FN Souza's Art Practice

'SOUZA PAINTED HELL': A REVIEW OF HIS LEGACY

https://selma-carvalho.squarespace.com/nonfiction-1/2017/7/26/souza-painted-hell-a-review-of-his-legacy

Souza painted ‘Hell’.  

Sartre said, ‘Hell is other people’, but Souza’s art laid bare the hell inside human beings that makes individual lives hell, which in turn is then visited on other people.

No doubt the world today is mired in war, terrorism and hate. 

Animal instinct versus human intellect has dogged the human race all along its evolutionary history. Human history started with Stone Age man devising methods to overcome his animal nature for better living. Using his brain, man has come a long way. Overpowering land, sky and earth, he has performed unimaginable feats. But the duality of his inner landscape, source of his intellect, as also his irrational energy catches him unawares, rendering him miserable and powerless.

Souza spent his childhood in this house in Saligao, his mother Lilia Souza e Ribeiro's ancestral house, where he was often left in the custody of his grandmother Leopoldina Saldanha Antunes. It was a household dominated by women and Souza felt adrift in it.

The human brain still remains largely unmapped, but illuminating studies by Sigmund Freud, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon and F N Souza is a revelation into the dark recesses of the ‘Walnut’.  

“I have made art my metabolism. I express myself freely in paint in order to exist ...” wrote Souza of his credo as a painter in the 1940s. “When I press a tube I coil. Every brush stroke makes me recoil like a snake struck with a stick. I hate the smell of paint. Painting for me is not beautiful. It is ugly like a reptile …”

The controversial alter ego of Souza pulls and repels in equal measure.

His first persona of a Goan-born Indian artist and a pioneer member of the Bombay Progressive Artist Group (PAG) is regarded well in the art world. He led Indian art after independence and imparted it a modernist idiom. A good writer with a powerful language, he became the spokesman of the PAG. He worked on a manifesto in which he stated, “They wanted to take art away from the sophisticated arty-arty crowd”.

Souza's 'Houses on Hampstead Heath'. These were signature townscapes painted by both the brothers, F N Souza and Lance Ribeiro. They lived in the areas of Hampstead and Chalk Farm in England during the 1950s, and these unpeopled houses with lighted windows were a frequent subject of introspection.

But his sojourn in Britain regressed from being a bright star of the British art scene in the 50’s to an experimental artist mired by scandal and the wrong colour of his skin. “Was the scandal that rocked the art establishment in London in the 60’s one where Souza became a scapegoat for artists' wayward lifestyles or was it racism?” wrote Conor Macklin, the director of Grosvenor Gallery, London, referring to his marriage in 1965 to Barbara Zinkant, just 17 years old at the time. Soon after, Souza migrated to New York and lived long years in obscurity interspersed with few surfacing expositions.

“The 1976 Dhoomimal Gallery exhibition of FN Souza art, inaugurated by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sold just one painting by Souza,” says Uday Jain, the director of the gallery. European art critics at best called his art derivative and  Jassawalla lamented, “the near indifference to his death - the mealy-mouthed praise” in an obituary.  

What is it about his painting, that he scaled just a couple of peaks during his lifetime? What makes viewers and art collectors uneasy when confronted by his art ? 

"Unlike other artists, his nudes showed no restraint. We did a specially curated booth at the India Art Fair in 2013, and even then many collectors said they were not comfortable hanging his work at home," says Jain. “No one wanted to hang a painting in their dining room whose figures looked as if they were about to leap out of their milieu and throttle you while you were eating dinner”, said Souza's daughter Shelley.  

No doubt, his work is grotesque, giving a free rein to the beastliness inside humanity. It is this second persona of his, etched in bold dark lines, a flat brush stroke and vivid colours, in distorted nudes and disfigured heads that people reject. It greatly troubles them. 

MF Hussain went on record and called him the most intelligent artist of PAG. He led a life of the mind, completely immersed in writings by Darwin and Freud. He closely studied ancient ‘Indian temple art’ and Western art titans of the Renaissance and Baroque period.

“Good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings,” said Virginia Woolf. Applying the paradigm to artists, then Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso and FN Souza were creative minds who lived more than other people in the presence of reality. Though their personal lives were mired by socio-moral controversies, they culled from life and circumstance what  others overlooked, curbed, or punished and communicated it in their art as best as they could.

This kind of art seems to perform a covert operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world stripped of its hypocrisy and given a more intense life. People see their psyche mirrored in the disfigured morphology of a ‘Souza Head’. His ‘Passion Series’ exposes punishment, injustice and cruelty behind altars of worship. His works on women echo Schiele’s female forms - no more demure and downcast – they mirror the psychological outlook of a masculine human mind.

Souza’s ‘Passion Series’

Inside the Mae de Deus Church in Saligao. This would have been Souza's first brush with Christianity. He was baptised in this church. The richness of its interiors no doubt would inspire his Passion art.

Brought up in a Catholic family; he was exposed to Christian iconography from early  childhood. When he moved to Europe in August 1949, he saw the grand scale of art and sculpture mirroring Christian religious myths. He went on to paint the complete ‘Passion Series’ from the ‘Agony of Christ at Gethsemane’ to ‘Christ at Emmaus’. The critically acclaimed painting ‘Good Friday at Goa’ also forms a part of this series. “Souza died on ‘Good Friday’ and he got the pain and agony of crucifixion”, says Julian Hartnoll, art dealer and Souza’s contemporary.

Souza etched Jesus not as a divine figure, but as a human - fearful, sad and anguished. He made the scenes palpable with tragedy and trauma. People can identify with the tragedy, based on their own experiences in life. ‘Art reflects life, life reflects art’ paradigm brings them closer to Christ’s story. God is no longer distant, divine, and majestic. He is like us. He suffers, His spirit fights with His weak flesh. He goes through torment and battles to rise above His emotions, to meet His destiny. Here besides the other ‘Passion Artists’ of the 20th century, parallels can be drawn with the religious paintings (Christ riven with thorns and nails) of Bernard Buffet, whose fame dipped in the 50s’ as Souza’s rose to acclaim.

On the other hand, Souza’s paintings also indicate human apathy and cruelty. As Plato said, the analogy with Christ is that the best amongst us, the wisest, the noblest, the purest, the most righteous, we put to death.

Souza Heads

A Souza 'Head' on display at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, 2012.

Souza’s ghoulish heads go back a long way in artistic history to Leonardo da Vinci’s mutant heads. The renaissance artist who constantly ‘doodled heads’ to comprehend the irrational in there. A raging storm prevails - the psychic terror, dread, fear – its dark – the unknowable. Uncertainty, aggression and lust born out of this unconscious scape drives men to violence and cruelty.

Francis Bacon’s ‘heads’ are legendary. Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X and three heads at the base of crucifixion are examples that create a context for Souza’s heads – be it in his ‘Passion Series’ or self-portraits. His sketch ‘Head (Angst)’ 1968, embodiesalienation and anxiety echoing the existentialism and absurdism of Sartre and Camus in post-war world.

Souza’s ‘Futuritic/Mutant Heads’ may also have been influenced by his study of the American Scientist, Sanford Redmond’s thesis of ‘Nature in an Altered Perspective’. The scientific climate in the 60s to the 80s (spaceflight, landing on the moon, study of DNA) greatly impinged his mind – “It progressively turned me upside down and inside out.” (F.N. Souza, Diary, 4 June 1984).  

Thereby nature became his ‘Sole Principle, the principle of Life itself.’ His narrative became allegorical, imaginative and expressed altered energy patterns in head and body morphology. Hesynthesized ancient Hindu Sankhya Philosophy with Modern Scientific Theory. Further his sketches (especially the later chemical drawings) seem to indicate evolvement of the human head from ‘chaotic mass’ to ‘alternative energy patterns’.

Souza’s Figurative Art  

Souza’s deconstructed  images  are controversial and deny its viewers a precise  interpretation. Bitterness, misogyny and masochism bind his couples in an agonizing dance. He explores the sadistic play at work in these so called clichéd happily-ever-after love unions. The pain and torment explicit in the facial expressions and body language of the figures is indicative of the inner struggle with ego and demonic sexual energy.  

However, there is no denying the fact that the irresistible, irrepressible and incorrigible Souza, began his career by sketching his mother and himself in the nude in different episodes. His nudes were revoked by the public from the very beginning. The Bombay Art Society exhibition (1949) displaying his nude self-portrait was jeopardized by a protest. What people associated with shame, disgust, guilt and sin was being displayed in a bold colourful palette on his canvas. It was highly provocative and aggravating to the senses of a people brought up on a certain value system.

Here a comparison with Egon Schiele’s figurative art work would be most appropriate. His twisted body shapes etched in expressionistic brushstrokes relayed intensity and raw sexuality. Schiele, too, began with nude portraits of family first - of himself and his younger sister, Gertrude. Like Souza, he had been brought up in a family of women and was very close to his sister. His brushstroke is radical, and sketches open sexuality of human form with confidence. It’s as if he recognizes this potential energy very well, and paints it the way he perceives it, its power, eminence and despair.

Similarly Souza venerates sexual language of men and women in his portraits. His earlier nudes are voluptuous and erotic like the figurines in Lakshmana Temple in Khajuraho. Presently in light of scholarly studies by Vidya Dehejia and Cristin Mcknight on temple art and Dehejia’s writings, ‘The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries Between Sacred and Profane in India’s Art and ‘Reading Love Imagery on the Indian Temple’, Souza’s nudes acquire an interesting perspective.

Later works of his evoke the posture and style of Lajja Gauri, the Goddess of Shaktism cult, invoked for her auspiciousness, fertility and prosperity. An example in case, the pregnant nude in the painting ‘Birth’ is said to be Souza’s then partner Lisolette who bore him three children.

Souza seems to have internalized Freud and his Theory of Sexuality. There is a frontal thrust on the libidinous drive of humans in his work. Souza lived for the autonomy of art: 'A true artist can never be pressurized by society. His compelling art shirks off all pressure, except the pressure of Art. The main purpose of the artist is to evoke an elevated response. Then only is the work meaningful and not a daub.'  

His relentless energy fuelled and fired him to lay nature bare in all its truth. Many a times his works made the faces of women recede, and made their sexual body parts prominent, which in itself is a vociferous commentary on human perspective on women, as solely sexual subjects. His intense, distorted figurative art first portrays the length, breath and height of human sexual drive, so that knowing what one harbours, one may devise ways of dealing with it best. Moreover, we cannot overlook the fact, that Souza is expressing his own energy, that of the male species. It’s out and out a man’s point of view.

A woman on the other hand may have the same sexual drive as a man, but a major part of it may be mitigated  through the  biological process of childbirth, nursing and nurturing babies. Not to forget her monthly discharge of heat and bloody fluid, which in a natural form dissipates her sexual energy safely. But what of the man who is culturally conditioned to project his masculine self – powerful and forceful with balls of fire - repressing his feminine side altogether. What of him and his reservoir of sexual energy?

Shankar Vedantam puts it beautifully, “Good people are not those who lack flaws, the brave are not those who feel no fear, and the generous are not those who never feel selfish. Extraordinary people are not extraordinary because they are invulnerable to unconscious biases. They are extraordinary because they choose to do something about it.” And Souza’s work completely orients the viewer towards this construct.  

Art of Growing Old

Where the Flowers Still Grow

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=19574&date=2017-05-28&pageid=1

                                

   Postcards from Kashmir

I went to see ‘Where the Flowers Still Grow’ - a visually vocal landscape of Kashmir by Bharat Sikka, at Sunaparanta Centre for Arts. You see, I was born in Kashmir, and though i didn’t want to go, dreading what I would see, I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Yes, I found flowers in a couple of photographic templates but they were minute, on spiked stems, or had fallen  - discoloured, shrivelled and torn, carpeting the earth enmeshed with stones.

The exhibition is inspired by Mirza Waheed’s novel ‘The Collaborator’ which tells the story of a Kashmiri man struggling to understand the past and present, and the sense of self in the ensuing context.  Bharat Sikka visited Srinagar in 2013, and came upon the novel.  Thereafter, he went 3-4 times in the following years, observing, listening and recording a story in his camera.

The exhibition has an eerie feel with no cataloguing essay. Untitled frames hang silently, as if robbed of expression. There is nothing left to say.  In this situation, Bharat’s photographic canvases capture existential Kashmir, exposing remnants of the enveloping violence in the region. It’s an ode to autumn, definitely, but  devoid of any colour.

The first frame at the entrance itself introduces the visitor to the inherent inversion of Bharat’s sublime statement on the state of affairs. The eye comes to rest on the silhouette of a man attired in customary Kashmiri dress with a shawl draped around his upper frame, against a grey mist, his back turned to the viewer. Others show men silently mounted on horse backs, staring fixedly with deadpan expressions. In another, a man stands rooted in a field of spiked tree trunks, hemmed in by the pointed stalks, immovable and imprisoned. An ash-marked bloodied hand subverts portraiture, occupying centre stage in the line.  A Rembrandt shot focuses on a man’s face surrounded by darkness. He is asleep or has he shut his eyes against the light, feeling hopeless?

A deafening silence clothes the entire landscape. Besides the inhabitants, nature too stands a mute witness to the continuing carnage - tree trunks seems eaten away from inside, hollow and disintegrating - their piercing branches sans the green foliage. Conifers stand like sentinels marking the horizon. Sometimes when the grey and black uninterrupted terrain is punctured by a green hill and a waterfall, it appears more an aberration, alienated from the rot everywhere else.

A complete absence of women and children from the frames is marked and forceful, an intentional choice by the photographer. The omission drives the point hard that this is now a ruthless man’s territory - cruel and colourless, where noise of cannon roars loud with no space for sensitivity, nurturing, compassion, innocence, or any other relevant feminine construct.

The gallery space is further haunted by a melancholic musical strain which stems from an installation at the further end of the corridor. It has a Steve Reich quality to it, a persistent beating pulse superimposed by electronic music that takes the story forward. But the impetus doesn’t change anything much on the lighted screen, where thick black clouds loom, moving in pace with the music. Standing in the empty room looking at the screen, the feeling imperceptibly seeps in - the grinding noise of cannon fire in the background and darkness are here to stay. They have become parts of the landscape.

If you pause to meditate within this deprivation, the juxtapositions built by Bharat and further enhanced by curator Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi become voluble. A torn and overused yellow and red  packet of 32” S&W revolver cartridges graces a wall,  a bloodied head of a goat on curled spikes symbolically completes that picture . A dark alcove from a dilapidated house with a zero watt bulb glowing on its wall ,  looks out to frames of bright light.  These and many more pictures are contrasted with the following  - sari hanging on a clothes line in a room, a miniature heart with very hard to read minute lettering – ‘be my valentine’, a postage stamp in the corner of a blank page  with the lettering ‘27^th Pacific Area Travel Association Conference’. The larger than life size of war objects against diminishing motifs of the softer frames is self-explanatory. 

Bharat uses visual metaphors and metonymy to express his personal sightings in the valley of death. He amplifies the war rhetoric with symbols - a wooden cross with a white sack tied to it embeds   the carnage in a much larger historical context. A polished walnut Trojan Horse packs in a punch of conspiracy and betrayal. A double rainbow outlines the mouth of a devouring shark. An empty inverted maroon velvet-lined chest box, becomes a vociferous statement about looted treasure. Ubiquitous chalk-white boulders lining rivers and pathways have acquired a mosaic pattern that on a closer look reveals itself to be dried blood and excreta. A loud speaker mounted on a tripod spews out words which no one seems to hear.

The entire bricolage gives the landscape a museum-like quality, on which we gaze for hours, drawn by muted rage, its ugliness and dismembered power. The greys and blues, indicate a mood of suffering that’s intensified by the red and yellow of the raging forest fire in the background, or is it a burning pyre? Predatory birds appear and contradict the non-existent livestock.

Bharat conveys the final blow with the showcasing of postcards from Kashmir in a customary glass-cased window. Nostalgia hits hard, for instead of pictures of colourful ‘shikaras’  on Dal lake, brightly clad women in ‘phirens’, tall handsome men adorning Kashmiri topee, gardens full of gorgeous Chrysanthemums and Dahlia’s  – the postcards are a muted grey with silhouettes of grey scrawny trees lining the breath of the page. Every postcard is a replica of the one before it and they together complete the exhibit in the show window. The irony is further exacerbated by a set of colourful ribbons worn on a soldier’s uniform, with medals encoding – ‘Satyamave Jayate’ and the ‘25^th Independence Anniversary Celebration’.

That finally nails the story tier in the storyboard permanently. I can feel a heaviness pervade my senses, which isn’t going away anywhere, I know. I will be back to meditate again!

   

The Matisse Stories by AS Byatt

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=18172&date=2017-04-23&pageid=1

Did Matisse Paint Stories ?

Art is a take from life or does life take from art - is a question Byatt deliberates and then answers copiously through her work of art ‘The Matisse Stories’. She draws upon her strengths of storytelling and art to paint evocative canvases of three women, caught at a certain juncture in their lives. Henry Matisse paintings superimpose the entire frame of the book nourishing the narrative with colour, texture and form. Each story begins with a vignette of a Matisse painting, linked to the essence of the story in a subtle and yet profound way. 

Byatt’s paintbrush etches beautiful verbal sketches of her characters and situates them in a milieu of their own making. Just as in her Booker Prize winning novel ‘Possession: A Romance’, duality pulls at the heartstrings of men and women caught between values, comfort zones and situations. Should Lucian go with his girlfriend to the Greek isles or stay with his wife?  Do the two professors let anorexics, namely self-loathing Peggi Nollett obtain her doctorate on Matisse or stay the course of events? 

The veneer sparkles and shines with suffused colour and artistic word-play but the core of each story is the corrugated grey colour of pain, white emptiness of loss and shards of splintered glass.  Humdrum sequences and inconsequential happenings acquire darker tones, climaxing to an undoing, exposure or a confrontation of hidden secrets in vitrines of human souls. The conclusive note is hopeful and liberating, like the light in Matisse paintings, visiting and dispersing the darkness, that idea of comfort in an armchair.

Byatt writes that Matisse shocked people by saying that art was like an armchair. “ What I dream of,  is an art of balance, of purity, of quietness, without any disturbing subjects, without worry, which maybe, something soothing, something to calm the brain, something analogous to a good armchair which relaxes him from his bodily weariness....”

 She continues the dialogue between the two characters expounding Matisse’s quote, unravelling it through words, giving it a lucid silvery silhouette - 


“Who is it that understands pleasure, Dr. Himmelblau?  Old men like me who can just understand their bones not hurting, who remember walking up a hill with a spring in their step like the red of the Red Studio. Pleasure is life, Dr. Himmelblau, and most of us don’t have it, or not much, or mess it up, and when we see it in those blues, those roses , those oranges, that vermilion, we should fall down and worship - for it is the thing itself. Who knows a good armchair? A man who has bone cancer, or a man who has been tortured, he can recognize a good armchair....”

Susannah, a middle-aged woman, in the first story ‘Medusa’s Ankles’, had come to trust Lucian (a hairstylist) with her disintegration. She had lost the desire to be seen and to be looked at. She had been awarded as a linguist and had to appear on television.

 “The cameras searched jowl and eye-pocket, expose brush-stroke and cracks in shadow and gloss. So interesting are their revelations that words, mere words, go for nothing, fly by whilst the memory of a chipped tooth, a strayed red dot, an inappropriate hair, persists and persists”. 

She wanted Lucian to make her look young and glowing (Suzie of the past). Lucian‘s soothing and softening touch parodies Matisse’s brushwork – the hairdresser induces relaxation and reverie. But Lucian tells her that he has finally decided to leave his wife (who has let herself go, with fat swollen ankles) as he wanted beauty, a must in life. Susannah, a mature composed woman aware of her own fat ankles and loss of flush rosy skin, comes undone and smashes his saloon to pieces.  

Here Byatt paints a sensuous portrait of the battle hoarded saloon “...puddles of venous-blue and fuchsia-red unguents, scissors dancing on a hook its frenzy diminishing, uneven spasmodic falls of glass, a susurration of hairpins on paper, and odd intense spills of orange henna or cobalt and copper”.  The destruction of the old transforms and creates room for the new in life.

‘Art Work’ is about the Dennisons’, an artistic family and their potential housekeeper Mrs Brown.  A generous designer artist wife and a self-absorbed neoclassical artist husband with two children, pave way for the growing artistic sensibilities of Mrs Brown. Her instincts for shocking effects and juxtapositions of colour get fine-tuned to a different artistic creation and she surprises the family with an exhibition of her work at a gallery.  This ‘untoward event’ for the artistic family unleashes the savage energy of the husband-wife artistic pair to newer realms in their own exploits of art.

The last story is the study of the self-loathing of an anorexic woman student Peggi consumed by bodily horrors with Matisse’s nude women, the play of colour and light in his works. The visiting professor Perry Diss, who holds Matisse sacred, has been accused of sexual assault by the student. In conversation with the dean of Women’s Studies, Dr Gerda Himmelblau, the professors while trying to decide about the outcome of the charge, experiences the cathartic planes of Matisse’s art.  Tiny unbalances in their own make-up trip into place and they part on a note wishfully hoping that journeying with art, Peggy too would find a release.

Juxtaposition of art and human life is what makes this triptych of fascinating short stories a must read.

This is just to say

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=19244&date=2017-05-21&pageid=1

       ‘This is just to say’

‘This is just to say’ is William Carlos William’s most famous poem. Who can convert everyday matter such as a slip or conscious trickery in quotidian domestic life into poetry! That’s WCW for us - a man who otherwise led a contrived life, working as a full time paediatrician, on the go making house calls at all times of the day in the first half of 20^th century America. He lived in the suburbs of New Jersey.  His was a conventional life interwoven with flashes of artistic talent, leavening the humdrum to sweetness and joy.

We are struck by the precise imagery of WCW’s poems. Nouns such as plums and icebox; adjectives such as sweet, cold and delicious, and verbs such as eaten, saving and forgive, combine to etch an episodic scene in the day to day turn of married life. A slice to savour, peep voyeuristically and imagine the sexual underpinnings of marital bliss.

Overriding it is the consistent sensibility of the poet to morph the mundane into something extraordinary and overwhelming like a still life painting!

There are numerous theories about this poem (it’s the fall of Adam and Eve who ate the forbidden fruit, or about repressed sexuality or  an apology for interfering with the schedule of a housewife’s culinary plan) which itself go to make this poem profound. It’s astonishing that something so simple can invoke such varied responses and engage the reader completely. The poem also incites abundant hilarity.

The next poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is an indelible image to think about. The varied connotation arise from the juxtaposition of colours in the poem, the image of the farm with domesticated poultry, the incurring workload, the abundance of nature, coming together of man - animal and machine, the necessity and miracle of simple machines and other endless pictures.

There is no denying the fact that WCW was an imagist poet. The concise and clear images that his lines put together are undoubtedly colourful, but realistic. The following poems are studies in this regard.

             

In these poems the subject is a fair woman. Her dilemma is loss of youth and vitality in the first poem. In the second she is coveted by a solitary man in a car (the poet) for her beauty and mystery.  The poet is well aware of the societal barriers which separate them, but cannot help the stirrings of desire for the pretty woman behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house.  What better picture of a beautiful small town romance that is never ending!

WCW sought his own idiom of poetry – free unrhymed verse and common vocabulary contrary to his contemporaries Ezra pound and TS Eliot. Their epic poems really rattled WCW, and he wanted to cut away from their formalized and stylistic tradition of writing poetry.  His own epic poem ‘Paterson’ imagines the city to be a man, and its progress with technology written in everyday American English.  

Now here is a poem that showcases his skill to reflect paintings. On a rainy night WCW came upon a noisy fire engine with the figure 5 flashing, tearing through the flooded street. The lasting impression of this encounter resulted in the poem ‘The Great Figure’. The poem was adapted into a modernist, cubist painting by his friend Charles Demuth.

WCW ‘s journey with painting also resulted in ekphrastic poems based on the works of  the Flemish painter, Pieter Brueghel, called ‘Pictures from Brueghel and other poems’. The reader can look up these poems and read them with the snapshots of paintings side by side.

What joy!  

Paterson by Jim Jarmusch

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=18930&date=2017-05-14&pageid=1

Goodbye cafes and bohemia, Hello downtown quotidian poetry!

The film ‘Paterson’, inspired by the epic eponymous poem by William Carlos Williams, introduces viewers to down town Paterson, NJ. Against this backdrop we listen to the poetry of Ron Badgett (of the New York School of poets) enunciated by the protagonist who’s also called Paterson. Writing before his shift on the bus as the driver, in the lunch break beside the Passaic Falls, or in his basement room at home, Paterson takes us through a solitude that is one with the world. It’s not poetry in a cafe or a watering hole amidst booze and brawl but in the solitariness of a man’s heart, singing a quiet song rooted in its rich dailiness.

The film is a paean to poetry, portrayed in the form of a poem that stays with us long after it is over. In the original poem, WCW imagines metaphorically speaking, the man to be the city, “Paterson lies in a valley under the Passaic Falls/its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He/lies on his right side, head under the thunder of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep /his dreams walk about the city where he persists/incognito......the subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river.”

The film continues to grow in our thoughts long after its over. At the heart of the movie lies a rare commodity – a beautiful marriage with his wife Laura that is held together by polarity and cords of understanding like a blue porcelain piece of beautiful china.

The director Jim Jarmusch says, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Select only things to steal that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

Jim takes his beloved poetry and philosophy to brush coat an industrial town of mixed ethnicity, similar to Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsberg. He celebrates town life, its sheer predictability, the everydayness of activity and small talk. The view of the town from a bus seat is theatrical; we are looking down into down town shops, back roads, bus depots and the intersections of lights. We pass through lanes and by lanes of small time America and its hub hub of life. The camera veers to the grand Passaic waterfalls, many a times through the film, etching poems on the cascading falls.

Jim coalesces lines of poetry from poets who lived in Paterson such as WCW, Allen Ginsberg or others whom he has admired and read widely.  Markedly most of the poets enumerated in the film led conventional lives interspersed with bursts of poetry inspired by their everyday experiences. The famous ‘Lunch Poems’ by Frank O’Hara is an example. There is a subtle hint at Emily Dickinson too, with her reclusiveness and disinclination to publish her poems, just like Paterson, a poet writing for himself to fulfil his own desire completely detached from things.

On the other hand, Paterson’s better half, Laura, harbours ambitions of becoming a country singer or owning a successful cupcake business. She is artistic and spends her time engaged in creative endeavours of cooking baking dress designing and painting. In the process her home has mushroomed into an artistic haven of color, design and gourmet recipes. She brings spice, distraction and disorder into her husband’s life that is otherwise a disciplined order of events each day. The recitation of WCW’s poem by Paterson in the film ‘This is just to say’ imparts that touch of domestic bliss, here, and completes the gilded frame.

The film is made up seven episodes or poetic stanzas starting Monday morning until the next week. The slow even pace sets in right at the beginning. Paterson wakes up with the morning sun rays streaming into their room, bathing their marital bed in a dappled light.  He kisses his wife, who shares her dream of having twins on one instance (this visual rhyme of twins repeats like a refrain through the film with Paterson encountering twins all over town), has his porridge and walks to the bus depot. He drives the bus the whole day through the town. People get in and off the bus and he listens in to their conversations. At the end of his shift he again walks home, shares a meal with Laura, talking about their day. Later he goes to his basement room and writes and reads poems before walking his dog Marvin, an English bulldog to a bar where he meets the bar owner - Doc and a couple of other regulars such as Marie and Everret. The entire sequence is repeated everyday with few variations.

The interlude of Paterson with the same characters lends gravitas to his persona. He is laconic, contained, peaceful and detached. Laura is verbose, dreamy, ebullient and a people’s person. His co-worker Donny is a constant complaint box and the bar owner is a traditionalist whose bar has a wall of fame where he celebrates the famous people of Paterson- providing a historical context to the place. The other couple in the bar – Marie and Everret bring in the drama – a relationship which is effervescent and dramatic.   Everret’s panache for histrionics and drama is a contrast to Paterson’s practicality and reserve.

Laura envisions a great poet in her husband and keeps cajoling him to print his poems and share them with the world. When finally she extracts a promise from the very reluctant and reserved Paterson to xerox his secret notebook at the end of the week , the director folds in a Freudian slip which makes Paterson leave his notebook on the living room sofa. Marvin plays truant and shreds Paterson’s secret poetry notebook when the couple go out to watch a film.

Paterson ends with, “Poems are just words on water” – it’s the magic and sheer delight of writing poems that’s important, what happens to them later is of no consequence. He meets a Japanese poet on a bench under the Passaic Falls, who gifts him a notebook to begin writing poems again and so the love affair with life and poetry begins anew!

Rushdian Matters

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=20114&date=2017-06-11&pageid=1

Rushdian Matters

Do you know why the characters in Salman Rushdie’s novels are monstrous, handicapped, grotesque and sometimes lovely bastards?  It’s because his stories are dealing with issues of identity crisis in an environment of multiculturalism, post-colonialism hybridity, multiplicity, dogmatic power of religions and economic disfiguration.

Another interesting paradox is that he himself straddles a multicultural space – born in India in the post-colonial period and living in the West, drawing from both Eastern and Western cultural traditions.

Thirdly, his agency of depiction is pretty intriguing. He uses magic realism (interplay of fact & fantasy) and chutnification of language to traverse this field of ambiguity. Allusions are drawn with ease, on one hand from classical literature and the other from pop culture. He surprises and disorients the reader with his abandonment and disregard for established code.

Welcome to Rushdian matters.

In conversation with Prema Rocha, professor of English Literature at St. Xavier’s Mapusa and writer of a book on literary criticism of Salman Rushdie’s works.

I would like you to elaborate on the title of your book ‘Shaping the World, Stopping it from Going to Sleep: The Novels of Salman Rushdie’.

Salman Rushdie is generally considered a remarkable contemporary writer. He addresses concerns that are pivotal to our times, like identity, tyranny and terrorism. He believes that writers who are apolitical offer their vote for the way things are. That his books have been mired in controversy has not deterred him from the compulsion to be politically expressive. And indeed, in his own work he takes sides, starts arguments, shapes the world and keeps it alert. The title is a quote from Rushdie, “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep”.

 What are the overall themes that prevail in Rushdie’s oeuvre? Name the novels that you have critically analysed in your book.

 Midnight’s Children is concerned with the newly independent India trying to find itself and assert its own identity. This new nation is grappling with religious, social, economic, political and linguistic concerns like the protagonist Saleem Sinai. Shame deals with politics in Pakistan. The Ground Beneath Her Feet explores issues like migration, corruption in India and pop music through a love story. The Moor’s Last Sigh juxtaposes multicultural Spain with a Bombay that is getting increasingly communal. Fury is Rushdie’s first novel set in America. It deals with migration, politics and art. Shalimar the Clown zooms in on Kashmir. It critiques communalism and terrorism. Rushdie’s targets include totalitarianism and oppression in its various avatars. His fiction largely narrates the Indian subcontinent in the 20^th century and its association with the world beyond.

How does myth, classical literature, popular culture and films interweave Rushdie’s novels? Give a prominent example from one of his books.

Rushdie is credited with carving out a space for the Indo-English imagination on the global map with Midnight’s Children. The book was a landmark. It inspired an entire generation of creative writers and forged new directions. A significant part of the galvanising energy of Rushdie’s texts is contributed by the inter-texts. Allusions to cinema, myth, epic, fable, fairytale, gossip, proverbs, superstition, popular songs and films, comics, advertisements as well as his own other work are integrated on his canvas. Rushdie’s love for Bombay cinema finds expression in Midnight’s Children. The motif of switched babies forms the basic plot of the text. So also, the pattern of amnesia from a blow to the head. These are typically formulaic fare in Hindi cinema. 

_{You have devoted a chapter each on Rushdie’s linguistic ebullience and English writing in India – tell us a little about it.}

_{Midnight’s Children put Rushdie on the map and Rushdie put Indian Writing in English on the global map like never before. This literary renaissance has been acknowledged by writers, somuchso that most of the writers of the present day are considered “Midnight’s Grandchildren”.  Shashi Tharoor pays Rushdie tribute when he calls him the “head of my profession”. In Indian writing in English, Rushdie is hailed for his “chutneyfication”. Unlike writers who avoided writing in English, in order to write in their native languages, Rushdie embraced English as yet another Indian language. Rushdie’s Angrezi boldly reworks English as a language of India. He taps into Indian English speech and story-telling techniques. He defamiliarizes English by bringing India into English as a strategy. For example, Hindi expression are literally translated as in “whatsitsname, or “madman from somewhere”.  And he defiantly and strategically doesn’t provide a glossary to this hybrid Indlish.}

_{You say that Rushdie’s non-fiction work forms a manifesto for his fictional writing.  How?}

_{That’s right. Rushdie has a significant number of articles and interviews. His non-fictional essays are a wonderful read. They range from musings on his own experiences, other writers, world issues, and much more. These essays provide valuable insights to the understanding of his fiction.}

How did the transformation from one kind of unpublished manuscript into another, that is, from an unpublished Ph.D. thesis into an as-yet-unpublished book manuscript take place?

I guess it really helps to have a good publisher.  All credit goes to the team. Publishing house Goa1556 did an excellent job. The affable Frederick Noronha is a one-man army when it comes to publishing in Goa. His concerted efforts have changed the publishing scape in our state.  Goa 1556 took care of everything when it came to technicalities, including the creative sketch for the book by Bina Nayak. The project is also associated with Golden Heart Emporium. I am grateful to the Directorate of Art and Culture for the scheme for Goan authors which supported the book. I consider it an honour to have Padma Shri awardee, author and educationist, Dr Maria Aurora Couto write the foreword to the book. She was one of the first critics to engage with Midnight’s Children way back in 1981.

It’s hard to pick up a dissertation and hear its author’s voice. Most of the time the author is quoting from other greats – critics, authors. Revising a dissertation is partly a matter of making the writer’s text speak up. Explain the process.

 It was Issac Newton who is credited with the statement, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Research, after all, builds upon previous research. It is imperative that one takes into account the body of existing work. Having said that, one has to keep one’s argument in focus and let one’s own voice and view be heard.

A wise dissertation director once counselled a doctoral student that the dissertation would be the last piece of his student writing, not his first professional work. Every editor at a scholarly publishing house knows this, too. How did you negotiate around this field?

That is so true! Research teaches you humility, among other things. Knowledge is expanding exponentially. In addition, the internet has changed everything. Prof K.S. Bhat, my Ph.D. supervisor and Professors Nina Calderia, Kiran Budkuley and Rafael Fernandes, my teachers at the Goa University provided valuable insights and timely suggestions. They did remind me that the completion of the Ph.D. marks the beginning of the journey. I realise now what they meant. And I try to keep writing!

 Speak about the targeted readership that will benefit from your scholarly book. 

 Being an academic endeavour, the book is aimed at a very specific readership viz teachers and students of Rushdie, those interested in Post Colonialism, Diaspora Studies, Indian Writing in English. I am happy to receive feedback from students who say the book has been of assistance to them. It also pleasantly surprises me when unexpected people stop to say they have seen the book at the wonderful Central Library or elsewhere.

There are very few who have the ability and courage to take on ‘Satan Rushdy’.  Prema Rocha is one of them.