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JANUARY - MARCH 2014
Team Founder and Editor-in-Chief
KRITI BAJAJ
Senior Editor
Sonal Jha
Art Editor
Medha Kulkarni
Associate Editor
Aarushi Uboweja
Associate Editor
Varun Warrier
Legal Advisor
Akshay Ram
Layout Design
Kriti Bajaj
Cover Photograph
“Renewed Hope� by sERENA THANGJAM London 2012
www.bricolagemagazine.com www.facebook.com/bricolagemagazine twitter.com/Bricolage_mag issuu.com/bricolagemagazine
Editorial Dear Readers, Welcome to our first issue of 2014! As always, we are deeply grateful to those who send us their work, and constantly - but pleasantly - surprised by the superior quality of submissions we continue to receive. As we move towards streamlining our magazine, we have decreased the number and frequency of the work we select for publishing, and it has been no mean feat. This issue features 12 works of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, art, and photography. As always, the written pieces are supplemented by visual content that is a mix of work drawn from public domain archives as well as contributors chosen by the Editor. We invite you to connect with us on Facebook or Twitter to receive news and updates about submission deadlines and future issues. Happy reading!
Kriti Bajaj Editor-in-Chief
submissions@bricolagemagazine.com Submission Guidelines - www.bricolagemagazine.com/p/submissions.html editors@bricolagemagazine.com All rights remain with respective authors/artists. Terms of service - www.bricolagemagazine.com/p/terms-of-service.html
Contents FICTION
ART
8 Othello and Ghalib: A Soliloquy - Onaiza Drabu
36 Postcards - Ira Joel Haber
12 Friendly Wars - Ndaba Sibanda
FEATURES
14 Neither Happy nor Sad Sara Halas
46 Bihari: The Portrait of an Artist Harsh Snehanshu
CRITIQUE
DIARY
18 Més que un Club: Barça as a Repository of Catalan Cultural Memory - Sonal Jha
58 Oceans of Independence Campbell C. Hoffman
POETRY
INTERVIEWS
24 Three Poems - Steve Klepetar
62 Q&A with writer Janice Pariat - Varun Warrier
28 Three Poems - Gary Robinson 32 Two Poems - Sudevi Geary
PHOTOGRAPHY 66 Egypt - Ashwati Vipin
Fiction
In this creative re-imagination of Shakespeare’s Othello, the author presents her version of Othello’s story, guided by Urdu poetry and the verses of Ghalib. Through her chosen verses, which she also translates to English, she seeks to explore themes such as love, longing, jealousy and separation, which resonate in the works of both Shakespeare and Ghalib.
Othello and Desdemona by Alexandre-Marie Colin, 1829. Wikimedia Commons {PD-Art} http://www.barbarapaul.com/shake/othello.html [Public domain]
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Othello and Ghalib A soliloquy by Onaiza Drabu I am a moor; I was always the Moor. My story bears no audience, yet I still narrate it once more to lament over how I was tricked. Happiness is a mirage; a distant dream in the hot desert of sorrows. Just when you think you’ve reached the green oasis of joy, the blistering heat snatches it away from you. Such is life. Such are the times. How can one love and live at the same time? Bas ki dushwar hai har kaam ka aasaan hona, Aadmi ko bhi mayasar nahi insaan hona (Although it’s difficult for every task to be easy, Even for a man, it’s not easy to become humane) My tale is one of deception, and how this wicked, treacherous world makes it so hard for man to be humane. I loved; I loved and I lost. I lost because of treachery; no, I lost because of my own jealousy. Or was it treachery? My mind deceived me, tricked me, the bastard. Could she ever do what they say? They said she cheated her father of twenty years. Could she have cast aside our sacred vows that easily? Jee dhoondhta hai phir wohi fursat ke raat din; Bethein rahein tasavur-janan kiye hue (My soul still seeks those nights and days of leisure, When we would idle away, picturing the beloved in our head) Desdemona and I used to lie on grassy slopes, looking up at the sky as I enticed her with my tales of travels far away. I could see her cringe at every mention of adversity, and see her fair, lovely face light up when I spoke of conquests. I could guide her eyes from wide, smiling surprise to misty empathy in seconds. She lived vicariously through me. I was her Marco Polo and she my Kublai; and for her, I painted the invisible cities, their people, their mysteries, their stories. As for me, I took delight in the changing contours of her beautiful face, knowing I was in charge of her emotions even if for just those few hours. Manzar ek bulandi par aur hum bana sakte Arsh se idhar hoga kaas ki makaan apna (We could have made a viewing-site at an excellent height; If only our house were on this side of the sky) It seems so long ago that the night breeze rushed past our faces as I caressed her lovely hair and told 9
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her of my dreams for us; for us to go beyond this world and soar the skies with happiness. We were to settle in Cyprus, you know; move to the beautiful city of Cyprus and have a new home. She wanted to see the marvels of the East I had so often told her about: the painters with their paraphernalia, the Chinese traders with their reams of silk, the buzz of this port city where the East and West came together. Tere wade par jiye hum toh ye jaan jhooth jana, Ki khushi se mar na jaate, agar itbaar hota (If we lived on your promise, then know this – we knew [it to be] false, For would we not have died of happiness, if we had had trust [in it]?) When you told me you wanted to marry me, did I not bring forth crowds to cheer at our wedding? Did I not do all but part the Red Sea for that vow of fidelity from you? Did I not once tell you that if it were now to die, ‘twere now to be most happy? Why then did that damned handkerchief make its way into someone else’s bed? Why then could you not promise me serenity? This tinkering seed of doubt that Iago has sown in my head is still not uprooted. I can feel it grow its parasitic tentacles deep into me. I know it shall be the death of me. You were too good to be true. Mohabbat mein nahi hai farq jeene aur marne ka, Usi ko dekh kar jeete hain kis kaafir pe dam nikle (In love, there’s no difference of living and dying Having seen only her, we live – that infidel over whom we breathe our last) Now, I sit here; the dagger in my hand raised to my chest over the body of my beloved – the wife I choked to death with my own hands. Reality goes by at an unfathomable speed sometimes. How could have I let this happen? My Desdemona; my beautiful Desdemona – I was misled. Will my tears wake her up? That whiter skin of hers than snow now lies lifeless before me, and my beloved, there is no way I can again thy former light restore. It wasn’t Iago; it was me who did this to her. ‘Tis true that your love left me in a trance; morning and night would go just looking for the beloved. Oh, you beautiful, my lady fair of face. Was I wrong to love this Venetian, this kaafir of mine? They didn’t want me; I was the treacherous moor who had entered their city and stolen their girl from their midst. I was the Other. Truth be told, I still do not know if it was she who was faithless, or I. At the end, which of us is the infidel? Zikr us pari wash ka aur phir bayan apna Ban gaya rakeeb aakhir tha raazdaan apna (The mention of that fairy-faced one; and then – my description Finally, he who was my confidant, became my rival)
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I am damned; I should have never professed my love to her so publicly. Oh, who wouldn’t be jealous? Who wouldn’t want her? That must have been it. He wanted her. I described her beauty; her fair skin, her rosy lips, her dark eyes. It was me. I let her slip through my hands. That is the cause and that is the reason; Cassio and Iago, both wanted her. It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Dard e dil likhunkab tak jaon un ko dikhlaon, Unglian figaar apni khaama khooncha apna (How long would I write the pain of the heart? I might go and show her My wounded fingers, my blood-dripping reed-pen) I cannot but write about us; this epic of ours breaks my heart as I pen it down. Do you not see the blood flow down my hands, trickling down the paper like beads? But our tale needs to be told. A tale of how I, like the base Judean, threw a pearl away richer than all my tribe. Qaid-e-hayat o ranj o gham asal mein dono ek hain, maut se pehle aadmi gham se najaat payen kyun (The prison of life, and the bondage of grief – in essence both are one, Before death, why would a person find release from grief?) I killed my own wife for her infidelity. I killed my own wife on the pretext of what a possible adversary told me. From here on, I will either live knowing I killed either my unfaithful wife, or my one true love, neither of which will justify the agony this act brings with it. This life is not meant to be lived happily. I loved and I lost. Perhaps it is time to free myself from these miserable shackles of human existence. Hue mar ke hum jo ruswa hue kyun na gark e darya, Na kahin janazah uthta na kahin mazaar hota (If disgrace after death was to be my fate, I should have met my end by drowning, It would have spared me a funeral and no headstone would have marked my grave) But alas! Even the decision of death seems to have taken its revenge on me. Fate, you tricky bastard; I see the sly game you played there. Oh, how I hope I escape the misery of a funeral! I should have plunged into the rivers and drowned. With a strong wave, I would have been forgotten. No processions to glorify me; no whispers to malign. But let it be known that I loved not wisely, but too well. Not easily jealous, but being wrought, perplexed in the extreme. Oh, my soul’s joy! I once told you that if after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death. I crave the tempest and the calm now. Let me come to you and let us now be together. Come, Desdemona; once more, we’ll meet at Cyprus. Onaiza Drabu is a business graduate who gave up a job with McKinsey to study for a year at the Young India Fellowship, while simultaneously trying to find something she could potentially enjoy doing for a living. 11
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Friendly Wars by Ndaba Sibanda
Ever since his appointment to the lofty position of Defence Minister, he seemed to be gripped by a phobia. Some citizens claimed that the irrational fear stemmed from the possibility that he did not know what he was expected to do. Others thought that he was a lucky coward who found himself having to oversee a strategic security portfolio which he did not deserve or understand. Then one day, one foreign journalist decided to ask him one general question. “Sir, please could you shed some light on what you are doing or intend to do as the Minister of Defence to keep soldiers fit?” With exaggerated steadiness, he cleared his throat and said, “Soon, I will start some friendly wars with neigbouring countries.”
Ndaba Sibanda is a Zimbabwean-born writer. He hails from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe`s second largest city, and is one of the most prolific poets to emerge from this Southern African country. A former National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA) nominee, Ndaba’s poems, essays and short stories have been published in Africa and the US. His latest anthology, The Dead Must Be Sobbing, was published in March 2013. Ndaba`s debut novel, Timebomb, has been accepted for publication in the UK. He lives in Saudi Arabia. This flash fiction story has previously appeared in The Dying Goose.
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Photograph by Sidharth Das
Public Opinion April 22, 1874 Susan H. Douglas Political Americana Collection, #2214 http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/5z67 Rare & Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Cornell University, via Flickr Commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cornelluniversitylibrary/4359955260/
* Wednesday is often referred to as “hump day” in North America, the middle of the workday week.
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Neither Happy nor Sad by Sara Halas Preference. I prefer it when elevators are quiet and don’t have music whispering from their speakers, unlike this one with poor taste in jazz. The middle-aged woman standing next to me shifted her weight from one foot to the other at a very fast pace. I could tell that she didn’t like the awkward silence between us. It sat heavy on both our shoulders. On the ground level of the apartment building, I dragged the empty suitcase I had borrowed from my mother behind me, and out into the dazzling sunlight. It was massive, made of brown leather and covered in stickers from her post-teenage self-discovery travels across the globe. She had only ever needed to take books, clothes, and food with her. Tonight, to have a peaceful holiday with my boyfriend, I planned to fill it with the self respect I had given up a long time ago. On the bus ride home from my mum’s, a bearded old man in a shiny yellow raincoat drunkenly stumbled onto the seat next to me. He sat on the suitcase, its corner pressed into his bottom as the plastic squelched. He hastily stood up again, rubbing the painful area and apologizing, all the while looking towards the back of the bus. I tried to catch his eye, but he avoided my gaze as if it would transmit a disease rather than kind empathy. The sky had been a clear blue on the afternoon of our first date. Not a happy blue, a sad blue. I could tell from the shadows of the lamp posts lining the quiet street that they, too, felt a little exhausted. Peter and I met at 3pm, in front of a small, run-down Italian cafe he had chosen. It took us a long time to decide on a meal appropriate for this time of the day. I was secretly craving the mushroom risotto, but kept quiet about it. Over tomato soup and tiramisu, we spoke simply and clearly, not wanting to give too much of ourselves away, yet trying to take, with hungry hands, as much as we could from the other. As we talked and ate on the terrace, a young red-haired waiter watched us from the counter nearby. He lingered in the corner of my eye, his eyebrows raised halfway to the top of his forehead while his mouth formed a little “O” shape. As soon as one of us turned towards him inquiringly, his green eyes would move rapidly in their sockets, darting left and right before dropping their gaze down to the computer screen in front of him. Each time, one eyebrow failed to return to its proper position, so that it stuck in the air, like a caterpillar performing the downward dog yoga position. He made us laugh, with honest laughs that were mixed with a hint of mutual discomfort. It would have been very rude to reprimand a man just for gifting me a bag of apple-flavoured sweets on our second date. Despite the fact that sucking them made the roof of my mouth sore, and I could feel the warm blood on my tongue, though I couldn’t taste it. Not wanting to injure his pride, I avoided telling him that his candy had the same painful effect on me as drinking a boiling hot cup of coffee. The crucial difference was that the lollies lacked the aroma of a cappuccino and its ability to stir a deep longing within me. The smell of apples could never achieve this, just as the smell of Peter never really could, either. BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE
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The night we broke up, the sky was dark. Neither a happy dark nor a sad dark. My mother’s suitcase lay upside down, empty, its contents strewn across the room: the result of an argument I was having with myself. The anxiety had multiplied within me like pathogenic bacteria throughout our flight to Perth, and reached its tipping point as Peter removed his leather jacket and hung it over the back of a chair in our hotel room. In my vulnerable state, naked without the self-esteem that lay by my feet, I was rendered incapable of letting my boyfriend treat me like his doormat. This frustrated him, and without reprieve, without a bridge of understanding to reach me by, he pulled his jacket back on and left. After the door slammed shut, I walked slowly around the room, picking up my belongings off the wooden floor, clothing myself with the self-respect I had not grown out of after all. I let myself into my mother’s apartment the following morning to return the suitcase. On her bedside table lay a book borrowed from the city library. It was written by an author whose name she had been pleasantly surprised to discover so far from the war-torn country they had both grown up in. But when she took it off the shelf, she had been overwhelmed with disgust. It was obvious from the immaculate condition of the novel that it had never been read. She flicked through its pages, the bleach-white paper painfully reflecting the glow of the light bulb dangling above. Frustrated that such a wonderful work of literature was under-appreciated by so many, she took it upon herself to return the book in a state reflective of a thousand previous readers. After each reading session, instead of using a bookmark, she would fold down the corner of the page, and position the on its stomach, so that creases would appear in the spine. She underlined her favorite sentences with a blue ballpoint pen. As the sunlight streaming in through the window passed over my face, I lifted the suitcase up to the top of my mother’s wardrobe, returning it empty, as I had found it.
Sara Halas is a university student from Perth, Western Australia. Her poetry has been published in Inclement Poetry Magazine and Westward Quarterly.
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Critique
MÉS QUE UN CLUB BARÇA AS A REPOSITORY OF CATALAN CULTURAL MEMORY* by Sonal Jha
Photograph by Alexandra Jonson
Set up in 1898 by Swiss footballer Hans Gamper, Futbol Club Barcelona (Barça) has long been a mark of pride for many Catalans, especially in the city of Barcelona. This aspect of the club was strengthened over the years of General Franco’s dictatorship. The image of Barça being més que un club (Catalan for ‘more than a club’) arose in this context. Catalonia, of which the city of Barcelona is the capital, is currently an autonomous region in Spain which has its own distinct language and culture. It was a separate region that was forcefully annexed to the Spanish crown in 1714. When General Franco came to power as the dictator of Spain in 1939, he embarked upon a forceful reunification of Spain and launched several offensives against rebelling * The writer is aware that not all Catalans are anti-Spain and demand secession. Also to be acknowledged is the opposition of the supporters of Espanyol, also a Barcelona-based football club supported by Catalans in Barcelona, to what they see as an appropriation of catalanisme and the Catalan identity by FC Barcelona and its fans. BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE
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regions like Catalonia and the Basque country. In Catalonia, the Catalan language was banned, and to be heard speaking it in public led to severe punishment. All cultural expressions, including the national flag of Catalonia, the Senyera, were banned. Numerous atrocities were committed upon the people by the Falangist army** during this time. Barça became the space for rebellion for many Catalans. It was during club games at the home stadium, the Camp Nou, that finding safety in numbers, people could freely express catalanisme, talk in Catalan, wave Senyeras and banners of support and feel a sense of community. Jimmy Burns, in his book Barça: A People’s Passion quotes an elderly fan: “Out in the city, Fascism was very visible – the names of streets, the Falangist crests, the portraits of Franco, the flags – but in the stadium you were among the masses and I felt…maybe I was imaging it, but I felt it all the same – that everyone around me was really anti-Fascist deep down, at least where we were standing.” It is easy to see why, in the aftermath of the Franco years, the football club becomes a central site for many Catalans where collective memory, with respect to the civil war, the atrocities of the Franco regime and the brutal suppression of the Catalan identity, continuously renews itself. According to Jan Assman, in his essay “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, cultural memory is that upon which “a group bases its consciousness of unity and specificity...and derives formative and normative impulses from it, which allows the group to reproduce its identity.” Cultural memory provides the basis for the formation and renewal of the identity of a group of people, and derives from “fateful events of the past.” Barça becomes the figure of memory upon which is tacked the cultural memory of the events of the civil war. The club is a cultural object invested with mnemonic energy that passes on cultural memory to generations of Catalans and helps them remember their past. A quote from Burns’ interview with Ricardo Huguet, a Catalan businessman and a culer (Catalan term for a supporter of the club) validates this: “My friends ask me why I am such a fanatical Barça fan. The answer is that I feel profoundly Catalan, that is to say that I believe there is such a thing as a Catalan nation with its own history and cultural roots, and that Barça is the product of historic circumstances which Catalonia has experienced for a century. So that Barça for me is a point of reference for the frustrations that we as a people have had to suffer.” Assman’s essay delineates certain characteristics of cultural memory which facilitate this analysis of Barça. The Concretion of Identity According to Assman, cultural memory “preserves the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity.” The idea of the cultivation of the identity of a community immediately invokes Benedict Anderson’s concept of an imagined community: the nation is “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” If we transfer this definition to a relatively smaller community, like that of the Catalan people, this is exactly what Barça does. It is a place where people, in supporting a football team and meeting each other at games, realise that their shared interest makes them a part of a larger Catalan identity.
** Belonging to the Fascist ruling party, led by General Franco, in post Civil War Spain. 19
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Interestingly, Anderson talks about the role of language in the formation of these imagined communities. Though he theorises in the context of the formation of nation states and the formalisation of the vernacular in mind, it is used in a slightly different context here. The importance of the Catalan language in the foundation of the imagined community of the Catalan people and the concretion of their identity cannot be understated. With respect to Barça, this becomes of note because during Franco’s reign it was only within the confines of the stadium that people could freely speak the language. It was through this act of speaking a common language, in defiance of authority, that a sense of community was engendered. With the end of Franco’s reign, the Language Normalisation Act was passed in 1985 and Catalan once more began to enjoy the same status as Castilian Spanish in Catalonia. Catalan became a tool to dispute the authority of the state of Spain, and, of course, the marked choice of choosing one language above the other is rife with political affiliations. Assman also states that concretion of identity through cultural memory helps make a sharp distinction between those who belong to the group and those that are foreign to it. The significance of this lies in the fact that Catalanism is not considered an ethnic quality by the people of Catalonia. According to Burns, it can “be acquired and does not have to be innate; it is something that every settler can aspire to – it has to do with language, feelings and a state of belonging to Catalonia as a nation.” All that is required is that one adopt the language, immerse oneself in the local culture, and of course, support Barça. Historically, Catalonia has been a popular choice for immigrants from the poorer regions of Spain who have always been welcomed. So even as it is a point of distinction for its fans in that it becomes a marker of their cultural identity, Barça also becomes the point of assimilation for new entrants to a dynamic group of people. As Jose, an immigrant from Almeria, states “to be with Barça is to feel Catalan. Catalonia means everything to me and that is why I am a culé [culer].” (qtd. in Burns). The Capacity to Reconstruct For Assman, cultural memory works by reconstructing, in that it relates the knowledge of the past to the contemporary situation. Every generation of the group appropriates it differently based on their contemporary context. In the case of Barça, the memory of 1714 becomes this frame. In September 1714, the Castilian king finally managed to annexe the region of Catalonia to the rest of Spain. For the Catalan people, this date holds talismanic value. In the current atmosphere of the increasing demands of secession from Spain, signs of which are evident from the banners at club games, it holds a greater contemporary importance. In a game against Real Madrid (considered the team of the royals of Spain and also a favourite of General Franco) played at the Camp Nou recently, as the match clock struck 17.14 the whole stadium rose up to the chants of “independencia” for the rest of the minute, while waving the Senyera and anti-state banners. Such a show of community is allied to the memory of 1714 which finds renewed resonance based on the contemporary climate. Formation and Organisation of Collectively Shared Knowledge A prerequisite for the transmission of cultural memory, this formation and organisation occurs through various processes and rituals. It is in this that the role of the stadium of Barça, the Camp Nou, becomes important. Emma Ranachan in her thesis “Cheering for Barça: FC Barcelona and the Shaping of Catalan Identity” identifies the stadium as “the site of collective Catalan identification BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE
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and key tool for ensuring the continued development of solidarity amongst Catalans.” The ability to physically bring people together and engender a sense of solidarity has given it a symbolic power. Pierre Nora in his essay “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoirs” defines a site of memory as a place that is material, symbolic and functional. According to him, a place becomes a site of memory when the “imagination (of the people) invests it with a symbolic aura.” The stadium materially, functionally and symbolically becomes a repository of cultural memory for culers. It is not a static idea but something that renews meaning with every generation. Ranachan associates this with the idea of topophilia which “refers to the ties that unite humans and their material surroundings, especially the ties that combine emotion and place.” The people meet, mingle and support a common interest within the walls of the stadium and the fact that so much history has been witnessed by the walls is not lost upon them. Certain banners, which can always be found in the stadium at any game, gain special significance. The most identifiable is the one which says “Catalonia is not Spain.” It is a defiant voice that is visible at every game, and the language here becomes a political choice – the message is aimed at the millions of people watching the game on television around the world, and seeks to assert the Catalan identity. Reflexivity Cultural memory is practice reflexive. It is reinforced through rituals and idioms of the people. The simple ritual of attending a game every weekend becomes a ritual that renews cultural memory. Another famous ritual that has been around for many years is the practice of taking children to a game at a very early age. It is supposed to be a moment of great importance when a Catalan family takes a child to attend his or her first game at the stadium where the child is exposed to years of cultural history as well as the larger community; an initiation of sorts. This practice, repeated over generations, also ensures the steady replication of memory and cultural identity. Assman writes that “it is through its cultural heritage that a society becomes visible to itself and to others.” It is therefore inextricably linked with the cultural identity of a group of people and Barça is similarly enmeshed in the cultural heritage of the Catalan people. WORKS CITED 1. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006. Print. 2. Assman, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” Trans. John Czaplicka. New German Critique 65 (Spring-Summer 1995): 125-33. JSTOR. Web. 4 Nov. 2013. 3. Burns, Jimmy. Barça: A People’s Passion. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print. 4. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Memoires.” In: Representations 26 (1989): 7-24. JSTOR. Web. 28 Nov. 2013. 5. Ranachan, Emma Kate. “Cheering for Barça: FC Barcelona and the Shaping of Catalan Identity.” Thesis. McGill University, Montreal, 2008. McGill Library and Collections. McGill University. Web. 4 Nov. 2013. Sonal Jha is a Literature graduate, avid sports watcher, couch potato, travel skeptic and culé. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D in the humanities from IIT Kanpur, and loves her typewriter. She is a Senior Editor at Bricolage Magazine. 21
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Poetry
Three Poems by Steve Klepetar
Photograph by Siddharth Pandit www.facebook.com/SiddharthPanditPhotography BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE
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Nightbirds “You are led by the sinister wings of nightbirds.� - Robert Lowell Everywhere the song of crows, those beauties in their shining coats of rage rain lashes against window panes pools around oaks, this night of omens and lost words, so many wings, such a flurry around these leafless trees a mage could rise on these tides of night, on these black waves, wind-driven rise, a blind seer with burnt out eyes until earth disappears and the sky opens again to a breath of brilliant stars.
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Counting Backwards from One Hundred The first ten numbers spill out easily, soup from a can, splashing with untidy force into a gray saucepan. Then the trouble begins. As the soup boils, insects swirl around the kitchen light, some of them lame and some masquerading with your father’s face. Maybe it’s Halloween and children are pounding on your door. Or maybe it’s just the crickets, which have broken the air with the sound of a billion snapping sticks. You’ve counted back to sixty now, and flames wrap around the yard, but they are cold and burn nothing. Thirty-seven is an ache in your heart, twenty-four another scare. They say there is a mirror somewhere that is the Form of Mirrors, which reflects a thousand other lakes back into your troubled eyes. In each of them a thousand frogs sing their enchanted songs and white clouds move across the water, through reeds and lily pads, where sailboats never go. Eleven is a red tongue waiting, five is breath and a whispered prayer. Sometimes the water is cool as a northern breeze, sometimes it freezes and the frogs go silent. You are finished now, only to sing again while earth plows its way through blackness and you count the days until warm nights return.
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Confrontation “Don’t put words in my mouth!” screeching anger dilating black eyes, white beard bristling, brittle-thin boss body lunging toward me in a storm of rage. And in that moment the world stops, time freezes in a hot bubble of air. I imagine feeding him words, opening reluctant lips, spooning in a stew of nouns – “mountain” and “lake” and “pine tree” and “oar” simmered for hours in adjectives, with verbs hot on his struggling tongue: “plaintiff,” “majestic,” “lonely” and “rich,” “beleaguered,” “transform,” “electrify,” “plunge.” I force him to chew, feel words against his teeth, make him taste every morsel until senses explode, images pour, red lava dissolving a barricade of ears.
Steve Klepetar has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Three collections of his work appeared in 2013: Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications); Blue Season (with Joseph Lisowski, mgv2>publishing); and My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press).
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Three Poems by Gary Robinson
412-DA-10264 “Two Men Sit Silently On Stoops Of Abandoned North Philadelphia Houses, August 1973” by Dick Swanson (DOCUMERICA) | U.S. National Archives and Records Administration http://research.archives.gov/description/552749 Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S), National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD, 20740-6001 via FlickrCommons
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Witness On Nepean Street, rain, a busted house, boarded up windows and missing windows noon wetly enters the walls corrupted by a script of rebel graffiti a for sale sign’s joke the house the punch line
And the past appears a horizon either never inhabited or left long ago but where the words those beautiful, painful words that would lead us back to hearth and beds Sunday afternoon movies whose villains couldn’t escape the law? This solitude takes us again and again
attracted (because I have always loved the speech of separation) I walk in an alley and read other buildings marked by their own lines of withdrawal and flight where what scatters becomes more distinct break to identity
Strange how it plays out, the past a shade refusing to leave and the grass and stones (the poem) motioning, come closer
ribs of damp brick waste with summer
Oh yes, when I return
(and the poem’s moment peers between the white of space)
Fragments like a clatter of memory search for a witness this afternoon in traffic
I watch the old heart of this corner slowly open doors on empty rooms and hallways floors of jealousy, arguments and embraces the reconciliation of early morning vestibules — footsteps I trail quietly as a Mohawk here, where smoky settlements loosened once to bear song bird shadow Names and conversations reach in the soft sawing rain while the vacant lots set the tableau: a curtain pulls back the distance 29
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The Animal Gospels Asks for change, palm out, and travels the stain of an illiterate hand this long-haired man who blurs over blind sun streets. I don’t know who he is he might be Stephen or Paul James or Francis. Perhaps he discarded his name traded to the animals for their furious sagacity offered his old clothed identity for the hasty rituals of slumber and flight. At night he wonders what else to give slyly sees he must invent himself again. Moving thickly like a land otter he composes in star mute eyes a camouflage of synapses a grin of lush coins. Each day searching for a new contract.
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The Origins of a Page Cardinal, from a feeder to a moon of pine trees, taps vision. Slow until this flying window came, to spill sight. And the yard frozen before cardinal broke the stiff back of a winter’s morning. It disappears, but the day has come out. An old clothesline sags over animal tracks my eyes follow into the white, bright and complete as a blizzard.
Gary Robinson is a poet and short story writer based in Ottawa, Canada.
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Two Poems by Sudevi Geary
by Jessica Tyner
Photograph by Talha Masood Siddiqui www.facebook.com/talha.photojournal BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE
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Mountain Song The leaves quiver with vitality, drawing wisdom from dark, heavy brush strokes drawing me in etching my curves onto bamboo stalks, threading my hair into vines bending my limbs into roots.
I moan songs of fearful resignation. Words dissolve in the trembles of your breathing and I see you behind your glazed eyes, I see myself in the hardened jewels of your caves. Not one face on your body, more than one being in your chest; share your mind with another, he sings the words that you ingest.
I bleed onto the scrolls, a trickle of life rolling down the mountain side, drawing dusty colour from the earth, travelling, carving the way for greater forces than I.
‘Wake up, wake up.’ I draw us breathing with one lung; two old mountains, weaving prayers into their dreams, c r a c k i n g each other open with their charms.
Ten thousand crumbling faces moan songs of weighted resignation; ten thousand tremendous beings move towards the sky; twenty thousand archaic eyes gaze upon my soul as I
I write us into Nature, bending your form around the planets, burying your navel into the ground,
drift on the rivers pouring my hands. ‘Wake up, wake up.’
but I leave us on the paper and read you only in the dawn.
I’ve forgotten their language. Let me climb you; let me hang off your eyelids, pushing my ears against your lips. Let me grapple at your roots, rest my head in your overgrown lap, losing my form in your warm wet womb until once again, I am simply a part of you. Your waters wash my eyes drowning them in the monsoon night, moonlight dancing on my nose and lips. I lay with an old face twisting under the illusions of time, tasting your transmutation, your reptilian skin.
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5AM We brought the moment to its crisis, he declares, between the lines of love and waste lands that lie before us form false horizons and vantage points to feel the changing breeze. And this false mountain has no sympathy for the grey, no shelter for the low and for the weathered we vow, as have done before, to carry them on our backs, to find warmth in the dirt of their feathers, to let them feed from our plates.
We struggle with transcendence, seek its unattached release, and fight its desertion of the swamp-sitters and troglodytes. It’s possible, I say as we lie in honest form, eyes sliced open by limbs or noses or hair that curls in cracks and I’m not sure he believes me, but I know he understands when tender fingers release my wings stuck in skin and spine. A blazing chest and two damp palms will set a room alight; and they’re careful not to teach you this, but we know how to paralyse time.
Vertigo, he tells me, is not to fear the fall, but to summon it; a pre-emptive acceptance of our dive into humanity to fill our lungs with another’s water, to draw our constitution from the mud that pulls us in.
Sudevi Geary is an MA Social Anthropology and a BA (Hons) English with Creative Writing graduate. She is many different things and someone once called her a ‘brutal angel of wisdom’, but he doesn’t speak to her anymore. She lusts after the forest, and when you’re not looking she will pick the flowers from your garden.
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Art
Postcards by Ira Joel Haber
Untitled, September 2013 4” x 6” • ink, paint, wax collage
Top: Untitled, February 2013 4” x 6” • ink, paint
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Below: Untitled, November 2013 4” x 6” • ink, paint, wax collage
Top: Untitled, February 2013 4” x 6” • ink, paint, wax
Below: Untitled, January 2013 4” x 6” • paint, collage
Untitled, October 2013 4” x 6” • ink, paint, wax collage
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Untitled, July 2013 4” x 6” • paint, collage
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Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe, and he has had nine solo shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, the Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Haber’s paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 140 online and print magazines including Rock Heals, Otoliths, Siren, Opium, Dirt, The Centrifugal Eye, The DMQ Review, Unlikely Stories, Eclectica Magazine and Backwards City Review. Haber has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. He currently teaches art to retired public school teachers at the United Federation of Teachers program in Brooklyn. 43
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Features
Bihari The Portrait of an Artist by Harsh Snehanshu A look at Subodh Gupta’s exhibition Everything is Inside through a Bihari’s eyes.
Subodh Gupta, installation of stainless steel utensils. Photo by Siddharth Singh.
The ornate Jaipur House, originally built as a residence for the Maharaja of Jaipur in 1936, now serves as an integral part of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA). Since 17 January 2014, it has been showcasing the largest ever solo exhibition by a contemporary Indian artist – Subodh Gupta’s Everything is Inside – which is on till 16 March 2014.
When I enter Jaipur House, a large screen greets me. It is playing Gupta’s interview with Germano Celant, the curator of the exhibition. Gupta speaks about his childhood spent in the littleknown town of Khagaul, near Patna, in Bihar. It is this childhood – filled with the clanging of new shiny steel utensils that had replaced the dull copper ones, the smell of cow-dung that was just another object of domestic use, the tiffin-boxes that wives packed for their railway-employee husbands – that Gupta derives inspiration from. Despite having lived in Delhi for more than two decades, his heavily accented English retains a strong whiff of Bihar. A minute later, I see how well he has translated it into his art.
I’m standing outside Jaipur House, gazing at a majestic installation: a stream of shiny utensils fall out of a giant steel bucket, the girth of the stream widening as it nears the ground. The stainless steel bucket, supported by the phalanx of utensils that are welded so adeptly together that they appear glued, seems to hang in the air on its own. In the narrow corridor that leads to the halls are BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE
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Photo by Siddharth Singh
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his first car, a Maruti 800, completely overshadowed the transformation that the cycle of the gwala had undergone during the same time. His new secondhand scooter was noticed only when it came with a specially designed wireframe that could hold numerous cans on either side, making it quite a spectacle on the roads. When I enter the next hall in Jaipur House, I encounter Gupta’s brass sculpture of
Photo by Kriti Bajaj
small paintings and sculptures on miniscule wooden stools (known as peedha in Bihar) on the wall. I am reminded of my childhood years spent in Bihar, eating afternoon lunches seated on these stools. A part of 29 Mornings, one of Gupta’s first exhibitions in 1996, the paintings on these peedha explore different ideas and media. One has turmeric rhizomes strewn haphazardly,
as if left out to dry in the noon sun, except here it’s the neon bulb that glows above them; another has a painting of a crouching white ox on a crimson background.
a rickety scooter holding six such metal pots. Its parts are exquisitely rendered; they look so real that I am tempted to touch the Stepney to ensure that it’s not rubber plated with gold. Photo by Siddharth Singh
The small corridor gives in to a large hall sparsely occupied by cycles. “They are not cycles,” says Peter Nagy, Director of gallery Nature Morte and Gupta’s friend, who graciously guides us through the exhibition. “They are sculptures of cycles.” Three such glittering brass sculptures rest against each other like old friends, with three tin canisters hanging on their sides. The canisters remind me of the gwala (milkman) who used to come to our house on a similar cycle in Telaiya, a sleepy town in South Bihar (now Jharkhand). Every morning he would give us three ladles of milk, which my mother poured into a cauldron to boil. I remember the excitement with which I observed the scene, watching to see if he mixed any water. Little did I notice how things changed at the dawn of the new millennium. The euphoria of my father buying BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE
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Photo by Kriti Bajaj
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Even though Subodh Gupta’s art begins at his to be in motion. In small cities where people had home in Bihar, its depth lies in its representation of no personal vehicles, long and often permanent Photo by Siddharth Singh
the temporal, economic and spatial changes that journeys in search of jobs always began on India has undergone. Consider the exploration of ambassadors with similar baggage rolled up on his subject of the milkman: the next carrier in line, top. after the cycle and a scooter, should perhaps be a mini-truck, but it turns out to be a magnificent brass installation of an Enfield. Laden with eight steel pots, four on each side, the Enfield signifies a drastic economic upliftment of the milkman. The Enfield startles me. I’ve never seen a milkman on an Enfield in Bihar; the number of Enfields there is miniscule even now. In the 90s, its older substitutes Yezdi and Rajdoot were in vogue only to be later taken over by the fancy Karizmas and Pulsars. Gupta’s use of an Enfield, instead of representing a changing Bihar, represents the transition that he probably underwent when he stepped out of his home state and moved to Delhi, famous, along with Punjab and Haryana, for its penchant for the Enfield.
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Photo by Kriti Bajaj
My anticipation of a four-wheeler comes true in the next hall, but now the protagonist has changed from a milkman to a passenger or a tourist. The hall displays a remake of the upper half of a taxi, with a carrier on top strapped with two tightly packed bags of luggage cast in brass. Despite missing the wheels and engine, it appears
Photo by Kriti Bajaj
The sequenced curation of artworks tells a story of its own. Following the taxi is the re-creation of an airport, where brass replicas of trolleys, complete with silver sculptures of suitcases and bedding, are strewn around. In the Bihar of the early 90s, when pockets were shallow, opportunities bleak and airplanes costly, the airport was associated with aspiration. Seeing off a person off at the airport meant a family excursion. Who could afford to miss watching airplanes from up close? The chance to use an escalator, to drive those fancy trolleys burdened with heavy luggage
anything else for the next few minutes. In an artwork titled “Black and White”, a white marble barrel is complemented by a black granite one, neatly finished. The next room contains two five feet tall sculptures of tiffin boxes made out of white marble. “How heavy are they?” I ask Peter Nagy. “Almost over a ton, so heavy that it took five men to lift it up, since a crane couldn’t come in here.” On the side wall, I see a gigantic photorealistic painting of a circular plate with a spoon, both unwashed. Then follows a marble sculpture of kneaded dough, with masterful depressions and troughs. Gupta is back to what he’s best at: realism in the sculpture of an obscure object that other people won’t even see as art. He brings me back to my hometown, when watching my mother knead dough was a daily experience. I could never decipher the exact amount of water needed to make the dough usable. Too little and it wouldn’t stick; too much and it would be too sticky. In the hard and brittle body of white marble – Gupta’s flour – he has added the precise amount of life to turn the otherwise dead marble into dough.
containing chyawanprash and pickles, or to get Air-India stickers for the Almirah at home? Those who were arriving, especially from abroad, were less enthused, with their family waiting with garlands and hired photographers to capture the precise moment of first familial eye-contact. I am An empty canvas hangs on a wall in the same standing at one such airport, where, in contrast to room. It’s a sculpture of an empty canvas. the previous display, time seems to have halted. There’s a brass replica of a door in the wall. An old commode that instantly reminds me of Once I take off from the airport inside Jaipur Duchamp’s “Fountain”, a ceramic urinal, signed House, the adjacent hall introduces me to a world with a fictitious name R. Mutt, bought and that hasn’t really been explored: food. Now that presented as artwork by Marcel Duchamp in early I’m aboard the flight, the first serving was bound 1900s; but Gupta presents his trademark style in to come. Subodh Gupta loves the culinary world the brass creation that stands by the original’s so much that he doesn’t allow me to think about side – even the stains are sculpted in. A steel 51
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Photo by Siddharth Singh
Photo by Kriti Bajaj
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tumbler filled with water to its brim is next, its protruding meniscus telling me that just one nudge of the table would spill it. The sight is meditative. There are guards who keep you off the table, not disrupting the tranquil spell in which the artwork is contained. All of us have seen it at home, when accidentally we added more water in a tumbler than it could contain. All of us have sipped the meniscus of one
in Delhi made fun of him and his terrible accent when he moved here from Khagaul, and used the word “Bihari” in a derogatory fashion. Seeing the word that defined his identity used as a cuss word offended him and he chose it as one of one of the first statements he wanted to make to the world. The installations that follow are an elaborate interplay of shiny steel utensils and wooden
Photo by Kriti Bajaj
stools showcasing a bhoj, the typical lunch hosted by Brahmins in Bihar, generally to mourn a death. The sharp contrast between the setting and the brightness in the room tells the story that Gupta probably wants to convey: there is life in death. Gupta’s most celebrated work follows next in line. But on close observation I notice that the plates Titled “Bihari”, it’s a self-portrait with cow-dung contain stainless steel replicas of kattas, the smudged across the canvas. In the bottom-center, country-made revolvers that Bihar is famous for. LED letters flash the word “(bi-ha-ri)”. Gupta boasts of being a Bihari as his most important attribute. The artwork that follows is neither a painting In one of his interviews, he narrates how people nor a sculpture, but a video titled Pure, in which such tumbler before. “Where’s the art in this? This is a joke. This is something that I can do,” people around me say. True, this is something that we all can do, but alas, none of us have.
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Photo by Kriti Bajaj
Photo by Siddharth Singh
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Gupta, covered in gobar (cow-dung), is taking a bath. The movie runs on a loop. Once the cow dung is completely washed off, the video starts rewinding and we see specks of gobar throwing themselves at him, against gravity, sticking to his body until he is covered in it. The connotation of gobar being a sacred item in Bihar, usually used for puja, links with the title – here, instead of water cleaning him up, it’s the cow-dung that does so. It is not until he’s entirely covered in the muck that he walks out. The exhibition at Jaipur House ends with the artwork that took me home. A pile of goethas (cow-dung cakes) arrayed like bricks make up a tiny, homely hut right in the heart of Jaipur House. Titled “My Mother and Me”, the imposing artwork makes me deeply nostalgic. I have seen these goethas stuck on so many walls in Patna; I have used these goethas to cook litti-chokha (a dish native to Bihar) in our courtyards during winter. I enter the hut and look around. Through its roof, an expensive chandelier looks down at me. The palatial residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur is as much a part of Gupta’s artwork as the smelly cow-dung hut I’m standing in. The irony of the installation makes it a moving self-portrait of Gupta’s rags-to-riches life story.
into gigantic sizes is necessary to grab the attention of the urban metropolis that looks down upon everything that is rural. A banyan tree titled “Dada – Grandfather” made completely out of welded utensils, its branches sparkling. In another exhibition room are several behemoths: a huge installation titled “Fountain”, unlike Duchamp’s, has hundreds of stained aluminium utensils with taps gushing water over them – a common sight at any middle or lower class home that never looked like art to me until now; a skull made out of welded utensils whose yellow teeth of brass and copper tumblers stand out dreadfully; a moving avalanche of utensils aptly titled “Tsunami (Thosa Pani)” that seems to be descending down with great force; a wall sculpture made of a thousand pairs of bronze tongs that reminds me of Premchand’s story “Idgah”; an old dilapidated sewing machine with oil-painted brass mangoes on it; a large boat filled with old unused utensils studded with whirring fans.
I come out of NGMA awed and intrigued, but troubled by a rather odd question. Did I connect with Gupta’s art just because I hail from Bihar, having moved to Delhi eight years ago and gone through the same experiences and transitions Gupta’s magnification of small domestic objects that Gupta must have?
Harsh Snehanshu is an author, and currently a Young India Fellow. www.facebook.com/harshsnehanshu
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Diary
Oceans of Independence by Campbell C. Hoffman
Growing up, my family had the privilege of sharing a beach house with my dad’s brother and sister, and all of the family that went with them. The house was small, certainly, by today’s standards, but back then, I never noticed that. The things that mattered were the cousins that were there, and the fact that the front deck cantilevered out over the sand dune, creating a perfect nook underneath to play in. I can be certain that each of us was shaped somehow by our time there. For me, the beach house was a place where I slowly took those first dodgy steps away from the safety of the nest. It was the place that I was first allowed to ride my bike, without grown-ups. Sitting on the banana seat of one of those salt-air-rusted beach bikes, I biked with my sister, always along the same route to get to the “Nor’easter,” a tchotchke beach store where we counted out our quarters and came away with treasures. One day, after riding all the way to the main drag in search of hermit crabs or hemp braided bracelets, or maybe just some gum, my sister’s friend cut her bare foot on the sidewalk in front of the store. It was bleeding, messy, and dramatic. Suddenly, this familiar trip had deviated, and now we were off script. I put a toe into the waters of independence: what did we do now? A rush of adrenaline was forcing me into action, and the fact that I was being trusted, somehow, with something more than I had ever been before. But there was now a blood stain on the sidewalk, and you can bet that every time we biked past that store, we gloried in the blood and bravery of our pre-teen selves. Not only was I marked by my experience, but I was learning to that I, too, could leave marks. Then there was the time when, in BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE
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celebration of my 14th birthday, my mom rented a fifteen passenger van to take my best girls for an overnight stay at the beach house. It was May 1994, and at the end of our eigth grade year. We were spinning our way out of middle school and almost into high school with so much drama (is there any other way?). Everything was heavy with this weight, and we belted out Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” with tears wetting our cheeks, because Why Not? My mom is sort of a hero in these memories, because while she was there and available and always said “yes” to things like this, when I close my eyes to picture these stories, I have no visual of her there. No hovering mother, doting on us with snacks, trying to eavesdrop on our conversations to find out what boy we all liked – though if I had to guess, she didn’t need to. She somehow had her finger on the pulse without being intrusive. So when 1:00am rolled in, we were on our own. We were on our own when it became clear that something was not quite right with one of my friends. We had been doing girly sleepover things, playing with each other’s hair, and taking quizzes in magazines; but the night turned darker, a step away from familiar shores. Standing over a day old newspaper, this friend sobbed dramatically, declaring, “Jackie O is dead!” And it was only because she was on an acid trip that this was deemed especially noteworthy. I remember little else from that birthday, but this scene in that bedroom of the beach house, the rest of my girlfriends hovering around my friend waiting to see how this would all play out, is firmly planted in the “growing up” section of my brain. Then there’s the Memorial Day I walked the blocks after dark, with older cousins, while we all tried on versions of cool. Did anyone even know we were gone? I learned to recognize my edges, find my voice: quiet at first. Later, tiptoeing up the steps back home, my cousin asked me to check her breath, wondering about the beer she still tasted on her tongue. The beach house is where we went after prom. There were sleeping bags and sleeping bodies in every cranny of the house. It was cold and rainy, but we ran on the sand, surfed in the waves, and drank convenience store cappuccino. One friend got a speeding ticket; another was in trouble for being out without permission. Years later, though not as many as one might expect, my sister and
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I spent a night at the beach house right before I married my date from that prom, and we talked through this next giant step of life. And for more than a few years after, Mark and I spent New Year’s at the beach, quietly toasting midnight with close friends. We all grew up, grew big and grew families, and this beach house went from quaint to impossibly small for all the people who loved it. It was full of stories; not just mine, but everyone else’s, too, and it couldn’t hold them anymore. The house was sold. Each family went its own way. It was sad then, for lots of reasons. My parents were splitting up; my sense of family was unmoored. This felt like one too many losses, being carried off by the sea. Life was complicated and raw with a different kind of independence – scarier and less safe than those carefree beach-bike years. That beach house, with its sharp dune grass and pebbled drive, had wide spanning views of the ocean. You could climb to the top deck, taste the salty air on your lips and watch the gulls fly above the horizon which, like the breath of childhood, stretched out forever.
Campbell C. Hoffman and her carpenter husband can mostly be found out on a trail, encouraging (read: begging) their three kids to keep hiking. When not out on the trails, Campbell is on another adventure, not altogether different: motherhood. Sometimes she writes about it on her blog (tumbledweeds.wordpress.com). Photos courtesy Campbell C. Hoffman.
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Interviews
Q&A with
Janice Pariat by Varun Warrier
Janice Pariat is an Indian poet and writer. She grew up in Shillong, studied English Literature at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and History of Art at SOAS, University of London. For her collection of short stories, Boats on Land, published in 2012, she was awarded the Yuva Puraskar from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for fiction. She is currently the Charles Wallace Writer in Residence at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.
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What made you take up writing? Writing took me up from when I was about eight and just wouldn’t let me go. I suppose we all have our own way of reimagining the world, and since I fail spectacularly at painting or playing musical instruments, mine is through words. Writing gives me meaning. What was the first piece you remember writing? I stole plot lines and characters from Enid Blyton and re-wrote her stories when I was in school – they were hardly original, or, for that matter, any good, but the encouragement I received from my family was tremendous, even if they were faintly amused. In addition to writing, you were also an editor of a literary journal - Pyrta magazine. What do you look for in a good work of fiction? Originality, obviously. A certain style, imagistic writing, writing that startles, writing that makes me wish I’d written that line. Also, work that has potential. That can be improved and refined.
Your book Boats on Land was immensely reflective, yet at the same time panoramic - covering a period of 150 years. What was the process behind writing these stories? Were these written over a period of time? Listening, listening, listening - to begin with. I’ve said quite often that I’ve carried these stories around with me for years – collecting them from friends, family, strangers – and so, they began writing themselves long before I put pen to paper. Finally, it took me about a year and a half to complete the collection.
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North Eastern India has a rich culture of storytelling. Was this an important part of your childhood? Did it inspire some of your stories in Boats on Land? I grew up in Shillong and pockets of Assam, in various tea gardens there, and yes, my childhood was filled with many wonderful storytellers. The Khasis, predominantly an oral community, are extremely fond of khanna, or telling tales, and I carry that art close to my heart. Many of the stories in Boats on Land explore the peculiar power of the word, of narration. Some of them are stories within stories. They touch upon the theatricality of oral story-telling, and the performativity employed even in our daily lives. The literary landscape in India has seen an interesting change since the turn of the century. Writing is increasingly seen as being lucrative, and more young people are taking to writing. What is your take on this? Lucrative? Tragic if that’s the only reason one “takes to writing”, or anything else for that matter. Is writing a ‘choice’? I’m uncertain. Thoreau said the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. That puts everything into perspective. If you don’t love it, don’t do it. It’s quite simple. What’s the best book you’ve read last year? I loved Sharmistha Mohanty’s Five Movements in Praise – terrifically ‘genre-less’, poetic, and utterly compelling in its originality. As a young writer, whose voices and writings have inspired you? I once had a definitive list that I’d rework for questions like this – and now, I realise that it’s futile to try and pin down inspiration. It’s constantly changing, and, ultimately, infinite. A line from a Cavafy poem, a flash fiction story I happened to read on the internet, graffiti on a London wall, watching Kate Tempest perform “The Brand New Ancients”, a walk in the woods. Vast as an ocean. Are you currently working on anything new? A year ago, I would have said a novella. But now, I must amend that to a novel. It’s called Seahorse – and it’s entirely, amazingly, utterly different from Boats on Land. Which, for me, is extremely exciting. And terrifying. What has been the best writing advice someone has given you? That no one else can tell my stories.
Varun Warrier is a graduate from Madras Christian College, Chennai, and a Postgraduate from University College London. He is currently reading for an MPhil in Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. His works have been previously published in magazines such as Chai Kadai, Pyrta Journal and Fiction365. He is an Associate Editor at Bricolage Magazine. Images courtesy of janicepariat.com. BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE
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Photography
Egypt by Ashwati Vipin
My travels through Egypt led me from Cairo to Aswan, along the river, through the desert and various towns and cities, on four modes of transport. The people and their history, the intimidating architecture and vastness of this once formidable civilization form a fascinating conglomeration. Glimpses of the past are present at every corner and the atmosphere is thick with the hustle and bustle of tourists, their guides and the rush of taking it all in before moving onto the next story.
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I have tried to showcase my favourite moments from the trip, but this is not just any travel photo collection. Instead, I attempt to convey the essence of a modern Egypt that is still so reminiscent of its glorious history.
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Ashwati Vipin is currently a Research Assistant in neuroscience based at the SINAPSE Institute, Singapore. She can be best described as a nerd with a photography itch. She runs a photography blog on Flickr as well as with the National Geographic Society. She loves travelling and capturing the essence of every location through her pictures. In her free time she is usually dreaming of her next holiday and the photo compositions that most certainly must follow. See more of her work at www.flickr.com/photos/ashwati
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