Life from Elsewhere E-Book

Various

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 126

Beschreibung

Reflections on the free movement of people and stories, to mark the first ten years of English PEN's Writers in Translation programme Writers in Translation, established in 2005 and supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England, champions the best literature from around the world. To mark the programme's tenth anniversary, ten leading writers from around the world, many of whom have been supported in their work by English PEN, explore the themes of movement, freedom and narrative. Introduced by Amit Chaudhuri, the collection includes contributions from: Asmaa al Ghul Mahmoud Dowlatabadi Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Chan Koonchung Hanna Krall Andrey Kurkov Andrés Neuman Alain Mabanckou Elif Shafak Samar Yazbek

Leseprobe

LIFE FROM ELSEWHERE

JOURNES THROUGHWORLD LITERATURE

CONTENTS

Title PageIntroductionAMIT CHAUDHURIIThe Dream Called Africa ALAIN MABANCKOUA Compass with Two SouthsANDRÉS NEUMANTo Understand a Culture Is Difficult, but… CHAN KOONCHUNLily AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHENDivisions or Unity? Art and the Reality behind the Stereotype SAMAR YAZBEKWhen Ideas Fall in Line ASMAA AL-GHULLiterature: Forbidden, DefiedMAHMOUD DOWLATABADI“Love” and “Oblivion”HANNA KRALLSea of Voices ANDREY KURKOVA Rallying Cry for Cosmopolitan Europe ELIF SHAFAKWRITERS’ BIOGRAPHIESTRANSLATORS’ BIOGRAPHIESAbout the PublisherCopyright

INTRODUCTION

AMIT CHAUDHURI

MY PARENTS spoke with each other in Sylheti. They were both born in Sylhet, which had gone to East Pakistan upon partition, and they’d known each other since they were children. What they spoke was, admittedly, a gentrified version of this robust East Bengali dialect, often characterized (even by East Bengalis) as being, along with the dialect of Chittagong, near incomprehensible and slightly buffoonish. (It’s worth recalling that the generic term for the East Bengali, bangal, also used to be synonymous with “villager” or “yokel”.) Sylheti is a variation of the standard Bengali that emanates from Calcutta, and, to many, it’s a comic variation. Besides, it is a language, as Marshall McLuhan would have put it, “without an army and a navy”, though standard Bengali doesn’t have an army and a navy either. What standard Bengali did have, for a number of historical reasons, was cultural prestige. A great-uncle on my father’s side reportedly advised my parents against speaking in Sylheti with me (my father, by now, was working in Bombay), probably because of its low pedigree in the social world of languages: it was a language without a future, he told them. Given the considerable entrepreneurial skills of Bangladeshi Sylheti Muslims, who single-handedly invented “Indian cuisine” and “curry” in Britain, he was to be proved wrong, but I don’t think he’d have cared anyway. My future was going to be forward-looking and cultured; Sylheti couldn’t possibly play a part in it.

Nevertheless, I continue to hear that tongue being spoken, and I once absorbed stories about Sylhet—from my mother, mainly, but also my father and my maternal uncles. The comedic strain of much of this recounting was undeniable: it would have to do, for instance, with the hubris of cousins and cousins’ imbecilic best friends who, while generally unable to conduct a conversation in uninflected Bengali, had ambitions—transformed as they were by Tagore and modern Bengali literature—to become poets. So much in Sylhet was, it seemed, the bangal’s daydream. And then there was the political history: partition, and the loss of home, memories that went back to partially noticed tensions and misunderstandings with Muslim friends who would turn against the narrator of the tale at the time of the referendum that decided Sylhet’s future in 1947. One thing was clear: everything had happened in Sylhet. The upheavals of history had happened there; so had the newly minted magic of literature and the incursion of the songs of Tagore, Rajanikanta, D.L. Roy and Atul Prasad. Sylhet was the centre of the universe, if these reminiscences were to be trusted. It had the oiliest hilsa fish my mother had ever tasted; the most extravagant paat shaak greens. The pithha my mother’s mother made were the most refined and delicate anywhere; this was borne out later by their reproduction in Bombay.

These memories could have added up to an account of a lost home, or a lost paradise or idyll, but they didn’t. They could have been viewed through the lens of partition and exile, as the story of a continuing separation, but they weren’t. Sylhet, being neither Calcutta nor Dhaka, could have been interpreted as a peripheral location, but it wasn’t. In my relatives’ narratives, it was, very simply, a centre. In other words, its appeal was neither personal nor immemorial; it was cultural and historical, animated by that moment to which those childhoods and that youth belonged. My relatives had been changed as well as made the people they were as a result of being situated in that town and in that history. For this reason, the division of the world into metropolitan centres and margins never quite rang true with me. Hardly anyone I met when I was growing up seemed to have actually known what it meant to live on the margins. They all seemed to have been located in the midst of history, wherever they came from.

What does it mean to be a “centre”? It doesn’t entail transcending the local or even the provincial, as the example of Sylhet shows. Its self-sufficiency doesn’t denote an independence from the outside world: where my parents and uncles were concerned, what we call the “international” was constantly impinging on their way of looking at things. But the “international” was most palpable in certain neighbourhoods and houses and conversations in Sylhet. To be in a centre meant believing you were in a centre; it meant to experience history as something you were being transformed by and might even contribute to. Much of this experience would happen in the head: in thoughts, speculations, longueurs, and in a form of immersion. This did not mean that this experience was less true than that of the centre, the city, in which the marks of metropolitan centrality were more overt. Nor did it mean that in the more canonical centres the experience of centrality was exclusively outward and visible, and unconnected to the daydream. All centres are to an important degree fictional and fictionalizing, in that they exist to some extent in the heads of people, in wishful thinking, and, as a result, are partly invisible. As the novelist and scientist Sunetra Gupta says about growing up in the Calcutta of the 1970s: “It is not a criticism that our love for the city was rooted neither in its history nor in its geography, for where it existed was in the life of the mind of its inhabitants.” The greatest excitements of living in a centre are internal, invented and not easily accessible from the outside.

Just as the life of the centre is often covert, and connected to the daydream, the marks of whatever it is that makes a culture, place or person “international” are implicit. In Japan, in the twentieth century, we could assume that the suit—dark jacket and trousers and tie— was a mark of (for the want of a better descriptive term) Westernization. But for the Bengali bourgeois, the suit was a sign of mimicry, as were the use of English and of cutlery. The minority that took on these habits was mockingly referred to as ingabanga (the “Anglo-Bengalis”). In the bhadralok, the native Bengali bourgeoisie, one confronted a type of Europeanization much deeper than that in the ingabanga, precisely because their European eclecticism expressed itself as Bengaliness. The most obvious way it did this was in the dress of the bhadralok: the native dhuti and panjabi, immediately identifiable at the time with not just a locality or a city but with what Gupta calls “the life of the mind”. To the outsider, the bhadralok’s Europeanness is hardly noticeable: his immersion is part of his invisibility. This question of invisibility then raises the question of what we understand—or notice—as being contemporary or immemorial, local or international, anywhere, whether in Calcutta or Japan or England.

My sense, increasingly, is that the twentieth century was made up not of peripheral locations (which people either departed, or remained in as provincials) and of canonical, acknowledged metropolises which many gravitated towards: it comprised innumerable centres. All centres are, to a certain extent, invisible, because they’re created most compellingly in the imagination; but some are invisible to a greater degree than others. Which is why it’s such a surprise to realize, in retrospect, that certain places, like Sylhet, were, after all, invisible, though it hardly seemed so to those who lived there. The middle-class inhabitants of pre-partition Sylhet were aware of their, and their language’s, distinctiveness as an eccentricity, while experiencing their location in all its urgency, plenitude and immediacy. Other places, whether those were London or Calcutta, felt curiously marginal. One has to respect this skewed vantage point as being not only real, but more true to what constitutes modernity than the accounts we have familiarized ourselves with and internalized. Our challenge is to recognize the invisible for what it is, and, through it, to try to access the different, interrelated, competing points of excitement that have made up our world.

THE DREAM CALLED AFRICA

ALAIN MABANCKOU

IMADE A DECISION a long time ago not to shut myself in, to tune in to the sound and fury of the world, and never to take a rigid view of things. I didn’t become a writer because I emigrated, but once I’d left it, I saw my country differently. In my early writings—all drafted in the Congo—I felt there were pieces missing; my characters were confined, stifled, they needed me to give them more space. Emigrating heightened the sense of unease which I’ve always believed is at the heart of all creative activity. You write because “something’s not quite right”, to try to move mountains or get an elephant through the eye of a needle. Writing grounds you; it’s a cry in the dark, too, and the tilt of the ear to the horizon.

I was born in Africa, in Congo-Brazzaville, and spent much of my early life in France, before settling in the United States. The Congo is the base of my umbilical cord, France the adoptive land of my dreams, and America the place from which I look back on the trail I’ve left behind me. These three geographical places are now fused, and sometimes I forget which continent I went to bed in, which one I’m in as I write.

I’ve been to so many towns, and loved them all. I’m amazed by all these places that are nothing like where I grew up. I arrive with a heart that’s light, and a mind free of thoughts of any kind. The true emigrant does not export his customs or tastes, seeking to impose them on the host country. It’s the contrast between the place where we live and our “natural milieu” that brings childhood images back up to the surface, the street noises, the suffering, the joy of our own people. The tornado season reminds you of the virtues of a clear blue sky, the swoop of a free-flying bird and the explosion of a scent you can’t quite name, until one day you remember it also grows round the back of your father’s hut.

With the proliferation of means of communication we’ve created new regions, networks shooting off throughout the world. “Rome is no longer in Rome”, the writer becomes a migratory bird, who remembers the country he came from, but chooses to stay and sing on the branch where he’s perched. Do the songs of these migratory birds still come under the banner of their national literature? I’m not sure they do, any more than I believe literature can be contained within specific borders. I wouldn’t mind where I lived, provided it sheltered my dreams and let me reinvent my own world. I am both of these things: writer and migratory bird.

My concept of identity goes far beyond notions of territory or blood. I am nourished by each one of my encounters. It would be futile to stick merely to one’s own patch, ignoring the endless interactions and consequent complexity of this new era in which we are all connected in ways that have nothing to do with geography.

In America I have often come across French people who considered me truly their compatriot, as though away from home, irrespective of racial origins, the French were prepared to broaden their sense of citizenship. As though a clearer definition of nationhood might be reached by leaving our homeland and meeting afresh somewhere where our culture can finally become the substantial link between us.

Just as we now need to reconsider what we mean by territory, we also need to re-examine the term identity. We should really look back at the origins of the word to remind ourselves of the extent to which the fearmongers have managed to transform a fluid idea into an ideology which is both static and suicidal for a nation. In the first instance identity derives from the self, the “I”, the existence of an individual within society. It is what makes an individual or a group particular and singular. Just as an individual has an identity card, a group might have one too. But what features would we register on the identity card of a group? Identity is a statement not of what we are but of what we might become through intersection and exchange, through friction and migration, in an era which looks set to become that of the utmost complexity for the human race. In this respect, as an African, I no longer consider my continent as a land apart. Africa is no longer just in Africa. As they disperse throughout the world, Africans create other “Africas” and embark on new adventures, which may considerably enhance the cultural standing of the black continent. The black diaspora thus becomes a kind of “mobile Africa”, a platform for African cultures. It is the birth of a new identity, not necessarily attached to Mother Africa, but with an autonomy of its own.

What is the nature of the connection, then, between Africans born in Europe and those who remain in Africa? They are two contradictory, and occasionally conflicting cultures, because they do not share the same vision of Africa, because Africa is a dream for some and a reality for others. An African born outside the African continent may well have little sense of connection to the Africa of his ancestors, which feels remote, distorted by news reports which reflect back an image of a land in the constant throes of tragedy and incapable of exploiting its immense riches. Equally, this same African, born outside the continent, is not recognized in his or her country of adoption, where the immigration laws and the policies of European governments grow increasingly inflexible. He doesn’t belong “back there”, but is not quite accepted “here” either. How will he react? What he needs is a way to express his condition, and what we are seeing is the emergence of an African “subculture”.