Happy Birthday Willie!

                                                       Happy Birthday Hip Hop Willie

Happy Birthday Willie! As the world celebrates Shakespeare’s 450^th birth anniversary on 23^rd April, 2014, we at the Hindu Literary Review raise a toast to greatest litterateur who has always enthralled  us with his amazing wordplay. Shakespearean works have been dissected and studied a million times over , but the latest ongoing study has completely bowled us. Hallelujah! Willie is the biggest rapper of all times!  Sonnet 18 as a rap verse completely astounds us! The Bards poetry raps to the beat of hip hop music!!!  

Originally, speaking of Shakespeare and hip hop in the same breath is like pairing the sacred with the profane.  Initially it sounds completely bizarre to classify the highbrow poetry of the Bard with that of rappers however popular they may be : R.E.M, Saul Williams, Kool Keith or Tupac Shakur. Yet research leads us to teachers, performers and projects, wherein hard core passionate followers of Shakespeare and hip hop have unearthed close resonance between the wordplay, meter and rhyme of the Bard and hip hop. Both employ meter, are fueled by rhyme, weave music and language to create the rhythm of a rap.

A visit back in time to the Globe Theatre with a Shakespearean play being enacted on stage would be an education in itself. The market place outside the theatre would be full of noisy jostling people, laughing, buying beer, nuts, and fruit from hawkers. The ambience inside would be no different, with people selling the same inside through the duration of the play. The crowd of charboys, servants, the illiterates who thronged the pit around the stage, and others in the galleries or boxes would be talking, criticizing, and booing through the performance of the play. Now if the Bard were to write serious poetry for such a crowd ( who had to be  lured from the bear baiting and bull fighting stands to come and attend his performances) he would have to rhyme and imbue it with powerful imagery and wordplay to be able to get their attention. In the absence of props, backdrops, stage settings, lights and other special effects ( the bards plays have no such directions ) it was the sound, wordplay, and rhythm of the language which conveyed everything. No doubt the poetry is high brow and all inclusive of action, imagery, thought and meter.  Ben Johnson’s quote – ‘Soul of the age, not of an age, but for all time - Thou art a monument, without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give’ holds so true.  Shakespeare, the ultimate master of human psychology and behaviour has held his audience at the time and through all times in the palm of his hand, through the sheer force of his powerful hip hop poetry.

Hip hop as a genre of music and song is familiar to us as a dervish chant of crude, debasing, violent lyric- which then understandably makes the comparison very difficult to assimilate. But if we were to shift our attention to the hip pop music of rappers like Saul Williams, (a decorated poet turned hip hop musician) we are pleasantly treated to a cathartic listening experience of  thought provoking , artistically viable poetry. Works of rappers like Aesop Rock, Illogic, Kool Keith, Andre 3000 from Outkast, Eyedea, Slug from Atmosphere introduce us to  clever use of words, exploring human psyche, existential disillusionments,  life , death, political and social upheavals . Sound diction, metaphoric- artistically themed poems rendered in pretty rhyme. Hip hop has a rich cultural context, a tradition that goes back thousands of years. ‘The most sacred histories of ancient African nations were recorded by a man known as a Griot, who was effectively a rapper. He would recite the nation's history over a beat of a drum’. Both Shakespeare works and hip hop as cultural expressions have been misinterpreted. Former is labelled as highbrow and taught in boring study rooms, and the latter is not accepted on a literary platform as an intellectual, artistic, poetic expression.

The ongoing projects sponsored by the UK government, explore intersections; where the twain shall meet.  One such project is the Hip Hop Shakespeare, where the Mobo hip hop award winning artiste Akala ( a passionate follower of Shakespeare) conducts workshops for teenagers. The exercise explores the close relationship between the rhythms of modern hip-hop and the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare. Iambic pentameter of Shakespearean verse has five sets of 2 beats each, which is the basis of hip hop and enables an emcee rap a Shakespearean sonnet at 80bpm and then 140 bpm tempo too. The iambic pentameter is stable, versatile and adaptable. It is maybe so because it is intrinsic to our life force, based on the beat of our hearts- dadham, dadham, dadham, dadham, dadham. Comprehension of this similarity in rhythm, prepares the students for the next step. Each teenager is   given a bag with strips of poetry lines from rappers and Shakespearean works. Th e students have to decipher and segregate the lines into two groups, that from Shakespeare and the other from contemporary hip hop poetry.  They get tangled in a maze and find it nearly impossible to do so, because of the similarity in wordplay, meter and rhyme.  Another group is given a task of writing a found poem by mixing lines from the love poetry of rappers and the Bard.

Shakespeare

Love is merely a madness

The course of true love never did run smooth

You, in my respect, are all the world

My heart unto yours is knit

O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

I do love nothing in the world so well as you

I give away myself for you

Speak low if you speak love

I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep

My love shall in my verse ever live young

Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee

I, beyond all limit of what else i' th’ world, do love, prize, honor you

Hip-hop

Walk this earth for her, glory, I'm grateful

To be in her presence I try to stay faithful

From lack of love many hide, some run

Love can free us, to it some of us react as a slave

Serenade her, without speaking a word

Because of you I'm stronger, I'm afraid no longer

I feel so alive in me, you have liberated me

I just want you to know your whole being is beautiful

I want to build a tribe with you, protect and provide for you

You're everything, sometimes I get nervous when I'm in front you

Send your soul through your lips to my heart

Sweet music will start, I want you to be the music of my art

Go through the seasons of love and never change with the weather

The language of love cannot be translated

Love is blind, you just see bright light

‘Hip hop Shakespeare Live’ -  are performances which explore the social , cultural and linguistic parallel  between the two , a modern retelling of William Shakespeare’s Richard II set against the backdrop of a live hip-hop concept album. My Macbeth class the other day resounded to the witches chant set to a rap beat :

• Once upon a midnight dreary, while I find her weak and weary
• Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
• Fair is foul : and foul is fair : hover through the fog and filthy air.

 Our most beloved Sonnet 18 rendered to a rap tune is the latest craze on you tube.

Happy birthday Hip-Hop Willie! We shall rap, sing and celebrate you endlessly through the year.

 Should I compare thee to hip hop! Yes I definitely shall !

Prajwal Parajuly

Prajwal Parajuly caught the attention of the media when he became the youngest Indian author to be offered a two-book, multi-country deal by Quercus in 2011.  He published his first book in 2012: a short story collection The Gurkha's Daughter and his second book in 2013: a novel The Land Where I Flee.  Parajuly is a  Nepalese Indian writer –an  advertising executive-turned-author,  as unassuming and unhindered as the stories he pens. He is the second author from the Indian diaspora after Kiran Desai to illuminate and bring to centre stage the world of Indian Gurkhas, the majority ethnic Nepalese-speaking community in and around Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan.  Kiran Desai’s narrative in The Inheritance of Loss borders on the demand for Gurkhaland at its peak in the 1980s in Kalimpong.  But Parajuly evocatively enlarges the panorama by his in-depth portrayal of the life of Gorkhas, coalescing their stories into the mainstream.  

He writes about the experiences, culture and belief systems of the ethnic and diasporic Nepalese. Insightful peeking into the minds and characters of these people shaped by their politics, traditions and economics makes the reader walk their perilous trails through refugee camps, caste divides, revolutions and ultimately the American dream. Generally regarded as immigrants within their own country, he satirizes the stereotypes which abound in people’s minds in the story- The Immigrants:  ‘When I told people I was of Napalese origin, they instinctively asked me if I had climbed Mount Everest. When I answered no, I hadn’t and no, I did not know anyone who had, they were disappointed. When I mentioned I was from Darjeeling, most people asked me a tea question. When I let them know I couldn’t distinguish one  variety from the other, and that I didn’t drink tea, they looked bewildered. And if I told anyone I was an Indian with Nepalese origins, they looked at me wide-eyed, thinking it to be a curious mishmash . . . I stayed silent and let people continue living in their uninformed bubbles.’ To the contrary, Parajuly hashes the myths, and visits the grey areas of ignorance surrounding these very people through the book. The legendary courageous Gorkha soldier’s post imperial perspective is summed up in the line: "I haven't been in any danger since the Gulf War, but they might have some useless war for me to fight again. They are the British after all." He also fiercely derides the epithet ‘loyal’, used for most Gorkha workers, working blue collar jobs – ‘it reeks of their servitude’,  he says , ‘trapping rather than liberating them’. Another very interesting aspect of most stories is the juxtaposition of the east and west prism of perspectives on choices in life. A woman in her prime decides to walk out of her marriage which is going nowhere to study further and travel the world. 

The writing style is lucid and completely unaffected. The primary aim of the writer is characters and their everyday lives, to the extent that though the stories are based in lush green ambience of the Himalayan foothills, yet the narrative does not deviate from its core to paint the landscape in different hues. Each story is introduced with a title and a map of locations in the story in and around Nepal, Bengal, Sikkim and Bhutan. With the last story the mapwork shifts to New York – Manhattan , the Nepalese diasporic recount of two immigrants who have to unlearn and relearn new ways of relating to each other far away from their ethnic lands.

The first story The Cleft abounds in societal prejudices and the caste system rife in the Gorkha community. The illusionary dreams of stardom by the servant girl Kali with a cleft, imbues it with poignancy. A Father’s Journey is a sweet story about an enduring relationship between a father and his daughter. The subconscious desires mired in bigotry that parents pass on to their children mingled with their love and attention, and which the most enlightened of progeny then try and live them, a living tribute to their parents’ love for them. Missed Blessing entails the delicate balance between debt and sacrifice, obsequiousness to the wealthy and powerful between families and the motive behind every goodness shown to you. No Land is Her Land is recounted against the backdrop of Nepalese exodus from Bhutan, the story of refugees and their striving at perfections to regain acceptance in other lands. Gurkha’s Daughter and Passing Fancy are marked for their narrative technique. The former relays the plight of 200 years of lives of   brave, loyal Gorkha soldiers and their Brit counterparts through a mimicry enacted by children and the latter showcases the dual relationship of a woman with her husband and the neighbour through direct speech and stream of consciousness technique.

Stories of dysfunctional characters painting mindscapes of dispossesion and divisions, yet these very imperfections make them human and their strivings heroic.  Some of the characters continue in his second book and evolve further into rounded beings, their energies lent to the realisation of a beautiful world!  Prajwal Parajuly, we look forward to more writings from you!

Tracy Chadlier

     Finding the Story in the Painting

Tracy Chevalier has vivid imagination. Her writing is a lucid blend of history and creativity. She is an American living in England, churning out stories that have caught the attention of the literary world. Her latest autumn release last year is ‘The Last Runaway’, a period piece on American pre – civil war. ‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’ earlier had catapulted her onto the global writing arena.  She is clever to dwell upon icons in the past(so much so that  literary archaeological  study too has minimal material to really bring them to life) that have been elusive.  She makes full use of the lacuna, and impregnates her characters and plot with her fictionalized versions. It’s  a treat to listen to her on her TED talk ( http://www.ted.com/talks/tracy_chevalier).  Her winging imagination gleefully  constructs a dramatic  story around Jean-Siméon Chardin's early masterpiece,  Boy Building a House of Cards.   She lived with Johannes Vermeer’s painting ‘Girl with a pearl Earring’ for sixteen years, and finally weaved a story around the enigmatic look of the girl in the painting. The unknown maid from 17^th century delft becomes his muse and through her the reader gets into the studio of Vermeer, the machinations of his work and thought process, a sole private world. The book sold 4 million copies, got translated into many languages and was adapted into a film. Tracy succeeded in taping into the mainstream consciousness with a dramatized story, based on the life of a reclusive genius artist. 

The book ‘Burning Bright, is similar writing, based on the mystic, revolutionary poet, William Blake. Tracy depicts the seamy side of England in the 1750s. Blake’s seminal work, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience forms a backbone for the changing city and lives of Jem Kellaway, Maisie Kellaway, and Maggie Butterfield in their pre-teens. The title Burning Bright is again a tribute to his poem ‘Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright’. Quotes from ‘London’ in the story lend significance to real time London - the slums of St. Giles, murder, molestation,  unwanted pregnancies, and a funeral cortege through the streets of the city. The book is full of action and drama portraying circus feats, fires, showdowns, difficult neighbours, swindlers, and patronizing owners. William Blake is a gracious presence in the neighbourhood where the children live, and it is through interactions with them that the reader is led through the story of printing and engraving. Though Blake is a sure presence through the entire book yet he remains a shadow. The effects of a revolution gone sour across the country in France, and Blake’s so called treason is hinted upon in the book yet  his ideas of inspirations for his poems,  mysticism, and he as a genius visionary does not really fructify in the book and the attempt remains weak and illusionary.

The Last Runaway, the latest book is steeped in the spirit of freedom. A desire for freedom by the victim and those who help him achieve freedom. It is the story of slavery and the resistance movement interwoven with the abolitionists, English Quakers, cultural contexts of North and South America and the English. Art of quilting by women is explored through different communities, patching, embroidering paths of healing, empowerment and freedom. Honor Bright is an emigrant to America in 1850, caught in the throes of the slave movement. The story moves from Ohio to Oberlin, prominent on the map of the Underground Railroad. The profiles of women like Judith Haymaker and Belle Mill, and Abigail are colourful and multifaceted. Defiant women who help salvage the spirit of slaves by helping them escape through their clandestine network of safe houses, food depots and rail lines. In contrast Donovan is a stereotypical character, who is a slave catcher, a rogue, and ducks being redeemed. Honor Bright with her strong Quaker principles, champions’ equality, inner light and silent meditation. She decides to undertake the freedom of slaves at the cost of personal safety. But her condescending righteousness and English superiority over the locals makes her fall short of a rounded character.

Art remains Tracy’s inspiration to weave stories around. If there are paintings which triggered her earlier; later mystic poets, medieval tapestries and quilt- making seems to have impressed upon her to continue her journey of storytelling. She candidly admits that she suffers from art fatigue whenever she visits art galleries, and to relive herself of the guilt she beelines to an art piece which beckons her. Her mind then goes into an overdrive to concoct a story around the piece of art in no time!  

Bard's Sonnets

The Bard at 450

The Bard is alive and with us at 450. The dawn of 2014 is special for that very reason, for the world shall sway to the strains of the Bard. The celebrations  shall continue till  man exists and the word lives on, and  we shall relive his works a thousand times over.  A mortal immortalized by his art of literature, ‘not of an age, but for all times.’ We shall begin the year of celebration of the Bard in this space by revisiting the Shakespearian Sonnets.

Revisiting  the 154 Sonnets of the Bard meticulously, helps  unearth the  technique which one  always disregards  in lieu of the theme of poems. It  acquires a color of its own and lures  one to assimilate sonnets in a completely new light. The better for the exercise on the writing of it;   which one can accomplish with finesse, with the comprehension of the origin, types, and structure of sonnets. After meditation on the outline frame of the sonnet, you are astonished to discover the immense space within the confines, structured structure of a sonnet to experiment on flowing verse. 

The Shakespearean Sonnet is a 14-line lyric poem consisting of 3 quatrains (3 stanzas of four lines each) of alternating rhyme and a couplet: a b a b c d c d e f e f g g . Each quatrain dwells on an idea, different from the other quatrains, but related to the overall theme of the sonnet. The couplet at the end resolves the juxtaposition of ideas, events, images in the quatrains, by possibly resolving or just revealing the tensions created and operative between them. Line 9, the beginning of the third quatrain, is the turn or volta which turns the preceding argument to a different image and then the culminating couplet settles the complete picture. Each line is of 10 syllables, with five feet, an iambic pentameter; a Shakespearean signature. 

Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership, but they came into the public domain when they were first published in 1609. His sonnets are divided into 3 categories, viz. those addressed to a fair young man whom he loves, then to a dark married lady, and lastly on myriad themes of life. The Sonnets are a profound meditation on the nature of love,  sexual passion, procreation, death and time.

Perhaps the most famous sonnet is Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?         a
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:      b
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,  a
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:  b
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,   c
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,    d
And every fair from fair sometime declines,   c
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:  d
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,  e                                  
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,  f
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,  e
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,  f
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,  g
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.   g

A typical English sonnet, with a typical Shakespearian rhyme scheme (indicated at the end of each line). The turn occurs at line 9, But thy eternal summer shall not fade. The Bard immortalized the beauty of the fair young man, through his words which reaches us 450 years hence.  

Sonnet 116, which is sung at all weddings worldwide, and is a celebration of the sacred bond of love in marriage:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me proved,
  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Sonnet 73 is one of his most beautiful sonnets. He suggests that his lover will love him more with the passing years, and declining beauty, because the physical aging reminds the lover of the ephemeral nature of things and that death is not far behind.

 To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey’d,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv’d;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv’d:
For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.

In Sonnet 104, The Bard expresses profound love for his lover who remains as beautiful and vibrant as she was on the first day that he saw her. The passing time has not marked her in his eyes. But he knows that time is fleeting and though his eyes are full of love and the lovely picture of his beloved, time is moving on, and beauty is moving forward deceiving his eyes. In the end, he remarks,  ‘In consideration of that, listen, you unborn generations: the height of beauty was dead before you were born.’

Watch this space for further interludes with the Bard through the year!  In love with literature we are: ‘WE ARE BECAUSE HE IS!’

 

 

 

 

Feisty Heroines in Literature

Feisty Heroines in Literature

Women’s Day’ celebrations are ongoing this month. I am celebrating by revisiting my friends and confidantes in Literature. Wispy creations of imagination and ink, these women characters have acquired definite personas and distinctive voices, and have stepped out of print to live in my mindscape like close, intimate companions. Women characters have evolved in books to make it to the elite list of feisty heroines of literature. They broke the shackles of tradition and patriarchy, treading untraveled trails to set precedents for others to follow in fiction and real life situations.

‘Alice in Wonderland’ directed by Tim Burton did not bag laurels just for the colorful portrayal of the Mad Hatter, but a complete reworking of the character of Alice. A well mannered, soft spoken, delicate darling Alice made it to the gumption list of the contemporary heroines. She takes on the evil queen in a fight and refuses to marry the prince. ManjulaPadmnabhan’s ‘Unprincess’ is a maverick girl who takes on her own battles and knows her mind. A far cry from the Marys and andBeths of the Enid Blyton fame who were docile, gentle and well mannered. Heroines of the yesteryears were about sacrifice, eternal love and duty. They were not supposed to flirt, throw a tantrum to acquire their heart’s desire or eye their friend’s suitor. Even if such human feelings surfaced in them they were to camouflage their true spirit under a garb of politeness and sweetness. No doubt women are always scheming and plotting – because they could never be forthright and open about themselves and their desires. Certainly not supposed to be assertive, let the whole world know whom they loved and be selfish and ruthless in pursuit of their goals in life. We would have heavily frowned upon such heroines and we did exactly that down the ages. Madame Bovary, Hester Prynne, and Scarlet o’ Hara were read with censure rather than admiration and sympathy.

But now the tables have turned and when we read Scarlet O ‘ Hara we see her as a brave woman who survives the civil war with hard work and a no nonsense attitude to the whole scene of war. We view her more realistically and admit that the reason Rhett Butler is attracted to her in the first place is because of her forthright attitude and outspokenness. A force to reckon with, she cooked and plotted scenes and was relentless in her love pursuits but that is what makes her human and not just a doll with plastic well- rehearsed answers and expectations.

‘Well behaved women do not make history’ said Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Creations of writing and imagination, literature has created legendary heroines who in retrospect rank high on the list of FIESTY HEROINES. Who are these heroines who compete for a place in the elite list? They don’t need to wrestle with stalkers, or kick sick men in their asses,  they just need to conform to being smart, confident, gutsy, vivacious, articulate and very clear to know their minds and make unhindered choices; female protagonists, whom we have read and who have stepped out of print and become our close companions and confidantes.

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra has been objectified, declared a temptress, a “whore” and an enchantress who made Antony “the noble ruin of her magic.” This threat has much to do with Cleopatra’s beauty and expressive sexuality.  Cleopatra is self-involved and a narcissist. The dichotomy of a manipulative seductress versus an able leader will always stay with her image as 19^th century artists painted her with the asp applied to her breast rather than the arm where it bit her – clearly indicating the fact that she was more an object of desire than a strong woman   ; nevertheless, her charisma, strength, and indomitable will makes her one of Shakespeare’s strongest, most awe-inspiring female characters.

Hester Prynne in ‘The Scarlet Letter’ wears the scarlet letter on her bosom with gumption and lives with her daughter in the same place that ostracized her. She also never breathes out the name of the father of her child.Shamed and alienated from the rest of the community, Hester becomes contemplative. She speculates on human nature, social control, and larger moral questions. Hester’s tribulations also lead her to be stoic and a freethinker.

Elizabeth Bennet is never intimidated in ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Jane Austen thought her ‘as delightful a character as ever appeared in print’; a woman who is delightful for reasons other than those of beauty alone. She is characterized by wit, independence and a courageous ability to admit her mistakes. She wants to be seen as a rational and autonomous human being in the same way as men are. She tells Mr. Collin as much.

Jo March, the rebel and tomboy of ‘Little Women,’ beseechingly asks her mother why she cannot be content to sew, cook and look after babies like her sisters. The restlessness and adventurous spirit drives her to travel and finally she falls in love with her writing and the professor. Her struggle to blend family life and responsibilities with a creative profession could be a precursor to the choices women make today.

Catherine’s wildness in ‘Wuthering Heights’ is the rejection of her gender identity as defined by a bourgeois society. The heliographic on the walls of her room at Wuthering Heights is the symbolic remnant of her struggle – Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff and then again Catherine Linton. Her practicality makes her choose to be a lady over her wild passion for Heathcliff, which is her real self. Catherine is a women’s anguished voice which revolts; a haunting presence, always to remind of that which is denied to her – of what she actually wanted to be.

 In Anna Karenina the theme is one of adultery, a romance which shakes the foundation of a society steeped in hypocrisy. Anna is unforgettable for her refusal to observe the proprieties exacted in such a liaison  - remember she adamantly argues with Vronsky and goes and attends the opera in her regal attire.

Growing up I admired  Anne Shirley of Green Gables – the red head with a definite mind of her own. She questions religious faith and hypocritical rituals. Her pride hath a fall, but she is quick to redeem herself. If now we are talking of young spunky girls, not to mention PippiLongstocking would be sacrilege. The most independent of characters, battles day to day encounters with superhuman strength. And Matilda  of Roald Dhal fame , a child prodigy – who has devoured each and every book in the adult section before she is ten. 

If we were to shift the narrative from fictional to real life women who live in our societies and create such colossal feminine characters then Maya Angelo, Alice Walker, Anita Desai would take the lead. Anita Desai is unique in portraying a wide gamut of Indian women in her novels. What really struck me was that in one of her interviews, she candidly admitted that she loved her writing passion and would yearn for time to herself away from her responsibilities of family life and children – to return to her first love – WRITING ; very akin to Virginia Woolf’s – a room of one’s own.

If you are attracted to some people and characters, it is an indication of the fact that you harbor some of their characteristics and aspire to be even more like them. Well, if that holds true and you admire these maverick heroines, come be part of the book reading workshop ‘Feisty Heroines in Literature’ conducted at ICG on 15^thMarch, 2012. The workshop entails book readings, movie excerpts, power point presentation and thought provoking questions on evolution of women to feisty characters.

These are those special, colossal women from print who can never be replaced, replicated or reworked. They have acquired larger than life images, and become legends in themselves. When we hail them we hail the feistiness in women!

Bard's Craft

                                  The Craft of The Bard

What more pleasure than to set upon a project to know the Bard more, when he is going to be 450 on 23^rd April, 2014.  In my attempt as a reader and celebrator of literature, I am devoting the coming 2 years to the study of William Shakespeare and his works.  I began the year by revisiting his 154 sonnets. The singing of the Shakespearean sonnet is an ongoing delight with me still, and moreover it is too short a time, since I began, to have devoured them all. But rather than just indulging in one genre of his writings I am also on to his plays. The four great tragedies:  King Lear, Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth, have the greatest following, and I am with Macbeth this season.

The triumph of the Macbeth lies in the portrayal of Macbeth as a Dostoyevskian character, an Aristotellian tragic hero, with his penchant for self-reflection.  He is a tragic hero indeed, because we, the audience, can see ourselves in him. The play has startling power and is akin to a modern work of art with its thick, poetic language and fast-moving pace, which makes it feel like a modern political thriller. The weird sisters, evil and grotesque, add darkness, mystery and doom to the play.  The powerful imagery is steeped in blood, the supernatural and shafts of conscience warring with serpents of desire.

Macbeth is introduced as a brave warrior, bathed in a bloodbath. He slays the enemy mercilessly and wins the war for his king, King  Duncan. He is a loyal subject to the monarch, a good friend to Banqo and lover and friend to his wife.  Lady Macbeth herself illustrates that Macbeth’s nature is "... too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness/To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great/Art not without ambition, but without/The illness should attend it." A compassionate, intelligent, honorable man whose dormant ambition ignites after listening to the prophesy of the weird sisters "Thane of Glamis!", "Thane of Cawdor!" and "King of Scotland hereafter". Macbeth’s grandeur is then suffused with acts of murder; he commits regicide propelled by his wife, Lady Macbeth.  Our awareness Macbeth’s grandeur  at the onset of the drama is important when we later witness his downfall and mental decay to the point where his persona, his rule and dear wife, all degenerate into the abyss of disease, instability, psychological trauma and finally death. Macbeth is a potent rendition of a tragic hero, the epitome of good and bad. Course of events and a flaw in his character makes him befriend the devil, and therein begin his downfall. The soliloquies, interior monologues give the readers access to his inner turmoil and descent into the realms of the underworld. We identify with him closely; ambitious, yet ambiguous; warring persistently with his conscience to achieve his desires. His strife is our strife and in his death we sympathesize and stand by him.

It is when we read the sources of Macbeth, that we get a peek into the genius of the Bard. It makes real interesting study to compare the sources and what Shakespeare finally achieved after altering and mixing historical records of Scottish period from the 11^th century.  The exercise then turns into a writing class – How to craft a dramatic, enthralling  story  from a raw material of history and fact.  Shakespeare's chief source for Macbeth was Holinshed's Chronicles (Macbeth), who based his account of Scotland's history, and Macbeth's in particular, on the Scotorum Historiae, written in 1527 by Hector Boece. Other minor sources contributed to Shakespeare's dramatic version of history, including Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, and Daemonologie, written in 1599 by King James. The Bard wrote the play during the reign of James I from Scotland in the early 17^th century , to hail the king’s Scottish ancestry, his interest in witchcraft, and the supremacy of Kings. He altered the character sketches and intermixed stories of periods of time, to render a dramatic account of a tragic hero, (original Lord Macbeth in Scottish history kills a weak and scrupulous King Duncan, to rule admirably for a decade, before he is replaced by Malcolm the heir to King Duncun).  

The nymphs and angels were reworked by the Bard into witches based on writings on witchcraft of the times and by the king himself.  They are grotesque wiry women but bearded , dole out a bizarre rhymed speech which makes  them seem ridiculous, but the undertone of doom is irreplaceable. They are the harbingers of  the supernatural and fate. Shakespeare has them speak in rhyming couplets throughout “Double, double, toil and trouble, / Fire burn and cauldron bubble” which separates them from the other characters, who mostly speak in blank verse. Despite their resemblance to the Fates of Greek mythology, they are the most dangerous characters in the play, found in the intersections of the human and the outer world, wickedly toying with human lives. Reading the play, we are not really helped in deciphering them, but their sure presence and meddling with the tragic hero (with whom we identify) imbues the story with layers of uncomprehending ominous darkness and palpable dread.
Reading his writings is not just about another story, but lessons in fiction writing, human psychology, the cosmic consciousness, poetic language and the Bard himself.  I feel closer to him every time I read him.
Watch out this space for more interludes with the Bard!

Histriographic Metafiction

                                     NOVEL Novels

My article ‘Winging Historical Writing’ came in the wake of announcement of Eleanor Catton having won the Booker last year for her historical novel ‘The Luminaries’.  Before that, we recounted the success of Hilary Mantel winning the title for same genre of writing. What is it about historical novels that the literary world is churning out so many in different parts of the world? Myriad writers are revisiting or recreating many periods of history.  Epics and Classics from antiquity are a favorite segment of the reconceptualization process. ‘Linda Hutcheon’s ‘Poetics of Postmodernism’ studies this very  current cultural phenomenon in postmodern writing  that exists; is attracting much public debate, and so deserves critical attention. She illuminates the paradoxes which come into play when a writer sets out to juxtapose his aesthetic autonomy, and self-reflexivity with the historical, social and political world.  This study is an attempt to see what happens when culture is challenged from within: challenged or questioned or contested, but not imploded.  Privileging the novel genre, and one form in particular, a form that she calls “historiographic metafiction ”. Those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages:’  Grass’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rushdie’s Shame and Midnight’s Children, Gregory’s Plantegenet series, Atwood’s Penelopiad….. 

Phillipa Gregory’s Plantegenet series is five books strong and followed by ten million readers, who are completely hooked after the enrapturing ten-episode BBC drama series on her first book ‘The White Queen.’  She has infused passionate and independent lives into women characters of the Plantegenet dynasty, marked in history by ‘War of the Roses’. A time in English history before the Tudor’s, also known as the three decade long Cousin’s War between the two houses of the Plantegenet dynasty, the House of York and the House of Lancaster. Women who just appeared as names on family trees, or footnotes to the reigns of powerful kings have been portrayed as strong women unto themselves, who pursued alliances, created rebellions, joined battles, and became Queens of England or ambitious mothers who made the impossible possible and with a killer instinct in the pursuit of power and swerving loyalties to the crown, got their sons to become kings. Powerful women

whom chroniclers of history may have projected as brood mares, or diplomatic currencies , sworn to their saintly vows of being good model wives and self sacrificing mothers. But Gregory enumerates character sketches of women personalities  made of  sterner stuff which propelled them to rule, that which could not be achieved aboveboard could then be possessed  using dastardly means, and scheming manipulations. Elizabeth Woodville a commoner who marries King Edward IV against all norms, bears him a dozen children, acquires estates, marriages and titles for her ten siblings.  Inspite of the imprisonment of her sons ‘The Princes in the Tower’, she makes sure her daughter, Elizabeth of York becomes the Queen of England. Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, grandmother of Henry VIII (the legendery Tudor King who went against the church to legitimize his six marriages),  plotted the Buckingham Rebellion, then known as the Beaufort Rebellion, which was the first step towards the ultimate defeat of Richard III, and the crowning of her son Henry VII.

Margaret Atwood in ‘The Penelopiad’ reworks the Odyssey and gives space and voice to Penelope and the hanged handmaidens to tell their story and circumstances which tradition and history barred them from doing.  Panchali in Govinda by Udaysankar is married to the eldest Pandava brother only.  She questions her identity and role, and her quest is justice and individuation of women.  Colm Tóibín, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker prize, is a plaintive monologue by Mother Mary who recounts certain episodes in the life of her son, shorn  of   celestial powers that myth has empowered her with through the centuries. She pines for a comfortable home with her husband and son and wishes to be delivered of the cross that her child is ‘Son of God.’ She is a pained mother reliving the stings and arrows of atrocious misfortune that flesh is heir to. Myths are demythologized to unearth the history of mankind. Defamilairization is a tool used by writers to give us an overworked myth from the perspective of unknown and unconventional angles. Others have questioned and rebelled against established iconic legends like the question of whether the sacrifice of Sita was greater than Urmilla (Lakshman’s wife) in the epic  Ramayana.

Rushdie in ‘Midnight’s Children’, revisits the birth of a nation, a promise through magic realism. He imbues the children born at the stroke of 15August, 1947 with extra psychic powers, magical in their reach and dreams. Their ultimate humiliation, torture and unmaking is a metaphor for the dissolution of the promise of a nation, through wars, politics, societal control , racism and the Emergency. Hilary Mantel subverts the character of Thomas Cromwell to a machiavellian Chanakya. ‘Wolf Hall’ is a book which portrays the break from Rome, a process where one man is wolf to another and the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon. ‘Bring up the Bodies’ deals with the reign of the second queen Anne Boleyn, and at the end, her execution ordered by Henry himself. Hilary Mantel doesn’t mess with factual history but experiments with the gaps in history and that becomes her playfield as a writer.

“Historiographic metafiction has often been noticed by critics and is a major debatable topic at literary festivals in India and abroad.  It is not just metafictional, nor is it just another version of the historical novel or the non-fictional novel. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is metafictionally self-reflexive and yet speaking to us powerfully about real political and historical realities: “It has thus become a kind of model for the contemporary writer, being self-conscious about its literary heritage and about the limits of mimesis...but yet managing to reconnect its readers to the world outside the page.  Modern history and modern literature [postmodern in both cases] have both rejected the ideal of representation that dominated them for so long. Both now conceive of their work as exploration, testing, creation of new meanings, rather than as disclosure or revelation of meanings already in some sense “there,” but not immediately perceptible.”

Historiographic metafiction has a liberating quality that has been seized by feminist and postcolonial writers to enable plural voices in the corridors of history to be verbalized and previewed.

Novel Novels indeed!