January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Dilip Chitre is and Indian poet, artist and filmaker. He has published thirty books, five of which have been translated into German. He has won several prizes and awards.
I have been drawing, sketching, and painting since my early childhood when I also started playing with words. My father collected books of all sorts and he being a printer and publisher by profession, some of the books he collected were examples of excellence in book production— illustrated books, art books, atlases, almanacs, catalogues, photographic books—and so on. They fascinated and intrigued me. I spent hours browsing through them. They were the beginning of my visual education as well as my verbal education.
I used to spend a lot of time in my father’s printing press and his master printer, Baldev Bhoi would give me tins of printer’s ink with their little left-over contents. I would also get left over cut pieces of various sizes and kinds of paper. These were the first art material I used. From Baldev I learnt how to mix inks to produce secondary colours and shades from red, blue, yellow, white, and black. Making different kind of greens by blending blue, yellow, red, and black was my favourite learning exercise. We had lots of trees and plants in our surroundings and the varieties of green I saw there made me want to reproduce many of them.
My father purchased an 8 mm movie camera and a projector, as well as a box camera, and being the eldest of siblings I got a chance to make five-minute silent movies and to make black and white portraits and landscapes, action snapshots and images of monuments. I used a baby pram to take tracking shots and pans and zooms that were not possible to shoot with the fixed focus lens of the camera. I was already innovating techniques to overcome the limitations of the basic equipment in my hands.
In the 1950s, after my family moved from the idyllic princely state capital Baroda to the congested big city then called Bombay, our financial circumstances changed for the worse. I could no longer afford to use water colours or fine quality pastels or crayons or pencils. I started writing poetry which costs much less to practise than the visual arts. However, I continued to work out charcoal drawings, pencil sketches, and pastel compositions often scouring the city at night in search of subjects: Irani restaurants, suburban railway platforms, beaches, and even cemeteries and crematoria.
During my late teens, I made friends with like-minded poets who were also visual artists. All of them were much older than me—-in their twenties or early thirties. Arun Kolatkar was one of them. Through Arun I met Bandu Waze, Ambadas, Ramesh Samartha, and Baburao Sadwelkar. I started visiting the Artists’ Aid Centre at Rampart Row, the Jehangir Art Gallery, and the campus of the Sir J.J. School of Arts. I met very senior academic artists such as Shankar Palsikar who liked my work despite my not being a trained artist, as well as the then upcoming professional artists such as Mohan Samant and Vasudev Gaitonde.
A little later, I met Bal Chabda and started observing artists at work in his Gallery ‘49 on Bhulabhai Desai Road. My friend Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, now a senior art critic, introduced me to Ebrahim Alkazi and his theatre group. I made friends with Nooruddin or ‘Nicky’ Padamsee and his younger brother Akbar Padamsee, the painter.
Bombay of the 1950s whetted my appetite not only to see art but also to practice it myself. I worked on paltry salaries as a tutor in two colleges and as a sub-editor in a daily newspaper. Acceptable quality art material still remained beyond my means. It was only when I went to Ethiopia in 1960 as a high school teacher of English in secondary schools that I got a chance to handle oil colours. In one of my homes there, I painted a mural on the wall of the living room, much in the spirit of prehistoric cave artists.
Back in Bombay in 1963, I returned to the cramped space of the big city once again. Wanting to live independently of my joint family, I lived with my wife and my small son in leased rooms in different parts of the city, eleven months being the standard period of lease. Living space competed and collided with working space, but now I had corporate jobs that I was forced to take up to pay exorbitant rents and support my small family with a growing son.
Undaunted, in 1969 I purchased twelve large canvases—-the largest was 180cmx180cm—-oil colours, linseed oil, turpentine, and a set of brushes to start painting the way I had always wanted to. My first one-man show was held in the now defunct Gallery Rampart on Rampart Row. I shared the gallery space with Bhai Patki, who was my colleague in an advertising agency where he was Art Director and I was Chief Copywriter. This show opened on September 17, 1969—-my thirty-first birthday.
Two of my twelve canvases were purchased by Air India International on the first day of the show: Green Divided by Itself and Erotic Textures. Some of my titles irritated The Times of India art critic, Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni enough for him to comment on the title A Painting for God’s Bedroom as frivolous, though The Sapphire Symphony the diagonally placed 180cmx180cm work dominated by subtle cubes of cobalt, ultramarine, and cerulean blue with a large, off-centre, vermilion dot was generously called by him a masterpiece. I still recall Akbar Padamsee telling me that the dot, instead of being vermilion, should have been cadmium orange to make the painting perfect. The greatest compliment I got, however, was from Professor Shankar Palsikar—-revered as a Guru by his art students. He came with his students, saw the entire exhibition, and said to me half-addressing everybody within earshot, “ I wanted my students to see how a genuine artist dares!”
I was vastly encouraged by the overwhelming response to my first public show, but I did not dare to take the plunge into the uncertain life of a full-time painter yet. My job in advertising gave me a chance to script, edit, and direct ad films just then; and I needed practice in that medium before I could realize my dream of making independent documentary and feature films on themes of my choice.
Later, I switched from advertising to the position of Creative Executive in the Art Department of the Indian Express Group of Newspapers. I contributed articles and edits to the paper, too (e.g. Editor S. Mulgaonkar asked me to write an obituary tribute to Pablo Picasso that appeared as the second edit on the editorial page on the day following the news of Picasso’s demise).
In September 1975, I joined the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa along with about twenty writers from as many countries. When I went into the artist’s materials shop in downtown Iowa City, I was surprised to find two of my poet colleagues—-Peter Clarke from Cape Town, South Africa and Ahmed Muhammad Imamovic from Bosnia-Herzegovina buying paints and canvases. It struck me that the three of us could hold a show of our paintings in Iowa City and in a flash I thought we should create a new interactive art form in the spirit of jazz-—the quintessential American genre of music. Peter and Ahmed agreed enthusiastically.
I coined the term Triple Triptych for the new form of painting. Each one of us was to do one initial painting and the other two were to improvise on the same theme in their own style. The size of the three paintings was to be uniform. As the space allotted to us by the University of Iowa’s museum of modern art was limited, we could only exhibit three triple triptychs ( nine paintings in all) plus some of our individual works.
The show was successful beyond our expectations. The President of John Deere Incorporation, a giant multinational company that manufactures tractors and other farming equipment, purchased a triptych entitled Non-migratory Birds for the company’s headquarters at Moline, Illinois that has a formidable collection of paintings and sculptures. Each of us sold some works. The Des Moines Register Weekly carried a cover story on the new art form—Triple Triptych that was credited to us.
I returned to India at the beginning of 1978 but resigned from The Indian Express, where I had a lien on my job during the Emergency, to work independently as a writer, artist, and filmmaker. I was consultant to a small advertising agency owned by a friend and wrote scripts for short films for another.
In 1980, I travelled with two other writers—-the late Nirmal Verma and U.R.Ananthamurthy—-to the then Soviet Union, Hungary, West Germany, and France to explore possibilities of reciprocal literary exchange through translation. The visit gave me a chance to visit legendary art museums such as the Hermitage, the Louvre, the Berlin museum, the Alte and the Neue Pinakothek as well as the Lembachhaus in Munich, the Impressionist museum in Paris— and so on.
Seeing art on such a scale actually disoriented me in the end. When I tried to fall asleep, I saw such an involuntary cascading slide show of random images of paintings that I was unable to stop. My brain was fatigued by the art I saw. I was like a starving man from a famine-stricken land invited to a gourmet feast that turned him into a glutton who ended up with indigestion. From then on, I learnt to savour art by avoiding to see too much of it in a short time, something that I had already been doing with literature and cinema.
In the 1980s I decided to focus my energies on making a full length feature film to realize a crying creative need. I knew by then that cinema was the most expensive medium of self-expression and that even to make a small budget feature film, I would need to raise a few lakh of rupees. I decided to take my chance by entering a screenplay in the annual scriptwriting competition of the National Film Development Corporation. I paid five thousand rupees to my friend, Bhau Padhye and purchased the first option on adapting his short story Godam before I set out to work on the screenplay.
I spent a whole year working on my script and in the process spent all my meagre savings. In 1982, my script won the NFDC’s national scriptwriting award which carried a cash prize of Rs 10,000 and, more importantly, a guarantee of 100% finance if I wanted to make the film myself.
Friends such as Satyadev Dubey and Govind Nihalani agreed to work without fees and I found an exceptional Art Director in Uday Joshi, a practising architect. My son Ashay was an apprentice cinematographer learning under Nihalani and my wife Viju looked after costumes and properties. My daughter-in-law Rohini worked as my script and continuity assistant. Several young and eager people wanted to assist me as apprentices and, always a teacher, I took as many of them on board as I could.
NFDC bureaucrats were reluctant to let me make the film and created a lot of hurdles. I had planned to shoot the film in early 1983 before the summer began because the location I had chosen was intolerably hot and dry from mid-April to June. I borrowed Rs 100,000 at an exorbitant rate of interest from the market and started the film. I presented a fait accompli to NFDC and eventually they released part of the budget and continued to release funds till the film was completed.
I finished shooting Godam in two schedules amounting to a total of thirty-four days and finished dubbing and post-production in ten days. It took us a month to edit the film. Alain Jalladeux of Les Festival des Trois Continents chose Godam as the official Indian entry in the Nantes Festival—as it is known. However, the NFDC bungled again by not sending the film to France in time for the festival and it was shown the next year, 1984, when it won the Prix Special du Jury for Direction. I was 46 when this happened.
My award for Godam was announced by the festival jury on December 4, 1984 and on that very day the media started bringing in initial reports of the horrible industrial disaster in Bhopal, where I lived with my family then. My son Ashay lived with us in my bungalow opposite Bharat Bhavan and his wife Rohini was six months pregnant. The two—or rather three—of them were in the city where thousands were believed to be dead, or maimed and crippled for life. Bhopal was cut off from the world. There was no way I could communicate with Ashay who was not only my only son but also my Chief Assistant on the Godam project. Viju, my wife, was as helpless as me. She was waiting in Mumbai for me to return from France.
Our small family world was shattered. Eventually, Ashay and Rohini flew to Mumbai and were immediately examined by several medical experts. As for treatment, none of them had a clue. A homeopath who had clinics in both Mumbai and Pune and had long queues of patients at either place, gave Ashay an out of turn priority in his Pune clinic. That is how we moved to Pune.
My tenure at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal as Director of its poetry centre was brief but extremely stimulating. In that multi-arts complex—the brain child of Ashok Vajpeyi, the Secretary of the Bharat Bhavan trust—-I had for colleagues the painter and thinker J. Swaminathan and the theatre director and producer B. V. Karanth. Bharat Bhavan became the hub of creative activity in the fine arts. The cream of Indian musicians, dancers, singers, actors, painters, potters, sculptors, ceramicists, and poets visited and presented their work at Bharat Bhavan. If the terrible Bhopal disaster had not affected, uprooted, and traumatized my own family, I would have continued longer there.
However, my son’s lung capacity was reduced overnight to a mere 40% due to exposure to the lethal gas— methyl isocyanate. No physicians knew how to handle the effects of MIC or reverse them. We moved to Pune where a homeopathic physician offered us the only hope of treatment for Ashay, Rohini, and their unborn child. In 1985, I resigned from Bharat Bhavan and decided to settle in Pune. Already suffering from chronic hypertension and unstable angina, I had to undergo an emergency angioplasty in 1989. That was the next turning point in my creative career.
The only way I bounce back in adverse times and difficult circumstances is by painting or writing in reaffirmation of my faith in life and its indomitable creativity. Crises spur me on, sooner or later. I write poetry and create art mostly in self-defence or in search of self-realization. The whole outside world impinges on my creative conscience with its political conflicts and cultural stagnation. I seek my way out by going into myself and re-emerging with what seems to me a way of saying I am.
From 1985 till this day, I found in Pune a whole range of visual images that came out on paper, wood, and canvas. I am a senior member of Friends of Visual Arts in Pune, an informal group of artists working in different media, in different styles, and using different techniques. We hold group shows in Pune and over the years we have established our presence. On my sixtieth birthday in 1998, Friends of Visual Arts held a special exhibition in my honour. Two years later, Bhaskar Hande curated my one-man show at the Solo Art Gallery at Churchgate in Mumbai. It was called Paintings of Bhakti.
My present show is the first presentation of my work by a reputed professional gallery. On view here are my works of the last twenty-three years. Friends who wish to remain backstage are behind this exhibition of works selected out of over a thousand drawings, sketches, and paintings that use a variety of media and surfaces: oil and/acrylic on canvas, canvas board, and paper; watercolour on paper; crayons and pastels on paper; marble dust, crushed stone, and epoxy resin on canvas; oil on wood; mixed media on canvas and paper; charcoal, pen, and pencil on paper—-and so on.
I am self-taught, self-driven, and seek self-realization through art.
However, I am not a self-proclaimed artist.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Samuel Rutter is an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne. He lives in Brunswick West and has an ardent passion for all things Latin American.
Box Hill
The beer was sitting uneasily in my stomach. Carl had the window of the taxi down as far as it would go, letting the air hit him full in the face. We rounded the corner and made it halfway up Whitehorse Road before the meter ticked over and we had to tell the cab driver that this was as far as we could afford. He pulled over almost immediately and rounded up the figure, the doors still locked as Carl handed him some notes and I left sweaty coins on the dashboard. He could count it if he liked, it was all there. I thanked the driver, without thinking why, and Carl was already on the footpath heading towards a service station in the distance when I slammed the taxi door shut.
Carl always got this way when he came back from his trips: impatient, brooding, nocturnal. I caught up to him and put my arm around his shoulder. His steps were surer than mine, although it was my neighbourhood. I had drunk too much beer.
Every time one of us came back we’d do the same thing. With the passing of the years, it was something we held on to as old school mates. We’d meet somewhere near Melbourne Central then head to a nearby bar where we’d drink beers by the jug until someone got hungry. So then we would set off for Chinatown looking for the same cheap restaurant we’d eaten at last time. We never found it, but quickly settled on one that might have been it or looked just as disreputable. There we’d eat three course banquets and wash them down with watery Asian lagers recommended by the waitresses. As the years went on, these nights began to end earlier and earlier; some had work the next day that now mattered to them. Work never mattered much to me, and even less to Carl. He didn’t have a job anyway; he was just back from South America.
As I shifted my weight from my feet to his shoulders, I told him how the others were turning into suits, how they now had office jokes and not much else to say. How they had changed, or maybe how they hadn’t changed but had stopped pretending to be something they weren’t. Carl agreed with me, and told me that I hadn’t changed, that I was doing different things but I was still the same. Even when things are different they’re the same I told him.
We were now past the church with signs covered in Korean writing and walking in the lights of the service station. We didn’t have to watch for traffic or lone trams rolling into the terminus as we crossed the road. It was past four in the morning and there are no cars, not even taxis, at that hour on a Monday in Box Hill.
I told Carl we should walk up through the mall as I wanted to go to the ATM on our way through. The mall joins the old Whitehorse Plaza with Box Hill Central, the bigger shopping centre set above the train station. Both of them are part of a chain of shopping centres that nearly went under last year. They are now joined as one, Whitehorse Plaza has been completely refurbished and is no longer the dark old cavern it used to be. I was too young to remember it first-hand but I got lost once in the supermarket there when I was about three. It was the lady from two houses down who found me and had them put an announcement over the loudspeaker for Dad to come to the service desk. Her name is Margaret, she used to be a nun and she still lives two houses down but I used to call her the Bird Lady, for the huge aviary of quails, finches and budgies along the back fence of her garden. To reach the bank, we passed through a neatly paved area where they had torn down a wooden gazebo overgrown with wisteria. They tore it down because men and women in tracksuit tops, jeans and runners used to drink there well before noon and smoke rollies in front of their children.
Carl hung back by the glass doors as I pulled cash from the metal slot in the wall. I’d lost the habit of using a wallet along with my actual wallet when travelling through Europe, so I just stuffed the two plastic notes into my pocket along with the bankcard, driver’s license and train ticket. My other pocket was reserved for a single house key and my mobile phone.
We walked by the TAB, with its tattered receipts and betting forms littering the pavement outside its locked doors, and Carl still wasn’t talking. I wasn’t feeling much better than in the taxi but I was no longer stumbling, the walk and the air putting an end to the spinning. It’s those dodgy restaurants every time it’s the same I told Carl and he said I ought to be used to it after twenty-one years and no wonder I hated the Chinese food in Europe, it just didn’t have that taste of home and that I must be the only white guy still living in Box Hill. I told him I was born here before it changed and he asked me if I could even remember that, if that even meant anything and so I told him if he didn’t like my neighbourhood he could fuck off back to the dead centre where he came from. And that must have hit on something he’d been sitting on for a very long time because he began to talk then and he spoke uninterrupted for what seemed like an hour, probably because I was drunk, but he spoke and I listened.
He said it’s not a question of like or dislike because you take your home with you whether you like it or not. He told me he’d left the desert behind years ago but that he still found the desert everywhere he went. Even when things are different they’re the same he told me. And then he told me about the ants. He said that in the desert, the sand is red, but red like it is nowhere else in the world. Out there in the day, he told me, it looks like there is nothing alive because there’s no vegetation and the wind leaves the sand rippled like a rusted sheet of corrugated iron. But there are ants out there, he said, not little black ants like the ones down here but ants as big as your thumb, and they live in this heat and build anthills as tall as a child. So all day these ants go about their business, using their six feet to move quickly over the scorching surface in a single file, working together. But at dusk this desert turns into an icy tundra and the ants have to retreat underground, where the heat stays trapped and doesn’t seep back up to the stars. The ants march back, he told me, they march back in single file, and one by one they climb up the mound and then down into the hole, down into the warm earth where they’re safe from the cold. This column of ants heads down, all except the last one, the last ant in the single file. That’s because this ant gathers together a clod of sand and pushes it up the anthill, stopping the opening with it so the cold can’t make its way into the nest. This one ant stays behind and stops up the opening and doesn’t go down into the warmth with the rest of the ants. It finishes its task and then does nothing. It sits there in the growing dark, waiting for the cold of the desert night to kill it.
All this time we kept walking, past the chemists where the signs were no longer in English and Italian but English and Mandarin, or English and Vietnamese, or Mandarin and Vietnamese, and past the stationery and gift shops and internet cafés, past the two dollar shops and the restaurants. The restaurants weren’t too different from the ones we went to in Chinatown, but at this time of the morning they weren’t lit up and didn’t smell of ginger or ginseng or shallots but like burnt oil and spoilt wantons. In the windows of the Yum Cha dens the metal hooks hung empty; only hours ago sides of pig and chicken feet and whole ducks dangled from them, glazed and crisp with the fat forming congealed stalactites threatening to fall as the night wore on. They would all have been full. Carl sucked on a cigarette.
We crossed the road, walked down Station Street and into Harrow Street, coming up against the huge, concrete Centrelink building. I started to tell Carl about Baudelaire and the swan but it didn’t come out right because I started to feel like I needed to vomit and next to Centrelink is the cracked white weatherboard house, which now has its window frames painted bright blue and I told Carl that’s where Mum lived for a while after she left and Carl nodded.
We weren’t a hundred metres from my house now; we were turning into my street. I was tired, my feet ached and my guts churned again. I was tired, but I wasn’t thinking about my house or my neighbours, the Hong Kong family whose grandma still called me Boy after all these years. I was thinking about what Carl had said. I pushed the key into the lock and we echoed through the hallway, collapsing finally into the couches. I knew Carl was tired too, but I also knew he wouldn’t sleep. He’d lie on the couch for a couple of hours perhaps, drink plenty of water. But as day broke, before the house stirred, he’d go, leaving the front door ajar to spare the clash of wood on wood.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Laksmi Pamuntjak is the author of two poetry collections, Ellipsis (one of The Herald UK’s Books of the Year 2005) and The Anagram; a treatise on violence and mythology entitled Perang, Langit dan Dua Perempuan (War, Heaven, and Two Women), and a collection of short stories, The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art. Pamuntjak also translated and edited Goenawan Mohamad: Selected Poems and Goenawan Mohamad’s book of aphorisms under the title On God and Other Unfinished Things. She is also the co-founder of Aksara, a bilingual bookstore in Jakarta. Pamuntjak is currently at work on her first novel, The Blue Widow, about the historical memory of 1965. She has also recently been appointed a jury member of the Amsterdam-based Prince Claus Awards Committee.
Letters from Buru
— Dec. 1973
Today I think of you like this star in the sky. Something that twinkles and fades, but always appears at the point of forgetting.
I imagine you this weeping, pearly blue.
31 December 1973
Dearest—
The year is drawing to a close and I am, again, cushioned at the base of some tree, watching yet another ketoprak. The others are spread out, huddled in their own unprepossessing bunches. Extension cords from the giant speakers not far from where I am sitting snake through the grass all the way to the stage; wow, aren’t we using a lot of electricity today.
There is a gay feeling in the air. The place is suddenly an oasis of brilliant moonlit optimism suspended in a haze of laissez fare and we do not recognize ourselves. The sky is a canvas on which greedy gods are doodling. It may even be chilly but we are numbed to reality.
As I told you earlier, it’s been a rather compassionate year. There can be as many as two, sometimes three shows a year, and the repertoire ranges from shamelessly banal to determinedly different. But most of the time these ketopraks are quite tedious.
Most of the actors and musicians of tonight’s show came from Unit XIV Bantalareja. They’re a vain lot, I must add, always psyched up about themselves. They boast as many as half a dozen groups with a decidedly old Jakarta bent, one for lenong, one for orkes keroncong, one for irama Melayu—Bantala this, Bantala that, Bantala what’s-it. The motor is a group of Tangerang youth with a certain amount of bile about them, and a certain veiled disdain for the genteel sensibilities of the shadow puppet theatre, the wayang, so they can always be counted on for political fervour. They do stick to lifting only popular stories from Javanese history books, as they do now, but they really are not very imaginative. Short of ideological freedom, most of the stories are chosen for their anti-feudalism. It’s all about heroes and patriots. Great, mind-numbing stuff.
(Being the unit closest to Namlea, these Bantalareja guys also get to look forward most to the giggling coastal girls.)
Of course like all folk performances, the stories behind the screen are much more delicious, and for a few days during rehearsals fresh love was declared, new acts and allegiances were made, old friendships were broken. There is a sense of deepened reality to the air, precisely because laughter suspends disbelief. Such is the narcotic effect of art. But by tomorrow, all will be depleted and everybody will be slightly depressed.
Bhisma
February-March, 1974
It’s been a while since I’ve given food a thought. Every so often there will be “patients” coming to me with some minor grievance concerning the things they’ve eaten.
Most prisoners on rice field duty look forward to getting their extra protein from catching the orong-orong that comes out and floats haplessly in water after they crush the soil in it. There are kelabangs too, a kind of crab-like spider, and of course, the easiest of all—lizards. The kelabang releases a bluish substance when it comes in contact with fire so often this gives those who consume it the most debilitating case of the runs. One has to admire their valor: we’re as hardy as they come, they always say, don’t know what plagues us this time. Still. Some have managed to get so sick they need to be transferred to the hospital in Namlea, the port city of Buru.
Today a man was brought before me who had recently sought medication for kelabang poisoning. Only this time he was barely a man: it was clear that he’d been knocked about unconscious, with two stab wounds on his abdomen. I asked the people who’d brought him in what happened. They said he’d had diarrhea so severe that he had to—just absolutely had to—empty his bowels into the Wai Bini. Now there is an express rule in the penal colony that no one should empty their bowels into the river, because we rely on it for clean water. It is our only source.
So of course they beat him up. And I feel awful, because he had sought treatment from me, and yet he had obviously mistrusted it (or me) not to have taken the tablets I’d given him.
Bhisma
—-, 1974
It just dawned upon me, darling. About waiting, I mean. When we talk about waiting, we do not talk about a few hours, days, even months. It’s about reaching a point where you occasionally dare to wait, such as when you pick up a pen and a sheet of paper, see the first smile of a recovering patient, or meet a visitor who tells you “It’s still better to have a home than no home at all.”
There is this man from Banten I visit from time to time. He believes I have a special power. When he first tried to point me to the fact, I dismissed him immediately. Don’t want to hear it, I said. I bet it’s something about my name. And if it is, then I already know about it. Don’t need a sage from black magic land to tell me that I will only die when I choose to. That yours, my love, will be the last face I see. But gradually I see what he means. There have been too many moments in which we as a collective would be beaten senseless for the error of another yet I have slowly come to realise that when it happens I do not feel any pain.
I don’t feel it during interrogation either, which is really a mere excuse for torture. They say physical pain always mimes death, and each time pain is inflicted upon the body, it is a kind of mock execution. I try to conjure these things in my mind almost to elicit the tonal sensation of pain, if there is indeed such a thing, but I can’t. I can see what it does to my body, the gashes, the long, angry streaks, the swollen pus, and I can see what it is all about, the power game, the naked show of brute force. But I can’t summon the feeling.
It is an idle hour, and I have acquired it through sly machinations. Darkness now.
My love. I have to take leave of you once more.
Bhisma
—, 1974
Amba,
I’ve learned to love the ocean because unlike the mountains I rarely see it. I often think of boating out instead of being boated in. I imagine the tremendous reefs under the water, the anemones my blind friends tell me are glued on them like jeweled mouths. Colour and poison they say are two sides of the same coin.
Imagine, then: An island this precariously small, and yet one that refuses to be leveled down by anything – not even by the sweeping blue and fickle waves.
You learn so much from people who in different parts of their lives have agreed to live on the coast. The three villages nearest to us are full of them. They are Butonese, and therefore not from around here, but they are happiest at sea. Every day they say to themselves tomorrow we might live another day. They feel the slightest threat in the sky, detect the ocean’s panic. Yet they sleep noiselessly and rise early as though to race dawn to another beginning. I’d like to take you with me to live by the ocean, if only to remind me of this thought where happiness knows itself.
Bhisma
(excerpts from the manuscript The Blue Widow: A Novel)
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ali Alizadeh is an Iranian-born Australian writer. His books include the novel The New Angel (Transit Lounge Publishing, 2008); with Ken Avery, translations of medieval Sufi poetry Fifty Poems of Attar (re.press, 2007); and the collection of poetry Eyes in Times of War (Salt Publishing, 2006). The main themes of his writing are history, spirituality and dissent. His current projects include a nonfiction novel about the life of his grandfather (to be published in 2010) and, with John Kinsella, an anthology of Persian poetry in translation.
A Familial Rennaissance
for Saf
Like the Italian one, my family’s rebirth
spawned masterpieces, caused a breakdown
like the civil wars of the Reformation
with few victors, countless casualties. Mine
a kind of persecution: bullied, beaten
at school for being a ‘dirty terrorist’ and
my resurrection stunted, my ‘new
start’ delayed. Immigration was more than
traumatic, abusive, for my father: defeat
and capitulation at the hands of employers
dreading a foreign-educated ‘wog’ without
‘acceptable’ Western work history. Mum’s
reshaping as an ‘Aussie’ almost aborted:
she returned to Iran (temporarily, it turned out)
when denied recognition of her degrees
by the union. I took up drugs; became a drunk
to forget the bullies, banish from my ears
the din of my parents’ jousts in the kitchen. But
my sister, a triumphant genius, the Leonardo
of this renaissance tale: the death of her Iranian
identity, followed by calm gestation – caring
daughter in the crossfire between workless father
and alcoholic brother – and then, yes, successful
delivery: a modern young woman, her alacrity
salary, property, paid holidays, etc. In photos
her posture, an homage to Michelangelo’s David.
A Sufi’s Remonstrance
I’m sick of You. Your magnificence
precipitates mental pain, ethical
cramps. That You continue to shine
blinds, asphyxiates, twists the sinews
of my words. How dare You bewitch
in an aeon like this? 14 year-old
Iraqi girl kidnapped, raped, burnt alive
by American servicemen; Palestinian
toddler’s head pulped by the shrapnel
of Israeli bombs; sleepy Israeli civilian
shattered by rubble while drinking tea; not
to forget the forgotten diseased, starved
billions expiring in the squalid ghettos
of ‘globalisation’. Could You possibly
justify the garish brilliance of your
intractable, effervescent spring
as rivers shrivel and soil turns saline
due to pitiless ‘progress’? Or the candle
of compassion in this starless night
of cyclic hatred? I honestly can’t help
my revulsion at Your volition to remain
prodigious, enchanting, Beloved. So what
if You discharge life, if my life is nothing
but a valley along the trajectory of return
to You? You flaunt the ecstasies of Union
and transcendence when reality demands
outrage and obduracy. Why won’t You
let me loathe my fellow creatures instead
of being mesmerised by Your allure? It turns
my stomach, aches my intellect, since I hope
and even occasionally smile, sleep and dream
in spite of the calamities, because of You.
Dubai
I can’t pretend
there’s beauty to exhume
from these slabs
concrete and sandstone
planted in the sand
funereal totems. I can’t
harmonise with the drill
fracturing the boulders
beneath the desert
puncturing the landscape
holes to insert
pillars as foundation
for incipient towers
towards a veritable
concrete forest. What
palm trees remain, inspire
the outline of the artificial
island, beach resort
to A-list celebrities. Camels
happy and humanised
logos on T-shirts
at the gargantuan mall
the largest in the world
outside of USA. Burger King
and co. don’t clash
but complement the Arabic
kitsch. I can’t conjure
my gifts (meager
as they are) enough
to resemble this reality
in an aesthetically refined
string of words: only this
beveled cluster
of clauses and the like
summoned by a Colossus
of a place called Dubai.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dilip Chitre n 1938 in Baroda, India. Studied in Mumbai. After graduating in 1959, taught English for three years in Ethiopia, returning to Mumbai in 1963, worked as a journalist, columnist, commentator, editor. Was Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA from 1975 to 1977, Back in India, made films, painted, roamed around. Now live in Pune, Maharashtra for the last 25 years. Published 30 books in all, 5 in German translation, Won many prizes, honours, and awards. Travelled all over Europe, parts of Asia, and Africa.
The Ninth Breakfast: Astrological Forecast
Sometimes a mere sausage portends,
Waiter, the coming shadow
Of Saturn. Sad days begin
Insignificantly. But sinister days
Foretell their ways. The innocent sausage in one’s plate
Grows into a cobra. And one knows
That the tables have begun
To turn.
On a Saturday you never
Get horseshoes for breakfast.
But a severe exhortation
In the morning’s editorial
On the duties of a citizen.
Here, where the cows are sacred,
And pigs taboo, a starving mob
Glares at your subversive sausage
Whose shape, moreover, is an implicit
Insult to Shiva’s phallus,
And you choke because you know
One man
Is another man’s breakfast.
No thanks. I’ll only have tea and toast.
Absence From Myself
I am emptying my shelves and my drawers
I cannot cope with their contents
Any longer. They connect with a past
That hardly seems mine though known to me.
The shelves contain books, of course,
And some of them go a long way
Into a memory not exactly my own
Where my treacherous roots lie
Into humanity’s favourite myths.
The drawers contain documents, notes,
Unfinished manuscripts, faded photographs,
Letters, memorabilia, and possessions
That could be called mere fetishes.
Alternatively, one could call it heritage.
My father’s dead and my only son died too
Within just a short span separating them
And I would be someone sandwiched
Between them—a piece of living history
Between two dead ends.
I am the one that has endured and survived
Two ends of history and the emptiness
Of shelves and drawers and largely
Unwritten books, abandoned poems,
Unfinished paintings, unrealised films,
Spaces more empty than filled,
Occupied and left.
Spaces, spaces, spaces.
Time leaves no detail untouched
And time takes all details away.
My ancestor’s gone and so is my successor.
That leaves me no space but
Here and now, no room to negotiate,
Not even an edge to fall off from.
I am exquisitely here and now
And where I never before was
Nor ever will be.
Moreover, this is not an end.
From Moscow To Leningrad (1980)
From Moscow to Leningrad
I was travelling through a three-dimensional notebook
The notebook had mile after mile of snow
The notebook had railway tracks
Close to my chest there was a broken
Anthill the size of a woman
Close to my chest were eighteen she-cobras
Close to my chest was powdered turmeric
My body flung northwards
Pointed to the Pole
Whose sins were washed out by that journey
Whose wounds bled away in that journey
There were characters written in the notebook
Spreading like fire through the snow
In the shape of a spark.
Underneath the Chandeliers Hung by Stalin
Underneath the chandeliers hung by Stalin
People swarm to buy bread
And at a distance stand the churches of Christ
Detached and compassionate
Underneath this Russian snow there could be
Several flowering plants of poetry
Countless thorny solitudes
The bones of former citizens
On the Way to Petrograd/Leningrad
(—for Irina )
Time turns to ice
Boots fall into a vanishing line
The grief of black living eyes
Lies hidden in the groin
Ointment on a tender spot
Graft on an alien branch
In the closed car of a train
Disoriented copulation
The ice of coals shovelled into
A couple of hours of intimacy
The rail track is refreshed by
Wheels speeding over it
From Moscow to Leningrad
You commit adultery and it’s a torture
And this Express goes
Right up to Finland
Towards the land of White Nights
The tall ghost of Peter the Great
The solid buildings of the navy
The palaces, the squares, the canals,
The innocent eyes of Mandelstam
Pushkin’s love affair
Lenin’s speech
Dostoevsky’s vigil in terror
And the European masterpieces
In the Hermitage
Before the Revolution and after
All this is eternal
The Great War and the great peace
The pleading breasts
Of a starved woman
Her thighs gone awry
Vodka dripping over her shoulders and body
And as a frightened sparrow hits a wall in its search for a window in the dark
Her breath enters my nostrils and my mouth as she gasps for air
I do not dare to write a poem
On all this
Our own relatives will become the angels of death
To exile us into Siberia
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nabina Das lives two lives, shuttling between USA and India. Her short stories have been published in Inner Voices, a contest-winning collection of fiction (Mirage Books, India), and The Cartier Street Review. A 2nd prize winner of an all-India Poetry Contest organized by HarperCollins-India and Open Space, her poems appear in Quay, Pirene’s Fountain, Shalla Magazine, Kritya, The Toronto Quarterly, The Cartier Street Review, Maintenant 3 (Three Rooms Press), Muse India, Danse Macabre, The Smoking Book anthology, Liberated Muse anthology, Mad Swirl and elsewhere. A poetry commentary and a poetry book review also appear in Kritya and The Cartier Street Review respectively. A 2007 Joan Jakobson fiction scholar from Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, and a 2007 Julio Lobo fiction scholar from Lesley Writers’ Conference, Nabina was Assistant Metro Editor with The Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, NY, and has worked as a journalist and media person in India for about 10 years in places as diverse as Tehelka.com, Down To Earth environmental magazine, Confederation of Indian Industries, National Foundation for India and The Sentinel newspaper. She has published several articles, commentaries and essays during her tenures. An M.A. in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, her other interests are theater and music. Formally trained in India classical music, she has performed in radio and TV programs and acted in street theater productions in India. She blogs at www.fleuve-souterrain.blogspot.com and freelances when not writing.
Aleph
The first sound uttered is always forgotten
Possibly it is never even a word. Just
An interjection that derives from faraway
Fears or an anxious rhythm of speech.
The first sound can be heard quite clear
When groans and grunts are taken care
Of with mighty sweep of authorized
Hands that also stifle songs and smiles.
If you were a baby or a doddering pair
Of legs, your first word would be despair
Not a calligrapher’s delight in dusky ink
Blinking away in the heliotrope night.
In one little fable the first letter was
Meant to be the first word of wonder
But no one wrote it down and so later
The ocean took it with fish and dead matter.
Living Room Homily
Women talking in high voice
Tingling streets
An indolent afternoon in the library
– All that glides up to whisper:
How we love life
After poems are read
Blood is spilled
Bee stings are removed
From unresponsive arms
We can measure up to reality
As though it’s a challenge
We can read minds
As though it’s an ancient art, revived
Furry dogs bustling
Smothering fleur du soir
A fleeting glance after remembrance
– Nothing that stops enchantment,
To say we love life
After you come back home
Hobble in the pantry
After newsprint withers
Becomes compost in the bin
I can clamour under the bright light
Straighten my pleats and scarf
I can wake up before dawn
As though night never came.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Anca Vlasopolos was born in Bucharest, Rumania. Her father, a political prisoner of the Communist regime in Rumania, died when Anca was eight. After a sojourn in Paris and Brussels, at fourteen she immigrated to the United States with her mother, a prominent Rumanian intellectual and a survivor of Auschwitz. Anca is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her poetry collection is titled Penguins In A Warming World. Anca is also the author of an award winning novel, The New Bedford Samurai and the memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement.
Wedded Bliss
gold bands glint
over a plastic bucket
where two pairs of hands
lovingly
gut
fish no bigger
than the hands
this could be a portrait
of marriage
man and woman
in harmonious
complicity
fish gored bleeding
from the side
Above the Bird’s Eye View
winter this year
sprang
a lynx
from still full-leaved branches
huge paws of wind to bat us
should we raise eyes toward light
or sigh at the thin horizon
arriving earlier each day
in this desolation in drab and gray
i look from a second-story window
see him—olive camouflage
for a pulsebeat unzipped
his rich summer gold
streaking
sun bullet
bursting through lynx dominion
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anthony Lawrence’s most recent book of poems Bark (UQP 2008) was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Awards and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. He is currently completing a PhD on the poetry of Richard Hugo, and a book-length poem The Welfare of My Enemy is forthcoming. He lives in Newcastle.
Your Letters
I can’t smell the oil-stained deck ropes
on the last boat leaving
the last town of the Cinque Terra,
or see the highlights in your hair
as you pass the Roman wall in Lucca,
but I can see you’re in a hurry –
the broken flourishes of your thinking
as you run for a train, the word because
reduced to bc in all your correspondence.
I can’t see you there, in that postcard
version of your dreaming, overseas
or when you returned to a life
doubled by keeping your options open
like a wound gone septic from neglect.
Today I see your name on my calendar.
Your birthday will come and go,
untroubled by gift or word, though under-
scored by this certainty: lost in the poor
terrain of your grammar, you worked
a moulting brush through muddy pigments
to abbreviate me.
The Sound of a Life
In frames of elapsed time
and contractions of deep sea light,
an open water dance
between science and bivalve
is bloodflow and the muted sound
of a life hinged and weighted
to its own design.
Behind the shelled meniscus
of a marine biologist’s faceplate,
where assessments of fact and beauty
play across her eyes, under pressure
she hears the blue mazurka
of loss and non-attachment
and she outbreathes what remains
in her tank to understand it.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Born in 1963, a Hindu in Malaysia, Anushka Anastasia Solomon left for the United States as a teenager to study journalism. She returned to Malaysia with a B.A (Creative Writing/Education), envisioning change of the race and religion based Malaysian system of Education. Her poem, “13 Ways of Looking at Malaysia” inspired by Wallace Stevens, which appears in Asia Literary Review Autumn 2008, articulates that vision. The Malaysian government, then and now, frowns upon her ideas. In 1998, due to intolerable family violence and persecution after her mother’s premature death, Anushka, her husband, Ben Solomon, and son David Marshall converted to Christianity, fled Malaysia and immigrated to the United States.
The author of two poetry chapbooks, Please, God, Don’t Let Me Write Like A Woman, (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and The Hindu and The Punk, (Pudding House Press 2009), Anushka’s work is featured by Amnesty International at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scotland, 2007, 2008 and 2009. She lives in beautiful Evergreen, Colorado. (www.atthewindow.us)
Recipe for Success –Slumdog Millionaire
I buy the Bollywood look in Wal-Mart
Gold hoop earrings with yellow beads
$1.50 marked down from 5 US Dollars
Decorate my years shrivel the sari to a
A skirt I buy at Forever 21
$10.00 marked down from more than that
With my skin the color of cinnamon bark
I dress up for a lark. I make naan and
Have An American friend photograph
Me by the Yellow Barn
The lentils are
Cooking slowly, I will add some spinach
And prepare to garnish the dish with some
Dried red chillies
That will crackle in my frying pan
And on your tongue, I will hum a Hindi
Song and you will never know
That perhaps
Like you
I do not know how to live
In a slum.
Cooking A South Indian Curry From Memory
1.
I slice tender red beef, the cold silver blade
Of the knife creating an everglade
Collide worlds in a colander
Demarcate the days on the calendar
Take a cutting from the past
It is not my intention to aghast
Those who consider the cow holy
I just want to cook a curry boldly
Solely
from memory.
2.
Listen. Here in America,
They tell me– the poet – that the onion
an apple and the potato
all have the same taste.
That the differences in flavor
Are caused by their smell.
Listen. Here they prove
these things
Science, Surveys, Studies.
I can’t argue with their facts.
I don’t. The facts mount this
case from Malaysia
And ride it, like a show horse,
around and around until I am
ground into the spices
bleeding the truth in my marrow bones
for William Butler Yeats
and this South Indian Curry I am cooking from
memory because I am
ornery
3.
To prove the onion, an apple
and the potato the same
They say – pinch your nose
Take a bite.
They will all taste sweet.
Try it!
Booze, women and writing.
All the same.
4.
I remember my Hindu father swinging a bag
Of goat’s intestines
For my mother to cook, she ran water
In the sink
Obediently washing the insides of a goat
Wrinkling her nose in distaste
Listen. Charles Bu-cow- ski wrote a poem
About a Mexican girl
Who washed his private part
With a rag
5.
Contemporary American men’s poetry
is that sultry
the Buddhist monks who conducted
Bu-cow-ski’s funeral rites
must set their sights a tad higher
for women. Our gravestones
ought to read: “Don’t Try”
like his.
Alternatively:
“Don’t Cry”.
The more things change
The more women I find
On the streets – like loose change.
They, like all things, stay the same.
6.
Or am I cooking this up from memory
Mixing it up with chicory
Using it to pound a point in
Like ginger and garlic
In a medley of flavors
For a variety of favors
Like the Thai and Indonesian women
With splayed toes
Who for a few bhat or rupiah
Rub the stress off the backs
Of the missionaries selling Jesus
Vying for a chance to stand
Beside Bill Gates? Accolades.
7.
I ought to go back to cooking the
South Indian curry from memory.
Don’t use beef. The cow is holy.
Remember?
Use chicken. Hold your nose.
And all the horses in Colorado.
It would be a good idea to hold
Your tongue as well, my belle.
Show some cleavage at Christmas.
And don’t joke about mangoes.
Or tell them that wearing a sari
And exposing the navel is asking
to get raped. Save the juicy parts
for when the Guests go away.
..unless they stay.
8.
Then you can tell them the recipe.
How you stand poised on the edge of the precipice
Cooking South Indian curry from memory
Listening for some inner harmony
Orange and purple bougainvillea
Climbing over the balcony like all
The idealized Tamil lovers
Of the silver screen
Your love of all things
falling unrequited
like the bougainvillia
Bunga kertas, paper flowers
Your nail polish, the new indigo blue of the sky.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
A dual Australian-Irish citizen, Nathanael O’Reilly was born in Warrnambool and raised in Ballarat, Brisbane and Shepparton. He has lived in England, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine and the United States, where he currently resides. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Antipodes, Postcolonial Text, Transnational Literature, Prosopisia, Blackmail Press and Southern Ocean Review.
The Hills of Bendigo
For Sean Scarisbrick
We spent the summer of ninety-two
In the hills of Bendigo
Living in a colonial house
Replete with a croquet lawn,
A ballroom, servant’s quarters,
A wine cellar, an in-ground pool
And a deep, dark verandah
Overlooking an acre of grounds
Scattered with pine needles,
Stone benches and rose bushes.
Home from uni on summer holidays,
We lived on my parent’s charity.
After sleeping past midday
In a room with burgundy velvet curtains
And foot-thick stone walls,
Days were spent swimming in the pool
Seven steps and a leap from our beds,
Reading Eliot, Salinger and Hardy
In the shade on the verandah,
Writing long letters to girls
We thought we knew and loved,
Listening to U2, Van Morrison,
And Hunters & Collectors, always
Getting a kick out of the line
“Way out back in Bendigo.”
When the heat was bearable
We walked over the hills
Along winding goat-track streets
Left over from the goldrush,
Discovering tiny pubs,
No more than front rooms
Of miner’s cottages,
Occupied by old blokes
In op-shop three-piece suits
Perched precariously
On vinyl bar stools.
Old Jimmy fished a battered
Harmonica from his waistcoat
Pocket, shook out the saliva
And puffed out a wheezy tune,
His narrow shoulders hunching
As the condensation slid
Down the side of his pot of VB.
Some days we walked to the mall,
After passing the oval, the Art Gallery,
The high school and the park,
Browsed countless racks of CDs
We couldn’t afford at Brash’s,
Left our sweaty fingerprints
On Thrasher and Rolling Stone
Under the disapproving glare
Of the Chinese newsagent,
Took refuge in the Public Library
Where we flipped through LPs,
Discovering Klaus Wunderlich
And His Amazing Pop Organ Sound.
Evenings were spent at home
Drinking my parents’ wine,
Eating thick slabs of cheese
Grilled on toast while watching
Day-night cricket matches on telly.
Or, if the Austudy hadn’t run out,
Drinking Carlton Draught downtown
In the Shamrock Hotel or the Rifle Brigade,
Playing pool and the jukebox,
Bullshitting about the great things
We would do after finishing uni,
What we would do for a living,
Where we would live,
Where we would go on holidays,
Which girls we would sleep with.
At night we wandered through the hills
Drinking from the silver bladder
Ripped from a box of Coolabah Riesling,
Unable to sleep in the January heat.
We took turns waiting on the swings
In the park across from the Milk Bar,
While you or I made reverse-charge
Calls from a Telecom phone box
With shattered glass and AC/DC graffiti.
Afterwards, we went back to the house
For more grilled cheese on toast,
More chilled wine, and conversations
That lasted into the early hours
And echo through the years.