Jorn Utzon Has Died

Sad news. One of the 20th century's architectural geniuses has died - Jorn Utzon, the controversial force behind Australia's most famous building, the Sydney Opera House - arguably, in terms of its surprising shapes, a precursor to the Gehry style.

Poetry and religion

There is something dispiriting - literally - about Nick Laird's latest column in this weekend's Guardian Review (the Review lists Tuesday's Oxfam event in London, by the way, and also features a best of the year book roundup, which might be of interest to readers of Eyewear) - in how he discusses his lost faith - and subsequent attempt to find it in poetry. Faith isn't just lost. Faith is like a radio that needs to be constantly tuned - sometimes, the faintest signals of possibility can be detected, at other times, it is all a fuzz.

When one entirely loses faith, one is in a sense saying something about the human soul: that there isn't one. Otherwise, if one still believed that, then not all would be lost. Nihilism and poetry reached an exquisite dead-end in the darkly fascinating morgues and flesh of Gottfried Benn. Laird, though, seeks to argue that poetry can replace, even supplant religion - not a new thought, surely. Keats thought this. Wallace Stevens exemplified it. And Heaney continues the modern-romantic quest to achieve epiphany in the world, not beyond it. So too, does Ashbery, in abstract indeterminate ways. Most poets these days are atheists, or non-God-types, who place a lot of store in pure poetry, to achieve the lift-off their discarded faith (or religion) can no longer supply.

Poetry, though, is not a sturdy belief system, nor does it supply the constant sources of wisdom, warmth, and illumination, that a religious, or spiritual, belief system can. Poetry, in the occult hands of a Yeats, has immense symbolic resources, and can yield extraordinary instances of illumination (Bloom speaks of such sublime instances in Emerson, or Whitman) - but poetic visions are rarely sustainable coherent systems capable of assisting one through all of life's natural cycles of joy and grief.

Lord knows, poets try. Poetry, however, is a handmaid to religion - as in the work of later Donne, or Hopkins. Poetry finds words for things that may not have words beforehand. But it isn't those things, itself. Beyond language: a mystery. In that mystery, perhaps, a God. I wish Laird well on his journey to map a search, with science and language as his guides. One day, the poet who seeks a new religion may find an old faith waiting for him, where his journey began.

Guest Review: Benson on Evaristo

Dzifa Benson reviews
Blonde Roots
by Bernardine Evaristo

When the television series adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots came out in 1977, I watched it with the scalp shifting horrified fascination that I imagine many people, black and white, watched too. Since then, I have read and seen many other books, films and television documentaries about the iniquities of slavery. Some of it has been documented in grossly minute detail – the floggings, rapes, amputations, the Middle Passage, the savagery, the exploitation, the humiliation – they are all very well known these days. All have been disturbing to take in but nothing has been quite as shocking since that initial jolt Roots ministered. It was difficult to imagine how slavery’s sorry history could be rendered afresh in art.

In what is perhaps a homage to Haley’s Roots (surely the title can’t be a coincidence?) the ever inventive Bernardine Evaristo’s new book and first novel entirely in prose, Blonde Roots, does make you consider that dark period of history in a new way. Here, the very Swiftian ‘what if?’ premise is a simple but audacious one – turn the slave trade on its head, imagine a world in which Africans enslaved Europeans for 400 years instead of the other way round and while you’re at it, make sure you mix it up geographically too. ‘Aphrika’ sits in Europe’s place, and ‘Europa’ in Africa’s. Off the coast of Aphrika is the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa, with its capital, Londolo whose districts include, Mayfah, To Ten Ha Ma and Brixtane. And where we expect the Caribbean, we find the West Japanese Islands. It puts me in mind of the African proverb “until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” But Evaristo, who is half Nigerian and half English, is not trying to score points for blacks against whites. The overarching thrust of the message in Blonde Roots is that we are no different from one another with regards to culpability and susceptibility, an idea that is encapsulated in the quotation from Nietzche in the preface, ‘All things are subject to interpretation: whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.’ Evaristo is making an important point about the way in which an excess of power corrupts and distorts human nature.

Our heroine, Doris Scagglethorpe, comes from 'a long line of cabbage farmers' in the north of feudal England where life is hard and she and her family are in serfdom to the local squire. One day, while playing hide and seek with her sisters, she is seized by her own countrymen, taken to a slave market near the coast and thrown on to a ship, where she lies on a shelf in the stinking hold and learns the reality of a slave's day to day existence during the Middle Passage. I n the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa, the most powerful country on the Aphrikan continent, she is enslaved by Bwana, also known as Chief Kaga Konata Katamba whose slaves are branded with his initials, KKK. The book is divided into three parts, the first and third narrated by Doris with the second by Bwana.

Evaristo’s background is in poetry and her language mixes contemporary argot and features such as ‘glamazons’, ‘wiggers’ and even idlers gathering in Coasta Coffee with the startling, precise imagery and emotionally wrought lyricism of poetry which is most apparent in Doris’ drily comic tone. In fact, language becomes a source of comedy in the last part of the novel, when Doris, having been thwarted in her first attempt at escape, is banished to plantations in the hinterland of West Japanese islands, falling in with a community of slaves who were born into slavery and learning their patois. As with the heroine Zuleika in Evaristo’s novel in verse, The Emperor’s Babe, Doris is feisty and faces her fate with an unflinching lack of self-pity. And just like in The Emperor’s Babe, Evaristo relishes meshing past time frames with contemporary vernacular in an anachronistic narrative structure. It’s interesting that Evaristo makes no reference to time at all making the novel atemporal and disorientating and therefore challenging.

While the parts narrated by Doris are undoubtedly the emotional anchor of the story, it is in the middle part, where we get to hear Bwana speak that carries the intellectual heft of the novel. In a bid to better himself as a young man, he visits Europa but finds himself appalled by its backwardness and savagery, its ‘Heart of Greyness’ and even more repulsed by an Aphrikan who has gone native in a clear reference to notions of race vis a vis intelligence raised by Joseph Conrad’s novel. Bwana, who comes off like an old Etonian finds that:

The Caucasoi is unable to calculate mental arithmetic beyond what they call their ‘ten times table’. Because the Caucasoinid brain is so stunted, it has also naturally led to somewhat blunted emotions. Along with the beasts of burden who work the fields, the Caucasoi is incapable of acute emotionality because, due to its Neo-Primate state, it is but a few steps up from the animal kingdom with its primary preoccupations of Perambulate, Agitate, Capitulate, Somnambulate, Ejaculate, Procreate, Masticate, Procrastinate and Hibernate.

Nor, when the Caucasoi receives physical ‘pain’, does he suffer in the same way as me and thee. Beating the hide of a Caucasoi is more akin to beating the hide of a camel to make it go faster. Be not hoodwinked into thinking that the blood shed and the skin torn of the Caucasoi is a crime against humanity, no matter how much they shed crocodile tears to convince the gullible among you otherwise.
Surely even you diehard liberals are by now doubting your old verities?
…To put it in simple terms, the Caucasoinid breed is not of our kind.

Earlier in the novel, Doris herself notes that: 'I could see how the Ambossans had hardened their hearts to our humanity. They convinced themselves that we do not feel as they do, so that they do not have to feel anything for us. It’s very convenient and lucrative for them.'

And as the novel winds to its conclusion, Evaristo is interested in looking at the social consequences of the trade. Nose-flattening jobs are affordable and tanning salons abound. Young ‘whyte’ men working on the plantations begin to talk about women of their kind as ‘hos and bitches’. Their black ‘massas’ read books with titles such as Healing your Inner Child, Planter Chic: Master of Taste and Beyond the Colonial: 100 Inspired Ideas for Your Home. Perceptions of beauty are completely subverted when we hear stringy, flaxen locked Doris herself describe in vivid detail her people's inferiority issues about belonging to the alleged physically, intellectually and morally debased ‘whyte’ race – ‘naturally, having whyte skin was all the evidence the sheriffs needed to accost a young man and strip-search him.’ It is a world in which even your name is not your own, perhaps the ultimate means by which an oppressor can suppress and obliterate identity and culture.

Cleverly, Evaristo shows admirable control over the story, restraining herself from allowing the reasonable anger engendered by her tale to boil over into a rant about the horrors of the trade. Certainly, the biting wit helps to leaven the pathos but ultimately, this is the sad and finally redemptive story of a teenage girl.

Dzifa Benson is a poet, writer and performer based in London.

Poem by Sampurna Chattarji

Eyewear is delighted to welcome Sampurna Chattarji (pictured) this Friday. Born in Dessie, Ethiopia in 1970, Chattarji is an award-winning poet, fiction writer and translator.

Her books include The Greatest Stories Ever Told (fiction) and Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray (translation) both published by Penguin India. Her poetry has featured on Hong Kong Radio; in the international documentary Voices in Wartime; in First Proof: The Penguin Book of New Writing from India 2; Fulcrum Four: Fifty-six Indian Poets (1951-2005) and Imagining Ourselves, an anthology released by the International Museum of Women (IMOW) in San Francisco; as well as in Indian and international journals such as Wasafiri, nthposition, Slingshot, The Little Magazine and Chandrabhaga. Sampurna is an Executive Committee Member of the PEN All-India Centre, Mumbai, and on the Editorial Board of its journal, Penumbra.

Her first book of poems Sight May Strike You Blind has been published (January, 2007) by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters. I first met her through the 100 Poets Against The War work I did in 2003-04 (she submitted poems that were in the anthology), and we had tea in London's Marylebone, and talked of many things, a year or so ago, as she travelled through on her way back home. She's very talented, and deserves to be widely read. I hope that, in time, the work of her generation of Indian poets, who write in English, will be better known (and more widely published) in Britain, and beyond.

Salt

Salt
of the earth,
all subtlety dies
with a pinch too much.
You taste freedom,
the knife-edge on your teeth.

Faceless men eat saltless food
in a north-western frontier town.
You cannot eat the salt of a man
you might one day need
to kill.
A blood-feud bursts,
froth at the corner of your mouth.

It kills you one grain at a time.
You crave it cold
crusted on a glass
a leech of lemon on your lip.
In hard times a bite of chilli and salt.
In good times a bite of chilli. And salt.

Then one day,
tired of domesticity,
you turn into a pillar.
No looking back now.
Your saline gaze fills oceans.
You melt into tears
warm and salt on my tongue.

poem by Sampurna Chattarji

Mumbai

Terror knows no bounds, is an attempt at boundless contempt for society's limits. It appeals, therefore, to those who believe that limits are wrong, or currently are of the wrong shape - paradoxically, many who enact terror desire more, not less, limit. Yet they work in chaos who desire a new order. Mumbai, a great city of the world, is currently facing a new kind of freewheeling madness and cruelty that makes artistic depictions of the urban same, in films (like the recent Batman) jejeune and false. What is being expressed in these terrifying acts is that free agents of ruthless determination can move at will through serious cities, nearly unhindered - yet ultimately, hindered. That battles are still raging, more than 24 hours after the initial attacks, is alarming. Anarchy, it now appears, can appear anywhere, in even the midst of great civilisations, and establish small failed states. The 21st century is falling apart. Obama can only do so much, and most of the world seems to be tearing itself to bits.

Is comment free?

The Guardian has a slogan online: "comment is free". Too true. I've noticed, lately, that sometimes articles appear (in print) in The Guardian, and other papers, a few days after the same ideas, even phrases, and images, have circulated, freely, in (on?) the blogosphere - including, a few times, at Eyewear.

Most recently, today, columnist Mark Lawson has a piece on the poet laureate, referencing John Sergeant, Obama (not normally two subjects linked, I'd have thought) and other comments that strongly echo my post of a few days back on the same subject. Coincidence? Surely.

However, bloggers are doing a lot of the unpaid gruntwork these days, it seems to me, for the "professional" media commentariat, and, since we all know (from plagiarism cases on campus) that "Googling" can get results, fast, it is surely time that some credit is due, when whole arguments or themes are lifted, verbatim, from popular blogs.

Woolworths Not Worth Much

Sad news. Woolworths, the original "five and dime" store, and one of my earliest childhood memories (buying red licorice there) has gone bust. The UK is entering a new phase, then, of its economic crisis.