Jaya Posts

Anil Menon’s review of Ian McEwan’s “Machines Like Me”

15 06 , 2019 No Comments

Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me is set in the past in which England lost the Falkand War and Alan Turing was still alive. The story is about Adam, an android, and its relationship with its owners. It is also a novel about Alan Turing and laying down of the theoretical principles of artificial intelligence. Ron Charles writing for the Washington Post ( 17 April 2019) says “…Mc­Ewan…is not only one of the most elegant writers alive, he is one of the most astute at crafting moral dilemmas within the drama of everyday life. True, contending with an attractive synthetic rival is a problem most of us won’t have to deal with anytime soon (sorry, Alexa), but figuring out how to treat each other, how to do some good in the world, how to create a sense of value in our lives, these are problems no robot will ever solve for us.” Sadly though this is a novel that has received a mixed reception. It also generated quite a hue and cry when Ian McEwan said in an interview that Machines Like Me was “not science fiction“. Nor did he have time “for conventional science fiction”. A month later in The Wired ( 19 May 2019) he clarified, “…actually I’ve read a fair amount of science fiction over a lifetime…I’d be very happy for my novel to be called science fiction, but it’s also a counterfactual novel, it’s also a historical novel, it’s also a moral dilemma novel, in a well-established traditional form within the literary novel,” he says. “I’m very happy if they want to call my novel science fiction, even honored. But it’s much else, that’s all I’m trying to say.” But by then articles such as “‘It drives writers mad’: why are authors still sniffy about sci-fi?” by Sarah Ditum ( Guardian, 18 April 2019) had been published. As Ron Charles says, “McEwan, who won the 1998 Booker Prize for Amsterdam, is a master at cerebral silliness. His previous novel, Nutshell, was a modern-day retelling of Hamlet from the point of view of an indecisive fetus. In that book and in this new one, McEwan knows just how to explore the most complex issues in the confines of the most ridiculous situations.” Author and computer scientist, Anil Menon, says in his review of the book:

It doesn’t help that McEwan’s alternate world is an implausible mess. Partly this is because McEwan gives many details, unwisely and often carelessly, to establish plausibility. For example, we learn that Charles’ car, a mid-60s’ vehicle, is a “British Leyland Urbala, the first model to do 1,000 miles on a single charge.” Since the novel’s 1940s more or less mirrors our 1940s, it means that in 20 years, McEwan’s world has gone from cars that run 15-20 miles/ gallon to a 1960s’ electric car with almost twice the mileage of a 2018 Tesla! On the other hand, we’re also told that Adam takes 16 hours to recharge on a standard 13 amp socket. Since Charles has already told us that “At thirty-two, I was completely broke,” it can only mean electricity costs next to nothing.

The real technical problem is that McEwan does not want to use a near-future setting. So he sets his novel in an alternate 80s’ world similar to our world, except for an accelerated development of technology after World War II. Turing is trivialised into a totalising genius responsible for practically every advance in computer science. The robot’s existential dilemmas were new in the 1940s, when Asimov wrote his tales, but McEwan seems to think they’re brand new. Turing sombrely informs Charles that “we don’t yet know how to teach machines to lie,” but didn’t robots supposedly pass the Turing test in the 1960s?

My criticism is not about “getting the science right”. It is about getting the psychology right. The Great Chain of Servitude — slave, serf, servant, employee and devotee — now includes a new subaltern: the robot. The stories we tell about robots are stories about our evolving understanding of personhood and servitude. History matters. By disrespecting history, McEwan reduces this understanding to a caricature.

Alas, Machines Like Me, is a dull book. In all likelihood no publisher would have taken it, if it hadn’t had McEwan’s name on it. Oh well!

15 June 2019

“Faber & Faber: The Untold Story: by Toby Faber

14 06 , 2019 No Comments

The big firms say that they intend to retain the imprints of the small publishers they absorb. But I doubt if that ever works for long. You might retain the imprint, but you must inevitably lose the elusive character of the individual firm, compounded by its proprietor’s personality and taste.

Geoffrey Faber in The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, 12 August 1939

Faber & Faber: The Untold Story by Toby Faber, grandson of the founder, Geoffrey Faber is a fabulous account of a publishing firm that is synonymous with setting the gold standard in literary publishing, including poetry. Toby Faber details this history by mostly presenting edited excerpts of correspondence from the official archives of the firm and presumably some from his family such as the diaries of Geoffrey Faber and his personal correspondence. Toby Faber’s commentary in the opening pages of every chapter and occasionally between the reproduced correspondence helps contextualise the moment in history. Faber is responsible for launching/ closely associated with the careers of many prominent writers and poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Ezra Pound, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Durrell, Tom Stoppard, Samuel Beckett, Vikram Seth, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Golding, Wilson Harris, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Barbara Kingsolver, Sebastian Barry, Gunter Grass, Harold Pinter, Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera, Peter Carey, DBC Pierre, Sally Rooney, and Anna Burns. Establishing the bedrock of this magnificent list of A-list authors can be attributed to Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot and the poet Walter de la Mare’s son, Richard, who were a part of Faber’s founding editorial team. They gave shape to the editorial policy of Faber & Faber and thus gave the publishing firm its distinctive identity of publishing excellent modern literature. Some of the other editors-at-large who joined the firm were musicians Pete Townshend of the WHO and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp.

In 2019 Faber is celebrating its ninetieth year. It was established on 1 April 1929 by Geoffrey Faber. Interestingly as this wonderful historical account describes, Faber & Faber arose like a phoenix from the ashes of Faber & Gwyer. A firm that had in turn been built by the distinguished lawyer, Maurice Gwyer* and Geoffrey Faber on the foundation laid by the Scientific Press, estd. 1880s. The Scientific Press had been established by Gwyer’s father-in-law, Sir Henry Burdett. This publishing business had been inherited by Sir Henry’s daughters, one of whom, Alsina, married Maurice Gwyer. Curiously or perhaps with some astute business sense, Geoffrey Faber persuaded the Maurice Gwyer to launch a magazine for nannies called The Nursing Mirror. Unfortunately as sometimes happens in businesses, the two partners fell out over what are keen strategies or sheer foolhardiness. Despite the steep learning curve Geoffrey Faber decided to reinvent himself and launch a new firm, Faber & Faber.

This ability to reinvent itself and respond to the changing times is embedded in the DNA of Faber & Faber. It is evident in the manner in which the firm took to publishing paperbacks although in principle for a long time remained a firm known for its hardback publications. It also at critical junctures of its history restructured itself and launched new firms such as Faber Music, Faber Academy, Faber Digital and Faber Factory. It also has a fine children’s literature list too. In the early years it also managed to “discover” new authors by encouraging T. S. Eliot to continue the publication of the literary journal Criterion. Later there was a fortuitous discovery in the slush pile of the manuscript originally called Strangers from Within submitted by William Golding, to be published as Lord of the Flies.

Faber & Faber is a superb history on how this publishing firm came to attain its legendary status. Extraordinarily it has retained its independence through its nine decades of existence. Toby Faber attributes this ability of the firm to hang on to its indepedence as being “lucky”. He says:

That repeated ‘luck’ points to something else: a publishing philosophy that, without ignoring commercial imperatives, has always focused on excellence and the long term, whether that applies to relationships with authors that last for decades, or to books that enter the literary canon. A philosophy like that can lead to books that continue selling; Faber’s backlist has given it the income as the core of its financial stability.

Philosophy alone, however, is not enough. It needs to be allied in good editorial taste.

Of course there have been extremely tense moments about Faber & Faber’s survival. In some particularly gloomy years the royalties earned from the musical adaption of T.S. Eliot’s poem Cats by Andrew Lloyd Weber kept the firm afloat. There have been conversations about mergers but ultimately the directors have steered Faber & Faber firmly to an even stronger footing. One of the notable moments in its history was when the widow of T. S. Eliot decided to support the firm. So while the Faber family holds a fifty percent stake in the company, Valerie Eliot joined the firm as a “sympathetic shareholder”.

Faber & Faber is known for its enviable stable of authors. Apart from those already mentioned, since 1990, Faber authors have won more Nobel prizes, the Man Booker, the Costa awards etc. While the book is a glowing account of a fiercely independent firm there are also moments of regrets such as losing out on publishing James Joyce and George Orwell. At times this history reads like an old boys publishing club that did occasionally publish women — Anna Burns was their first woman writer to win the Man Booker Prize in 2018. As Toby Faber points out that this win “itself [was] an indication of the firm having travelled a very necessary distance from the chauvinistic 1980s. The same could be said of Barbara Kingsolver’s victory in the Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction in 2010”. Be that at it may, Faber’s list is fantastic and makes every author proud to be a part of it. A testament to this is an excerpt of the correspondence between Indian author Vikram Seth and the then Managing Director Matthew Evans.

Author Vikram Seth to Matthew Evans, 28 May 1985

After we had lunch yesterday, it struck me that you would be a good person to send my novel in verse to. If you like The Golden Gate, you might want to do a British edition — and even if that doesn’t happen, reading it might somewhat increase your affection for a city that is — I promise — far from dreary and provincial.

I’ve told Anne Freedgood at Random House — who tells me that TCG is out at a few British houses — thatI’d like to send it to you, and she says that’s fine. ( She showed it briefly to Robert McCrum, but when he offered to consider it only for the poetry list, she refused. The book is fiction, and to put it on a poetry list would be to kill it.) [. . . ]

The book is due out in February 1986, and I can think of nothing more pleasurable than to appear simultaneously on the fiction lists of the British and American houses I most respect.

To read some more excerpts from the book, here is a link to the Guardian. To commemorate 90 years a fabulous collection of 90 short stories have been released.

Faber & Faber: The Untold Story is a wonderful, wonderful history of an iconic publishing firm.

14 June 2019

*Sir Maurice Linford Gwyer, GCIE, KCB, KCSI, KC (25 April 1878 – 12 October 1952) was a British lawyer, judge, and academic administrator. He served as Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University from 1938 to 1950, and Chief Justice of India from 1937 to 1943). He is credited with having founded the prestigious college Miranda House in 1948 in Delhi, India. Gwyer Hall, the oldest men residence for the university students is named after him. ( Source: Wikipedia )

Note: All pictures used in the gallery are off Twitter. I do not own the copyright.

Tuesday Reads (Vol 1): 11 June 2019

11 06 , 2019 No Comments

Dear Reader,

There are so many exciting new books being published that sometimes it is a tad challenging writing about them as fast as one is reading them. I have truly enjoyed reading the following books. Each one has had something special to offer.

The Remainder by Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zerán and translated by Sophie Hughes is a darkly comic road novel. It is about an unlikely trio in an empty hearse chasing a lost coffin across the Andes cordillera.  Felipe, Iquela and Paloma are the three friends who are in search of Paloma’s mother’s coffin. It was “misplaced” in the journey from Germany to Chile. Paloma’s mother passed away overseas but wanted to be buried in her homeland. It is a bizarre journey they embark upon, narrated by Felipe and Iquela. The three were young children and often refer to the referendum night of 5 October 1988 when the people voted to topple Pinochet. At one level the journey can be perceived as a bildungsroman but it is also a coming-to-terms moment for the three with their past. A dark past that cast a long shadow upon Chile. Alejandro Zambra has called such novels belonging to ‘the literature of the children’. It is probably pure coincidence but it oddly parallels a Bollywood film called Karwan in which too an unlikely trio go on a road trip to sort out a coffin mix-up that occured at the airport. The Remainder was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019 and was the winner of a PEN prize.  It is a remarkable book!

Another translation that I read but would possibly exist at the other end of the spectrum from the frenzied The Remainder is the quietly meditative The Forest of Wool and Steel by Japanese writer, Natsu Miyashita. It has been translated by Philip Gabriel who is better known for his translations of Haruki Murakami’s novels. Set in small-town Japan, it is about Tomura who is charmed by watching the piano tuner working on the school piano. He is convinced that this is the career he has to pursue. It is impossible to offer a gist of this beautiful novel. Suffice to say that a million Japanese readers who bought the book could not be wrong! Hitsuji to Hagane no Mori won the 2016 Booksellers novel and was also turned into a film. The English translation was published recently. It offers the confidence of one’s convictions to pursue a career that is out of the ordinary. The Forest of Wool and Steel is stunning for its peaceful stillness in an otherwise noisy world.

Saudade by Australian Suneeta Peres Da Costa is an equally gripping coming-of-age novella. It is set in Angola in the period leading up to its independence from Portugal. The young girl who narrates the story is of Indian origin. Her parents are Goans. Her father is a labour lawyer, working for the Ministry of Interior, preparing workers’ contracts. Her mother is a housewife. Saudade is a novel about domesticity and the impact the outside socio-political developments on the family. Saudade is also about the relationship between mother and daughter too. Caught between the different worlds of Portugal, Goa and Angola, the little girl, is finally packed off “home” to Goa by her mother. The little child experiences what her parents were never able to articulate — a sadness, a saudade, a lostness, a feeling of not having a place in the world. Saudade is a memorable story for it wraps the reader in its wistfulness, its sadness, its pain and it is not easy to extricate oneself from it for days after. Suneeta Peres Da Costa is a young writer worth watching out for. Hopefully one day she will write that that big inter-generational novel spread across continents. Let’s see.

More in the next edition of “Tuesday Reads”!

JAYA

11 June 2019

An interview with Ekarat

10 06 , 2019 No Comments

Recently Speaking Tiger Books published a collection of short stories called The Book of Love Stories by Ekarat. The book cover is illustrated with two thorny branches. Not exactly an enticing book cover. Yet the stories are a curious collection exploring a range of love. From that of marital love, extra-marital, innocent love shared by little children who are probably imitating adults to young lovers determined to be together cutting across barriers, including the terrifying one of religion. It is a collection that does not grip you from the word go and yet it is difficult to put down. There is something about the detached, seemingly unaffected, style of writing of the narrator which makes it difficult to put the book down.

Ekarat is an alter-ego, a self-created role model, with a million stories to tell. He has walked this Earth for forty bittersweet summers. He has been a travel magazine editor, film marketing executive, communications lecturer and salesman.

After reading the stories, I emailed the author. Here are lightly edited excerpts of an interview with him.

  1. Why did you opt to write short stories and not longer fiction?

Can I tell you the truth? Maybe it was the failure to complete a novel (two actually – in the last seven years) that made me give short stories a go.  In 2016, I had just given up midway on what I thought was a very provocative novel. I was disheartened. My friend Palash Krishna Mehrotra read a couple of short stories (one found its way into the book – “Maria”) and he pondered and pronounced that there was something here. That was the inception of the short story collection.  

2. How did you get into writing fiction? 

Since I can remember, I have been in love with storytelling. I know nothing else. I wrote my first book (unpublished, not sure about the whereabouts of the manuscript anymore) in 2002, just after college. It was an ambitious project – a short story collection that flowed like a novel. My first published novel was The Nothing Man (published by Rupa in 2011) written under my name Ajay Khullar. It was a story of redemption through evil.

3. Did you consciously make every story revolve around love? 

Not initially. I wrote the first few stories with the flow of what I had in mind, but when I saw that there was a thread of love running through these stories, I decided to pick up this thread and roll with it.

4. The different explorations of love are fantastic — from the little children in “Love has come to town”, the wife/lover in “Perizaad’s Lover”, to the besotted husband in “Wild Horses (Couldn’t Drag Me Away)” to the stunning “New Kid in Town”. Were these written at different moments in time or in quick succession? 

‘Love has come to town’ was among the initial stories, written a few years ago. The others were done in a span of eight-nine months. ‘The Point of Inflection’ was added to the collection last, when the book was already with the publisher.

5. Where do you draw the inspiration for your stories? 

Keep my eyes open and my ears close to the beat of my heart. Life provides a lot of material, enough to fill up volumes, if you pay attention. I also draw from my own life. Some of these stories are fictionalised depictions of real life love stories (mine and those that others told me).  

6. What is the most challenging aspect of writing a short story? 

Honestly, there was no struggle with this collection of short stories. While writing ‘The Book of Love’, I too was in love with a beautiful lady. It made writing these love stories that much easier. It just flowed.

7. Do you think being a travel journalist has made a qualitative difference to your fiction writing? 

One hundred percent yes. As a travel journalist you are also telling a story, of a place, of people. You are connecting people to these places. That’s what you also do in fiction, in storytelling.

8. In many ways travel writing and fiction help readers “escape” and experience different landscapes without moving from their chair. Yet, in what way are the rigours of writing distinct for these two forms? Are they demanding in in their own way? 

I think to write on travel and to write fiction is a dream job. And I think I’m very fortunate in that regard. I guess you have to have a keen sense of observation for both formats. I’ve had a great time doing travel journalism and I love writing fiction. You, though, invest very heavily when you write fiction (short stories or a novel) and sometimes it can be quite heart breaking – I abandoned two books after spending three years plus on each. It was a terrible feeling.

9. Who are the writers/journalists and poets who have influenced you? 

My biggest influence has been the late British writer Graham Greene. I believe a lot of the darkness in my writing comes from the formative years of reading Greene. Also Stephen King – a very effective storyteller who walks the balance of good quality writing and being extremely popular.

10. Why did you publish your stories using a nom de plume? 

My reasons for taking a Nom De Plume are very subjective. In my 20s I lived through some dark hours, hours which rolled into years. During these dark hours, I created an alter-ego, a role model, a sort of hero. Over the years I saw some bad days, mostly better. There was no constant in these years, except the idea of Ekarat. I took the name.

10 June 2019

Mira Jacob’s “Good Talk”

10 06 , 2019 No Comments

Award-winning author Mira Jacob‘s Good Talk is a graphic memoir. It was written after the extraordinary success of her 37 Difficult Questions From My Mixed-Race Son: “Are white people afraid of brown people?” published on BuzzFeed ( 8 June 2015). Though seemingly inspired by the questions her son posed to her incessantly about Michael Jackson, music and race but the Good Talk is also much more. It is much more than the conversations every sane and rational parent has with their children, let alone those of mixed parentage. It is all about the difficult conversations that are most often ignored even by adults. These are mostly revolving around race in America.

Mira Jacob’s Syrian Christian parents immigrated to America in 1968. So Mira and her brother were born and brought up in America and are Americans. Yet because of their brown skin colour the Jacob children have experienced racism at all levels whether as microaggression or explicity racist comments/attacks as the horrific one described in Good Talk of Mira Jacob being physically assaulted in public. This is quite unlike the America Mira Jacob’s Jewish husband, Jed Rothstein, has ever had to face as he is white.

To unpack all that exists in this exquisite graphic memoir will take an essay longer than the book itself! There is much to read, analyse, mull over and share. Many, many readers will have the same reaction that they did to Mira Jacob’s first book The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing — “This is a story about us and our family.” It is immaterial that Good Talk has been written by an American of East Indian / South Asian origin. This is a book that will resonate with readers of different nationalities. A fact Mira Jacob records in “I Gave A Speech About Race To The Publishing Industry And No One Heard Me” about the reaction of readers to her first novel.

…really, it happened a lot. It happened with people of all ages, races, and genders. It happened at readings and it happened in emails and a lot of times it was just a thank you for writing this book — but just as often, it was someone commenting on the family dynamics. “I know you are Indian,” they would say, “but really, this is about my family, the Italians. My family, the Jews. My family, the Greeks. The Dominicans. The Koreans. The Irish.”

In a fabulous interview on Longreads, Mira Jacob speaks of the title, particularly within the context of parenting in this new world. ( “Imagine Us, Because We’re Here: An interview with Mira Jacob, March 2019)

The title is really tongue in cheek because so many of the talks in here are not anything you would ever call a good talk. For me, it’s almost like when you step away from a conversation that you know has gone bafflingly off-the-rails and you’re like, ‘good talk, good talk’ you know? You just say it to yourself in this way that’s like, ‘that was a disaster, I don’t know how anyone is going to recover from that one!’ Mostly I would leave conversations with him and I would be like, ‘that’s another five years of therapy right there.’

This is the really frustrating thing about being a parent especially in this moment, but I imagine all parents in every moment feel this — that despite all your carefully laid ideas about how you’re going to grow a small human into a big one, it’s just a disaster. It’s a shitshow left and right. You’re doing your very very best and it is so not even close to enough.

Good Talk must be read by everyone. This is not a memoir meant only for adults. Share it widely.

10 June 2019

Book Post 38: 26 May – 8 June 2019

10 06 , 2019 No Comments

Book Post 38 includes some of the titles received in the past few weeks. Wherever available Amazon’s Kindle widget has been embedded in the blog post. It will allow you to browse through the book before you decide to buy it.

10 June 2019

A request from award-winning Canadian children’s writer, JonArno Lawson

09 06 , 2019 No Comments

Asking for a friend. JonArno Lawson is a Canadian writer who is doing research on storytelling that’s nonverbal, or close to nonverbal. Storytelling that’s done primarily through pictures, scrolls, frescoes, bas reliefs, silent films, stained glass windows, but also pantomime, or shadow puppets (without voices) – parades or parade floats for festivals, etc.  He is also interested in objects and pictures that focus on a certain moment in a story, in either a religious or secular context. An example might be the Christian Nativity scene Weihnachtspyramide of Germany (a candle carousel lit at Christmas).  Any information you might have would be of interest to him. Please feel free to contact him  at:   JONARNOL@yahoo.com  Also please feel free to circulate this post.   

A few years ago JonArno Lawson’s award-winning wordless picture book Sidewalk Flowers was distributed to every Syrian refugee who arrived at Canadian shores.

9 June 2019

Jeanette Winterson “Frankisstein: A Love Story”

07 06 , 2019 No Comments

Nothing — said Professor Stein — it tells us a great deal about Saudi Arabia.

Professor Stein, as you know, the Hanson robot, Sophia was awarded citizenship of Saudi Arabia in 2017. She has more rights than any Saudi woman. What does this tell us about aritifical intelligence?

…

Will women be the first casualties of obsolescence in your brave new world?

On the contrary, said Professor Stein, AI need not replicate outmoded gender prejudices. If there is no biological male or female, then –

…

She says, Professor Stein, you are the acceptable face of AI, but in fact the race to create what you call true artificial intelligence is a race run by autistic-spectrum white boys with poor emotional intelligence and frat-dorm social skills. In what way will their brave new world be gender neutral — or anything neutral?

…

Even if, even if the first superintelligence is the worst possible iteration of what you might call the white male autistic default programme, the first upgrade by the intelligence itself will begin to correct such errors. And why? Because we humans will only programme the future once. After that, the intelligence we create will manage itself.

And us.

Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein: A Love Story is a modern retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankstein. The story begins at the Villa Diodati (1816) on the shores of Lake Geneva a well-known scene for it is the one in which 19-year-old Mary Shelley conceived of her novel Frankenstein. Two hundred years on Frankisstein is about Ry, short for Mary, Shelley, a transgender medical professional self-described as “hybrid”, meeting Victor Stein, a celebrated professor of artificial intelligence, during a visit to a cryonics facility in the Arizona desert — a setting that exists in reality called Alcor Life Extension Foundation but is never mentioned by name in the novel. there is a professional and a sexual attraction between the two scientists.

The novel makes this overarching connection between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with modern science advancing sufficiently to enable those who wish to, to have a sex change to the application of AI. Frankisstein starts off really very well but after a while fizzles out particularly when The Romantics are clumsily described. Byron and Polidori come away nowhere like the characters one has known them to be and the Shelleys too are an odd couple. The descriptions of Mary Shelley come across as too modern or more as if a twenty-first century interpretation has been imposed upon her character.

Nevertheless artifical intelligence is gaining significance by leaps and bounds every single day. Real life is rapidly morphing into something out of a science fiction story. AI research is helping these initiatives in many, many ways. Some more apparent than others but AI is most certainly here to stay. “The world is at the start of something new,” Winterson writes, “what will happen … has begun.” It is a brave new world but with its many challenges. The crux of Frankisstein is well articulated in the conversation quoted above. It is an unnerving thought when expressed so clearly to have a new world created by a handful of AI scientists propogating their own biases — knowingly or unknowingly, we will never know!

Jeanette Winterson explores her pet themes in Frankisstein of gender, sexuality, and individual freedom. These issues are gaining importance in a technologically driven world. It is rapidly transforming the reality as we know it into something that is increasingly unpredictable as the evergrowing and controlling presence of computers increase in the human world.

Frankisstein is a curious novel that some may find readable and others a tad alarming. But it is a novel meant to be read.

7 June 2019

“It’s Not About the Burqa” edited by Mariam Khan

05 06 , 2019 No Comments

I am a woman, but I am also a Muslim and a person of colour, and these identities cannot be separated. I can’t set aside being a woman of colour when it comes to being a feminist and I can’t set aside being a Muslim woman when it comesto being a feminist.

It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race is a superb collection of essays exploring what it means to be a Muslim woman today. The anthology has been edited by Mariam Khan. The idea was sparked off by British politician David Cameron’s comment in the Daily Telegraph which reported him to consider Muslim women to be traditionally submissive. It sparked off a Twitter storm where #TraditionallySubmissive quickly spread. While watching this annoyance unfold online, Mariam Khan realised she had to do something as she kept reading these perceptions “about” Muslim women. It resulted in this magnificent anthology. In her introduction Mariam Khan says:

It’s Not About the Burqa brings together Muslim women’s voices. It does not represent the experiences of every Muslim woman or claim to cover every single issue faced by Muslim women. It’s not possible to create that book. But this book is a start, a movement: we Muslim woman are reclaiming and rewriting our identity. Here are essays about the hijab* and wavering faith, about love and divorce, about queer identity, about sex, about the twin threats of a disapproving community and a racist country, and about how Islam and feminism go hand in hand. Every essay in this book is unfinished, because each one is the beginning of a very necessary conversation.

*It’s worth pointing out at this stage that though ‘hijab’ is now more commonly used to describe a scarf that covers the head, in the Quran, the word ‘hijab’ denotes ‘partition’ or ‘curtain’. ‘Hijab’ can also refer to a standard of modesty.

It’s Not About the Burqa is a magnificent book for the stories it shares are no different from any other feminist publication. The preoccupations of the contributors are like that of any other woman — challenges of being a single woman, voicing an honest opinion and facing the consequences of it, single parenting, childcare, sexuality, negotiating life while encountering patriarchal structures on a daily basis, cultural patriarchy and #MeToo. It even recognises the problematic challenges created by “Well-meaning feminists [who] are often the people who perpetuate an exclusionary feminism that centres their experience as universal.” Most importantly the contributors to this book do manage to address the ignorant remark made by David Cameron and one that is unfortunately echoed by many others too. The essayists do it magnificently by sharing their experiences and opinions. The essayists have strong voices that will resonate with many readers, not necessarily only Muslims. As Mona Eltahawy says in her essay upon discovering feminist books in her university library in Jeddah:

Those books were irresistible. And they terrified me. So much so that I would pick them up, read a few pages, put them down in fear and walk away, only to be drawn back again the next day. I was terrified because I knew on a visceral level that those books — that feminism — would unravel something that I needed, something that would change me forever.

It’s Not About the Burqa will do this for many more readers too.

5 June 2019

Tishani Doshi’s “Small Days and Nights”

05 06 , 2019 No Comments

I had been prepared for ugliness because that’s what grows in India, sprouts and flourishes like the hair on a dead person. But the space in which you from adult to child, that leaf-thin whiplash, that I had not expected.

…

I do not need the freedom I imagine I need.

Dancer, poet, writer and literary critic Tishani Doshi’s second novel Small Days and Nights is about thirty-something Grace who is half-Indian, half-Italian. Upon her mother’s death she discovers she has a younger sister Lucia. Lucia has Down’s syndrome which their Italian father insists on referring to as “Mongoloid”. Grace decides to take charge of her life and one of her first decisions is to move her sister home. This despite protests from Lucia’s Teacher at the home. The sisters move to a home their mother had bought many years earlier for a song. Now it is considered to be prime property. Ten acres of land with a detached house by the sea. Grace relies upon a young girl from the village called Mallika to help her manage the house and Lucia and the many stray dogs they seem to have become responsible for. This is a domestic scene that is quietly idyllic. It is a feminist utopia with no men in the household. Although men from the village come to Grace regularly seeking funds and offering unsolicited advice. The sisters also get unwelcome visitors like hostile property brokers.

Small Days and Nights focuses on a tiny slice of domesticity, a world that is usually invisible to most, at least in literature but is all around us. There is something reassuring to know that women’s fiction can make matters of “little” importance such as “caregiving”. Even the frustration that Grace feels for Lucia one day and vents it upon her younger sister by becoming physically violent is understandable to those who are caregivers 24×7. Caregiving is a relentless and an unforgiving responsibility but to those on the outside incidents like this became an occasion to pass judgement. Whereas it is far more complicated than it looks. The outcome is that Lucia is taken away from Grace’s care and back to the home.

While it has the makings of an internationally acclaimed novel there are moments in Small Days and Nights which are bewildering such as the act of Grace taking Lucia out of the home where she was well provided for and Lucia was obviously at ease. Why was it necessary to remove Lucia from her comfortable environs? Or an equally inexplicable act of Grace taking off for long weekends to the nearest city, Chennai, to be with her friends. Wanting time for oneself is a self-preservation act which is necessary for every caregiver but taking time out like this can only be managed if there are reliable people to step in while the primary caregiver is away. Caregiving is a responsibility and not a noble act. It is a constant in one’s life and impossible to take a break from even with support staff to help with the minute-to-minute supervision. And as Grace discovers to her dismay that once she was away Lucia was not being provided for instead she had been abandoned by the maid. Another cause for friction between Teacher, the villagers and Grace.

Small Days and Nights has a way of consuming one with a seemingly insignificant women’s domestic drama but lingers for much longer for the larger issues it raises such as what is the definition of a household, of a family, of relationships, of love etc? The responsibility of caregiving is a thankless task where every caregiver needs their safety valve moment without also having to tackle the judgement passed upon them by outsiders. It forces conversations upon readers about women and their world that would otherwise not under ordinary circumstances be considered as worthwhile.

Small Days and Nights is an unforgettable novel.

5 June 2019

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