then so be it. For myself, I confess I can see no reason why any Englishman should abet the Manchu tyrant in depriving the people of China of this miraculous substance.”

Popular will, democracy, representative government have as little to do with the action of Ghosh’s novel as Congress did with the war in Iraq. “Parliament?” Ben Burnham scoffs to a disbelieving Indian raja. “Parliament,” Burnham laughs, “will not know of the war until it is over. Be assured, sir, that if such matters were left to Parliament there would be no Empire.”

Our free-ranging conversation touches on, among other things, Niall Ferguson‘s apology for empire; the narrowing discourse in American media; Afghanistan and Pakistan today; the polyglot world of sailing ships; the anthropological eye; and the history of Asian words in English.

It is not his project as a novelist and an Indian, Amitav Ghosh remarks, to break the “imperial gaze” of British writers from Kipling to Conrad. Rather he would love to recapture the cosmopolitan vision of the American, Herman Melville — the real precursor, he says, of Barack Obama.

Conrad’s work really doesn’t interest me that much… Conrad is writing about the age of steam, as opposed to the age of sail, which is what really interests me. The writers who have profoundly influenced me and my project are Americans, Melville most of all. To me, Melville is the greatest writer that America has ever produced. And I find his writing, his projects, so rewarding in every sense… his take his anthropological projects like Typee, or his ethnographies of the ship, like White Jacket. “Benito Cereno” precisely addresses the question of repression and rebellion, a really amazing story. Benito Cereno was based upon an episode in the memoirs of Andrew Delano, who was actually an opium trader, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ancestor…

One of the most wonderful things about Melville is that he was just about the only one of the nineteenth century nautical writers who paid enough attention to the world of the sea to actually write about Indian sailors. Even Conrad, when he does write about Indian sailors writes them as faceless and demonizes them. Melville is much more open-minded, much more curious. He’s Obama’s true precursor if you ask me.

Melville has a level of curiosity, a level of engagement with the world that is completely absent from 19th century English writing. Even though England has a long connection with Asia, it is so rare actually to find a believable representation of an Asian in English books. In Melville, on the other hand, you remember in Moby Dick, the 40th chapter, all of the sailors sing in different languages, and then suddenly you discover that this ship, which is a Nantucket whaling ship, actually has forty different nationalities on board, including Indians. In those ways, Ishmael — there you have him, a figure who is articulating a very challenging view of our relationship with nature, in terms of attention to nature; and the whole idea of the destructiveness — both the interest of whales and the horror of killing whales, and at the same time the joys of men working together in killing whales. All of these things are so richly and ambiguously rendered in Melville. In many ways, his work is inexhaustible in its inspiration.

Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Chris Lydon, November 19, 2008.

 

So the first homework assignment, kids, is: read Moby Dick.

Podcast • May 30, 2008

Calabash ’08 (Part 2): As Others See Us

The Caribbean literary festival known as Calabash breathes the wondrous tropical salt air of Bob Marley, Derek Walcott and C. L. R. James — an air of lyricism, multiplicity and resistance. It’s the air of ...
c'bash

The Caribbean literary festival known as Calabash breathes the wondrous tropical salt air of Bob Marley, Derek Walcott and C. L. R. James — an air of lyricism, multiplicity and resistance. It’s the air of a once neglected precinct of empire that has produced by now a powerfully diasporic people and consciousness. Chris Abani, the exiled Nigerian poet now teaching in Los Angeles, observed at the start of his remarks to Calabash ’08 that “there would be no Nigeria without Jamaica. All the freedom movements in Africa,” he said, “began in the Caribbean.”

Calabash, in its 8th year, has made a name along the writers’ tour for edginess, freedom and outspoken talent. It is a monument to what the co-founders Colin Channer and Kwame Dawes honor as the “reggae aesthetic,” by which one learns that they mean a Marley-inspired mix of earthiness, spirituality, social urgency, sensuality, celebration and, of course, great music.

I came to Calabash ’08 to hear perspectives from wildly articulate near neighbors on the United States, at an inflection point on matters like race, power, and globlalism. I brought with me the conceit that Caribbean writers and thinkers cast the intimate, critical backstage eye on America that Irish wits traditionally trained on imperial England. It’s a penetrating but not unloving gaze. One senses among the Calabash writers a rising confidence, maybe a second surge of post-colonial feeling. There’s a pervasive dismay about the American condition, and an inescapable excitement about the Obama possibility. Not all the Calabash crowd is Jamaican: one of the best-received readers is an Irishman who lives in the American Midwest, whose last novel is set in Maine. Among the Jamaicans, many teach in the States and all know us better, for sure, than we know them.

The last time I came to Jamaica, I stumbled on the possibility of local-global radio. This time I gathered a sort of composite conversation. This first section is a ramble on whatever it is we are all “going through.” The second, to follow, reflects on the Obama phenomenon.

Margaret Cezair-Thompson is a novelist, both popular and serious, who teaches creative writing at Wellesley College:

cezair-thompson2

We have a unique perspective. I think it’s true of all the islands, it’s just many many different layers of race and culture and many different histories all mixed together… and it hasn’t caused a weakening in our perspective or any kind of dilution. I think we have very intense feelings about race, about politics, about tradition, cultures, but we have a way of having those things being expressed side by side without great problem. And that’s why these racial issues that have come up with the Obama campaign… for me as a Jamaican, it seems naïve to be so completely shocked or overly fascinated by the idea that he’s of mixed race… People in Jamaica have been thinking along those terms for centuries. Bob Marley has a white father and a black mother. For centuries African American have been dealing with the fact that they are of mixed ancestry, that they are a hybrid people. What I love about Obama is that he’s, in a sense, bringing this into the face of America where it hasn’t been dealt with before…

Margaret Cezair-Thompson, novelist of The Pirate’s Daughter in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 23, 2008.

Gerard Donovan, the Galway-born novelist, picked up the Irish connection that Margaret Cezair Thompson had affirmed:

It’s a simple fact that Ireland did get the English language from the English, and then improved it and gave it back to them. And I have this feeling that Jamaica has an upsurge in music and poetry and song that is finding its own melody as they begin to gain in confidence. It’s all about a nation’s confidence… With it comes the art of being able to tell your story and the story of people who’ve gone before you. I do believe that artists do come from a particular country, they are not individuals. In the end, I think every writer comes from a place and ultimately writes about that place…

Gerard Donovan, novelist of Julius Winsome in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 24, 2008.

Beverly East is a forensic graphologist — a handwriting expert — as well as best-selling novelist. She speaks the many accents of Jamaicans in England and the States and at home:

beverly east 

I like to think I’m tri-cultural. I was born in Jamaica, raised in England and now living in America, I see the world in three dimensions. I consider myself a Jamaican, but when I in America, I am very conscious that I am an immigrant. I am very conscious that I have this Green Card that Homeland Security can take away from me at any moment. I tip-toe gently when I’m in the states. I feel like I don’t even want to get a [traffic] ticket. I never felt that way until 9/11. I felt differently when the Patriot Act came in, and then the D.C. sniper with one of them being Jamaican. You know, you get a little nervous… I always think I’m viewed as the drug mule, the alternative person that would be bringing the weed or the drugs from Jamaica to the United States…

Beverly East, novelist of Reaper of Souls in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 23, 2008.

Yusef Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994. Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana in 1947, he is best known as a “jazz poet” and a poet of Vietnam. This was his first trip to Jamaica.

komunyakaa

We have extremely poor people completely divorced from the pursuit of happiness in America for the simple reason that they don’t have dreams. That is very devastating especially when this deficit in dreaming is passed on to young people. For some young people, the only thing they inherit is rage and that is deadly and unhealthy. [The Calabsh community] is almost like an extended family, isn’t it? Some of the same challenges some of the same thoughts. Not that there is an immense agreement, but it’s a community of ideas, and that is very important.

Yusef Komunyakaa, poet of “Love in a Time of War” in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 23, 2008.

Chris Abani was imprisoned for his outspokenly political early poetry in Nigeria. He remembers the the music star Fela Kouti in the same lock-up, telling him “truth is a risky business.” He’s himself a very hot American literary star nowadays, based in Los Angeles, and still speaking truth to power.

abani

I think the end of Bush moment, the frenzy in America, is a very disingenuous frenzy. I think Americans voted this man in. When he clearly cheated on this election, they did nothing to stop him. When he started a false war, they did nothing to impeach him. It’s now easy to join the bandwagon of people calling for the end of Bush or distancing themselves from him, but all of America, even those who protested the war, because that is not enough, rode on America’s empire, and this is what happens when empire fails – everyone tries to get off a sinking ship…

Chris Abani, poet and novelist of Graceland in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 24, 2008.

Podcast • May 28, 2008

Derek Walcott: Calabash ’08

“It’s going to be nasty,” Derek Walcott said, prefacing his war on V. S. Naipaul with a warning. “The Mongoose” was the last of Walcott’s new poems at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica last ...

“It’s going to be nasty,” Derek Walcott said, prefacing his war on V. S. Naipaul with a warning. “The Mongoose” was the last of Walcott’s new poems at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica last weekend. He’d wondered whether he ought to read it, Walcott said, “and then I figured if I don’t do it, I’ll say: what the hell, you should have done it… I think you’ll recognize Mr. Naipaul.”

Nasty it was. And beastly (“a rodent in old age”). It was smelly (“And off the page its biles exude the stench / Of envy, la pourriture in French”).  It was indiscreetly personal (“This is a common fact in his late fiction. / He told me once he thought sex was just friction”). And in its anti-racialism, it was racial (“To show its kindness it clutches a kitten / That looks as if it’s scared of being bitten / Right at the neck; it’s the Mongoose’s nature, It cannot help that it was born in Asia”). And it was crowd-pleasingly funny (“Cursed its first breath for being Trinidadian, / Then wrote the same piece for the English Guardian. / Once he liked humans, how long ago this was. / The Mongoose wrote: A House for Mister Biswas.“).

Naipaul, 75, started it, as kids say of sandbox fights, with a book-excerpt in the Guardian last summer that was taken as a dismissal of 78-year-old Walcott (“a man whose talent had been all but strangled by his colonial setting”) and yet another in a long series of insults to the black Caribbean (Walcott, said Naipaul, “sang the praises of the emptiness; he gave it a kind of intellectual substance. He gave their unhappiness a racial twist that made it more manageable.”) Walcott has jabbed before at “V. S. Nightfall.” But on Saturday came the full blitz from the Caribbean’s first Nobel prize winner for literature (in 1992) against the second (2001).

The Mongoose

I have been bitten. I must avoid infection,

Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.

Read his last novels. You’ll see just what I mean:

A lethargy approaching the obscene.

The model is Maugham, more ho-hum than Dickens.

The essays have more bite. They scatter chickens,

Like critics. But each studied phrase is poison,

Since he has made that sneering style a prison.

Their plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly.

The anti-hero is a prick named Willy,

Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence

And whines with his creator’s self-abhorrence…

This wasn’t what I came to Calabash for, and it wasn’t the best poetry to be heard over the long weekend. But it was the “lede,” as we newspaper guys say, on Calabash 08. And it betokened both the high hilarity and the underlying seriousness of the scene. There is venom yet in the old antagonisms of colony and empire, class and caste, Africa and India even in the context of Trinidad, where Naipaul’s ancestors came to work the cane fields after black slavery was abolished in 1833. The Walcott version here was: “Imported from India and trained to ferret snakes and elude Africans, / The Mongoose takes its orders from the Raj.” Walcott, though a world figure himself, summons the resentment of race and region against the universalist Naipaul, who “climbed to club- and gate-house with good manners, / The squirearchy from the canefields of Chiguanas.”

naipaul.kitten

Walcott mocking a press photo of V. S. Naipaul: “To show its kindness it clutches a kitten / That looks as if it’s scared of being bitten… “

 

The mostly Jamaican audience hung on every word: 2000 or so celebrants from the avidly bookish “Calabash demographic,” as poet and organizer Kwame Dawes puts it. (The poet Valzhyna Mort from Belarus struck a chord when she remarked later that day: “You are by far the sexiest audience I’ve ever stood before!”) As Walcott hammered away at Naipaul, there were listeners who kept laughing at couplets of cleverness, and others who looked half-aghast at the fury on display. I had a sudden flash of Emile Griffiths, the welterweight champion, beating Benny Paret literally to death in Madison Square Garden in 1962, a moment of gladiatorial excess that Norman Mailer gave literary immortality. Naipaul wasn’t in the ring with Walcott, but some referees would have jumped in to save Walcott from himself. I also wondered: has Derek Walcott, whose masterwork may be Omeros, a modern Caribbean telling of Homer’s Iliad—, dwelt overlong on the rivalries of Achilles and Hector?

“The Mongoose” was not, in any event, Walcott’s only contribution. In conversation with the remarkable Ghanaian, Jamaican and now American poet and all-round all-star Kwame Dawes (of whom more later), Walcott spilled a lifetime’s learning about the lively, literary and visual arts with the relaxed air of a master practitioner and teacher.

On music: “The cliché is that the Caribbean has a rhythm. It’s not a cliché, but it’s so true and so obvious that it’s a cliché. Whether it’s Latin America or the Caribbean or Central America, the basis and beat of all those art forms are basically rhythmic, very rhythmic. And the rhythm of course is African. I don’t want to do one of those, you know, waving flags, or race, and so on… And I think it relates very strongly to the fact that the music that we speak is a language. We have a language in the music we write. And we think simultaneously in both words and music. We don’t divide ourselves into, say, composer and lyricist. This instinct of crystallizing two forms into one is a very Caribbean thing.”

On his own painting and contemporary art: “My father was a very good watercolorist, and my mother understood what we wanted to do because her husband was a writer and painter. I was completely encouraged by Harold Simmons, a painter; we used to use his studio. There’s nothing better for a young writer or painter than to have someone who takes his or her work seriously. I had great teachers. My mother was a teacher. Part of the work I do is teaching, and I enjoy working with young poets a great deal. I’m a square in terms of painting. I hate Abstract Expressionism. I cannot stand it. Which is nonsense, because there are some great Abstract Expressionists, I think. I just think it’s very hard in art to do what is—to get what is there. I think there are a lot of artists who ignore the fact that we yearn for meaning, and who think (especially in America) that meaning is passé, you know; or syntax is passé; certainly rhyme is passé. You find a lot of that in America, because America’s dictum is: everything has to be new, and everything is based on psychology rather than aesthetics. So the natural direction of any actor is toward a nervous breakdown.”

On his own life and work: “I’m 78, right? I never thought I’d get here. I thought I was going to die at 30. I saw everything. I saw the gravestone, I saw the people coming to visit it. I saw the brackets and my name, “died at 25.” Oh, my God, fifty years later I’m still here… I’m going to be reading some stuff that — I say to myself: this is very simple, this is very ordinary. And I think I am delighting in that, not from any sense of resignation about anything. I just don’t like it now when any art makes a fuss. I don’t like any over-agitated poetry, because I know the technique, I know what people are doing. I know they’re going to be very bright. I don’t want to be bright. I don’t want to be intimidated when I read a poem, or challenged, or grabbed by the collar. I just want them to let me alone, please. Let me read the poem in peace, you know. And so I am coming to a point where even if it appears to be resignation and repetition, I don’t care as long as it’s clear, as long as what I am saying is at least honest emotionally.”

Derek Walcott had top billing before he got to Calabash, and “The Mongoose” was the talk of the festival to the end. My mission, however, was to catch the rhythm and melody of the Caribbean as a commentary on the Obama moment in the States, what feels like a challenge to the imagination of the whole wide world. So the conversations from Calabash 08 have just begun.

Podcast • March 21, 2008

Speaking of Race: John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon

And people think Rev. Jeremiah Wright is angry. The jolt in John Edgar Wideman’s new novel, Fanon is the open rage in the modern black heart about the history of slavery and lynching, and the ...

jewidemanAnd people think Rev. Jeremiah Wright is angry.

The jolt in John Edgar Wideman’s new novel, Fanon is the open rage in the modern black heart about the history of slavery and lynching, and the furious living consciousness of the color line in 21st-Century America. A surrogate “author” in the story in his Manhattan apartment receives a severed human head, plastic-wrapped and hand-delivered by UPS. In the writer’s mind, the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 might have been yesterday. The Homestead neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where Wideman grew up, is today a wasteland. The author’s brother Rob, serving an endless prison sentence for murder, tells the writer: “Trouble does last always.” The author’s project, in honor of the anti-colonial hero, Franz Fanon (1925 – 1961), is “to tell the truth about color and oppression.”

In our American context today, Wideman says in our conversation, “I think we’re somewhere in the low end of the beginning, because we haven’t really faced up — and we have not taken on the burden of divorcing ourselves from the myths about color. We talk about it, and various times in our history we’ve fought about it… But we have not — in the words of maybe the most profound thinker about these things in the last 50 years, in the words of James Baldwin — we have not made the personal and private connection. Not his words, but his conceptualizing of the race situation. And that is: you cannot be a person if you deny personhood to another. You are as incomplete a human being as you project incompleteness on other kids of human beings.”

But at least Barack Obama has just spoken about race, and the country is listening. “For one thing,” Wideman says, “he made me happy. In the sense that he foregrounded what’s in the back of everybody else’s mind. Obama existed in a kind of a trap. That is to to say, he was a man who, you look at him and say: “Oh, this is an African-American guy, a guy of color.” But he was not supposed to be that. He was in kind of a classic Fanon dilemma: he was wearing a mask of one color, and he had another color underneath that mask. Everybody knew it, but the question is: who was going to take it off, who was going to pull it off? … At least now, he’s acknowledged: yes, there’s a mask and there’s skin underneath. And we’re at such an immature level, or it’s such a difficult question, we can’t exactly say what’s skin and what’s mask. But let’s talk about it, and here’s my version.”

We talk about “three idols” in life that Wideman reveals in the novel. One is the warrior-intellectual Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. When imprisoned brother Rob asks, “Why Fanon?” the author answers: “Fanon because no way out of this goddam mess, I said to my brother, and Fanon found it.” Another idol is the author’s mother, dying of cancer in Pittsburgh, talking straight and serving the risen Lord of Homewood AME Zion. “… her belief generates an appetite for love, a flickering presence around her and an abundant radiance within her she shines on me.” The third is the artist Romare Bearden, who went to the same high school, Peabody in Pittsburgh, that the Wideman brothers did, and seems to have suggested something of Wideman’s style in print and in speech: fiction and conversation as a sort of collage:

If this book works in the way I want it to work, I want Fanon and my mother to meet and communicate. [they do] And I want the reader to believe that. I want the reader to see the inevitability of that. Because in thost two “heroes” I see sides of myself. On the one hand an intellectual, a public person, a trained person, someone who’s traveled, an international person. And on the other hand a woman whose accomplishment was to make herself an extraordinary human being in a very private, personal and closed community of family and friends in Pittsburgh. And I think that if there is any kind of remedy for the troubles of the world, if you will, it’s when those two impulses can have a conversation. Romaire Bearden is more or less an aesthetic hero. His main mode or form was collage. And certainly collage is a very suggestive art form, because it means you take bits and pieces from every damn thing and start throwing them together, and if you do it in the right way, maybe something new is created. Maybe the parts become greater than the whole, and whole greater than the parts, and suddenly you’re in the presence of something new. So I guess that is a kind of derivation of those three folks and the roles they played.

John Edgar Wideman, in conversation with Open Source at Brown University, March 19, 2008

June 6, 2005

Passage to India

Amitav Ghosh is a novelist, a journalist, a star among postcolonial writers. He’s a child of post-Independence India who sees all too clearly the dangers of empire — both in the past, in its indelible ...
Amitav Ghosh is a novelist, a journalist, a star among postcolonial writers. He’s a child of post-Independence India who sees all too clearly the dangers of empire — both in the past, in its indelible effect on present-day India; and in the present, in the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq. US news coverage of India seems to focus on outsourcing and economic globalization; Ghosh is headed back to India, and he’ll show us the full postcolonial Indian reality — the political, religious, social, and environmental changes in this country of 1 billion souls.

Guest List