COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING) (ONLINE ISSN 2278-9650 | PRINT ISSN 2278-9642)
NO. 8 | SEP ‘13 | 2.4
ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING) | POETRY – RESEARCH PAPERS – NONFICTION |
ISSUE VIII | SEP ‘13 | 2.4
ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING) | POETRY – RESEARCH PAPERS – NONFICTION |
Coldnoon envisions travel not as flux but instead as gaps in travelling itself, from which derives its theory of travelogy. Coldnoon means a shadowed instant in time when the inertia of motion of images, thoughts and spectacles, comes to rest upon a still and cold moment. Our travels are not of trade and imagining communities; they are towards the reporting of purposeless and unselfconscious narratives the human mind experiences when left in a vacuum between terminals of travel.
First published in New Delhi India in 2013 Online ISSN 2278-9650 | Print ISSN 2278-9650 Cover Photograph, Patrice Carré
<http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/France/North/HauteNormandie/Le_Havre/photo734312.htm> Cover Design, Arup K Chatterjee Typeset in Arno Pro & Trajan Pro Editor, Arup K Chatterjee Assistant Editor, Amrita Ajay Contributing Editors: K. Satchidanandan, Lisa Thatcher, Sudeep Sen, G.J.V. Prasad, Sébastien Doubinsky Copyright © Coldnoon 2013. Individual Works © Authors 2013. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or copied for commercial use, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent acquirer. All rights belong to the individual authors, and photographer. Copyright: Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Sep ‘13, 2.4) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi 110067 India www.coldnoon.com
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Contents
Introduction
1
Poetry Love Song of a Journeyman – Vihang A. Naik Four Poems – Pritha Kejriwal Four Poems – Ankita Haldar Six Poems – Christopher Reilley Four Poems – James I. McDougall Five Poems – Ranjit Hoskote Six Poems – Jerrold Yam Four Poems – Anne Lovering Rounds Four Poems – Elsa Mathews EMotions – Sébastien Doubinsky
12 13 21 28 35 42 48 54 62 67 74
Nonfiction Sketches of Health in Travel Narratives on India – Elwin Susan John A British, Middle-Class Woman in the Harem: Emmeline Lott’s The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople (1865) – Elisabetta Marino Metaphor of Travel: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) – Chin-yuan Hu The Maya in Monuments: Musings on the Makes, Masks and Mirages of Modern Dalit Memorials in NCR and Lucknow – Siddhartha Chakraborti and Anurima Chanda The Rooftops of Vienna: An American in Austria – Stephen Newton
84 85
98 110
133 153
Contributors
167
Editorial Board
172
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Introduction Citation: Chatterjee, Arup K. “Introduction: Travel and Self.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 1-11. Web. Copyright: "Introduction: Travel and Self." (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Introduction: Travel and the Self
One of the most important questions that have been concerning me for some time now is how far should one go in sophistry; more specifically, I am bothered towards a justice that the subject of my present sophistry deserves. This subject is travel. Since I, for one, am the most untravelled of people, living in almost pure fear of travelling, I have at least found the simple answer to the reason for my object. Sophistry must be the practice of s/he who considers the work or sport of another to be full of deficiencies, and even callousness. So, the sophist is also the great cynic, the latter that I definitely am, while the former I only propose to the reader to become, in this supposedly new methodology of travel, as I would like to often perceive it. I have a fear of class, any class, and to me any class travels. It travels objectively from place to place and leaves the onlookers in dismay. The crowd is never a class that moves because its movements are so imperceptible. So often, I reject class by naming it as the crowd, the infinite realm of only too finite practices and laughable codes of popular subjectivity. My proposed travel has always been the solitary one whose irredeemable pathos brings the traveller to such an ignoble rank in my eyes that I have nothing to fear from, and I even start to care for his motives, although ideological, his motifs although useless, and his poetics although very artificial. There is always a consciousness in the solitary traveller or nontraveller of the incredible, for throughout history travel has been wrought upon the unbelievable monstrous allure of spaces. I wonder if we all went together would we ever be able to see that monster as it was: the fearsome, ungraspable, and mortalising Cerberus. In 1997, Sofia, or as Inger J. Birkeland calls her in his Making Place, Making Self, was reported for the first time in the Norwegian media as the woman who walked 2100 km from Oslo to the North Cape, in Norway. Her reason for doing so was to reclaim her north which she appeared to have lost along with her youth. The North Cape which was quite well known as a
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popular destination, since Thomas Cook introduced tourism there in 1874, was not the same place she ended at; the place she made for herself in pursuit of her north is not accessible without a severity of purpose instead of a mere velocity of travel which has been so often imposed on us that we forgot to worry about the former. Sofia explained: “the north is the most important point of reference for the travellers. When people want to know where, they are they use a compass, since the needle always points to the north” (in Birkeland, 2). This loss and rediscovery was rather interesting: to begin with it was the loss of the most common intentionality of travel, not even an object, but the mere representation of a northerly direction. What is the significance of the North Star for us? I wondered how important this celestial reference was for me, for instance, when I conceived Shakespeare’s Caesar in the following, about twelve years ago: I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament (61)
It is well possible I had only begun thinking about the North Star not much before this time. Of course, Caesar falls from his fixity, and so the North is vulnerable at least, since Shakespeare, but that is beside the point. I am embarrassed at something far simpler: that the North Star is not only losable but also forgettable. There are these representations therefore, even the most mythical ones, which feature too largely in our lives to be noticed afresh. They are located somewhere too palpable to be always perceptible. In the example of Sofia we find a travel to a very predictable space. The means of travel chosen for this purpose was even commoner, but the final execution, and the experience thereof, very sophisticated. The process rebuilds the North, objectively for Sofia, and even her own body; it redefines the architecture of both. In Sofia’s words: To find myself I had to use my own rhythm, and this is in walking. I walk inside myself to be inside myself, to look for myself, to use my natural rhythm. This is also walking outside of myself. I have to use the physical world because I am here on earth, and I have to use the ground and water and other physical things I can touch. To do that
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– to travel outside – I had to walk. That is a direct expression of my inside walking (in Birkeland, 3)
The emphasis on an (internal) rhythm and the purpose of establishing its symbiosis with the rhythm of the external geography or atmosphere is what the discipline of architecture is based on. More interesting than Sofia’s travel is the sensitive treatment it receives at the hand of Birkeland. The travel en-genders a new North altogether, which according to Birkeland is a sexualized (therefore revitalized) space containing the life vigour that Sofia had lost prior to her pilgrimage. And at this point Birkeland begins simplifying by broadly referring to Sofia’s experiences as non-dualist, and adding brief observations from the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. The basic understanding of the human body as a cosmic manifestation of the earth, in what Eric Dardel called geographicality (Birkeland, 9) – although his usage was based more on material and objective realities – is found even in the Baul philosophy of deha tattva which can be defined as: …the reflection of the cosmic truth within the human body. To achieve inner pureness it is necessary to direct one’s outward attentiveness towards the inside so as to open the inner sight for the Infinite Reality that indwells the microcosm contained in the human body. Inward attentiveness is therefore the quintessence of deha tattva…(Pūrṇadāsa and Thielemann, 11).
This inward disciplining and almost laboratory treatment of the same under travelling conditions is what Sofia also talks about. Now, the question here is not to deflect the attention that Birkeland lays on phenomenology and the study of the sexual body with respect to the intentionality, which is a sexualized space, but to observe the deep levels of circularity in all the three discourses we have had so far: Sofia’s, Birkeland’s and mine own. There is a tendency in each to dodge a stable position, in fact a loci where the walker, the traveller, the philosopher, and even this present essay may stand. I am not merely talking about the difficulty of the language used but a circumlocution which is somewhat borrowed from a tradition of Western thought witnessed in Spinoza’s “– God is the immobile supreme mover –” (qtd. in Badiou, 143) or
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Rilke’s primal circling around God.1 In other words the body becomes the representation of something immensely powerful, something that can only be represented, such as the North Star or God. This is a rigorous path, as opposed to travels that tread on a path of class communalism. If it is the body and the treatment of the sexual, sentient and geographical self that phenomenology talks about I would consider it as ideologically closer to the sexual feminine that Sofia represents in her travels. On the other hand the concept of tourism which fosters a communal identity, that of a tourist, who is the same as all the others he might cohabit his visited space with, is correspondingly a masculine agency which annihilates the delicacy and the disciplinary study of the travelling body. The communality of the travelled spaces is often lost in tourism, and the traveller himself comes to be part of a travelling community. He reads in reviews the places he must visit, and soon he himself begins reviewing them. He is also in a constant quest for that which is hitherto unreviewed; he is always seeking the novel in the known. His job is that of detection of an affair that is ventured into by another. Indeed, his case is similar to the frustrated nowhere-to-go sleuth who the noir-obsessed world has so readily welcomed into its self-fashioning that it has smartly obliterated the way he used the blondes around.2 It however, took more meticulous efforts to have an affair than to detect it; merely the latter part was shown to us. The sleuth created no human relations, he saw them terminate, or himself became a spoke in the fatalistic wheel of a larger web of lives. The blonde featured briefly or vulgarly towards the end, or intermittently when she tried to convert the sleuth, or seek reunion with her corrupt lawful keepers, the way she was “I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song” (Rilke, in Bly, p. 76). 1
In the sleuth figures of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, both played by Humphrey Bogart, and their corresponding femme fatales Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) in John Huston dir. The Maltese Falcon (Warner Bros., 1941), and Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers) in Howard Hawks dir. The Big Sleep (Warner Bros., 1946). Also see Glen Ford as Det. Sgt. Dave Bannion, and Gloria Grahame as Debby Marsh in Fritz Lang dir. The Big Heat (Columbia Pictures, 1953) 2
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made to feature. But the real forces of production happened at her will. Likewise in Henri Lefebvre’s masterpiece The Production of Space, the philosopher leaves no room for an active production of space by tourists and such ruffians, who play no more than a passive role befitting the mere onlooker: The power of a landscape does not derive from the fact that it offers itself as a spectacle, but rather from the fact that, as mirror and mirage, it presents any susceptible viewer with an image at once true and false of a creative capacity which the subject (or Ego) is able, during a moment of marvellous self-deception, to claim as his own (189).
The more self-satisfying details and mirages one finds in travel the more touristic and travelogue-oriented one becomes, and needless to say the duller still. The one who stays not cheaply captivated but herself transformed, or at an undecidable stretch of geographicality produces space ideologically, sexually and bodily. The boom, or what I suggest as a sort of eye-hurting cause, recently in travel writing, is born out of a Western fear of homogenization as Patrick Holland, Graham Huggan note in their Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing following the loss of diversity in easy accessibility of spaces of the earth (2). This idea that helps the “commercial ends” of tourism even though performing in strictly literary capacities, is hardly logical. Thrills are sought and the world deemed heterogeneous still, therefore. Were there an industry with which, let us say, the literature of love, or better still war, were associated what would be the “commercial ends” we might seek from such a literature and practice? It is nerve racking to think in these terms. Why then travel (only) is always about creating new spaces, away from the orthodox, where in fact the orthodox itself would like to crash in soon afterwards, maintaining this thorough entropy of space? Often the native travel industry itself plays into the hands of the tourist by capitalising on a tradition of touristic ideology that was charted across the years of colonization, now even in a postcolonial time. The rhetoric of the
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preservation of the self and its body in Indian travel industry invites Elwin John’s critique in “Sketches of Health in Travel Narratives on India.” Travel seizes the language of the travelled; the corollary is: the traveller “seizes with his language the land he crosses” (Butor, 13). The uniqueness of space is less interesting to many than its blankness. There is that primitive order of a Crusoeian name-giver in all of us who crave to redefine space by building it anew, by receiving it as a blank space where we can write the language most intelligible to us. So, we do not really look for authentic spaces to inhabit or to write about but spaces that are more inferable to our authentic imagination (Levin, 34). Spaces are being created everywhere, all the time. We cannot talk of travel autonomously as a discipline or practice but only as the necessary element for covalent bonds between all other elements of our daily lives. So, contrary to the popular understanding that travel is about bridging some gap between two spaces, it is the duration that we abide in these interconnecting gaps, rather than the duration we take to traverse them. Holland and Huggan add: [Travel writing] is a hybrid genre that straddles categories and disciplines. Travel narratives run from picaresque adventure to philosophical treatise, political commentary, ecological parable, and spiritual quest. They borrow freely from history, geography, anthropology, and social science, often demonstrating great erudition…(8-9, italic mine)
One way to look at the above is how travel writing follows a theoretical eclecticism that is ruled not by the dictates of the disciplines it borrows from but by its own positionality. Another would be to see travel writing to be present in any form of writing. I want to stress on “erudition” as this is the only way out of losing the so called heterogeneity of travel. The moral superiority of the traveller over the tourist, a capitalist barter on which the tourist industry thrives, shapes the personality of Emmeline Lott in Elisabetta Marino’s essay “A British, Middle-Class Woman in the Harem – Emmeline Lott’s The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople (1865).” What thrived in the case of Lott was not the tourism of today, but a more primordial tendency of European ethnographic superiority and also the turpitude of the
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Orient. These unfortunately are the values and the fears from which we have not been able to extricate travel writing even today. There is not a lack of space but that of rigour with which we study travel. Where was Sofia’s commitment to her north in Francesco Negri’s – Italian adventurer to visit the North Cape in 1664 – standing on “the edge of the world” (Birkeland, 4), where was the sexual body, the circularity of the simultaneous inward and outward walking? While travellers take the to and fro around the travel site, the sexual body travels to and fro within its own geographicality. After the Second World War and the sudden collapsing and shortening of worlds and world routes there was the fear of the death of travel writing. But it was only to mask the death of the masculine traveller, who had become so common and spread everywhere that he inspired no sexually emancipating identity. Travel writing had become non-gendered. Waugh's announcement [of the death of travel writing], echoed by Levi-Strauss, later elegized by Fussell, was very much part of late – specifically postwar English – modernist anxiety. Bureaucratic impersonality; progressive means of transportation allied to a sophisticated travel infrastructure; the monstrous rise of tourism – all of these struck Waugh as symptoms of the modern (male) adventurer's decline (Holland and Hugan, 197)
But travel is also about building settlements, temporary or durable, in those fleeting moments. And what could be more heterogeneous than the individual traveller? The fake promise of a paucity of space leads to the cramming up whatever little information we can find about new spaces. This leads to a desexualisation of the travelling body, with the omission of the essential step of “becoming-woman” that is central to travel, as we will see in Chin-yuan Hu’s essay “Metaphor of Travel in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928),” in this volume. The cult of moving away from a homogenized world, in pursuit of an authentic heterogeneity is most affectingly summarized in the National Geographic Society’s “Geotourism Charter” which lays a historic emphasis on “authenticity and making a place better by visiting and spending money” (qtd. in Levin, 9) The question of authenticity is most troubling and inquired after
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in Siddhartha Chakraborti and Anurima Chanda’s essay “The Maya in Monuments: Musings on the Makes, Masks and Mirages of Dalit Memorials around Delhi,” that talks about a recent phenomenon of Dalit architecture, the legitimacy of whose aesthetics, identity, and even need for construction has been so severely under scrutiny that people forgot to even care about the fate of these monuments apart from those at its governmental helm having kept these neglected forums for revenue generation. In other words with the possible recouping of the expenditure on these buildings in future, they might turn become legitimate and even authentic; the travel aesthetics that Chakraborti and Chanda point out however remains at bay. The final essay in this volume, befittingly a travelogue itself, sensibly shatters the protective bubble of leisure and capital with which it begins first of all, promenading complacently down the streets of Vienna, as part of a Fulbright scholar’s travels, which is of a rather commonplace value today. Stephen Newton has premonitions about death in his “The Rooftops of Vienna: An American in Austria,” like any suspecting tourist has in a foreign land. And accordingly he comes to represent a paternal order which is soon displaced as he finds that it is not the death of his own self, but that of the traveller, in philosophical sense, when he discovers how the natives themselves go on about actively producing their own spaces and travelling in them, like the spray painter painting “planets and stars.” History takes a back seat as what happens right there is more historic than all the ideological, capitalistic, academic, and historical reasons why someone had come to Austria. The music not so melodious to the ears of the traveller gathers life force for an ailing woman in the wheel chair. Towards the end Newton, in the words of Levin, manages to “portray a subject who enacts a dramatic negation of the social field of signification” (3). Probably what dies soon hereafter is the tourist’s identity; the native has usurped it all. The poems in this volume are too numerous to begin discussing upon. There are over forty poems by ten authors and none can be singled out just here. It is up to the reader to pay rigorous and enjoyable attention to their scopes and mores. As such they are like what Deleuze and Guattari have called rhizomes in their Nomadology: wherever a poem opens, a space is found to have grown.
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This issue marks the second year of Coldnoon: Travel Poetics. It is indeed a joyous moment for both you and me to have come this distance in very little time, as it seems. I hope we will keep up creating our promised changes. Editor, September, 2013 Bangalore
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References Bāula, Pūrṇadāsa, and Selina Thielemann. Bāul Philosophy. New Delhi: APH Publishing Corp., 2003. Birkeland, Inger J. Making Place, Making Self: Travel, Subjectivity and Sexual Difference. Ashgate Publishing, 2005. Butor, Michel. “Travel and Writing.” Mosaic 8.1 (1974): 1–16. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (Seattle: Wormwood Distribution, 2010). Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. University of Michigan Press, 2000. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1991). Levin, Stephen M. The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel: The Aesthetics of SelfFashioning in the Era of Globalization. Psychology Press, 2008. Rilke, Rainer Maria. “I Live my Life,” in News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness, ed. Robert Bly. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995. Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar: Reader, ed. Roma Gill. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006. The Maltese Falcon. Dir. John Huston.Warner Bros., 1941. Film. The Big Sleep. Dir. Howard Hawks. Warner Bros., 1946. Film. The Big Heat. Dir. Fritz Lang. Columbia Pictures, 1953. Film.
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Poetry
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Love Song of a Journeyman by Vihang A. Naik
Citation: Naik, Vihang A. “Love Song of a Journeyman” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 1320. Web. Copyright: "Love Song of a Journeyman" (by Vihang A. Naik) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Love Song of a Journeyman by Vihang A. Naik
I Your upholding downward look. Dimpled shyness, warmer breath. Transparent eyes. Flickering flames. Ankle play. I’d then begun to hear wings in empty spaces. A song in the desert of my heart. A first journey.
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II You revealed the edge of a dream. I pointed to a rainbow in the sky. Our fluttering yearned to fly afar beyond the horizon but our outward selves trusted tomorrow for a rhyme to proceed.
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III The world shrinks within the boundaries of flesh. Drink nectar. Grasp the luster of a sculpted beauty in handsone cannot, for instance, gather fog in the fist.
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IV How long can our hands keep the distance bound. Look aheadthe journey is short. There the road unwinds, where you’ll pick up the race and melt away in the noises of a city whose streets lead you nowhere.
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V Time preaches mortality. The day should give up to the night as the dead retires bodiless. Memory like candle lights a darkened room. You become a touch, letters of words; a perfumed card in a changed city.
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VI You broke petals from the sunflower. I heard the cry of a dying swan at the sunset point among rocks and city riots. A difference of tea and coffee. You want to select the other path. You went forth to count the future on delicate fingertips. I stood there to perceive the sides of a coin.
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VII The flower devoid of colour and scent. A fossilized past. The vexed moon heaves with autumn’s dried leaves. I smell the ink of your letters. Words betray.
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Four Poems by Pritha Kejriwal
Citation: Kejriwal, Pritha. “Four Poems” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 21-7. Web. Copyright: "Four Poems" (by Pritha Kejriwal) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Four Poems by Pritha Kejriwal
Jaltarang I collect all my drippings In little wooden bowls of poetry Tears, sweat, ideas Hopes, musings, dreams Shattered, whole, globules Particles, chinks, droplets These little wooden bowls When struck on their edges With thin bamboo beaters Create percussion It’s the sound of a dying world
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All that Unfinished Business of Love Like a cardigan, half sewn Ending in scraggy tendrils of wool Like a spider’s web, half woven Ending in broken, hanging gossamer threads Like an uprooted plant Ending in muddy rootlets Like an unfinished song Ending in half notes Like an unfinished life Ending in death Like all that weight Ending in a sudden lightness Like all that meaning Ending in a silly vagueness Like a tremendous swell of a wave Ending in a crash Like all that precipitate Ending in a poem.
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You Bring out the Persian in Me (After Sharanya Manivannan’s ‘You bring out the Sri Lankan in me’) You bring out the Persian in me Wrapped in a white toga Walking in veiled languor Through narrow dark lanes Entering arched doorways Touching pillars of blue mosaic Running my fingers on ruby roses Embedded in white marble You bring out the Persian in me That feeling of being ancient Bombarded, contested Wounded, smelling of Zata’ar, dyed in henna You bring out the cat in me A wide-eyed curiosity A majestic walk A long, dense mane that loves the wind The star-lit magic of the Arabian nights Becomes me The red wine pouring from surahis Becomes me The magic carpet Becomes me The genie of the magic lamp Becomes me You bring out the Persian in me
Four Poems | Pritha Kejriwal | p. 24 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Heavily embroidered Dripping rose petals Baked in a tagine Preserved in lemon and oil Brewed in sugar and mint leaves Bathed in orange blossom water I fly out of the window Sitting on a verse by Hafiz And come back in the night On the wings of Rumi I want to build my little Riyadh with you Two tangerine trees in the courtyard And an olive tree that stands at the door You bring out the house in me The history in me The memory in me The dreams in me The love in me
Four Poems | Pritha Kejriwal | p. 25 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Cities What is it about cities, That is so incredibly human? Much more than forests or seas Or mountains…or villages? Is it the stench of a trampling? Trampled leaves and flowers Banana peels Animal carcasses, human limbs Flattened under rubber tyres Is it the heaving of a pneumonic bosom? Ravaged by smoke, dust, ashes And bitter cold nights A heart rubbing against its metal cage Making gagged sounds of friction Rusted iron against charred flesh Is it the hundred, thousand, million windows? A tiny light trapped in each of them Bright, dim, flickering, dying So lonely Like dry eye balls in sunken sockets Dark alleyways, long roads An ancient tree sticking out of nowhere, And new trees – bleeding Crumbling turrets of old buildings And new ones – hiding their faces in shame Is it the lack of stars, the lack of sweeping winds? Like claustrophobic human minds
Four Poems | Pritha Kejriwal | p. 26 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Some new wrinkles, some deep old ones Warts, a mole, a cleft in the chin Fragile ear-lobes Cheap ornaments, a stud in the nose Quivering lips, sweaty armpits Weather-beaten, patchy clothes; The city ages, as beautifully As the old woman in the mountains Brewing her tea, boiling her eggs Climbing the hills
Four Poems | Pritha Kejriwal | p. 27 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Four Poems by Ankita Haldar
Citation: Haldar, Ankita. “Four Poems” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 28-34 . Web. Copyright: "Four Poems" (by Ankita Haldar) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Four Poems | Ankita Haldar | p. 28 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Four Poems by Ankita Haldar
The Altamira of My Flesh On the Altamira of my flesh, you etched fossilized memories with your feverish touch. The polychrome ceiling in my head has animated the stubborn powerful bisons which roam the mythological meadows of my minds moanings. They graze on the pasturelands of my palaeolithic pining and my life seems to be held captive between the chiaroscuros of your various yes and nos. 13,000 years ago, a sudden rockfall sealed the mouth of my cave, preserving my coloured memories, in a state of pickled suspension but the dill of debris and dust do not seem to have settled yet. And your various handprints are splayed out all over my cave walls. Haematite, ochre, charcoal… these are the flavours of your leftover legacies, and nothing more. Perhaps I will not open my caves, not anymore to be painted by prehistoric minds and hands. The Solutrean and Magdalanean artefacts inside me, underneath me
Four Poems | Ankita Haldar | p. 29 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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cannot be recast and repeated. My Altamira is vulnerable to corrosion from the new carbon dioxide of your high views and of your boiling bounteous breaths.
Four Poems | Ankita Haldar | p. 30 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Colony of Rocks I stuffed myself with a giant colony of rocks. One that is alive, breaking, hurting and growing. My body can no longer harbour the hearts, the living and all its loving. All the formulaic foraging, forgoing the fore-playing, the forethoughts, forbidding and all the forbearing! This mind is now the only house, left for breathing. Your skin softeners, the wet kisses: they don’t work inside your own head. Let me grow and nourish my own rock colony, instead. On each will perch my not so well bred, not even well-thought, thought. I will allow you to enter and rain on me, your calculated touches, so precise and accurate like darts. You can even drizzle down on me, your counted embraces, which ooze from love-proofed pretty faces. You know how illusion works Yes, we don’t deal in hearts; it’s now just meeting and touching of the colony of rocks. My head may tell you some other story, but everything can’t be forged as my skins too have their own memory, in spite of individuals and hearts plucked out and bodies repeatedly merged. Come to me, the day you want to rest and are finally rock travel weary. Come and sit, on my rock colony. Climb atop each of them. Be comfortable, be careful, on my rocks. Some will be sharp and might want to cut you,
Four Poems | Ankita Haldar | p. 31 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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some will be riverbed pebble rock smooth, and treacherously try to trip you. But on the rocks, I have spread some plush and fresh carpets skin softeners...for that rock texture weary nomad in you. Step on my carpeted rocks tenderly that day, perhaps you would recognize something draped like art on the colony of rocks, they are all of my stretched out skins with their own memories.
Four Poems | Ankita Haldar | p. 32 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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My River I heard my river rumble today. She was falling in heaps, her body squeezing in unimaginable postures, wriggling, wrapping round rocks and mountains. She kept contorting convulsively, testing the limits of her warm waters. She keeps stretching herself, wanting to go further inland, where you sit hiding your river, reining it’s urges and ripples, fearful that I might discover you amidst your riverine moistures. But often she is not welcome. Those banks she wants to inundate intimately – they fear to bathe in her. They reject, repulse the river. But she plunders through the massive masculinity of their mountains. She sweeps through the mannish banks of resistance and authority. She came down in cascades, contented, conquered but invaded you with her torrid torrents. It is your river that now runs through me, past my slopes of silhouetted solitary softness, breaking my burdens of bleak brown barricades and mysterious moaning valleys of moody depths and devouring desires. I am, that roaring, resilient, resolute river which you can never bury, cover, rein and hide.
Four Poems | Ankita Haldar | p. 33 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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A Mayfly Lust The lust is lost, between you and her. Together you have become an efímera, A flimsy fragile short-lived fleeting star. A rarity for her to be ignited, inflamed, but a common occurrence for him, who lives among fairies, flames and fireflies. Once upon a time, a much awaited moment of viscosity, breath stopping density occurred, a frenzied Tisza blooming when they swarmed like mid-air mating Mayflies, and then within moments you are extinguished, struggling eros, reaching last of the lust, and a dead amour. Suddenly, her mouth parts have become vestigial for you. Her happiness is mostly always a Mayfly, an enviable short life span, moulting several times as she tries to learn and grow, to glow and warm the others. Her wings are clipped, flight muscles flutter but are weak still. She has compound eyes and sees where she must be but her swarm says a Mayfly’s lust and loving is only meant for procreation. Love without that is only for nymphs. But she has a Naiad in her that resists this last moulting. She keeps swimming around bright lights in lying hiding eyes. It’s all ephemeral, her happiness, his love, touch and gaze. Would the Mayfly for once be imprisoned with you in the cage of her own final moulting where lies the unending of love, touch, and time?
Four Poems | Ankita Haldar | p. 34 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Six Poems by Christopher Reilley
Citation: Reilley, Christopher. “Six Poems” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 35-41. Web. Copyright: "Six Poems" (by Christopher Reilley) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Six Poems | Christopher Reilley | p. 35 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Six Poems by Christopher Reilley
Up Here in the Night Way, way up here in the night we learn secrets; what goes on in the treetops or on the forest floor if no one is looking to see but the wildings. Bats dance an aerial gavotte, and fears - both fresh and stale vanish in the dwindled light. This mountain top we stride is surrounded by higher ones yet, and they play as only mountains can, tossing the lightning between them. Try to grasp a bit of an earthly thing if you can, hold onto smoke, chin held up high to touch the smile of the moon peeking between scattered leaves. Question what you hear, not the gun’s bellow, but the heavy footfall on last year’s leaves, the war growl of the bobcat, too close at hand, or the warming roll of insistent thunder. Yet another night of rain, moist love from above, a review of life, as seen by kites in the air, very few moments manifest as they touch ground. What a fine way to be.
Six Poems | Christopher Reilley | p. 36 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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I Sail Alone Perhaps we will meet once more beneath the waves, among the ruins, beyond the horizon. With compass in hand I have set course knowing that my happiness is out there, certain in the knowledge that I will not find it with you by my side. When once we walked together boardwalks gave splinters, oceans churned in choppy dispute and sharks swam among the broken crockery. Let Davy Jones keep what we had locked tight in his cold embrace, I no longer need it. As whales sing a dirge, straining through baleen and trillions of specks of splintered trust, I will master my skiff, alone, my course set for the shoals of joy on the far side of the horizon.
Six Poems | Christopher Reilley | p. 37 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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A Young Man’s Introduction to Spanish Dance Flamenco guitars thrilled the air playing traveling magic as she sang for him in a language he could not recall from school. She spun, flowing through the air, her oil-black hair spinning circles, wrapping him in a cloud of Latina brunette. She moved for him alone, as he etched her grace into his mind. Holding ruffled edges that flashed colour, she whipped her skirt into a frenzy, flashing the blade in her garter against a thigh thick and hard that he longed to taste. His heart paced the music, tempo rising, the tapping of her feet tympanic in his head with the sound of hard rain on tombstones, filling his being faster than the tequila. He felt love, and other parts, swell past purity. She felt passion, and power mixed with pride as they made love with nothing but their eyes.
Six Poems | Christopher Reilley | p. 38 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Dreams of Travel I take the bundle of maps and roll them tight, stack them neatly in the shelf where they will rest, marveling at my trick of sliding the whole world into a cardboard tube, wondering if oceans spill, if mountains will tumble like laundry being dried, continents trickling away as hourglass dust. I know that when I sleep, they come to me, unfurl themselves in order to lay against my skin, whispering the names of exotic places with the hot breath of sirocco in my ear, moonbeams glittering possibilities across their paper wings. Their fragile magic is eternal, but changing, place names and political climates mirroring fortunes. They wrap me in a traveler’s blanket calling me to come where I’ve never been taste the winds of Moroccan streets and the lush fruit of unknown isles. And in the warming light of day I walk the public gardens and concrete ways of urban indifference, my face a shuttered lantern, my work-booted feet recall the papery shush of stolen steps across a fragile field.
Six Poems | Christopher Reilley | p. 39 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Window to the West If I had a window that opened upon the West I would open it every dusk, tether my will to the fading sun, and allow it to pull me drag me across the studded curvature of the Earth bouncing me along topography and Time like a tin can behind a wedding car. I’d savor the tastes of the middle of my land, smell sweet corn in fields ten miles wide, taste the dust of deserts becoming mud under my tongue, scrape myself along asphalt and tarmac, viewing my country up close and personal until I had the sense of coral and brine on the coast farthest from my home. If I had a window to the Western skies I would spend the time to understand how the pale blue of a day can find the power to become cobalt of night by passing through the fires of red. I would thrust myself skyward at every chance, a superhero who saves nothing but memories, finding silken threads of gossamer left behind by the death of the stars. And before I returned to my window I would scatter what I know of true Love, leaving it behind for others to find as they look out into their own skies.
Six Poems | Christopher Reilley | p. 40 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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A Turkish Proposal Tobacco tangos with Golden Horn and saffron across the tongue, the lovers sharing their first taste of goat with giggles and fingers. Glottal calls from Topkapi markets, smells of exotica mix with the heady local wine. They laugh together at merchants with monkeys on their shoulders while they delight in playing tourists with abandon. He rubs her aching feet, sore from miles of marketplace starting at the Sultanahmet and finding themselves at the Galata Bridge. She brushes hair from his eyes, squinting in desert sun. In the shadow of Rüstem Pasha Mosque he takes her breath with a stolen kiss. Her heart, she gives him for free, surrounded by hagglers who will never make a better deal.
Six Poems | Christopher Reilley | p. 41 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Four Poems by James I. McDougall
Citation: McDougall, James I. “Four Poems” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 42-7. Web. Copyright: "Four Poems" (by James I. McDougall) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Four Poems | James I. McDougall | p. 42 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Four Poems by James I. McDougall
The Yellow Wall of Delft The lion’s share of a century’s blue Adrift, like a continent You remember your past In mountains And rivers Not like a satellite image But sweat beads And mosquito bites Ripped shins from Overgrowth of understory Hiding tales of lost trails I remember eating that madeleine Bill of lading read “bric-a-brac” Not that I ever understood décor Nor came up with a theory of sympathy I didn’t even know that thinking such Things could lead one out of oneself And into one’s kernel of being– the God and Godhead at once. Ground into dust those memories Harbor wharf– a black finger wrapped in lace Or smashed for usable fragments in mosaics The ships past the break wall
Four Poems | James I. McDougall | p. 43 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Pull anchors ass end from the storm. Rusted hulls speak of self-sacrifice. As if they brought us food.
Four Poems | James I. McDougall | p. 44 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Walk to Shantou, August 12, 2012 While Liulu, Colin, and Sean Had an Afternoon Nap I walked into Shantou Town From the university gate Along the tree-lined Moto-lorry-van buzzed lane. Bought a Coke. Looked down when people stared. It wasn’t really the town Just a crumbling edge Where intersections Make for shops and motorcycles. And tarp-covered stalls out to the sidewalk. And fish in bathroom basins, refreshed by water Hosed in from snaking loops That forced my eyes into the murky concrete interior of the roadside shop, don’t meet my stare But rather look round and round their plastic Container. I’m sure they are happy that There is no way out.
Four Poems | James I. McDougall | p. 45 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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The Gulf Road Jet skis bounce the cresting Arabian Gulf Bunker fuel tears the nostrils. Colin runs towards the birds Sisters of mercy crowd him With kisses ululating blessings: Habibi Masoot! Tama’am! Hamdulilah! A pigeon presses its head into the shaded corner Of an eighth-floor window. Beijing opera from CCTV’s spring festival show Replays on satellite TV. French kids down the corridor screaming at their nanny in Hindi Who in scarlet pajamas slips into the balcony alcove Of lost dreams. A crack in the glass moonlight splinters into a radiating crystal from the gold piercing on her nose. Pounding the pavement In a dirty dishdasha Mopping his brow with a sweat-stained Cloth (I see the grey salty waterline at 100 kilometers an hour suspended in time) Crossing mad traffic 4 lanes, 8 lanes Growing out of heat radiating American and European cars Spreading through the dusk, like the dark dank stank of bunker fuel. I can see now on the expressway– four accidents have blocked All progress. Flashes from miniature police cars are hemmed in By angry white and red dragons. Birds are flying backwards with the wind, And the season’s first clouds are blooming Thick black gentians from an empty blue sky.
Four Poems | James I. McDougall | p. 46 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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The Temple Kitchen: Huayin Shan for Feast of Guanyin Out behind the temple kitchen are two stools; My father-in-law and I sit; the pine valley far below Is now lost in darkness; and from there more pilgrims with flashlights wind their way up the mist-dampened trail of mud and rock; They form a dragon of lights curling its back up to the temple gate. A cook in army shoes, apron, a dirty button-up shirt smokes and answers our questions. This part of the temple is only four years old, But other parts are much, much older– Two thousand-year-old steles Have been found on this mountain peak. My brother-in-law returns from the outhouse. The night turns cold. Pilgrims crowd the temple Buildings, and make camp on the temple floor. Outside the flame is too hot, the smoke too thick A bonfire of offerings to Guanyin Makes Huayin Shan a black candle Burning Linshui County’s spiritual pain. On sawhorse benches in the temple cafeteria we sleep propped up against the wall With hat brims low over our eyes Like extras in an old John Wayne movie Until some local middle school kids Come to practice their English. Together we played cards until the Cooks urged us to grab gruel and steamed buns And head down the mountain trail.
Four Poems | James I. McDougall | p. 47 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Five Poems by Ranjit Hoskote
Citation: Hoskote, Ranjit. “Five Poems” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 48-53. Web. Copyright: "Five Poems" (by Ranjit Hoskote) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Five Poems | Ranjit Hoskote | p. 48 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Five Poems by Ranjit Hoskote
The Navigator’s Last Entry Paradise is a narrow waterway and the clocks on board are dripping wax on maps mottled with new islands. Grow fins. You have a week to spare before climbing the reef.
Five Poems | Ranjit Hoskote | p. 49 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Revised Passenger List The ship is filling up very nicely with those who were never counted: the artist-philosopher makes place at his desk for the plantation slave and the hawk-eyed Sultan, the explorer gathers up his satin cloak so the bird-crowned Emperor of the Spice Islands can sit, and the Duke of Whatnotburg has to squeeze in a bit for the pepper trader whose sweat has dried to fine salt on his ebony skin, tidal Malabar exchanged for canalled Venice. This ark is seriously overloaded, the captain tells the first mate. You can bet your last dinar it’s going to be tough to get the Renaissance to sail on this particular voyage. New rules in the book, but will the vessel haul? It’s funny, but they took up no space at all in the hold of the Memory. No one told me, not even the lost novelist we saved from the wreck, that ghosts weigh so much when you pump them with colour.
Five Poems | Ranjit Hoskote | p. 50 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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The Guide Recalls the Mountain for Atul Dodiya Every summer, they’d get off the train with their frayed knapsacks and prop up their easels. They’d complain about the clouds and dance on clear days when you could see right across the bay, waves breaking on the silver sand like glass. At the museum, you can see the mess they left behind: the beach daubed in dots, the sky woven in stipples, the sun blotted out by cloud-wool, and the mountain, they painted this mountain so many times, there’s nothing left to see except blotches of sienna and ochre. You have to wait until the clouds wipe out the light and the wind blows hard, impaling everything in its path. Stand your ground: don’t run halfway down the slope to hide in the forester’s hut. Look, here’s the ledge where the painters always stood. Lock your arms, stand up to the wind and face north: the peak stands cold and crystal-sharp. It speaks to you when you squeeze your eyes shut.
Five Poems | Ranjit Hoskote | p. 51 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Passport Rivers abrupt as whiplashes, mountains adamant as fathers. He had run away from home at fourteen. Now, caught up in a holding action against an autumn of muffled cannonades, Commander M. wanted to fall back. Back, as far north as his lost youth. Do you expect to recapture Kabul? He saw clouds of dust, heaps of bricks. Sometimes, the shadow of a hawk on the hills. God is great, but Kabul exists only on television screens. One September morning, he asked Ambassador K. to fly with him to a rearward base. Take your passport. K. had left it on a side table. He put down a teacup patterned with willows, rimmed in dull gold. The door opened and two foreign journalists entered the room. One of them pointed his zoom at M. and pressed the shutter. The explosion hurled K. against a wall. Seven pieces of shrapnel lodged in the leatherbound document he had just put in his left breast pocket. Commander M. never went home to the valley of his birth. A month later, recovering in hospital, Ambassador K. told reporters: The Commander saved my life with a passport. A passport for a fictional country, which covered his heart.
Five Poems | Ranjit Hoskote | p. 52 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Crossing the Heart of a Continent for Axel Fussi Your hand scuttles across the page, the landscape cruises past. Something beautiful is waiting to break in hard weather. Somewhere, yellow pods are bursting. Somewhere, the glissade of eighteen musicians. Steeples queue up to question the afternoon’s testimony. We pass the thicket where you buried your shadow, bedouin child of light. Now scatter these pomegranate seeds that I’ve traded with you for a skull. Cross this plain before the blackbirds wake up and cry. The train skirts a barricade of hills and glides through the gauze of evening light. Fingers scrabble at ivory knobs, old voices screech. Who’s speaking? You’re travelling in a trap. The stands of fir are priests frozen at mass, the road signs flag the tombs of autobahns. In this museum, the war has never ended. Your hand grows crabbed in the cold but you cannot stop the train in the middle of a poem. Let the lines run on, past the bay horse in the field, the lightning-hit steeple, the white gate. The open book of the sky burns very slowly.
Five Poems | Ranjit Hoskote | p. 53 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Six Poems by Jerrold Yam
Citation: Yam, Jerrold. “Six Poems” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 54-61. Web. Copyright: "Six Poems" (by Jerrold Yam) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Six Poems | Jerrold Yam | p. 54 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Six Poems by Jerrold Yam
Climb Beyond itineraries and tarmac indifference I dodge the unswerving sky, one that always proves the same everywhere: nonchalant blue the vanguard for every relationship endured or denied, an occasional string of swallows sewing up its edges, pride of consistency, unattainable flight. To know I accept the fabled difference between leave and leaving behind, but somehow failing to fulfil its antithesis. To know the sky rents a history of all our insecurities. What I remember upon waking: ticket pocketed like papered hope, fresh towels and their reassuring astringency, a glass of champagne, the plane taking off.
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Archaeology It was worth all the fighting, when I was younger, the way land heaved apart, surrendering to land greater than itself, the dirt’s authority over its pretty tenants. I saw tarmac recede to a scrawl, my face turned away from my mother as she braves another holiday. Then it wasn’t about control, or my sister’s quiet shedding I later conceded to be generosity and loved her for it. These days I could build cities on my mother’s flesh to deem her selfish. And from my seat the lights persevere, thin as scattered vertebrae, I am thinking of our family’s women as faraway bulbs, their history with crippling loss, and how I am pieced together, shell and sand, from the spine of their collective strength. Who knew. Something tells me I’m ready for the better nature of distance, I want to gather their ashes before the plane reconciles with earth.
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Routine I am caught talking to myself again, ears coveting their own audience, eyes anchoring on pictures and birthday cards along my study table. I don’t know why I felt this would be different– how this place, strange and unapologetic, may bestow the home I never accepted. Everything can perform familiarity’s rites. Friends I have made this morning brag of deadlines, conversation a concert of sympathies. Yet there are things to envy. Through the frosted pelt of my window an old city accelerates into winter, shedding inhabitants at each interval, clinging to the only route it knows even when we are gone.
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Trajectory For JP Four days after we first met in that café I used to avert each morning with guarded indifference I mistook for courage, I am on the plane home, suspended hours trailing in your wake, time a circuitous ritual christening my inability to forget. Who found the other? I was so sure that my eyes could not confront yours for long, escaping to the display of cakes and exotic teas, their need of anchorage fulfilled, sated as lovers. Maybe we found each other, how fickle paths on a map seek solace at a well or marketplace, but the finding came too late, or too early; you with your boyfriend and I not returning for three summer months. Maybe this shall not endure, brief as a kiss or handshake. In my seat, I find myself rehearsing our armoured embraces, liquid caution. How my heart hastens to keep up each time I see your silhouette outside the restaurant where we are supposed to meet a half hour ago, your smile like the curve of an upturned palm in worship. And below the baggage shelves looming dense and whitewashed as hefts of shale, I am ready
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to love again.
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Resemblance I could hear him, even as the elevator arrived, his coughs like fruit flies knocking on the walls of his room. Our third day in London and my father seems to have finally surrendered to the slightest hint of affection, busying himself with making my stay more comfortable, as if he is one of those parents who haven’t talent enough for letting go. Leaving his hotel for my hall, facial wash and Milo packets snug in my backpack, I cannot help but rehearse his movements in my mind: emails, conference calls, symptoms of the efficiently alive, texting to check if I’ve gotten back safely. When we talk at breakfast, I feel the air around his prosperous heft coagulating, taking shape, moulded by his presence, as if his being here is a gift of reconciliation. Why does it take so little to depart from the ones we love the most? As my new life gathers speed, determined as the revolving doors of his hotel, I could be the one breaking free and not the child from whom he breaks away. My father and I are more similar than what we concede to each other.
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Flight Seeing my father leave in a cab, his face arched towards me as if to delay the lifespan of our hard-earned intimacy, I am shocked to have started to miss him, the cab’s incandescent bulk retreating to traffic. For a week my father absolved himself of meetings to help me settle into London, the way a father tucks his child in bed, and now he is flying off again, the cab disappearing like a lover’s face at the end of a relationship. How can I begin to love someone who has not stopped loving me? No fights for a whole week, no equestrian instincts of pulling away from his grasp. Back in my room, I unpack the remnants of my father’s generosity– shoes, shirts, headphones he thinks I’ll declare as stylish, and the thought of him greeted at the airport like he is going for a holiday.
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Four Poems by Anne Lovering Rounds
Citation: Rounds, Anne Lovering. “Four Poems” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 62-6. Web. Copyright: "Four Poems" (by Anne Lovering Rounds) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Four Poems | Anne Lovering Rounds | p. 62 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Four Poems by Anne Lovering Rounds
Flight Waiting, there’s only the fadeout of what was on the platform, canals and outlines, the two three suspension in an Ives quartet. The train’s coming flash forward to the tarmac, JFK, the open timespan before takeoff infinity in a runway queue before we evaporate into the sky, resolve suspense, and disappear from view.
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7th Avenue South hooded icons, phantom standalone ATMs funnel the dark current, the cash flow go down into the club the little branch the golden bough otherwise be bled into the sea via tunnel this is a townsend a water street
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South Ferry The morning after the night Obama won, after the hoot and holler, the cars that stopped for joy along Mass Ave, I went alone to the Northwest, read the headlines in each deserted port, the trailing wake, Seattle to Bainbridge. The needle dropped from view; we drifted from the pier. And so I drift here too, South Ferry, renovated, white and glass, a limbo between islands where we wait after a colleague dies on her commute to visit her on unfamiliar terms. Nobody exclaims when Liberty emerges on our right. Not tourists now, nevertheless we’re strangers. Staten: most of us have been there once or twice, if that, and only to come back. There were three Ellies on my father’s side. When Ellie One, my father’s mother, died my older cousin stood hard-faced staring into the distance from the dock on Little Diamond. Father, mother, portlands east and west, return, return, as now we crowd the deck, another terminal, another wake.
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Blink two three red in a black tunnel instead of the endgame meditate on the idea of 32 blank piece of paper field of snow flashback or not Columbus Circle, was it? Ninetysixth?
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Four Poems by Elsa Mathews
Citation: Mathews, Elsa. “Four Poems” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 67-73. Web. Copyright: "Four Poems" (by Elsa Mathews) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Four Poems | Elsa Mathews | p. 67 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Four Poems by Elsa Mathews
Delhi I Oh Delhi! we, who once lived behind your walls have now found our footprints to where we came from tracing them back we wonder what we became behind your sturdy chest where we now have left our marks of grace, disgrace our names, with our craven hands embellished with blood, sweat and tears the city now resounds with our shouts of victory, our screams in the night hoots and catcalls love songs, castles in the air and words that resonate even in the corridors of your time Oh Delhi! We once lived in the dark, overcrowded chambers of your memory
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scattered under the blanket of heat clinging to your warmth in cold winters dreaming of spring and colours of autumn we followed the trails of marigold through that long abandoned lane that now opens into a busy street where past and present are now, just passer-byes
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Delhi II a splinter that fell of Nebuchadnezzar's tower as it collapsed under the weight of a tongue cut now with the sharp fangs of time you hide within your primitive wounds the seeds of centuries that flower in abandoned corners of your antiquity your children eternal newborns floating in the deep green bosom of your mystery
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Christmas in Paris We lost ourselves in the sea of lights blue, yellow, green under the blushing sky held under the spell of a dark knight We marched like the three Musketeers through the streets Towards the light that beamed blue and misty up a few feet “Is that it?” we asked or just one of those lights burning, blue and bright playing magic on our chimeric minds on this cold, Christmassy Parisienne night? The light beckoned swung and danced and winked at us from afar We followed like three men of yore who once followed a mythical star to see what it had in store Gliding through the narrow paths we stopped in nooks, corners and window panes
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like two children in a Christmas game Suddenly, everything stopped the twinkling lights and the walk we were in a lane plain and dark we met our shadows long and stark. And just when we thought all was lost the blue light far away, the most round the corner stood a sight The Eiffel Tower bathed in blue light
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Nostalgia She lies awake Listening to the dark Catching faint sounds of bangles footsteps And wisps of words Somewhere a suitcase Dumped on the floor Resounds like noises from Her mother’s womb The language of her childhood Now a distant murmur In the neighbour’s hall Curled into slumber A distant world awakens With bangles Jingling in a cacophonous camaraderie Between the swish of sequined saris And incensed verandahs Where father hums A bollywood oldie And mother sets the record With the dhobi
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EMotions by Sébastien Doubinsky
Citation: Doubinsky, Sébastien. “EMotions.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 74-83. Web. Copyright: "EMotions" (by Sébastien Doubinsky) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
EMotions | Sébastien Doubinsky | p. 74 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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EMotions
by Sébastien Doubinsky
I the flute extends silence distant echo of the mountain my shadow turns blue and dances by itself – epiphany is just another word for panic
EMotions | Sébastien Doubinsky | p. 75 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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II reflections girls the restaurant on the other side of the street – what we watch when we are bored
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III the priest priests the poet poets the dog dogs the earth turns
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IV poetry like the horizon is an imaginary line ships never disappear and the sun never sets – all images are artificial
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V a bird escapes his reflection in the window
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VI no haiku today – the season has been cancelled
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VII same window different paintings – spring
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VIII the cat's fur changes with every season – slow clock
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IX we think we are advancing when in fact we are falling fortunately some simple things (an apple, a set of keys, a few coins) are here to remind us every day that gravity is time
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Nonfiction
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Sketches of Health in Travel Narratives on India by Elwin Susan John Citation: John, Elwin Susan. “Sketches of Health in Travel Narratives on India.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 85-97. Web. Abstract: Despite the popularity of India as a modern travel destination shaped by writings since Megasthenes to Dalrymple, health concerns and the fear of malaise underscores a formidable travel discourse in which even the indigenous capitalist plays its part to foster the culture of health fetishism, among native and foreign travellers. The paper suggests four constants namely; anticipation, appropriation, assimilation and augmentation with specific illustrations, as tools to read the representations of health discourses in travel writings featuring India. India has been regularly represented in foreign accounts as teeming with crowded streets, unhygienic practices, polluted water and miasmic air. Anticipation of diseases while travelling in the contemporary times has resulted in the creation of a large number of travel support sites. Today, India is flooded with tourists who come to experience the grandeur of India’s “enchanting splendour.” This health rhetoric plays on the glory of the past in terms of wisdom and purity to portray a land which is safe for travelling, while presuming, and therefore highlighting health as a commodity that is inherently adulterated, in keeping with colonial ideology, and must be guarded purified. Keywords: Health, travel, body, Incredible India, Health Tourism, Karnataka Tourism, SOTC Copyright: "Sketches of Health in Travel Narratives on India" (by Elwin Susan John) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Sketches of Health in Travel Narratives on India by Elwin Susan John
he records of travel writings on India by foreign travellers dates back to the time of Megasthenes (scholars suggest 298 BC), during the reign of Chandragupta Maurya. Nevertheless, travel writings on India in the form of travelogues were popularised by Fa-hien, Marco Polo, Ibn-eBattuta, Jean Baptiste Tavernier, and more recently by William Darlymple, Elizabeth Gilbert and Paul Theroux. Among the travel experiences within India, references to physical and mental health of potential travellers, as well as their maladies and remedies is almost an omnipresent category. Although the discourse of health in itself is wavering, the underlying theme in travel writings is generally how to preserve health in ‘not-home’ locales. Travel writing has always been in the forefront of such representations as the fear of infection in strange locales as well as the hope for cures in alternative systems. The concern for the preservation of health, cleanliness and the anxieties about tropical diseases has been a routine in travel writings on India. This has resulted in a situation where health or rather, the desire for health has actually become a malady, or hypochondria has become a major illness and health itself a fetish. The idea of travelling abroad for healthcare gained an increased momentum only very recently. Today, rejuvenation-travel packages are coupled with leisure and healthcare. In these cases, one might travel to a particular destination for better treatment, and the travel package will also ensure visits to the local attractions. In broad terms, such a travel account presents a dichotomy between the anxiety to preserve health while travelling and the credulity which motivates an act of travel, primarily intended to improve health, often through experimenting with miracle cures. Through this paper, I attempt to analyse some of these manifestations of the general tendencies of travellers in India as far as their bodies, health and improvement are concerned. I intend to study this curious ‘health fetish’ and its intersections
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between the discourses of Health and Travel through travel narratives on India. To focus my stance with clarity, I suggest four constants namely; anticipation, appropriation, assimilation and augmentation with specific illustrations, as tools to read the representations of health discourses in travel writings featuring India. While closely examining the travel accounts of colonial travellers to India, we will identify the presence of a surgeon on every naval trip from Europe. This surgeon not only looked after the sick onboard and land, but also studied the diseases of the colonies. In other words, colonial travellers anticipated a bout of illness in the new locale and they internalized the idea that the colonies contained the worst possible scourges. As a result, in order to preserve the European health in new and ‘hostile’ lands, the travellers loaded themselves up with protective gear from ‘home’ and tried to stay away from the native medical systems of the very locales/countries they were travelling to. India is regularly represented in these accounts as teeming with crowded streets, unhygienic practices, polluted water and miasmic air. Lord Dalhousie’s (Governor General of British India, 1848-56) life in India has been called as “a continual struggle against pain, weakness and disease”. (qtd. in Arnold, 47) H. K Kaul’s Traveller’s India records John Huighen Van Linschoten’s account in 1583 about the diseases in Goa: There reigneth a sickness called Mordexiin, which stealeth upon men and handleth them in such sort, that it weakneth a man and maketh him cast out all that he hath in his body, and many times his life withal. This sickness is very common and killeth many a man, whereof they hardly or never escape. (qtd. in Kaul, 297)
As it is obvious from Linschoten’s recounting, India was presented as a dreadful place with a sickness that made one so weak that it could cast out everything from the infected individual’s body and hardly anyone survived this disease. The perception of Western eyes with regard to hygiene and cleanliness stays unchanged even after decades. Joe Roberts’ Three-Quarters of a Footprint: Travels in South India (2000) illustrates the Indian practice of hawking which he identifies as an obsession with mucus. Elizabeth Gilbert’s
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film Eat Pray Love (2006) mentions the rule laid down for safe travel in India as not to touch anything but oneself. Thus the foreign land, here India, has been widely established as a land of unhealthy habits and pandemic diseases. Another anticipation of the travellers during the colonial days was the possibility of death while being abroad. The sick European travellers were usually abandoned by their palanquin bearers at the roadside and were eventually devoured by wild animals in most cases. They were scared to face a death of that sort. Thus the travellers always tried to stay away from diseases with the help of all the available resources from their native places. Although the exotic nature of these places attracted them, they dreaded the maladies there. Anticipation of diseases while travelling in the contemporary times has resulted in the creation of a large number of travel support sites. Leaving aside the few armchair travellers, we tend to get proper information regarding any place in question through the blogs of travellers. Online services like travel doctors provide advice on the precautions, probable diseases and threats while travelling and also the possible remedies. It is rather interesting to note the different categories of travellers these sites have made like holiday makers, adventure travellers, business travellers, expedition members, long term travellers etcetera and also the subsequent health suggestions.1 Colonial travel narratives record that there was a considerable amount of concern and anticipation about the sex life of travellers in India. Although Indians were regarded as unclean people, the European leisure and pleasure experiences with Indian women are widely known. The traveller’s enthusiastic approval of Indian women was a distressing concern to the European women. Thus they started to knit narrative patterns to prevent this depressing act of “Indian women from being suitable mates for the ‘civilised’ Englishmen” (Menon, 105). Fleets of ships came to India carrying European women for
The health suggestions are very extensive and divided into in-flight problems, travelers’ diarrhoea, malaria page, yellow fever, respiratory infections, blood borne & STDs, insect borne, insect bites, animal bites, accidents & hazards, sunburn & heat stroke, exposure & altitude, mountain sickness, SCUBA page etc. (“The Travel Doctor”). 1
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their men in India so as to control miscegenation. Isabella Fane2 was worried that her nephew would grow up ‘very black’ as he had a native wet nurse. Moving on to the next constant, the etymology (OED) of the word ‘appropriation’ can be traced back to the Late Latin word ‘appropriatio’ and then to the Late Middle English word ‘appropriare’ which means ‘make one’s own’. I propose that there are striking evidences in travel narratives about how and why travellers tried to appropriate the medical practices of this country. With all due appreciation to the post-colonial connotations of cultural appropriation, in this paper I consider appropriation along two veins of thought. One strand is the trial of the native system of medicine by the travellers due to the lack of any other options. At times, the travellers were forced to try out the native practices when they had no other options to deal with a situation. The second strand of thought is the desire to adopt and conquer an already successful, effective practice and to eventually make it one’s own. This second strand was more complex by virtue of its disguised agenda to control this country also. Travel accounts have depicted India as a land of mysterious cures with its curious potions and arcane decoctions. India as a land untouched by science and technology, yet filled with advanced methods of treatment was a surprising trope for these travellers. Thus, even today curious travellers try to unearth the treatment techniques by talking to the traditional vaidyas. The English East India Company encouraged its employees to rely on local medical practitioners in its initial days. In the early days of the Raj in India, the European medical experts studied indigenous medical practices as they believed that the indigenous doctors (hakims and vaidyas) would know better about treating tropical diseases being more familiar with the native climate and terrain. Pedro Teixeira, a Portuguese soldier (1590-1591) recalls a medicinal stone that grows in the belly of a porcupine, which worked wonders against a certain disease.
She accompanied her father to India during 1835-1838. Her letters and diaries to her aunt were later published as Miss Fane in India and it is regarded as an account of her travel experiences in India. 2
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The governor there used up two such stones in the service of the poor, working wonders against a disease more dangerous and violent than the plague, which lasted for two whole years and carried people off in four or five hours…An infusion of this stone in water is effective in all maladies which may be safely given in all…(qtd. in Kaul, 298).
Similarly Linschoten records the use of China root and other herbs and ointments with which Indians cured themselves from dreadful diseases. Tavernier’s Travels in India accounts a native custom of following a special fish diet for fertility ‘charms’. He also mentions a remedy prescribed for all Europeans to recover their colour and get themselves into perfect health. It is prescribed for them to drink for twelve days three glasses of …one in the morning, one at midday, and one in the evening; but as this drink cannot but be very disagreeable, the convalescent swallows as little of it as possible, however much he may desire to recover his health. This remedy has been learnt from the idolaters of the country and whether the convalescent makes use of it or not he is not allowed to leave the hospital till the twelve days have expired during which he is supposed to partake of this drink (160).
Indigenous medical practices were rich and bountiful. The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in India mentions how Indians used the scrapings of horn against poison, ananas (pine apple) to ensure good digestion and the chewing of areca nuts with astringent nature to strengthen teeth. Joe Roberts (2000) is bewildered by the medicinal properties of flowers and the medicinal and spiritual significance of the various constituents used in the face make up of a Kathakali artist. The above documentations by Pedro Teixeira, Linschoten, Tavernier, Pietro Della Valle and Roberts are suggestive of the mysteries behind the Indian medical practices and also the European attempts to try out some of these procedures. As mentioned above, the second strand of ‘appropriation’ gains its meaning by the growing European realization of how power can be exercised on the ‘colonial bodies’. The more they tried to understand Indian practices,
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the more they were aware of its loopholes. As a result, the same knowledge was used as a powerful weapon against the natives. Indigenous medicine was discredited as being based on speculation and poor scientific validity when compared to the western medicine which was praised for its scientific rootedness and clarity. The introduction of western medicine turned out to be a powerful tool to control the native population by targeting human body through public health measures. Or precisely, colonialism turned out to be a brilliant activity because of the right kind of interventions it could make. The intercessions it made with regard to the public health care system completely wiped out indigenous practices from the mainstream. When the Europeans tried to protect their bodies from the maladies of the colony, they also propagated the notion of the unscientific nature of Indian practices among Indians. This resulted in divided opinions among Indians. History demonstrates the success of this particular divide and rule policy of the British in India. Consequently, western practices could easily penetrate into the Indian medical system whereas the native practices of medicine were tactfully removed to the periphery. Medical interventions proved to be a tool to get into the religious life of Indians too. The missionary narratives explicate the role of medicine in introducing and converting Indians into Christianity. The natives relied on the missionary doctors for their ‘special’ cures. The missionaries believed that by means of providing cures to the people, they would automatically embrace Christianity. With the ‘white man’s burden’ in mind, they wanted to introduce the Christian ways of living here. And this was made possible through the priest, who was also a doctor and could ‘save’ them from disease as well as from the ‘barbaric’ ways of living. They started setting up medical dispensaries as they believed that “even the Muslims can be approached and befriended by means of medicine” (Taffarel, 86). The missionary who had to take up multiple roles of a priest, doctor, counsellor, helper and judge is a recurrent image in the missionary chronicles. A missionary with a ‘medicine box’ is one among the stereotypical figures of the European travellers as seen in travel records. Thus, this veiled ‘appropriation’ of the native practices proved to be working. Although in the colonial period western medicine popularized itself for being specialized in its treatment, during contemporary times, people
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mostly prefer a holistic approach of treatment to their bodies and this is exactly how Indian systems of treatment are advertising themselves today. This is the concern of my next constant ‘assimilation’. My second tool for understanding the representation of health in travel writing, that is ‘appropriation,’ was accomplished with the help of a disguise as the primary purpose of those travels was not health oriented. They were meant for colonial expansion wherein health was only a part of the bigger concern rather than travelling itself for better healthcare. My third constant, ‘assimilation’ centers on the traveller’s conscious choice of alternative/exotic systems of medicine. Travelling for healthcare is not a recent travel trend. It can be dated back to the biblical account of Namaan from Syria, a leper, mentioned in the Bible who dips himself seven times in Jordan after which he recovered. It is said “his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean”. (2 Kings 5:14) Travel literature has chronicled Celia Fiennes’ Through England on a Side Saddle: In the Time of William and Mary (1888) and her trips for water cures and also The Turkish Embassy Letters (1803) of Lady Montagu describing the Turkish baths and the Turkish method of inoculation against smallpox. Travel was a prescribed medication in the west for a long time. Writers like Wordsworth, Keats etc. famously undertook health travels. Thus, travelling abroad and within the country for health concerns is an age old practice. Somehow the idea of travelling to a soothing place has tagged India as a possible destination. Travellers to India have identified India’s potential to heal both physical and mental ailments. India is believed to be close to nature which renders Indian medical practices pure (without any side effects) and natural. However, now there is a growing realization among the masses that calling something ‘natural’ is just a marketing ploy. Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy or what used to be side-lined as alternative systems of medicine, are widely embraced by travellers around the world today. Professionals in these fields assert that the key factor that distinguishes Eastern from Western medicine is the holistic approach adopted by Eastern systems. By following the agricultural imagery3 on modern and Modern medicine is compared to treating the seeds and alternative practices to treating the soil. By treating the seeds, modern medicine will also affect the good 3
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alternative medicine, the latter practice is welcomed by people around the world. Nevertheless, today Ayurveda is often reduced to mere massaging of body parts. On the flip side, medical tourism is a booming business concern in India. The Eleventh Five Year Plan addresses the concern that India should take up medical tourism with renewed zeal and effort. It also calls for pursuing medical tourism vigorously so that the infrastructure and facilities can be developed to the global standard. The Indian Institute of Tourism and Travel Management (IITTM) was asked to expand its curriculum to cover medical tourism, health and rejuvenation tourism as its various courses. The government’s concern in promoting health tourism paves way for other private enterprises (travel agencies, massage parlours, spas and other tourist attractions) to take up medical tourism as their concern too (“Eleventh Five Year Plan 2007-2012”). 4 Today, India is flooded with tourists who come to experience the grandeur of India’s “enchanting splendour” (“SOTC Holidays of India”). The health rhetoric of the Incredible India5 tourist brochures play on the glory of the past in terms of wisdom (the wisdom of the ancients) and purity (pure air/unpolluted nature) to portray a land which is safe for travelling. Discover India’s August 2010 issue calls the luxury spas of the country as “backwater bliss”, “elixirs of harmony”, “wellness retreats”, life force harmonizers and site of escapades (Dube, 42). The Incredible India pamphlets and brochures invite tourists to ‘experience’, to ‘discover’ and to ‘relive’ India. There is no Indian tourist package that does not claim to have an Ayurveda therapy. The New Year Wow of Karnataka’s Department of Tourism reads: seeds thereby affecting the overall health of the patient. Instead, alternative medicine has a holistic approach which will preserve the general health of the individual. “Eleventh Five Year Plan 2007-2012”. Welcome to Homepage of Planning Commission. Web. 18 May 2011. <http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/11thf.htm>. 4
“Incredible India”. Incredibleindia.org Home Page. Web. 9 May 2011. <http://www.incredibleindia.org/emailers/news_mar05/marnews.htm>. 5
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Celebrate this festive season abroad The Golden Chariot- South India’s only luxury tourist train. Work away a year’s worth of stress at Arogya- the spa. Delight your taste buds with our special festive menu. And resolve to love the journey as much as South India’s heritage (“Karnataka Tourism”). 6
This vivid presentation of the novel celebrations of New Year justifies the tagline of Karnataka tourism – “one state, many worlds”. The choicest blending of words like festive season/tourist train, work away/stress/spa, delight/taste buds and resolve/heritage perform a beckoning to potential tourists. India is conceived as an abode for not only physical wellness but also for spiritual and mental wellbeing. Travellers come here to attain a state of nirvana. Paul William Roberts’ Empire of the Soul: Journeys in India (2002) traces his spiritual encounters, and Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love (2006) presents her praying experiences, in India. Pilgrimages and spiritual tourism are new forms of tourism promoted by the Indian government. The mental and psychological wellbeing of these travellers are revitalized by the strict diet patterns and other practices offered to them. It can be seen that the traveller’s ‘body’ is forced to ‘assimilate’ new ideas and experiences in all these practices. Though the act of ‘forcing’ is definitely oblique (like the tourist brochures that play on time, space and distance), it has been a quite effective attempt. Somehow an idea that ‘this is the way to do it’ is injected into the minds of the travellers. What was discussed earlier as the exercise of power by the European travellers through the manipulation of health systems in ‘appropriation’ is reversed in ‘assimilation,’ because India today is at the top of the most visited places on earth, a status achieved in terms of health travel through the successful marketing of a careful amalgamation of ancient wisdom and modern technology. India promises to enhance the physical, mental and spiritual health of its travellers. After presenting my thoughts on anticipation, appropriation and assimilation, I move on to my last constant, augmentation, which is also proposed as a means to read the representation of the discourse of health in 6
“Karnataka Tourism”. Advertisement. The Hindu [Hyderabad] 18 Dec. 2010.
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travel writing. Drawing on certain theoretical strands where the ‘body’ is called as the border between self and the world, I argue that contemporary travels have successfully crossed this border. Even perfectly healthy travellers, who have internalized the idea of body as a commodity, travel and experiment to improve their health and beautify their bodies through the attachment of external objects – cosmetic implants, pacemakers, etc. Surgical interventions penetrate through the body’s border whereby body parts and organs are altered. It is seen that people take up travelling options not only to maintain the natural state of the body, but also to improve their body mechanisms by augmentation. What started out as a hope for rare cures soon became diversified into a tendency to enhance the natural state of the body. This tendency is also a marker of the ‘health fetish’ which has infected individual minds. Travellers ‘augmenting’ themselves with something extraneous is gaining popularity where ‘extraneous’ stands for both the alien place in which it is done and also the extrinsic item which is attached. Being the age of virtual reality, the act of treatment may also get a different dimension here. It is yet to become an everyday affair where doctors diagnose and treat patients via the internet, or telemedicine.7 With the advent of digital technology and its offshoots like the Visible Human Project,8 the body comes closer to be within the reach of human interventions, than before. This is a boon to the furthering of advancements in medicine as it allows us to ‘see’ through the body. Unlike any other times, we have new technologies that make things possible and also an increasing number of people who are ready to try out new things. As a matter of fact, the body offers itself as a space for spectacle with different patterns of modifications like clothing, ritualistic practices, bio-weapons, body arts like tattooing, piercing, etc. There is a constant attempt to push the body’s endurance levels. In commodity culture, the body is not only protected and It is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. 7
It is a project undertaken by the National Library of Medicine which has produced three-dimensional representations of the male and female human bodies. From human cadavers, intense and anatomically detailed illustrations have been recorded. 8
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preserved, but is also ‘packaged’. Here one’s body is constantly under ‘surveillance’: we monitor our blood pressure, sugar level, examine our teeth and calories. Technology ensures us with self-injection devices (insulin pens), sphygmomanometer (blood pressure apparatus) and thermometers. On the other hand the digital body according to Pramod K Nayar, “does not have a border; anyone can traverse it, manipulate it, see it differently or get a closer look” (204). India as a destination for technological interventions in the health sector is in its growing stage. Thus I would suggest that ‘augmentation’ is also in its nascent stage. At this juncture, The Incredible India brochure presenting India as the global healthcare destination is significant. A low cost of treatment compared to their own countries is the primary reason for travellers coming to India, seeking help from the departments of ‘cardiology, oncology, dentistry and cosmetology’. Travellers are lured with the promise of succour through a holistic approach. The Incredible India medical tourism brochure adds credibility to its promotion by including the testimonies of patients who have taken healthcare from India. As I have tried to illustrate through this paper, the idea of health is merely a concept as it varies according to differing perceptions and is also subjected to varying definitions. It can be concluded that these changing trends within the rhetoric of health in Travel Writing will continue. And while its forms and manifestations will obviously change with new technologies, the basic anxieties and anticipations will remain reasonably unaltered, which is to stay increasingly healthy, and even healthier, coupled with easier access to travel mechanisms within and without the territorial borders of the body.
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References Arnold, David. The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005. Dube, Maneesha, and Smita Singh, comps. "The Third Spa Age." Discover India Aug. 2010: 42-65. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything. Britain: Bloomsbury, 2006. Kaul, H. K., ed. Traveler's India. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997. Menon, Sindhu. "Constitutive Contradictions: Travel Writing and Construction of Native Women in Colonial India." Travel Writing and the Empire. Ed. Sachidananda Mohanthy. New Delhi: Katha, 2003. 100-11. Nayar, Pramod K. "Borderless Bodies." Sarai Reader: Frontiers (2007): 199-211. Roberts, Joe. Three-quarters of a Footprint: Travels in South India. London: Black Swan, 1995. Roberts, Paul W. Empire of the Soul: Some Journeys in India. Toronto: Stoddart, 1994. SOTC Holidays of India 2008. Taffarel, J. S J. Jottings of a Poor Missionary. US: Waldo’s Books, 1950. Tavernier, Jean-baptiste. Travels in India. Trans. V. Ball. Ed. William Crooke. New Delhi: Oriental, 1977. The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in India. Trans. Havers, G. Ed. Edward Grey. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services Reprint, 1991.
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A British, Middle-Class Woman in the Harem: Emmeline Lott’s The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople (1865) by Elisabetta Marino
Citation: Marino, Elisabetta. “A British, Middle-Class Woman in the Harem: Emmeline Lott’s The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople (1865).” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 98-109. Web. Abstract: Though, up until the first two decades of the nineteenth century, travels to West Asia were largely an “androcentric experience,” in his Bibliotheca Cisorientalia Richardn Bevis noted that, between 1821 and 1911, 241 travel accounts were penned by women writers, thus bearing witness to the increasing number of female travelers who ventured to Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. The reason for such a dramatic increase in output is partly grounded in the Victorian readers’ desire for tantalizing Oriental tales featuring harems and hammams –those private spaces inhabited by multiple wives, voluptuous odalisques, and submissive concubines –that were positively forbidden to men. Yet, far from indulging in a highly seductive portrayal of the female quarters, many nineteenth century women travel writers thoroughly frustrated the expectations of such armchair travellers; by depicting the seraglio as the mirror image of the middleclass British home, and by focusing on the manners and the morals of its residents, they succeeded in desexualizing and domesticating the alluring Orient. This paper is focused on one of those female writers, Emmeline Lott, who forcefully challenges both the conventional voyeuristic fantasies connected with a strictly feminine environment, and the familiar vision of household purity, absolute restraint and temperance conjured up in the accounts of Victorian women writers. Regardless of this, however, Lott transpires as a champion of British imperialism and Victorian values, turning both European high handedness and Oriental corruption to the making of a marketable image of herself as the representative of a higher civilization. Keywords: Emmeline Lott, Victorian, 19th century women’s travel writing, Orient, hammams, overness
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Copyright: “A British, Middle-Class Woman in the Harem: Emmeline Lott’s The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople (1865).” (by Elisabetta Marino) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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A British, Middle-Class Woman in the Harem: Emmeline Lott’s The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople (1865) by Elisabetta Marino
s Billie Melman writes, up until the first two decades of the nineteenth century, travelling to Western Asia could be considered an “exclusively androcentric experience” (31); hence, the related genre of travel literature was essentially cultivated by male authors, with a couple of notable exceptions, namely Lady Montagu and Lady Craven.1 Nonetheless, as Richard Bevis underlined in his Bibliotheca Cisorientalia (1973 – a comprehensive inventory of travelogues in English about the Near and Middle East), between 1821 and 1911, 241 accounts were penned by women writers (Melman 31), thus bearing witness to the increasing number of female travelers who ventured to Turkey, Syria, and Egypt (to name a few of the most popular destinations). The reason for such a dramatic increase in output is partly grounded in the Victorian readers’ desire for tantalizing Oriental tales featuring harems and hammams – those private spaces inhabited by multiple wives, voluptuous odalisques, and submissive concubines – that were positively forbidden to men. Yet, far from indulging in a highly seductive portrayal of the female quarters (closely resembling the mesmerizing paintings
Lady Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters were posthumously published in 1763, while Lady Craven’s epistolary travelogue, entitled A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople: in a Series of Letters from the Right Honourable Elizabeth Lady Craven, to His Serene Highness the Margrave of Brandebourg, Anspach, and Bareith, was released in 1789. It should not pass unnoticed that both authors were aristocrats: their experience abroad (somehow connected to their respective husbands, their engagements and behavious) was quite extraordinary. 1
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of Ingres and Delacroix),2 many nineteenth-century women travel writers thoroughly frustrated the expectations of such armchair-travelers; by depicting the seraglio as the mirror image of the middle-class British home, and by focusing on the manners and the morals of its residents (women of all ages and children), they succeeded in desexualizing and domesticating the alluring Orient3 (Melman 99). The peculiar and rather disturbing description of harem life in Egypt and Constantinople provided by Emmeline Lott in her travelogue – The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople (1865) – forcefully challenges, as it will be observed, both the conventional voyeuristic fantasies connected with a strictly feminine environment, and the familiar vision of household purity, absolute restraint and temperance conjured up in the accounts of Victorian women writers. Lott’s personal life is shrouded in mist: her very dates of birth and death are uncertain, even though Michael Wojcik argues that she was probably born in the 1830s or 40s (235). Nevertheless, the frequent references to Italy and India in her narratives (including topographic details, personal recollections, and curious hints at customs and traditions)4 indicate that she, at least, visited See, for example, Delacroix’s “Odalisque allongée sur un divan” (1827-1828), and “Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement” (1834), and Ingres’s “La grande odalisque” (1814), “La petite baigneuse: intérieur de harem” (1828) and, later on, his famous “Le bain turc” (1862-1863), inspired by Lady Montagu’s description of the hammam in her letters. 2
A very good example of travelogue in which the Orient is completely desexualized is the account in two volumes entitled The City of the Sultan; and, Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836 (1837) by Julia Pardoe. 3
For example, in The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople Lott mentions the dreadful “Italian banditti” (II: 221), “the Pitti Palace at Florence” (I: 90) − a city where she certainly lived (I: 5) − and “an elderly French gentleman” (I: 34), a relation of somebody she had met in Pistoia (Italy). She demonstrates her acquaintance with India by referring to the caste system (I: 145), by comparing hashish with “the Bang drunk by the Sepoys in India” (I: 304), and by uncovering ominous similarities between the Turkish eunuchs and “the Thugs in India, adepts at strangulation” (II: 208). She also recalls “mud-built hut[s] in any of 4
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those countries in her earlier years. In 1861, Lott was offered a two-year appointment as governess to Ibrahim Pacha, the five-year-old son of His Highness Ismael Pacha, the Viceroy of Egypt, and his second wife. After extensive negotiations (which included an escape clause in case of illness), she accepted the post, probably impelled by strictly financial reasons (her contract shows that she had been married, so she was probably a widow, needing to support herself in some respectable way – Wilkinson 61). Arriving in Egypt in 1863 (Roberts 93), she took residence in three different harems: first in Ghezire (near Cairo), in one of the Viceroy’s stately dwellings, then in Alexandria (in his summer residence), and finally in the imperial palace outside Constantinople. Poor health caused by an unbalanced diet and the unbearable conditions she was forced to live in prompted her to leave her position before time and to go back to England. Settled in Brighton, urged by economic pressure, she decided to capitalize on her disappointing experience in Egypt publishing The English Governess in Egypt, followed by two more literary endeavours: The Mohaddetyn in the Palace of Ghezire, or Nights in the Harems (1867), and The Grand Pascha’s Cruise on the Nile in the Viceroy of Egypt’s Yacht (1869). As this paper sets out to demonstrate, by introducing her audience to a land of conspiracy, widespread corruption, and ethical as well as bodily degradation, Emmeline Lott, an obscure and self-supporting governess, employed her improvised writing skills to artfully fabricate a marketable image of herself as the representative of a higher civilization, and a valiant defender of Victorian values. Successfully drawing on the rhetoric of British imperialism in order to promote the sales of her account to her “gentle reader” (Lott I: 66), she regarded her profession as an enlightening mission, which also granted her some kind of social ascent, elevating her from the status of governess − a problematic borderline figure between classes and spheres − to the rank of lady, as she deliberately defined herself throughout her travelogue. This essay will first of all explore Lott’s hyperbolic portrayal of an obnoxious, depraved, and brutal Orient, much different from the paradise of pleasures fantasized by the suburbs of Bombay, Madras, or Calcutta” (II: 277-78), thus showing her familiarity with the Indian environment.
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many Romantic poets; then, it will analyze the clever construction of the writer’s literary persona, as both an authority in Eastern matters and the champion of British propriety, rectitude, and education. Even before reaching Cairo, Lott gathers the first, ominous information concerning her future life in Egypt from two fellow-travelers (a Greek and a German-Jew) on a train. In their words, harems are “the hot-bed of intrigue, jealousy, and corruption” (I: 12); women, compared to attractive “caged birds” (I: 12), “are viewed as marketable commodities” (I: 18-19) and considered as “the mere slaves to their [masters’] sensual gratification” (I: 17). The system of bribery is so deeply ingrained and so widely practiced that Baksheesh (the term for tip or present) is the most powerful among the rulers of Egypt: virtually every citizen must pay a tribute to Him. When Emmeline Lott begins her stay in the Viceroy’s harem, she is terrified by the “hideous and ferocious” (I: 67) looks of the eunuchs, the guardians of the female apartments, those “spectre[s] of m[e]n” (I: 68) that gratify themselves by tyrannizing over their captives “as despotically as they can” (I: 58). Later on, she will discover that women are actually much more dangerous than their repulsive keepers: child-killers, capable of destroying their own offspring, merciless “odalisques adopt[ing] all kinds of intrigues, plots, and often have[ing] recourse even to poison” (II: 245) to rid themselves of their rivals in the sultan’s favor. As the author soon finds out, those vicious creatures could not be more distant from the stereotype of the youthful, meek and graceful Oriental beauty featured by Thomas Moore in his narrative poem entitled Lalla Rookh, which she explicitly quotes as a stringent example of feigned and unfaithful representation of the “ladies of the Harem” (I: 75).5 In Emmeline Lott’s vivid prose, “most of [the women’s] countenances were pale as ashes, exceedingly disagreeable; fat and globular in figure; in short, so rotund, that they gave [her] Just to quote two of the most meaningful passages in the travelogue, as Lott underlines, their appearance was “totally at variance with that glowing myth-like picture that the prince of Irish poets, Tom Moore, gives of retired beauty” (I: 212); “the general appearance of this bevy of ladies was not, as Tom Moore, in his ‘Lalla Rookh,’ describes […] for they were indeed very plain−nay, ordinary, and some absolutely ugly” (II: 212-13). 5
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the idea of large full moons; nearly all were passée. Their photographs were as hideous and hag-like as the witches in the opening scene of Macbeth [sic.]” (I: 75). The harem inmates are often associated with savages or animals: they “jabbe[r] away” (I: 215) and “make grimaces like monkeys” (I: 216); when they express sorrow, they never cry like humans, but “how[l] like wild beasts” (I: 273); during their feasts, they dip their hands into the dishes “like savages” (II: 189) and, after tearing “the meat with their fingers like a set of cannibals” (II: 48), they lie down on the carpets and “f[a]ll fast asleep, like wild beasts after a gorge” (II: 50). In the secluded “Castles of Indolence” (II: 296) of the Viceroy’s palaces, “there is no culture of the intellect or soul” (II: 296); neverending conversations revolve around subjects “which in Europe,” as the writer sadly underlines, “are regarded as criminal, abominably indecent, filthy, and disgusting” (II: 290). The extensive consumption of tobacco, hashish and opium contributes to thicken the atmosphere of decay and stagnation that dominates the harem; princesses and concubines are so deeply affected by the free use of drugs that, at times, their facial features are deformed, their minds, deranged, while their idle bodies, devoid of energy, are enslaved by the dolce far niente: “their eyes glared, their eyebrows were knot closely together, no one dared to approach them. In fact, they had all the appearance of mad creatures” (I: 241). The use of wine, a beverage “so expressly forbidden by the Prophet” (I: 242), only worsens their already serious health condition. Even the hammam is deprived of its traditional charm;6 in Emmeline Lott’s opinion, “the bath of the poets is a myth” (I: 79). She actually views the ritual of the bath as a form of self-inflicted punishment, since she contemplates with horror the prospect of being “scalded with boiling water like a dead pig, and then [being] kneaded about like a lump of dough until your whole body Conversely, Lady Montagu’s famous hammam scene is extremely fascinating and exciting, as it can be noticed in the following passage: “To tell you the truth, I had wickedness enough to wish secretly that Mr Gervase could have been there invisible. I fancy it would have very much improved his art to see so many fine women naked, in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their cushions” (59). 6
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looks like a mummy” (I: 175). Cleanliness − signifying sexual purity to the Victorians, in connection with the ideas of social order and stability (Melman 130) − is not a virtue among the women of the harem. Despite the profusion of jewels, diamonds and other precious stones with which they adorn themselves, their muslin dresses are generally “dirty, filthy, crumpled” (Lott I: 235). Their hair, literally swarming with vermin, is only combed once a week, on the eve of their Sabbath (I: 238). Their heavy and grotesque use of cosmetics (to alter their natural − albeit disgusting − looks) reminds the writer of the infamous “Madame Rachel” (I: 260), a professional beautifier active in England in the 1860s who, under the pretense of selling miraculous concoctions and beauty treatments, was actually a quack, a petty criminal, and a brothel keeper (once again, harems and moral pollution are joined in Lott’s mind).7 Against this background of squalor, shame, and degradation, the author “is always at pains to establish her status,” (89) as Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright have pointed out, and to assert her Britishness and cultural superiority. Readers should not be misled by her unusual portrait (placed immediately after the frontispiece) in which, were it not for her name underneath the illustration, she would be unrecognizable, due to her veil and habarah (a large cloak, covering her whole body). In fact, as Ruth Brandon has emphasized, her voluminous robe and mantle “look distinctly crinoline-like” (203). Besides, far from indicating her intention to capitulate to the other and her willingness to blend in, her ethnomasquerade can be interpreted as a symbol of her privileged position (Roberts 81): living in the harem, she has the possibility to peep into forbidden domains without being noticed. She thus succeeds in “uplifting that impenetrable veil” (Lott I: viii) that, as the writer elucidates in her “Preface” to the first volume, had constituted an overwhelming hindrance for all the other European travelers, including Lady Be it noticed incidentally, the writer’s reference to Madame Rachel establishes a subtle but powerful connection between the dark and ambiguous environments she describes in her travel account and sensation novels, often featuring villainesses and murderesses artfully disguised as angels in the house. In Armadale (1866) by Wilkie Collins, for instance, Madame Rachel may be recognized as the character of Maria Oldershaw, the devious business partner of Lydia Gwilt, the main protagonist and a treacherous criminal. 7
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Montagu. Indeed, using a language that evokes images of colonial expansion, Emmeline Lott points out that harems had actually been “a terra incognita” (I: vii) even to her famous predecessor (a visitor but not a resident in the seraglio); hence, she herself, in her capacity as governess, is entitled to be acknowledged as the very first person to venture into the “all unexplored regions” (I: vii) of the female quarters. From the opening chapters of her travelogue, the author’s lady-like demeanor is highlighted through the contrast between the baseness and brutality of the Ottoman women and her higher standards of living and decorous manners. While the odalisques are perfectly content with their scantily furnished accommodation, Lott laments the absence of “all the appendages necessary for a lady’s bedroom” (I: 85), such as a piano, pictures to adorn the walls, and a writing table. The ravenous appetite of the concubines and their addiction to smoke clash against her aversion to both cigarettes and the Arab dishes “swimming in fat” (I: 45) that she insists on eating using knife and fork. Taking her meals with the three German maids of the household is “a degradation” (I: 155) to her, as she respectfully explains to the Viceroy, thus managing at times to be served her food in a separate room. Totally indifferent to adulation, eager to avoid the jealousies and dangers of the harem, the writer politely rejects any insinuation that she secretly longs to become the Viceroy’s Ikbal – one of his favorites; as she states, “I have no desire to please the Viceroy in that manner; that is an honor I do not covet” (II: 139). Very few lines of the account are devoted to the education of the little prince, also because, as Lott explains, she is not allowed to use textbooks or other didactic materials: the child8 is just supposed to pick up the English language by sharing his tutor’s company (I: 206). Consequently, readers are subtly induced to believe that, rather than being employed as a simple governess, Emmeline Lott, a true icon of Victorian propriety, had been invited Far from being an innocent creature, even the little prince shares his countrymen’s brutal and uncivilized behaviour: “the prominent features of his disposition were three of the worst vices that a child could possibly demonstrate, namely, cruelty, avarice, and greediness” (I: 286). 8
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to Egypt for a much deeper reason: to enlighten the uncivilized. One of the two travelers she meets at the beginning of her adventure (probably a purely fictional character), actually expresses this very wish: “you will, I hope, by the influence of your example, be able to graft a few civilized customs on their Arab and Turkish manners” (I: 13). Accordingly, the author (who even flaunts her acquaintance with the Queen,9 thus giving evidence of her elevated rank) begins to show her wardrobe of crinoline dresses, hats, and bonnets to the admiring women of the harem, to whom she even gives a practical demonstration of “how European ladies generally pac[e] up and down their rooms” (I: 97). As she remarks at the end of the first volume, “the whole of the inmates of the Harem soon began thoroughly to appreciate my European ways and habits […] and did their best, poor ignorant, deluded, and neglected creatures, to abandon any habits which I explained to them were repugnant to delicacy” (I: 266-67). A similar comment is placed at the beginning of the second volume, when Lott accounts for her interest in the young princesses, “poor dear neglected creatures” (I: 24): “I thought it was a pity that such noble females should be brought up in that barbarous manner, I took an interest in them, and began to teach them English, and to cause them to adopt many European modes and customs” (II: 25); “had we remained longer together, [they would] have become considerably Europeanized” (II: 24). In the words of Narin Hassan, Emmeline Lott “participates in the inscription of colonized spaces as places of physical and mental deterioration and disarray” (32); in her utter isolation from her compatriots, the pioneering British lady fails to resist the corrupting power of the Orient. Recurrent fits of cholera, nervous fevers, and exhaustion prompt her to an earlier return to her motherland which, as Dr. Ogilvie (her English physician) explains, is the only treatment that could restore her immediately to health (II: 289). Michael Wojcik has observed that the sales of her travelogues brought the writer “little profit or recognition” (235). The English Governess in Egypt was positively reviewed only by J.G. Maline of the Catholic World (in June 1868), given the contrast between Christian values and heathen immorality As a child, she used to play at Windsor, in the gardens of “Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen” (II: 26). 9
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explored in the text10. Conversely, the anonymous reviewer of The New York Times (November 11, 1867) harshly criticized both her endeavor and her “badly written [and…] badly arranged” account: Lott “seems to us to have recklessly undertaken a mission in which success and comfort were alike impossible, and to have made very little use of the opportunities which her position gave her for observation” (nytimes.com). All the same, the obvious faults of her volumes (namely the excess of details, the reiteration of concepts, and her overtly biased perceptions) are, as well, the strength of her narratives: without Emmeline Lott, readers would have been deprived of a thoughtprovoking – albeit disquieting – insight into the cultural relationships between Egypt, Turkey and England at the time of Queen Victoria and Ismael Pacha.
According to Maline, Egypt was characterized by a stagnant and decaying atmosphere; progress and evolution were alien to the texture of the country, doomed to barbarism and corruption: “if on the title page [of Lott’s travelogue] nine centuries before the Christian era were substituted for the date of publication, instead of nineteen centuries after it, the change would be so unimportant in a chronological point of view, that no annalist would be aware of the anachronism” (408). 10
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References Brandon, Ruth. Other People's Daughters: The Life and times of the Governess. London: Phoenix, 2009. Collins, Wilkie. Armadale. London: Penguin Classics, 1995. Hassan, Narin. Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge, and Colonial Mobility. Farnham and Surrey: Ashgate Pub., 2011. Lewis, Reina, and Nancy Micklewright. Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women's Writings: A Critical Sourcebook. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. Lott, Emmeline. Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople. Vol. I. London: Bentley, 1865.
––––. Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople. Vol. II. London: Bentley, 1866. Maline, J. G. “Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople.” Catholic World June 1868: 40713. 19 August 2013. <http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/bac8387.0007.039/411:16?rgn=full +text;view=image;q1=lott>. Melman, Billie. Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady. Turkish Embassy Letters. London: Virago, 2000. Roberts, Mary. Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Wilkinson, Alix. “Governess to the Grand Pasha of Egypt: Emmeline Lott.” Women Travellers in the Near East. Ed. Sarah Searight. Oxford: Astene and Oxbow Books, 2005. 61-69. Wojcik, Michael. “Emmeline Lott.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 166. Detroit: Bruccoli, 1996. 235-239. “Oriental Life and Manners.” The New York Times, November 11, 1867. <http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archivefree/pdf?res=F60B15F93C551A7493C3A8178AD95F438684F9>. Web. 19/8/2013.
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Metaphor of Travel: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) by Chin-yuan Hu
Citation: Hu, Chin-yuan. “Metaphor of Travel: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928).” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 110-132. Web. Abstract: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) is a travel narrative about Orlando’s becoming-woman through boundary crossings. The time of Orlando’s life spans 340 years; the places of Orlando’s travel bridge “the familiar” (England) and “the foreign” (Turkey). Appropriately enough, travel being a metaphor of boundary crossing witnesses the process of Orlando’s gender crossing, which happens after his spatial boundary crossing from Turkey to England. That Orlando has to go through the other place/culture (the foreign) to “become a woman” so that s/he eventually “becomewoman” suggests that the tradition of English literature and culture needs a new mode to transform its desire, experience and knowledge. And this alternative is not the feminine mode opposing the masculine mode in the Oedipus structure, but the molecular mode that transcends the male/female binary opposition. The present essay explores the metaphor of travel in Orlando in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of nomadology. In view of Orlando’s boundary crossings and constant becomings, the present essay argues that Orlando/Orlando is a prototype of nomadic travel, and eventually a metaphor of travel. Keywords: Orlando/Orlando, travel, metaphor, becomings, boundary crossing, Nomadology Copyright: "Metaphor of Travel: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928)." (by Chin-yuan Hu) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Metaphor of Travel: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) by Chin-yuan Hu
n Travel Writing: The Self and the World, Casey Blanton points out that travel writing as a literary genre was “firmly established” by the 20th century (59). It is not just because many writers have accomplished a significant number of excellent works. More importantly, travel as metaphor for the discovery of the self has been applied to many travel and non-travel writings. According to Blanton’s studies, it is precisely the phenomena of traveling and living abroad, writing to explore the significance of life, and presenting these issues with travel writing that characterize the modern period whose keynote features “discontent” and “self-examination” (59). Sharing Blanton’s insight, Caren Kaplan observes that “this propensity of occidental ‘moderns’ to look ‘elsewhere’ for markers of reality and authenticity” is a primary facet of Euro-American modernity (34). She says: “The quest for better models, newer forms, fresher images, and relief from the ills of metropolitan centers compels the modernist to move further and further into places perceived as the margins of the world” (ibid). Most notably, a peculiar aspect of this form of modernity is “a complicated tension between space and time” (35), which is represented and highlighted in many early 20th century travel writing. On the other hand, in modernist works, the theme of the discovery of the self was rendered through the metaphor of travel: “The theme of selfdiscovery or, more accurately, the search for a shattered and scattered self that one sees in much modernist literature is itself often expressed in terms of travel” (Blanton, 59). Works of this kind include James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, and Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps.
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Having observed this phenomenon, Samuel Hynes thus declares that “travel metaphor” is “the basic trope of the generation [the 1920s and 30s]” (Blanton 59-60). However, before “travel metaphor” can be well taken, our first question remains to be the definition of “travel.” According to Oxford Dictionary, to travel is “to go from one place to another, especially over a long distance,” indicating that “moving over a long distance” defines travel. Likewise, Georges Van Den Abbeele proposes that the definition of travel is based on “the transport of a person from the place where one is to another place that is far enough away” (xv). As there are differences of culture, language, religion, and ethnicity between “the place” and “another place that is far enough away,” the “transport” from one place to another is an act of boundary crossing. The traveler experiences the differences with a round-trip, encounters the other and searches for the self. “Boundary crossing” can thus be perceived as a metaphor of travel. What is a metaphor then? According to traditional analogy, a metaphor is an implicit and indirect comparison of two things with similarity resulting in a rhetoric transformation. In other words, a metaphor departs from the literal. As M. H. Abrams explains, this view of metaphor claims that “the ordinary use of language is pervasively and indispensably metaphorical, and that metaphor persistently and profoundly structures the ways human beings perceive, what they know, and how they think” (157). Using metaphors is a cognitive activity practiced in daily life. A metaphor is not only a literal description and a transformative recognition, but also a view of things and a part of conceptual system. Based on a cognitive viewpoint, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson further develop a “conceptual metaphor theory”: in the process of comprehending or practicing a metaphor, some qualities of “source domain” are triggered and mapped to “target domain” in parallel with each other. In so doing, a metaphor extends the meaning of target domain, concretizes an abstract idea, and changes our comprehension of target domain. A conceptual metaphor thus consists of “source domain” and “target domain,” in which one domain is understood in terms of the other. Taking “travel” as a “source domain” and Woolf’s Orlando as a “target domain,” the present essay argues that “boundary crossing,”
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“deterritorialization” and “becoming” that characterize travel help us understand Orlando in a new light. And more importantly, they also verify the meaning of travel, transforming Orlando into a metaphor of travel.1 In such a context, a metaphor initiates an in-depth understanding of the world, compelling us to create and to describe the world in a distinctive way. A metaphor, indeed, is “central to our understanding of ourselves, our culture and the world at large” (Lakoff 1989: 214).
I. Travel: Boundary Crossing Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) is a travel narrative about Orlando’s becoming-woman through boundary crossings. The time of Orlando’s life spans 340 years (1588-1928); the places of Orlando’s travel bridge “the familiar” (England) and “the foreign” (Turkey). In Orlando, Turkey, an oriental country, stands for the foreign and the unknown. It is also a location for escape from perplexity and frustration as well as an imaginative land filled with possibilities that a person could ever long for. England, on the other hand, represents the familiar, the homeland that a traveler must return to. As such, we see that Orlando hinges on “travel,” probing into the difference between the foreign and the familiar. In the novel, Orlando’s boundary crossing of gender is presented with the metaphor of travel. As Orlando’s “becoming a woman” does not occur until he leaves England for Turkey, travel, as a metaphor, pertinently shows Orlando’s transformation from a man to a woman. And most notably, Orlando has a round-trip ticket for this gender-crossing. After returning to England, Since its publication in 1928, Orlando: A Biography has been the subject of numerous scholarly studies. Written by Virginia Woolf, Orlando touches upon gender issues in an avant-garde way, making Orlando the title and Orlando the protagonist the emblems of “women’s writing.” A project on the history of women’s writing in the British Isles named after Orlando is one of the many cases in point. Against the grain with “women’s writing,” the present essay demonstrates that the issues Orlando touches upon include not only women’s writing, but also nature, poetics, history, culture, travel and individual movement, all of which cannot be covered under a single rubric of “women’s writing.” 1
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Orlando verifies the difference s/he experiences in Turkey and thereby redefines his/her English poetic legacies. Having Orlando transform to a woman in a foreign country, Woolf explicitly suggests that literary and cultural legacies of England succeeded by Orlando require a new mode to reconstruct its desire, experience, and identity. Instead of being the male-female mode in the Oedipus structure, this new mode is a molecular one that transcends the binary opposition of genders while highlighting versatile, heterogeneous differences. The present essay turns to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of nomadology to look into the theme of travel in Orlando. In view of Orlando’s boundary crossings and ceaseless becomings, the present essay argues that Orlando/Orlando be a prototype of nomadic travel and eventually become a metaphor of travel.2 In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and other works, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of nomadology to explore the possibilities for an individual to mobilize his/her desire. In its resistance against the appropriation of the State Apparatus, nomadology resorts to “deterritorialization” to achieve autonomy. In the meantime, nomadology constructs “a very special kind of space, smooth space” to pursue change and transformation (1995: 33). With mobilized desire and continual transformations, an individual may become a “desiring nomad,” learning the genuine way of life and defeating the oppressions of centralized controls. In light of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology, travel can be divided into two kinds: “sedentary travel” and “nomadic travel.” A sedentary traveler In “On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism,” Janet Wolff observes “the metaphor of travel” in relation to “ideology of travel” and finds the contemporary metaphors of travel are extremely gendered. Wolff agrees that “Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the ‘nomadic subject’ has been found to be a useful way to acknowledge the television viewer’s or the reader’s complex ability to engage with a text both from a position of identity and in an encounter which also potentially changes that identity” (119). However, Wolff claims that because “[her] knowledge of Deleuze’s work is mostly secondary” (130), she does not go a step further to look into the metaphor of travel with Deleuze’s concept of nomadic subject. In her article, it remains unresolved whether a nomadic subject’s metaphor of travel is able to subvert the gendered metaphor of travel in the contemporary time or not. 2
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follows rigid lines, reinforces the boundary between the self and the other, and moves from the self to the self. In other words, a sedentary travel is an immovable movement where the self neither crosses the boundary nor encounters the other. By contrast, a nomadic traveler moves freely in a smooth space and looks for lines of flight. S/he crosses the boundary, encounters the other, engages in “becoming-other,” and returns home with differences (Islam 57). In Orlando, boundary crossings can be perceived on the levels of space and gender.
Space In The Ethics of Travel, Syed Manzurul Islam proposes that traversing threshold alone does not count as crossing boundary. While “traversing threshold” is “leaving one spatial marker and arriving at another,” “crossing boundary” goes a step further by enacting “‘the between’ that divides and joins spatial locations” (5). In the case of Orlando, s/he traverses the spatial threshold, goes through the process of negotiating “the between,” and returns to England to verify the “differences” that have happened in “the between.” Orlando can be said to make her/himself a traveler. In Orlando, at the end of 17th century, Orlando meets Sasha the Russian princess in England. She attracts Orlando with her dynamic energy force and mysterious look, which in turn challenge his concept of gender identity. Orlando tries to define Sasha with language but fails. He invites Sasha to elope with him but is betrayed at the last moment. As Emmanuel Levinas notes, in such circumstances, the best way to regain a man’s dignity and power is to stay at home, the center of patriarchy. Home provides a sense of security for the self, ensuring the self’s ability of “totalizing” the other; home excludes the dangerous and the unfamiliar, protecting the self’s domination over a certain domain (37-38). However, Orlando, who has experienced loss of love and difficulties of poetry writing, “realiz[es] that his home is uninhabitable, and that steps must be taken to end the matter instantly…[Orlando] asked King Charles to send him as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople” (113). For King Charles II, to appoint Orlando to a station abroad is to fulfill the
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colonial mission. For Orlando, to go to Turkey is to search for a possible answer to the most urgent question of life. With his good diplomacy and fluent Turkish, Orlando properly represents Charles II to communicate and negotiate with Turkish Sudan. But Orlando does not intend to propagate the superior British culture. He quickly discovers that to establish political and military forces is not congenial to him. Instead, he finds himself responding to local conventions, rather than being disposed to regulate it. Orlando renounces his English aristocratic upbringing, joins the local community and even marries a Spanish gypsy dancer (128). The gypsy qualities such as being defiant, unrestrained and outside history are exactly the opposites of the British lordship and the instrumental civilization inherited by Orlando. At this point, Orlando’s boundary crossing is extended to a spiritual and social dimension in the foreign country. As Henri Lefebvre notes – space is continuously re-produced and re-constructed based on human activities (26) – Orlando’s spirit, thinking, behavior and social relations create a spiritual and social space. He escapes the English mores by getting involved with nonEuropeans. His anti-traditional marriage to a gypsy dancer can be considered as a starting point of his departure from British tradition. His becomingwoman is the summit of such a departure, constructing a whole new spiritual space.
Gender When the coups d’état breaks out in Turkey and Sudan is overthrown, Orlando’s “becoming a woman” occurs during a seven-day sleep. That Orlando’s sexual metamorphosis and the political revolution occur simultaneously is not meant to be a mere coincidence. As Karen Lawrence notes, it is Woolf’s satire on the “mapping of gender onto the colonial adventure”: both the “policing of the orient” and the “policing of sexuality” are disrupted by revolution (193-4). However, while Orlando’s tenure as ambassador is disrupted by the political revolution, his private sexual metamorphosis (“becoming a woman”) prepares him/her for the eventual “becoming-woman.”
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Taking place in a foreign country, Orlando’s “becoming a woman” brings about some questions. Why does it, being a radical event in the novel, occur in a foreign country, not in England? Could the reason be that England is hostile to female desire and subjectivity, or female imagination and creativity cannot be nurtured in England but have to be sowed in a foreign country so as to bloom in England? To these questions, Lawrence suggests that Orlando’s “gender crossing” be imagined as “cultural border crossing” (182), which “enables a return to the scene of home in which home itself is transformed” by new paradigms of desire constructed on the journey (206). Woolf, however, has not answered these questions in the novel, and the absence of answers actually highlights the significance of travel. As one of the motives of travel is the discontent with the status quo of the homeland, it follows that travel requires a search for an alternative in the foreign country. What is special about Orlando is that the alternative is a gender-transcending one: instead of political, military, economic, scientific or technical strategy, the alternative is a molecular mode that features multiplicities and breaks the binary opposition of male vs. female.
II. Travel: Lines of Movement The movement from one “point” to another shapes a “line.” As Deleuze and Guattari indicate, we all have to take some line: “we are made of line” (1987: 194). By virtue of the internal lines, we travel along the external lines, paths and trajectories. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose that human life is “spatially and socially segmented” (208) from which there are two distinct types of segmentarity: rigid and supple. While the rigid segmentarity brings binarism, the supple space is lineal. Beyond “rigid” and “supple” is the mode that is “one or several lines of flight” (222). These three lines are not mutually exclusive or independent of one another. Instead, they “do not only coexist, but transform themselves into one another, cross over into one another” (223). Observing on a grand scale, the present essay finds that Orlando’s life is composed of these three lines that inform her interactions with the world. To study Orlando’s life, therefore, is to study the lines and to
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investigate how the boundary crossings shape and develop the movements of Orlando’s life.
A. Rigid Line Also called the molar line, the rigid line consolidates and reterritorializes the existing relationship among individuals, religion, society and country by representing binary oppositions and differentiating the reality into subject and object. It is seen as the concentric State Apparatus, whose power absorbs the other to its own center and assimilates the difference to its own controlled territory. At the beginning of the novel, young Orlando is on a rigid line which keeps him grounded in the enclosure of the familiar: “Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed” (13). What Orlando does every day is to practice “the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters” (13). Aiming at joining the expeditionary force of the Great Britain, he prepares himself to be a typical British man. He intentionally estranges himself from his mother, and is eager to participate in the patriarchal world: “But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade” (13). Even though Orlando wields the sword, his movement is subject to the State Apparatus. It is a confined reaction lacking in speed and intensity, staying put without moving toward “the outside” to encounter “the other.” Besides, Orlando’s writing, adding to his rigid movement, is restricted to the existing system of signification. He replaces his self with “representation”: “He was fluent, evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the personages of his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible territories; horrid plots confounded them; noble sentiments suffused them; there was never a word said as he himself would have said it” (16).
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B. Supple Line The supple line, or the molecular line, deterritorializes the world of representation and disrupts the rigid line (the molar lines). As Deleuze and Guattari explicate, the supple line is to be understood in its relation to the rigid line: “molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, classes, and parties” (1987: 216-7). On the other hand, supple lines break the limits set by rigid lines, thus “picking up speed” (25), composing a prelude of transformation heading beyond the boundaries, towards becomings, towards lines of flight. Engaged in the following three acts of deterritorialization, Orlando moves on the supple line, whose speed haunts the rigid line of travel. 1. Criticizing the Tradition of Male Adventures: However much Orlando likes to “listen to sailors’ stories of hardship and horror and cruelty on the Spanish main” (28), he gets bored with the stories about male adventures and conquests – they are so dry and unimaginative: “he began to be a little weary of the repetition, for a nose can only be cut off in one way and maidenhood lost in another . . . whereas the arts and the sciences had a diversity about them which stirred his curiosity profoundly” (30). In traditional western travel writing, such a masculine writing tends to feminize the foreign territory as a virgin land which is to be conquered and domesticated. Expressing his discontent with the mode of male domination, Orlando criticizes the masculine tradition of travel writing while the novel Orlando provides an alternative.3 In The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World, Paul Zweig analyzes the structure of male adventures in terms of the adventurer’s relationship with women. According to Zweig’s studies, for an adventure to take place, the male adventurer must leave his mother and will then encounter a young woman (68-80). At some point, Orlando is structured in the same way as the male Orlando leaves his mother and encounters Sasha. However, the subsequent events after Orlando’s separation from Sasha, including sex change, poetry writing and home-return, are the revisions and challenges to the traditional structure of male adventures. 3
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2. Refusing an Absolute Gender Identity: As for gender identity, adult Orlando demonstrates the tendency of multiplicities, refusing to make a single absolute choice from the binary opposites. On first meeting Princess Sasha, Orlando is attracted to Sasha’s “androgyny.” When finding Sasha’s female identity, Orlando reacts in a complicated way: “She was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arms with the beech trees and the oaks” (37). It is difficult for Orlando to accept any kind of gender fixity. Archduke Harry’s infatuation with Orlando also reinforces Orlando’s oscillation of gender identity. Extremely confused, Orlando describes love as “two faces”: “For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. . . indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them” (112-13). When seeing Archduke Harry in an embarrassing female disguise, Love, the Bird of Paradise, shows itself “black, hairy, brutish” (113). When Love flies in wet feathers to his desk, Orlando feels disturbed and his poetry writing is interrupted. 3. Searching for an Innovative Expression: The reason why Orlando falls in love with Princess Sasha has much to do with his search for an innovative literary language and expression. After meeting Sasha, Orlando tries to describe her but thousands of figures of speech fail alike: Orlando “tr[ies] to tell her . . . what she was like. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree . . . like nothing he had seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words failed him.” On the other hand, Sasha, who comes from a foreign country, knows how to utilize language as a veil, revealing and concealing herself at the same time: “For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame.” Nevertheless, Sasha’s peculiar expression cannot find its way in English, which is “too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech.” Orlando then figures out that he “want[s] another landscape, and another tongue” (45).
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The nature of love and how to express love with figures of speech in poetry have always been the issues that Orlando is much concerned about. In a continual fashion he finds that the English tradition of literature he succeeds to is insufficient to provide proper language to accomplish his mission: “Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter” (97). As “lines of writing conjugate with life lines” (Deleuze, 1987: 194), Orlando, whose life is experiencing the difficulty of love, can hardly finish writing the poem, “The Oak Tree, A Poem,” that he has worked on for years. As Orlando cannot entirely break away from the system that he desires to escape from but is engaged in a process that is directed toward a course of “changes in values” and continual becomings, we see him move on the supple line. Taking the supple line means that one does not possess the territory, but rather the movement itself becomes the “molecular flow” that is able to “escape the binary organizations” (Deleuze, 1987: 216).
C. Lines of Flight With much potential, the line of flight is the one that can evolve into creative metamorphoses of the assemblage and result in constant “mutation” that forms the ongoing force. As Deleuze makes it clear, to flee on the line does not mean to avoid commitments or make an exit from the world: “to flee is not to renounce action: nothing is more active than a flight” (2002: 36). The line of flight consolidates the force released by the individual, constructs mobility and multiplicities, moves with all directions, and leads the mutating individual into “becoming,” a continual production without termination. It is on the line of flight that the traveler takes the boundaries as “something to cross, to punch back, to go beyond” (37). In the novel, Orlando’s lines of flight lead to “becoming-woman” and “stuttering.” 1. Becoming-woman: Through travelling and crossing the boundary, Orlando achieves “absolute deterritorialization”: “becoming-woman,” which is different from “becoming a woman.” While the former breaks the male-female
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binary opposition, the latter is a molar identity enclosed within the binary opposition. The procedure of becoming-woman begins with destabilizing the molar identity. As Deleuze explains, a molar entity is “the woman as defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject” (1987: 275). Instead of representing or imitating the entity of the molar female figure, becoming-woman releases the physical molar bond imposed on an individual and relieves the individual’s speed, intensity and fluidity, thus generating a “molecular-woman.” Based on a traditional molar identity, binary opposition of sex has made a tremendous impact on the individual’s body, experience and history. Becoming-woman deterritorializes existing hierarchy with molecular energies, breaking the form and relation of binary opposition. Deleuze thus views deterritorialization as the threshold for the lines of flight, the beginning of all becomings (1987: 275, 277). To deterritorialize the gender hierarchy of binary opposition, all men and women have to go through the procedure of “becoming-woman.”4 As a result, sexuality is “the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings” (278). The ultimate goal of becoming-woman is neither to redefine the gender category nor to invent a new identity, but to destroy the existing gender category, having identity break Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “becoming-woman” has provoked many discussions, most of which are concerned about “difference”: do individuals with different genders, sexualities, ethnicities and subjectivities all end up with disappearing in the concept of undifferentiated multiplicities? If men as well as women have to undergo “becoming-woman,” there will be no firm demarcation between proper male and female, and the spirit of “the personal is the political” which is based on difference will be undermined. Some feminists, on the other hand, identify with “becomingwoman” as it brings about energy and dynamics. In Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Claire Colebrook endorses the theory as follows: “This might provide the way of thinking new modes of becoming—not as the becoming some subject, but a becoming towards others, a becoming towards difference, and a becoming through new questions” (12). Indeed, “becoming-woman” is a theory of “multiplicities” developed by Deleuze and Guattari to solve the predicament of binary oppositions. As Brian Massumi points out: “Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the reality of sexual difference. They simply argue that it does not lie at the foundation of subjectivity. In their view, the binary couple Man/Woman is one of the interlocking sets of coordinates on the categorical grid defining the person” (86). 4
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through collective “sameness” and achieve individual “singularity.” According to Deleuze and Guattari, the goal of gender politics is to destroy the ossified gender hierarchy under patriarchy, to “ungender” everyone and to create a “non-molar” social territory (Massumi, 88-9). In this way, “becoming-woman” can be said to prophesy a new society, in which “the father function that construed as the need to conform to an established model (Man)” is to be destroyed (ibid). As Buchanan sums up, “becoming-woman” is “a solution to the unbearable fact that we become our parents because they own us” (96). Prior to his becoming-woman in England, Orlando becomes a woman in Turkey. As Patricia Pisters notes, “Orlando first has to change sex to understand what it means when your body is stolen from you (‘You are mine!’)” (125). From the moment of coming back to England in the mid-18th century, Orlando encounters all those prejudices and oppressions the society imposes on women, which she had never sensed when he was a man (150-2). Back to England, Orlando remains to be the same individual, but social hierarchy accompanies her change of sex; her new sexual identity becomes a pressing case for the English court, and Orlando as a woman loses her estate. Orlando’s relation with poetic inheritance has also changed. She sees that to pursue a writing career is antithetical to the proper codes of women’s conduct. The Victorian ideology of the “angel in the house” demands that the society should not expect or encourage a woman to work on serious writing, such as Joseph Addison’s The Spectator and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. What the society allows a woman to do is to engage in trivial mental activities: “Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretense of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper . . . And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes, nobody objects to a woman writing either)” (256). With strategies of parody hidden in the system, Orlando then criticizes, decodes and deterritorializes the existing literary tradition (190209). While Orlando leaves England to search for inspirations for poetry writing, she returns to England to create an alternative mode of expression for the literary tradition of England. The difference between the two situations lies in the fact that Orlando returns home as a woman, confronting the discord between a female poet and the patriarchal tradition of English literature.
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One day in the 19th century, when walking in the garden, Orlando quickens her pace and runs. She runs as if she were fleeing, running towards the world of becoming. At this moment, Orlando encounters Shelmerdine. Her “self-same other” relationship with Shelmerdine climaxes at the point when they recognize the presence of the opposite sex in the other: “‘You’re a woman, Shel!’ she cried. ‘You’re a man, Orlando!’ he cried.” (240)
For both of Orlando and Shelmerdine, “encountering each other” signifies the liberation of desire and elimination of fixed gender mode. However, the metaphor of androgyny does not refer to the unity of male and female, but a vacillation. As Orlando’s biographer points out, “In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place” (181). Similar to travel, vacillation means changes, boundary crossings, and defiance of stagnation. Just like the book title of Orlando, Orlando’s vacillation does not occur within the hierarchical binary opposition of “either . . . or . . . ,” but creates new possibilities and multiplicities by replacing the “l” in “Orlando” with a slash and transforming it to “Or/ando”: “or/and (and/or) and/or” (Bowlby, 50). Undergoing the intensive moments of his/her life, Orlando transcends the conditional historicity of “the actual,” and moves towards the becoming of “the virtual.” As Deleuze notes, it is the opposite of the imaginary: “there is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity; neither multiplicity nor becoming are appearances or illusions” (1983: 23-24). At a moment like this, Orlando experiences the process of “becoming-woman.”5 Patricia Pisters agrees that Orlando’s “becoming-woman” occurs at this moment, though she does not develop her observation in greater details (125-26). Still most regrettably, many critics regard Orlando’s “sexual metamorphosis” or “becoming a woman” as “becoming-woman.” The novel provides a contrary perspective: “…Orlando woke. He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! We have no choice left but confess – he was a woman” (132). It’s quite obvious that Orlando’s “complete nakedness” manifests her biological sex as a woman, yet “becoming-woman” is “non-representational” (Sotirin 102). As Deleuze and Guattari propose, “the lines [of flight] are ‘inscribed on a Body without Organs’” 5
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Orlando’s becoming-woman frees her from the binarism of gender identity. She thereby has more potentials for transformation and searches for constant becomings. For Orlando, writing is her lifelong desire, the inevitable future. Becoming-woman with high self-awareness and abundant creative energy, Orlando finishes and publishes “The Oak Tree: A Poem” which could be done when Orlando was a man. Becoming-woman and the change it comes with are certainly the turning points in Orlando’s life, as she looks back into her life: Yet still, for all her travels and adventures and profound thinkings and turnings this way and that, she was only in process of fabrication. What the future might bring, Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease. High battlements of thought, habits that had seemed durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it. (168)
Indeed, Orlando’s three-hundred-year lifespan has been transformed from his identification with the authorial patriarchy to the one with mature molecular cognition. At the end of the novel, Orlando rejoices with ease and is immersed in sublimity: “‘Ecstasy!’ she cried, ‘ecstasy!’” (312). 2. Stuttering: According to Deleuze, becoming-woman is a “procedure.” There are many ways for a procedure to be transformed into a device, but Deleuze is most emphatic on “stuttering.” For Deleuze, stuttering does not refer to the stammering of the tongue, but the stuttering of the language itself, i.e., the breakage and difficulty in communications. He explains: “when the stuttering no longer affects preexisting words, but itself introduces the words it affects; these words no longer exist independently of the stutter, which selects and links them together through itself” (1997: 107). In other words, stuttering is a “mode of composition, as well as an effect” (Buchanan, 100). The effect of stuttering (1987: 203). In other words, the body does not imitate or represent the existing shape, and the organ does not provide the existing functions. On the line of flight, one moves freely in every direction, undergoing continual “becoming.”
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generates a “minor” function of language: “Language is made to ‘stutter’ when its molar function of representing order takes on a halting, stuttering characteristic, thereby opening up on to a realm that has remained unbound by societal structuring (and molar language)” (Albrecht-Crane, 125). This realm releases non-mainstream meanings from the very repressed bottom, forming “agrammatical formula” (Deleuze, 1997: 68) and thereby challenging the mainstream conventions. When trying to write in England, Orlando notices that the English literary tradition falls short of something so that his words cannot fully convey the meanings. The deficiency of “something” in English becomes clear when one compares English with the other language. Involved with Sasha, Orlando finds that the Russian people’s sentences “often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them” (44-5). In the case of Sasha, Orlando finds that she, though remaining quiet most of the time, “talked so enchantingly, so wittily, so wisely”: “For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed.” By contrast, “English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech,” and Orlando “ransack the language as he might, words failed him” (45). In front of Sasha, the Russian other, Orlando stutters (45-52) and accordingly “want[s] another landscape, and another tongue” (45). Orlando is not the only one that stutters; the English language does as well. After resigning from the office of the Turkish ambassador, Orlando starts roving around with the gypsy. In front of the gypsy other, he stutters again: “. . . when they were all sitting round the camp fire and the sunset was blazing over the Thessalian hills, Orlando exclaimed: ‘How good to eat!’” (137), breaking the convention of saying “How beautiful it is!” In doing so, Orlando deterritorializes the absolute value and function of the mainstream language. At the same time, the gypsy notices that Orlando gets quieter: she hesitates for a long time before answering others’ questions (140). Her stuttering, silence and hesitation altogether give shape to a new resistance – of thinking and expressing. Orlando reasons that since “the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down,” the modern spirit, therefore, can “dispense with language.” And to practice what s/he reasons, Orlando invites the reader
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to endorse this new way of expression: “we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion” (242). After returning to England and encountering Shelmerdine, Orlando creates and uses a foreign language to communicate. While creating and preserving the very few functions of language, they have no difficulty understanding each other: “he having told her that the supply of biscuits now gave out, he was surprised and delighted to find how well she had taken his meaning” (246). Most appropriately, it is through creating this new language that they find the vacillation and nonfixity of gender: “‘Are you positive you aren’t a man?’ he would ask anxiously, and she would echo, ‘Can it be possible you’re not a woman? ’” (246). The stuttering of the existing language, the creation of a new language, together with the vacillation of gender identity, add up to resist fixed social organizations and imagine a different future with experimentations that lead to intensifying life. As such, one sees that Orlando’s becomings are not the one from one language to another, or from one identity to another, but those of intensity and “multiplicities” composed of heterogeneous “singularities.” At this point, Deleuze comments that “Orlando already does not operate by memories, but by blocks, blocks of ages, block of epochs, blocks of the kingdoms of nature, blocks of sexes, forming so many becomings between things, or so many lines of deterritorializaiton” (1987: 294).
III. Travel: Orlando Returns Home After the coups d’état in Turkey, Orlando, who is “becoming a woman,” resigns from the office of the British ambassador and leaves Constantinople with some gypsy friends to lead a nomad life. At first the gypsies accept Orlando, willingly helping her integrate into the community. They teach her to steal, weave baskets, make cheese and set up bird traps. They even consider marrying her to a gypsy man. In a word, they try to “totalize” Orlando. However, even though Orlando is much eager to rush about freely on the Turkish plain, she cannot abandon the (British) cultural vehicle of imagination because “Orlando had contracted in England some of the customs or diseases .
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. . which cannot, it seems, be expelled” (137). Orlando’s “diseases,” in short, is the love for nature and poetry. For Orlando, nature is the God she believes in. The essence of nature is closely related to love, truth, beauty and poetry: they are neither self-evident nor self-manifest, but have to be represented via imagination and figuration. When Orlando is immersed in nature, “she liken[s] the hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the flanks of kine. She compare[s] the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn thin. Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders.” When Orlando writes and enjoys nature, she realizes that “[e]verything, in fact, was something else” (138). Everything relies on the other as a “mediation” to form a figuration and manifest itself. The “figuration” that Orlando relies on is also applicable to her poetry because the truth of poetry is as mysterious and ambiguous as nature. Being a severe god, the truth of poetry hides its message underneath language and thoughts, making it difficult to look through. Still for the gypsy, there is no difference between essence and surface, i.e., the surface of a thing is the essence of it. Everything is the thing itself, nothing else. All kinds of figuration such as metaphors, similes and metonymies cause tension in human relationship and turbulence in society. But how can poetry that Orlando loves exist without figurations? Whenever Orlando has difficulty communicating with the gypsy via speech, she begins missing pen, paper and ink: “‘Oh! If only I could write!’ she cried” (140). However, the gypsy world is one without permanence of place, history, and literary tradition. With the background of a written civilization, Orlando starts wondering: “there was some difference between her and the gypsies which made her hesitate sometimes to marry and settle down among them forever” (141). Realizing that there is something missing from the rootless gypsy life, Orlando decides to go home. After all, it is English literature that nourishes her concept of poetry; it is in England that Orlando must record his/her travel experience. In fact, even in a foreign country far away from the homeland, what Orlando stays close to is his/her beloved poetry and English culture. On the journey of flying imaginations she never leaves the home behind. Without home to be posited as a fixed point of reference, there will be neither departure nor return, and the concept of travel will not be possibly established. No
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matter how obscurely or symbolically the return is presented, home as a fixed point of reference is the key to every travel. Orlando’s returning home does not disqualify her as a traveler. As Deleuze elaborates, “the nomad is not necessarily the one who moves: some voyages take place in situ, are trips in intensity. Even historically, nomads are not necessarily those who move about like migrant. On the contrary, they do not move; nomads, they nevertheless stay in the same place and continually evade the codes of settled people” (1985: 149). A nomad has not necessarily to be the one who moves. A nomad can stay where s/he is, as they act freely, constantly escaping the “coding” of the State Apparatus. After returning to England, the problem Orlando faces is the controversy over her sex. By the end of 19th century, people still argue about her sex. When the court announces that Orlando’s sex is indisputably female, the whole of London rejoices at the result of the lawsuit. In the market-place, dozens of Turkish women and peasant boys with the label “I am a base Pretender” (244) were burnt in effigy. The English people cannot tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity of sex; they try to totalize Orlando. At a moment like this, what Orlando chooses to do is to take a walk with Shelmerdine in the woods. When the wind blows, Shelmerdine mounts on a horse and heads to Cape Horn to take a sail. While the London people fail to totalize Orlando, she does not even try to totalize Shelmerdine. Both Orlando and Shelmerdine move freely and encounter the other on the line of flight. As Deleuze explains, “encountering the other” is not meeting or associating with the other, but respecting the other, establishing an “intersubjective” relationship with each other, and thereby “becoming-other”/ “becoming-woman” (2002: 6-7). The seed of Orlando’s “becoming-woman” is planted in Turkey and blooms in England. Encountering Shelmerdine, Orlando’s “becomingwoman” bears its fruit. When Shelmerdine first introduces himself as “Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine,” Orlando answers immediately “I knew it!” (239). Shelmerdine is for Orlando what she has always already known, as she is for him. Their relationship, figured by travel, is as good as double. Shelmerdine, who falls in love with Orlando and marries her, is unmistakably a total traveler. He takes adventures, sails with the wind, and roves around the sea and the land: “. . . his life was spent in the most desperate and splendid of adventures – which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale”
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(241). As for Orlando, Shelmerdine comprehends her name in a “metaphor of travel.” When they first meet, Shelmerdine intuitively calls her “Orlando.” He explains, “For if you see a ship in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, ‘Orlando’” (239). Indeed, in this imaginative piece of work that transcends space, history and gender, hasn’t Woolf called out: “Orlando my love, your name is travel!”?
IV. Epilogue In “The Spectacle of Travel,” Paulo Prato and Gianluca Trivero argue that one of the essences of modernity is “mobility”: “In recent decades, mobility has exploded to the point of characterizing everyday life much more than the traditional image of the ‘home and family’. Transport ceases to function as a metaphor of progress or at least of ‘modern’ life, and becomes instead the primary activity of existence” (40). In a similar vein, James Clifford argues, in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, that human location is constituted by displacement as much as by stasis, and that “travels” are the crucial sites for an “unfinished modernity” (2) in contemporary globalization. Seen in this light, Orlando’s becomings may prompt us to think anew about change/mobility and be exposed to affects in unpredictable ways. Accordingly, the novel Orlando: A Biography may be said to have already pointed out “the routes” for us. Or, to put it in another way, it is not that Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology verifies Woolf’s Orlando, but that Woolf had written about movement, travel and boundary crossings based on the concept of becoming much before Deleuze and Guattari developed their nomadology. Woolf is one of the writers whom they deeply admire. They do so mainly because they see that Woolf’s work proceeds an infinite productivity of becomings: “The only way to get out of dualisms, be-between, pass between, intermezzo, is what Virginia Woolf lived out with all her strength, in all her work, never ceasing to become” (1987: 277). True, in Orlando: A Biography, Orlando crosses multiple boundaries, engages in the procedure of becomings, transforms to a desiring nomad, and hence becomes a metaphor of travel.
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Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993. Pisters, Patricia. The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Prato, Paulo and Gianluca Trivero. “The Spectacle of Travel.” Australian Journal of Cultural Studies 3: 2 (1985): 25-43. Sotirin, Patty. “Becoming-woman.” Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Ed. Charles J. Stivale. Montreal: McGill-queen’s University Press, 2008. 98-109. Turner, Mark and George Lakoff. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Van Den Abbeele, Georges. Travel as Metaphor from Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Wolff, Janet. “On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism.” Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. 115-34. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Zweig, Paul. “The Flight from Women.” The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. 61-80.
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The Maya in Monuments:
Musings on the Makes, Masks and Mirages Of Modern Dalit Memorials in NCR and Lucknow by Siddhartha Chakraborti and Anurima Chanda Citation: Chakraborti, Siddhartha and Anurima Chanda. “The Maya in Monuments: Musings on the Makes, Masks and Mirages of Modern Dalit Memorials in NCR and Lucknow.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 133-152. Web. Abstract: The commotion over the creation of “Dalit Monuments” and the encouragement of Dalit Tourism in Uttar Pradesh by Chief Minister, Mayawati brought about a wide range of reactions within and beyond the intelligentsia. The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Uttar Pradesh Governments were widely criticised for their inability to address the central issues of employment, land redistribution, wider health and education. In this backdrop, the creations of ‘new’ monuments were seen by some to be a mere symbolic assertion diverting public money for unnecessary extravagant expenses. Because of the vigorous debate, in a way, the monuments are visited only in a premeditated and mediated manner, having themselves become a part of an imaginary order because of their constant representations This essay and accompanying photographic presentations attempts to ‘visit’, ‘read’ and follow the story behind and beyond the making of the monuments. It demonstrates how the monuments themselves have now become mirages – fleeting inaccessible hopes of sanctuary in the deserts of injustice, or how through an ironical resurrection, the age old hegemony of brahminism has turned the solid brick and concrete monuments of inspiration, into traps of Maya (illusion). Keywords: Dalit Monuments, travel and architecture, Mayawati, BSP, Maya Ambedkar Park, Lucknow, Noida, Delhi, NCR, Brahminism, Dalit architecture
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The Maya in Monuments:
Musings on the Makes, Masks and Mirages of Modern Dalit Memorials in NCR and Lucknow by Siddhartha Chakraborti and Anurima Chanda
here is no tradition of Dalit Monuments, unless you consider the recently attempted appropriation of ancient Buddhist structures, through an active Dalit assertion. Even these monuments, like the Sanchi Stupa or the Karle Caves, can hardly be called exclusively ‘Dalit.’ At any rate the actual control of these monuments lies with the Archaelogical Survey of India (ASI), which can perforce be seen as merely allowing “access to a cosmic identification denied [to the Dalits] in many Hindu shrines”(Tartakov, 410).It is in the context of this absence of a Dalit tradition, not only in terms of monuments, but even public space, identity and access that we must approach the recent commotion over the creation of Dalit Monuments and the encouragement of Dalit Tourism in Uttar Pradesh by the former Chief Minister of the State, Mayawati. Being a contested ground, the issue has already brought about a wide range of reactions within and beyond the intelligentsia. The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Uttar Pradesh Government were widely criticised for their inability to address the central issues of employment, land redistribution, wider health and education. Against this backdrop, the creation of new monuments was seen by some to be a mere symbolic assertion diverting public money for unnecessary extravagant expenses. At the same time, many voices came out in support of these monuments as pioneering the resurrection of the voices of the most downtrodden majority of the country, providing hope and inspiration to the two hundred million who had lived without it for thousands of years. Through this paper, we hope to discuss some of the intricacies in the politics of building Monuments. As we progressed with the subject, we realised what had happened because of the constant debate on Mayawati’s
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monuments, in the media, the internet and elsewhere, was that the quotient of travel to the monument had been effectively suppressed. The debate had taken a life of its own, and the monuments themselves had become inaccessible. Nelson and Olin note in their introduction to Monuments and Memory Made and Unmade: Social processes surrounding the monument begin even before it is seen. Travel to the monument, like all forms of pilgrimage, transforms object and beholder. The round trip, the full rite de passage…remakes the memories of individuals and connects both object and beholder to larger social structures, thereby inculcating senses of personhood and history that society deems important (6).
It was this elision of mobility – of the round trip – from the debate which we decided to attack through a determined travel to, and actual visiting of, the sites in question. In many ways, travel becomes central to the methodology of this paper, which is aimed at penetrating the mediated and premeditated notions on 21st century Dalit architecture which have taken centre stage today. The state government of the Bahujan Samaj Party itself saw the monuments as a reason for journey. It projected the new buildings as monuments to the long journey which culminated in the first democratic conferment of power to a party of untouchables, the bahujans, the large majority of the Indian population who had historically been marginalised and silenced: those determined out of the Hindu caste system, those backward scheduled castes, and subhumans who were consistently denied even the most basic of human elements of food, water or education. In some ways, linking the Monuments to Tourism was a strategy aimed at creating a certain monetary logic. Visitors to the monuments would in the long run ‘pay’ for their upkeep, and perhaps even mature as a source of revenue. Indeed, the monuments are made with the intent to survive the present and break into eternity. They are all in stone, and the statues all in bronze – materials historically proven durable in their fight against the eroding and corroding effects of nature over time. Physically, the structures promise a solidity and presence that one may expect from the Stupas or the Iron Pillar. As befits any public monument, they will last too long, definitely beyond the
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immediate urgencies and visions of their commissioners or builders. Writing on Civil War Monument building era, Kirk Savage explains: Public monuments are the most conservative of commemorative forms precisely because they are meant to last, unchanged, forever. While other things come and go, are lost and forgotten, the monument is supposed to remain a fixed point, stabilizing both the physical and the cognitive landscape (4).
With regard to the above, the potential longevity of this new Dalit architecture has raised some colourful comparisons and comments. Consider the sort of description the journalist Amy Kazmin of the Financial Times conjures to describe the structure in Noida, in many ways, as the grandest of the many built by Mayawati: Spread over 130 acres, the compound matches London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, Cambodia’s Angkor Wat and Egypt’s Karnak Temple in terms of sheer scale. Only the pyramids are starker; only the Parthenon itself more monumental. You might call this the new Rome, except it has [only] all the authenticity and originality of a Bollywood set: Mogul-style pavilions here, Buddhist-style domes there, white marble statues everywhere (2009, italic mine).
In a similar vein, Ajoy Bose, the author of Mayawati’s biography, “Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati” is quoted by Corey Flintoff of the NPR to have said that the monument: “almost takes you back to antiquity and the old, medieval days and ancient days where the emperors used to build these things...” (2011). While the former ridicules the need for such monuments in its pun on authenticity (reviving also the horrors of authenticity in lineage and caste determination in Hinduism), the latter is an equally spirited defence of these gigantic construction projects. And, both suggest a travel back in time, but more importantly the potential time the monuments will travel into the future. With the comparisons to ancient monuments, the aspect of tourism, which is in common association with monuments in general, too entered the public debate. The debate travelled from the media to blog posts, where in a
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blog entitled “India Retold,” the author Vinod Sharma took up the common buzz on the street that the monument was “Grander than the Akshardham Temple”– another modern monument and popular tourist destination – which had the following accredited by the author: …a temple like the Swaminarayan Akshardham Temple in Delhi has possibly not been built in India for over a thousand years. It is stunning beyond words, transports you into a different world and generates an awe that stays with you. No wonder it is already perhaps the biggest tourist attraction in Delhi, with 70% tourists coming to Delhi visiting it, in addition to Delhiites. It is also Delhi's most impressive architectural landmark that took 300 million man hours to build, in only five years; that is the equivalent of constructing 42 Empire State buildings! (2009).
In case of the Dalit monuments their obvious repeated linkage with tourism is has been endorsed by the official governmental ratification of ‘Dalit Tourism,’ through the tourism ministry, but perhaps most clearly in the statement by Mayawati herself at the inaugural function on the October 14, 2011, where she attacked the congress government for wasteful expenditure, and went on to clarify how through tourism she intended to have it recouped. As quoted by Dean Nelson of the The Telegraph, Mayawati says: All opposition parties have a prejudiced attitude towards the Dalits. People are accusing us of spending a lot on this park. We have just spent one per cent of the Uttar Pradesh budget on this project and that cost will be recovered from ticket sales (2011).
What is interesting is that while on the one hand any monument or smarak is a node in a travel, the naming of the monument as a Dalit Prerna Sthal marks a different sort of a stop, a pause for inspiration and rejuvenation in the usual travails of life for a Dalit. Etymologically, ‘travel’ and ‘travail’ are related, with the original meaning involving a sense of difficulty, often inflicted through instrumental torture (“travail,” Online Etymology Dictionary). In some ways the monument becomes a product of travel, and of struggles long and hard through thousands of years, leading to the final vocabulary of a Dalit
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political articulation – a process that the erstwhile prime minister of India, PV Narsimha Rao expressed as a “Miracle of Democracy” in 1995. The Monuments are actually promoting a culture of travel which has its own particular relevance in the context of caste. Within the established geographical confines of the village structure it was much easier to propagate and enforce caste laws. With the coming of modern transport systems, and the growth of urban centres people travelling would seek out others of their own caste in order to cohabit. Amongst the Dalits travel was a luxury not only because they had no money for it, but also because they had no recognizable group with which they could put up. With caste Hindus, even if one did not have relatives, one could always stay in the temple premises, often for free, or for a minimal charge. Similarly, Sikhs would have their Gurudwaras and the Muslims, Mosques. Monuments therefore become tools which facilitate travel. However, till today, Dalits had no monuments, or public spaces to call their own. Despite the best efforts of the government, and the strict laws against untouchability, even today we find that entry into temples, parks and other public spaces, access to drinking water, etc. are severely limited for Dalits. In this context, the creation of these monuments proves an important and objective emancipatory step for the Dalit community. With sprawling grounds, facilities for guests including individual rooms and shared dormitories, the Monuments were designed to ensure that they don’t just become an end to a journey, but create the possibility of its beyond. With the monuments Mayawati created a special security force, the Special Zone Protection Force (SPZF), distinct from the state police, in order to ensure that they were protected against possible casteist miscreants, and also to give confidence to the Dalit community that their travel security was the responsibility of the government, no matter what the cost. As Atiq Khan reports for The Hindu, The SZPF proposal envisages the constitution of a battalion comprising about 1,200 security personnel, and would be headed by an ex-Army officer of colonel rank. The recruitment process and the service rules would be the same as applicable elsewhere in the country. About Rs.8 to 9 crore would be spent on constituting the force in the first year and it is likely to be set up by April-end.
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To begin with, the security force would be responsible for the security of nine sites, including memorials, museums, parks, statues and galleries built to Dalit icons in Lucknow and Noida (Gautam Buddha Nagar) (2010).
However, as with all journeys, there was a twist on the road. In March 2012, the BSP was swept out of power by a Samajwadi Party (SP) riding high on the charismatic leadership of Akhilesh Singh Yadav. One of the major criticisms that the SP was making against the Mayawati Government was regarding what they projected to be severely wasteful expenditure. Whatever be the reasons, one of the first moves of the new government was to close down the monuments from the public, citing incomplete facilities or some other minor work – such as tiling, or plastering – being incomplete: a stream of constant apologies. Next, the new government declared that the monuments would be opened to the public for functions like marriages, in an attempt to generate revenue. With the changing times, the idea that monuments were perennial structures set up for eternity began to crack. While all monuments do outgrow their own immediate historical context, the incredible speed of the change further underlined that it was not only the building materials which gave stability to a structure, but also the surrounding politics and assertion. As Young points out, …monuments have long sought to provide a naturalizing locus for memory, in which a state’s triumph and martyrs, its ideals and founding myths are cast as naturally true as the landscape in which they stand. These are the monument’s sustaining illusions, the principles of its seeming longevity and power. But in fact...neither the monument nor its meaning is really everlasting. Both a monument and its significance are constructed in particular times and places, contingent on the political, historical, and aesthetic realities of the moment…(13)
In a report filed by the Press Trust of India (PTI) and carried by The Hindu, the full scale of the changes was brought to public notice for the first time. We are reproducing the full details to give an idea of how complete the restructuring plan was:
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“BSP supremo Mayawati’s dream projects, including memorials and parks in the name of Dalit icons in the state capital, would now witness marriages and cultural events with the Akhilesh government deciding to use the space for public purposes. As per the plan, guest houses constructed at Ramabai Ambedkar ground and adjoining area will be handed over to the estate department besides its administrative building will be used as the Committee’s office. The administrative offices of other places could now be given to government, semi-government departments, corporations and different bodies on rent. The dormitories constructed at memorials, parks and rally grounds will be given on rent to government and semi-government departments and the adjoining vacant land could be used for social functions, including marriages and cultural events etc. Similarly, type four dwellings constructed at Buddha Vihar Shanti Upvan will be handed over to the estate department and canteen at eco-garden be given on rent to a private operator. The administrative building at Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal, which was earlier allotted to National Investigative Agency (NIA), would be allotted to the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), Udyog Bandhu or any other department on rent. Besides, outer administrative building of the Sthal would be given on rent to police or the home department. Similarly, Kanshiram green (eco) garden would also be rented out by Estate department. After leaving space for the annual Lucknow Mahotsava, the remaining space at Ramabai Ambedkar ground would be given on rent for organising expo-marts and other fairs. The parking place would be given to the state Transport Corporation for inter-state bus terminal.” (2013)
The complete dismantling of the monuments had begun. With the change in the government and the change in the power relations, the resilience of the monuments designed to transcend time was already under probation. Goin back to Nelson and Olin,
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The monument expresses the power and sense of the society that gives it meaning. Designed to be permanent, the actual monument…changes constantly as it renegotiates ideals, status, and entitlement, defining the past to affect the present and future. Deprived of its enabling and enabled social networks and left untended, monument and memory disappear (7).
With the Dalits no longer enjoying the centre stage in Uttar Pradesh politics, and having little say or the actual ability to affect policy decisions the fate of the monuments was endangered. *** The new government had removed the SZPF, and handed over security to the Uttar Pradesh Rajkiya Nirman Nigam (Keelor, 2013). Furthermore, plans included stepping down even that minimum security (because the monuments were already closed) and handing it over to the District magistrate. The complete annihilation of the monuments was underway, amidst negligible protest by the BSP and a few Dalit Intellectuals. It was at this juncture that we had the chance of visiting both the monuments: in Lucknow and in Noida. The Lucknow monument was interestingly indorsed on us by the auto rickshawallah we had hired, who declared that it was definitely grander than any of the things the nawabs had built, or even the ruins of the Residency. At the same time, we were repeatedly discouraged by many of our acquaintances that there was nothing to see at the Ambedkar Park, and were instead told to join a tour of the city which covered the usual historical places. In a changed and changing Lucknow we were caught in an unusual position. On the one hand we were confronted with a nostalgic past of decadence and tehzeeb which was fast disappearing, and on the other by the assertion of an even older order of a silenced community, fast gaining in their confidence of articulation. One was a mirage, rapidly disappearing, nonetheless fighting for existence in changing climes; the other was a reality eager to project itself. The words of Baudrillard in his “Simulations” rang clear.
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When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its true meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production...a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal (11-3).
Amidst this flux of time – the flux over the destination of travel – we must understand the underlying role the flux in current politics has to play. This is not a fight solely over architectural merit, aesthetics, or pleasure. It is a fight over assertion of identity, of the assertion of a heritage and of a voice, of the agency of travel. The monuments are not solely objects of beauty, a joy forever, but rather the grounds for a struggle. As Lucknow emerges into a new century, ...which places do or do not become part of heritage and what transformations places undergo in this process of recognition is a key arena for combative struggles of identity and power. It is not simply that heritage places symbolize certain values and beliefs, but that the very transition of these places into heritage is a process whereby identity is defined, debated and contested and where social values are challenged or reproduced (Jacobs, 35).
We could not enter the monument, but even from outside its breathtaking magnitude, along with miles of concrete grounds, made a stark impression. With the sun bearing down on us, even in the relatively pleasant climate it was not difficult to imagine how unbearably hot the grounds would be in full summer. With not a single tree in sight, the visitor would perhaps feel the shock of what it means to be Dalit, or oppressed with nothing or no one to protect him, whatsoever. At the entrance we saw the characteristic statues of Mayawati and Kanshiram, with the former holding on to her handbag on the one side, and another of Babasaheb Ambedkar and Savitribai Phule. Having constantly heard about the so called ugliness or lack of aesthetics of the monument from various quarters, we realised that none of these naysayers had
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ever seen the monument themselves. Having taken the equation of travel out of the picture, all that remained was commonplace anger, Brahminical vestiges, and outright derision. We realised that the monument was never visited (for most of its existence it has been closed to the public). It was only pre-visited notions from politically motivated quarters, and the constant re-visitings of the same which had done more to destroy these awe inspiring monuments than the actual governmental strategies.
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The enormity of the monument cannot be explained in words. It is massive. It was impossible to cover the entire monument in one 35 mm camera frame even though we were at least two kilometres away from the structure. With gleaming tiles and the omnipresent elephants the structure has both a theme and a powerful assertion. Even the stupa inspired central structure gives a clear message. True, it was an experience beyond anything else we had seen in the city of winding histories. Having visited the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Prateek Sthal in Lucknow, we were drawn into the entire debate surrounding the monument, and the other monuments. This journey into a different world, of silences and silencing, of struggles and assertions was deeply moving. One could call it a sort of pilgrimage, only the doors to the temples were forever shut. Amidst attempts by the government to have the monuments appropriated, converted into government offices, or even razed (Mishra) we set out on a personal journey to the complex in Noida. We were denied entry even here. On informing that we were students on a project, we were curtly told to approach the Commissioner of police in Lucknow, and get permission.
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The doors of the Rashtriya Dalit Prerna Sthal were resolutely closed, and the best we could do was to sneak some photographs from the boundary fence.
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We continued our journey to the Ambedkar Memorial, where a single guard enthusiastically guided us around the museum and the library. Both were completely bereft of people. The library had almost no books. He sadly told us that there was hardly any promotion of the place, and that it was only on the day of Ambedkar Jayanti that some government people would come to lay flowers. We inquired whether they kept the complete works of Ambedkar for sale. No, the guard shook his head and revealed that hardly anything happened there at all. The government had simply set up the place to pay lip service to the Dalit community. Even the house where Babasaheb died had been destroyed by some businessmen who came into the possession of the property after his death. There had been little attempt on the part of anyone to preserve anything. He directed us to the Ambedkar Foundation Library, saying that it was the body in charge of the dissemination Ambedkar’s works. When we reached there, we found another empty reading room which was supposedly the library. The condition of the place was such that they did not have even a single copy of his collected works in English.
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In reality, the Dalit monuments have been masked, appropriated, and closed. Through this they have become a part of an imaginary order, which cannot be accessed except from a distant secondary visiting, through and after their representations in the media, or debates about their relevance, or criticism of their aesthetics, even when one visits them physically. The monuments themselves have now become mirages – fleeting inaccessible hopes of sanctuary in the deserts of injustice. Ironically, the monuments built by Mayawati, and the few other governmental memorials, have been assimilated into the modern forms of our ancient complacencies, and their purpose slowly demolished through a systematic and determined campaign, until all that remains is the illusion of the monument, the Maya of the monument has assumed an autonomous existence, over which debates and denouncements continue unabated. Through the closure of travel, through the deferment of the journey, we are again brought into a stasis of inactivity with no possibility of movement. In the words of the 18th century poet, George Keate No other Noise in this calm Scene is heard, No other Sounds these tranquil Vaults molest, Save the Complainings of some mournful Bird That ever loves in Solitude to rest (Keate).
Is that what we want?
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References Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), Inc. 1983. Flintoff, Corey. “In India, Once-Marginalized Now Memorialized”. NPR. October 28, 2011. http://www.npr.org/2011/10/28/141775668/in-india-once-marginalizednow-memorialized. Web. 29/8/13. Jacobs, Jane. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. New York: Routledge. 1996. Keate, George. The Ruins of Netley Abbey, a Poem. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764. Keelor, Vandana. “Dalit Park's Security may be given to District Magistrate Soon”. The Times of India. July 11, 2013. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-0711/noida/40513713_1_dalit-memorials-parks-and-memorials-dalit-park. Web. 29/8/13. Mishra, Subhash. “Dalit memorials to be razed in Uttar Pradesh.” The New Indian Express. December 4, 2012. http://newindianexpress.com/nation/article1365717.ece. Web. 29/8/13. Kazmin, Amy. “India’s palaces of the untouchables”. FT Magazine. June 4, 2009. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e01f13f0-44d7-11de-82d600144feabdc0.html?siteedition=uk#axzz2dKBGoBUm. Web. 29/8/13. Khan, Atiq. “Mayawati sets up special force for guarding monuments of Dalit icons.” The Hindu. April 3, 2010. http://www.hindu.com/2010/04/03/stories/2010040365961400.htm. Web. 29/8/13. Nelson, Dean. “Head of India's poorest state opens £10 million theme park dedicated to her family.” The Telegraph. October 14, 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/8827368/Head-ofIndias-poorest-state-opens-10-million-theme-park-dedicated-to-herfamily.html. Web. 29/8/13. Nelson, Robert S. and Margaret Olin. Eds. “Introduction,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003: 6-7. Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-century America. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1999. Sharma, Vinod K. “Mayawati’s Memorials Mark Epochal Change”. India Retold Blog. July 3, 2009. http://vinodksharma.blogspot.in/2009/07/mayawatismemorials-mark-epochal-change.html. Web. 29/8/13.
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Tartakov, Gary Michael. “Art and Identity: The Rise of a New Buddhist Imagery,” Art Journal, 49.4, (1990):409-416. “Travail.” Online Etymological Dictionary (etymoline.com). http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=travail&searchmod e=none. Web. 3/9/ 2013. Young, James E. “Memory and Counter-Memory.” Harvard Design Magazine, Special Edition: “Constructions of Memory: On Monuments Old and New.” 1999: 613. PTI Lucknow. “Mayawati’s Dalit memorials to host marriages, cultural events.” , The Hindu. May 23, 2013. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/otherstates/mayawatis-dalit-memorials-to-host-marriages-culturalevents/article4742636.ece. Web. 29/8/13.
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The Rooftops of Vienna: An American in Austria by Stephen Newton Citation: Newton, Stephen. “The Rooftops of Vienna: An American in Austria.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 153-166. Web. Abstract: A Fulbright scholar makes his way into Graz and later Vienna finding difference in all he travels across, almost window shopping for the “weird,” never disengaged from what he sees, The Viennese church, Der Graben, the spray painter painting space landscapes, and the Pestsaule or the Plague Column built in 1679 to mark the great Viennese pneumonic plague. In the hospitability that he receives, the characteristic of complacency, and even life security seem to dwindle; the scholar begins having premonitions of death in a foreign land, which after all has been proven not so foreign since he saw the human Statue of Liberty which he was more likely to have seen from Brooklyn Bridge or Battery Park, back home. Rather than unfolding in a strictly Viennese culture the journey enters a more cosmopolitan arena with the above, and later the gypsies the traveller sees near the cathedral. He does not clarify whether he scorns the city for being non-unique in this ethnographic display of people and cultures or is grateful to it for its diversity of entrapments. However, towards the end we are shown a passage out of this binary by the author when he realizes how natively and unequivocally even Michael Jackson music in “thick German/Austrian” accent affected a lady in the wheelchair, thereby redefining the codes of travel itself. The work is an example of meta-travel wherein while the author is supposedly the traveller, and the city he treads upon was itself caught unawares in its ongoing flux. To any traveller a city is ideally a kaleidoscope sans ideological afflictions, and that is the last impression we are left with, of Vienna’s shadowed orange tiled rooftops. Keywords: Vienna, Graz, Austria, travelogue, Fulbright scholarship, Mozart, Requiem, Pestsaule, Der Graben, Statue of Liberty, spray painting, Beat generation, New York subway
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The Rooftops of Vienna: An American in Austria by Stephen Newton
hortly after I arrived in Austria, I was out walking in the park one Sunday afternoon near my apartment in Graz, Austria’s second largest city, when I heard some music playing. I headed in that direction. The park was really quite something, with sculpted bushes and huge trees, and the music was coming from a bandshell. The band was all dressed in lederhosen, maybe twenty pieces, mainly men, but there were some women wearing dirndls, and they were playing a kind of oom-pah happy yodel Austrian smiley-smile brass band music, that was indigenous to this area, I supposed. There was a bunch of old folks in folding chairs sitting in front of the band. The band leader/conductor – a tanned, Teutonic sort of guy, blonde and handsome, with a perennial smile – introduced a group of four teenage boys in lederhosen who came down in front of the bandstand and danced. This was a kind of butt-whacking, knee-slapping, herky-jerky cuckoo-clock dance, while about fifty yards away, on the steps of a high modernist institute that published an avant-garde art and literary magazine, a large group of punks with purple and green Mohawks stared sullenly at the festivities, diaper pins drooping out of their lips. Then an ambulance pulled up and parked in back of the bandstand and loaded in an old man who had suffered some kind of health crisis, perhaps even a heart attack, while this other rich tapestry of central European life was going on during a sunny day in the park. This all happened in September of 2005, when I was just beginning my teaching as a Fulbright Scholar at the Department of American Studies at the University of Graz, in Graz, Austria. I was still very new to the country. Because of this fresh, undiluted perspective as a newcomer, I think that I was seeing things in ways that were different – maybe even dramatically so – than I did after I had been there a while.
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On that day in the park there were all these crazy, vibrating scenes, full of what looked like unresolvable contradictions to me – butt slapping oompah dancing in lederhosen while central European Sid Vicious acolytes lounged in imperious, disdainful, opiated boredom – and then, right there in the middle of it all, was the reaper. There’s not much that I can do about noticing this kind of thing. I know that I frequently have a somewhat morbid outlook on things. One could also argue that it is not morbid at all, but rather just a willingness to see what is clearly here, in front of our faces all the time. Be that as it may, for some reason I tend to focus on the bizarre touches in the weave of this vale of tears, or at least I make note of them, and I then remember these little twisted surrealistic dimensions while most other people, quite naturally, and reasonably, pay attention to the more wholesome and uplifting aspects of life. In other words, there are lots of people of who might not have focused on the butt-slapping lederhosen teens, and the way that they contrasted with the bored-witheverything, blue Mohawk, facial clothespin set, or if they did notice they might not have found it all that noteworthy. I found it so amazing it made my head explode. Different strokes, I guess. There have been times – plenty of times, actually – that this has led me to feel like I was walking alone down the dark side of the street, and I think that perhaps this is why there have been long stretches when I have I felt so at home in New York City, a town that will get as gnarly and bleak with you as you want it to get. Oddly enough, however, in Gotham the P.T. Barnum sideshow freak parade seems to always exist side by side with the kind of oldfashioned, everyday life that is as wholesome as a Sunday afternoon church social in Nebraska. Of course in New York the preacher at the picnic might be wearing something lacy from Frederick’s of Hollywood under his vestments, but who’s quibbling. Shortly after the scene in the park, and once again, very soon after I had arrived in Austria, I spent a week in Vienna getting oriented for my upcoming year, when I would be teaching at the University of Graz. This was all sponsored by the USA State Department. The all-day sessions were in a grand building, on a little winding cobblestoned side street, where you had to show a photo ID to a scary looking and ill-tempered troll of an armed guard, who spoke no English, to get in the front door. You then found yourself in a large
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imposing Habsburg Empire era lobby with portraits of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney smiling broadly down from the opposite wall. I was there, primarily, to teach the literature of the Beat Generation, a bunch of drug fiends, ecstatic queer Whitmanic yawpers, religion seekers, alcoholic scribblers, and compulsive handgun blasters who chased boys, girls, fast cars, pot, cheap wine, and heroin with equal abandon through the subway stations, highways, saloons, mountaintops, and back alleys of Europe, North Africa, America, and Mexico in the 1940s and 50s. There was no contradiction in this, I guess. Surely the Bush/Cheney era State Department wouldn’t have sent me to Europe unless they knew what they were doing. Of course, the good folks in the Fulbright Office, or Senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen, might not actually have read Naked Lunch or “Howl” all the way through. They could perhaps have read parts of On the Road thirty or forty years ago, as even middle-aged Republicans went to college once upon a time, and not all of them to Bob Jones University. Surely they must have read at least a little bit of this trashy commie hippie stuff after hitting the bong in their dorm room and turning on the lava lamp. Then again, that’s probably why they don’t remember just how depraved some of it is. The Marquis De Sade’s got nothin’ on Old Honest Bill Burroughs. Naked Lunch is just not something that you would be likely to take to Hilton Head for a little light reading on a rainy afternoon while the kids play Uno on the porch. But even if they had read the literature that I was going to teach, and furthermore, if they had remembered something about it, it was not likely to be the kind of thing that someone in fuchsia plaid plants talking on a cellphone on the eighteenth green would want to think about all that much, believe me. But it’s important to remember that there are always contradictions in life that will never be resolved, I guess, no matter what Dr. Phil says. Perhaps this is how rich gray-haired men with beach ball waistlines and road-kill combovers can be so effortlessly comfortable with gorgeous third wives the same age as their youngest daughters. Some things you just can’t figure out and it’s pointless to try. Have another martini. ***
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So there I was in Vienna. I was walking around trying to cheer myself up and at least temporarily shed the ever-present melancholy of what was rapidly becoming what looked, at the time, like a possibly permanent mid-life crisis. I was finding out that no matter where I turned, however, the city had me trumped when it came to the weird. This was not something I had been expecting. I don’t know quite what was I expecting, other than strudel and the odd museum and palace, but it started as soon as I left my hotel one night after a long orientation day comprised of immersion in the intricacies of Austrian politics, right down to the ways that parliamentary caucuses interface with provincial governors. I’m sure that Uzbekistan and Paraguay have similar governmental nuances, but that doesn’t mean that I need to sit and listen to someone drone on about them for an entire afternoon, sounding like they are reading a lease out-loud, for chrissakes, in order to teach there. Maybe some policy wonks in the room were gobbling it up, but they could have fooled me. They looked about as enthusiastic as a room full of tongue-pierced Green Day fans at an Osmond Family prayer breakfast. After retiring to my hotel for a much needed nap – worn out after all the soporific effects of the orientation – I went into a church across the street that I had been walking by every day, after leaving the hotel. It was spectacular, in an opulent, over-the-top, Michelangelo on magic mushrooms kind of way, with a huge dome rising into the clouds – there were actually clouds and blue sky painted on the inside of the dome – and elaborate, bright paintings covering all of the surfaces that were not plated with gold. Along the walls were what looked like several small mini-chapels with their own paintings above them, and as I walked closer it seemed that there was some kind of skeletal figure lying in a glass case, dressed like a decayed drum major. Sure enough, this was a skeleton, wearing shiny, 76 Trombones voodoo doll clothes, all tinsel and glitter, under the dark ascendant figure of some saint or other above it on the wall. On the other side of the room was the same thing, another skeleton dressed for a Mardi Gras dance. It turns out that this was common in the middle ages, that long stretch between the Romans and the Renaissance, when they would dress up the remains of local saints and put their party-ready bones on display. I saw the same thing later in the week in a couple of churches in the Danube valley that we visited on a Fulbright outing.
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Well, I found this somewhat, oh, unusual. Of course this is all part of travel and I was striving to be open-minded, but given the fact that the church I went to as a lad was so severely Northern European protestant that it did not even have stained glass windows, much less a thin hippie-looking guy nailed to a cross, these kinds of things carry a certain frisson of startled recognition, believe you me. I then walked out onto one of Vienna’s central grand concourses, Der Graben, properly startled. Der Graben is an open area restricted only to pedestrians that goes on for many blocks and seemed to me to constitute one of the main shopping areas of downtown Vienna. It was a long stretch lined with stores and open-air cafes and restaurants. In the middle, not far from my hotel and the skeletal drum major church, was a tall statue, once again incredibly ornate and beautiful, with a large cast of marble figures swirling around all the way to the top. It was under reconstruction and maintenance, and around the base was a series of large poster sized paintings, lithographs, and text in three or four languages, all about the history of the statue, and by extension of Vienna itself. It was called Pestsaule, or The Plague Column. It was erected at the end of the worst epidemic of pneumonic plague ever to hit Vienna, in 1679. The plague killed somewhere between 70,000 and 110,000 people in the span of a few months. I walked all around the base of the statue and read about the plague and looked at paintings of carts loaded with bodies being carried out of town, that sort of thing. Oh my. This was all in the context of having just spent the previous week obsessively going to websites focusing on the possibly impending bird flu pandemic, potentially...well, some were saying that it could be the worst natural disaster to ever hit the human population of the planet. The media was suggesting that something truly beyond imagining could realistically happen. It’s hard to remember, in 2013, how vivid the hype was, at the time, in 2005, but I can assure you, it was plenty scary, especially for someone living in a foreign country. In retrospect, at least for now, it seems like one of those times when there was a great deal of undeserved mass hysteria, much ado about nothing, but while I was in the middle of it things got significantly weird, to the point where I was quite seriously asking the Fulbright officials questions about ways to get out of the country in the event of an epidemic. These queries were quickly dismissed. And now, eight years
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later, epidemiologists are once again warning of a possible global pandemic. Life goes. This Plague Column, then, was a little too serendipitous for comfort. Shelley’s Ozymandias came to mind, as did the then recent disaster in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina had hit the weekend before I was leaving for Austria. There was another impending storm that was about to hit Houston, Hurricane Rita, which I had been watching on CNN just before leaving the hotel, and that made this entire cataclysmic atmosphere even more ominous. Walking through the crowds of happy shoppers I kept on thinking that this is what it is like before the end comes. All of this blithe celebration and sidewalk handholding would soon be turning to tears. Oh, the humanity! I would only like to emphasize, dear reader, that this is what I was thinking then, at the time, walking crest-fallen through the afternoon streets of Vienna, thinking about the end of the world. It probably goes without saying that along with a propensity for noticing the strange and weird, I also have a bit of a flair for the dramatic. But enough of that noise. After hanging out at the Plague Column for about half an hour and giving myself a good case of the plague jitters, I walked down the concourse aimlessly, turning on to Stephansplatz, until I came to a plaza where I could see from a distance that there was a milling crowd. This was the large square in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the largest church in Vienna, dating back to 1160, which is of course huge and impressive and all of the things that European cathedrals are. It was not disappointing. It was right up there with Westminster and Notre Dame and York, just overwhelming, really, but the really interesting thing for me was not the church as much as what was going on in front of it. I love the splendor and the history and the majesty and all that, but I could see big old cathedrals any day. The human statues and the guy spray-painting outer space scenes on the sidewalk, though, well, this was something worth seeing, by God. I’ve seen things like this in other cities, of course, but here there was a special Viennese touch, at least for me. There was a fairly large group of people standing around in a circle, all facing the inside and looking down. When I got closer I could see that the focus of their attention was a man spray painting space landscapes on large pieces of construction paper that had been placed on the sidewalk. He was
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wearing a kind of surgical mask to protect himself from the fumes, which were substantial, and he was using masking tape to cover parts of the painting as he worked. He worked fast, as you might expect someone who made his living painting on the sidewalk would, ripping off the tape and moving the spray can back forth in quick whiplash motions. It was an impressive show, even if it was something I had already seen on the sidewalks of New York City. And speaking of which, looking up over the crowd, there was the Statue of Liberty in the middle of the square. Well, actually it was a guy with his face painted green and dressed up in a Statue of Liberty costume standing on top of a pedestal and motionless as well as a statue. I had also seen this kind of sidewalk act before in other places, and kids especially seemed to get a kick of it. Some of these people were quite amazing in the ways that they could stand still for so long without moving a muscle, and the oddness of having the Statue of Liberty here in Vienna was rather hospitable in itself; I’m used to seeing it from the Brooklyn Bridge or Battery Park. I turned back to the group watching the masked spray painter and noticed a few feet away that there was a star inlaid in the plaza, like the Hollywood sidewalk stars, with the name of some Austrian famous person along with birth and death dates. I had already seen a few of these and had not recognized any of the names. No big surprise there. I wouldn’t have known the names on most of the stars in the sidewalk in Budapest or Istanbul or Beijing either. *** So there I was, sort of just soaking everything in, kind of half leaning into the circle watching the masked man spray painting planets and stars, Statue of Liberty frozen on a pedestal, crowds wandering in front of the church, when I happened to look down. There was another star right beneath me. I was almost standing on it. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791. In keeping with the trend of the evening, and of course my own morbid personality and world-view, I quickly started thinking about Mozart’s Requiem, his early death and the mystery surrounding it, and then some of the scary images of the black-masked Salieri at the end of the movie Amadeus, as I stood there in the middle of the city where he had lived much of his genius life and died so
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young. And then, well, then the city of Vienna hauled off and really freaked me out. I turned around, and about three feet from me, with St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the background, standing motionless on a pedestal in the same way as the Statue of Liberty, but facing away from me so that I could not see his face, was the Grim Reaper. Death had been waiting motionless in back of me with a bloody scythe. I stood there for long minutes watching before deciding that I could not walk away without seeing the face of the Reaper, and even though I of course knew that this was just another carnival act for tourists, there was something so uncanny about this whole thing – the skeletons in the church dressed up like party dolls, the Plague Column, the Mozart star – that I didn’t know what to think by this point, not that I’ve hardly known by now what to think about much of anything, but still. This was weird even by my own twisted standards. I walked around in front of the Reaper. He had a skull face with big grinning teeth with a little bit of blood in them. He was holding the scythe with the long blade and this was also dripping with painted on fake blood. A young man walked up and tentatively reached out to touch the blade and the motionless Reaper waited until the very last milli-second and then lunged at the guy, the first movement of any kind I had seen him make. The poor chump jumped about a foot. I would have too, except I was not getting close enough to touch. No thank you. I don’t think so, Mr. Death on a pedestal in Vienna. Not tonight. It did put me in a mood that was a little bit on edge, though, just a tad agitated, which is not all bad, everything considered. It was a bit like jumping in a cold shower or diving into a mountain lake. It makes you shiver, but you are wide-awake afterward. I turned and started strolling over to the cathedral. There were a couple of people in the shadows at the base of the wall at the front of the cathedral with some backpacks that they were unpacking, and they looked like gypsy vagabonds of the sort you see all over the place now, a young man and young woman, both with long dreadlocks and baggy clothes. They were both dipping things in a can. He had a long pole and she had what looked like batons. I had an idea about what they were up to, and sure enough, before long she lit the ends of two batons on fire and walked out a ways into the plaza, while he sat down and started banging on some kind of drum. They looked like the kind of
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people you might see at Burning Man, the once a year festival of free expression, proto-mythic imagery, and ritualized behavior with a Mad Max 2/ The Road Warrior set and costume designer, held in the Nevada desert. It had gotten full dark, and this was quite a show. You couldn’t see the shafts of the batons as she tossed them. All you could see was the spinning fire as she tossed and spun and flung the flames into the air, turning around and catching them behind her back, twirling and spinning and not missing once. This went on for maybe five minutes before the fires went out, and then her partner came out with his longer pole with the flames on the end, again spinning and throwing it high in the air while she beat on the drum. It seemed that I was seeing the kind of act that could easily have been performing in front of this same cathedral 1000 years ago, by gypsies or some other pagan group – this being middle Europe, after all, not that far from the Balkans or Budapest, with Transylvania only a little bit more than a mountain range away. This kind of ox-cart performance of fire juggling would have been perfectly in keeping all through the history of this place, and it could well have happened right here where I was watching it, the eternal mix of the sacred with the profane, flying buttresses and intricately carved tympanum arching over the crowds gathered to watch a little bit of spectacle before they walked into the hushed and almost monstrous majesty of the cathedral. Which I then did. *** It was all the things that it is supposed to be and it was beautiful and you can imagine all of the things that it does to you as you stand there in the back and look up at the magical rising light in the arches and shadows falling up into the space of the sanctuary. But for me the thing that I took away, the image that I will always remember, was a woman praying in one of the little side-chapels. She was small and young and Asian and she looked very sad. She was kneeling down and praying intently for a long time. One can only imagine what was going through her heart, as I did not intrude and speak to her, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her, the focus and passion were so complete, and she seemed to be in such pain. I put a Euro in a kind of phone activated information tour machine and stood there listening to the history of the Cathedral, to all of the dry information that is so important to so many people, while watching what
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seemed to me the true importance of this place, the way that it could provide some kind of dark solace for someone who needed to kneel down and commune with something larger than herself, or maybe to ask for something for someone she loved, someone sick, perhaps, or dying, or to pray for the soul of someone she loved who had passed away. It seemed to me that this was a place that with all of its majesty was still saying to pilgrims, Yes, come in and open your heart my child, I am here for you in spite of all you may be wondering about, you can rest your soul in this place, I am here. And then I went back out to the gypsy fire-jugglers and the lunging bloody reaper and the carnival Statue of Liberty and the whiplash space painter and the Mozart star. The crowds in the plaza in the front of the cathedral were energetic and cheerful and seemed to be from all over the planet, or at least the parts that generated enough money to allow people vacations in Vienna. The only people I saw from Africa, however, or at least that I could tell were from Africa, were a group of Christian singers testifying and singing in a vaguely American Gospel style, which of course means in a style with unmistakable African roots. They sure looked happy, though, with seemingly sincere smiles, not show-biz fake sincerity, but the real deal, God bless their hearts. And they were good singers, unlike the one white woman who was playing guitar for them and singing along, but that was OK as well. It’s important to remember that one is not judged by the quality of praise but by the quality of your heart, or something like that, and she seemed to mean well. Couldn’t sing a lick, though, and couldn’t have swung if she were hanging from a rope. But at least these people were for real, unlike the Indians down the concourse a little way. There were three that were dressed up, and one to pass the hat, and when I say dressed up I don’t mean Brooks Brothers three piece. They all were wearing full-bore, Hollywood war paint and feathers, Big Chief Rain in the Face outfits – leggings, necklaces, moccasins. They looked like they were ready to stand on a hill overlooking a wagon train and start sending smoke signals. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what reservation they were from, however, or even what country, because they had the same kind of long flutes as the Peruvians in the New York City subway playing Paul Simon songs. They had a crowd gathered around waiting for them to start, and finally one of them hit the button on a boom box for the start of a rhythm track to accompany the flute players. One Austro-Indian started some low drone on the longest set of
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flutes, and then the boom box died. Talk about losing momentum. Everyone sort of looked at each other in all of their feathered finery and Viennese warpaint and then the guy with the long flutes just shrugged and walked away while the others were giggling and fooling around with the equipment. It was starting to get late but before turning in there was one last tableau. A middle-aged man was playing guitar and singing and he was, well, not very good, but not terrible, sort of an OK baritone voice, singing songs that, for better or worse, make me cringe. I suppose this makes me a snob, but there is not much I can do about it. He had been singing “We Are the World” as I walked by earlier, performing Michael Jackson music in English with a rather thick German/Austrian accent, the Terminator in Neverland, just down the sidewalk from the technology-challenged Native-whatevers and around the corner from Miss Liberty, Skull-face, and the dreadlocked fire-twirlers. But as I stood there and listened something remarkable happened. A man came up pushing a tiny young woman in a wheelchair. She was terribly emaciated and was so incapacitated by whatever disease she had that she looked like Stephen J. Hawking. She seemed to be almost completely paralyzed. They stopped in front of the man playing the music. It seemed clear that they had been here before. The guitar player played a song, in his heavily accented English, with a chorus that went something like “you are my friend.” It was a nice enough song, I guess, but this song, and the singer that I had judged so harshly as I walked by earlier, secure in my snooty American ethnocentric Levis-wearing hauteur, appeared to mean everything to the young woman in the wheelchair. The man pushing the chair tipped the singer, and as I walked away they were still there, the three of them linked by music, joined by a bond that seemed, at least for a moment, to make the city and their problems fall away. I had to walk around the church with the Ken and Barbie dress up glitter skeletons to get to the hotel. I imagined them dancing together inside the darkness of the sanctuary, in their decaying sparkle rags, under the soaring, Michelangelo in the clouds dome, as moonlight filtered down in misty beams over the lights in the windows, over the churches, wheelchairs, and sidewalk stars, shining equally on the doorways and cobblestones and windowsills of the city, on the plains of Hungary and on the forests and mountains of Austria,
The Rooftops of Vienna | Stephen Newton | p. 165 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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illuminating crosses and stars by the banks of the Danube and casting deep blue shadows over the orange tiled rooftops of Vienna.
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Contributors
Vihang A. Naik studied at the M.S. University of Baroda in Philosophy, Indian and English Literature. He teaches at Shree Ambaji Arts College, North Gujarat. His poems have appeared in literary journals such as Indian P.E.N., Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi’s Bi-Monthly Journal) , Kavya Bharati , Poeisis : A Journal of Poetry Circle , The Journal of The Poetry Society (India), Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Brown Critique, and Poetry Chain among others. His books of English poetry are City Times and Other Poems (1993), Making a Poem (Allied Publishers, 2004), Poetry Manifesto (IndiaLog Publications, 2010). His Gujarati collection of poems includes Jeevangeet (Gujarati Poems, pub. Navbharat Sahitya Mandir, 2001) dedicated to the victims of the Gujarat Earthquake of 2001. He also translates poetry from Gujarati into English. His personal website is: <http://www.vihang.org>. Pritha Kejriwal is the Editor-in-Chief of Kindle Magazine, a national, political and cultural monthly journal, published from Kolkata since August 2008. She has completed Masters in Journalism from Calcutta University and was employed at the Hindustan Times and NDTV, before she founded Kindle Magazine along with Maitreyi Kandoi. She is currently working on two collections of poetry – The Book of Questions and The Book of Dreams. Poems from both the collections have been published in Contemporary World Poetry Journal and Pens on Fire. Ankita Haldar is a PhD student at the Center for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her area of research is Culinary Fiction. An amateur photographer and painter, she is also passionate about travelling, art history and art iconography. Another minor research interest of hers is symbolism in prehistoric rock cave paintings. Christopher Reilley is the current poet laureate of Dedham, MA, and founder of the Dedham Poet Society. He is the author of Grief Tattoos and the
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upcoming One Night Stanza (Big Table Publishing), and a contributing editor at Acoustic Ink. His poems have appeared in many magazines and reviews, such as Boston Literary Magazine, Word Salad, Frog Croon and Poetry Review. His works have been featured in several anthologies, including Sanctuary, Hot Summer Nights, and Dark Imaginings. James I. McDougall, PhD is Associate Professor of American Studies at Shantou University’s Center for International Studies in Guangdong Province, China where he teaches courses on cultures of globalization, literature, and critical theory. He has recently published on the connections between US and Chinese modern poetry in American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter, and the globalization of higher education in The American-Style University at Large: Transplants, Outposts, and the Globalization of Higher Education. Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and curator. His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Akzente, Boulevard Magenta, fieralingue.com, Fulcrum, The Green Integer Review, The Iowa Review, nthposition.com, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, sangamhouse.org, Wasafiri, and Wespennest. Hoskote’s poetry has been published in many anthologies, including Short Fuse (Todd Swift and Philip Norton eds., Rattapallax, 2002) The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Jeet Thayil ed., Bloodaxe, 2008), Language for a New Century (Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar eds., W. W. Norton, 2008), The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (Sudeep Sen ed., HarperCollins, 2012), These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo eds., Penguin, 2012), and Another Country: An Anthology of Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English (Arundhathi Subramaniam ed., Sahitya Akademi, 2013). Hoskote’s collections of poetry include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006) and Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012), the first annotated critical edition of a major Anglophone Indian poet’s work.
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Hoskote has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including the 7th Gwangju Biennale (Korea, 2008). He curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, under the title ‘Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode’ (2011). He was a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, and has been writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich; Theater der Welt, Essen-Mülheim; and the Polish Institute, Berlin. He holds a research residency at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Jerrold Yam is an undergraduate law student at University College, London and the author of two poetry collections, Scattered Vertebrae (Math Paper Press, 2013) and Chasing Curtained Suns (Math Paper Press, 2012). His poems have been published in more than sixty literary journals and anthologies worldwide, including Antiphon, Counterexample Poetics, Mascara Literary Review, Prick of the Spindle, The New Poet, Third Coast and Washington Square Review. He has been awarded poetry prizes from the Arts Council England, British Council and National University of Singapore. He is the youngest Singaporean to be nominated for the Pushcart Prize. <http://www.jerroldyam.com >. Anne Lovering Rounds is Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and a BA in English and Classics from the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared in Literary Imagination and Studies in the Novel. She is a co-managing editor of Modernism/modernity, the journal of the Modernist Studies Association. Elsa Mathews is a Master of Arts in Media, Communication and Cultural Studies from the Universite Stendhal, Grenoble, France and the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She has worked as a journalist at The Pioneer and The Indian Express. She currently works at the United Nations as Communication Consultant. James I. McDougall, PhD, is Associate Professor of American Studies at Shantou University’s Centre for International Studies in Guangdong Province, China where he teaches courses on cultures of globalization, literature, and
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critical theory. He has recently published on the connections between US and Chinese modern poetry in American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter, and the globalization of higher education in The American-Style University at Large: Transplants, Outposts, and the Globalization of Higher Education. He currently lives in South China with his wife, Liulu, and sons, Colin and Sean. Sébastien Doubinsky is a French bilingual writer, born in Paris. Having lived in the United States in his early childhood, Doubinsky has always been closely tied to American culture and literature. He has published more than 24 novels and 6 poetry collections in France, the UK and the USA. His last three novels are: Goobye Babylon, Absinth and The Song of Synth. His fiction can be seen as a mosaic of different styles and subjects, although they always are centered on the questions of freedom and identity. Doubinsky’s poetry is a mixture of “poésie du quotidien” (“daily poetry”) and a deeper approach of language and meaning. He currently lives and teaches in Aarhus, in Denmark, with his wife and their two children. He the Editor/Publisher of Le Zaporogue. Elwin Susan John is a PhD student in the Centre for Comparative Literature at University of Hyderabad. She is a UGC Junior Research Fellow; she submitted her MPhil dissertation at the Department of English at University of Hyderabad in 2011. Her academic interests include travel writing and body studies. Elisabetta Marino is tenured Assistant Professor of English literature at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” She published three monographs Tamerlano dalla letteratura inglese alla letteratura Americana (Tamerlane in English and American literature), Introduzione alla letteratura bangladese britannica (an introduction to British Bangladeshi literature), Mary Shelley e l’Italia (Mary Shelley and Italy). She edited or co-edited four volumes (among which, Transnational, National, and Personal Voices: New Perspectives on Asian American and Asian Diasporic Women Writers, and Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary Canon). She has published extensively on travel literature.
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Chin-yuan Hu is Associate Professor of English and Director of Centre for Cross-cultural Studies at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She has offered courses of “Travel Narrative” and “Travel: Literature and Visual Arts” to graduate and undergraduate students since 1994. In addition to travel writing, her research interests include epistolary literature and gift studies. Siddhartha Chakraborti is a PhD student at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has served as a SAP (Special Assistance Programme) fellow under UGC-DRS-Phase II for the tenure of June 2011-June 2012. He has written Othello: A Retelling of Shakespearean Plays in Prose (pub. Scholastic India). He is presently a tenured Assistant Professor at Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi. Anurima Chanda is a PhD student at the Centre for English Studies (CES), School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies (SLL&CS) in JNU. Her MPhil dissertation was "Theorizing Nonsense in the Rasa Framework: A Study/Analysis of Select Indian English Texts" in 2012. She has served as a SAP (Special Assistance Programme) fellow under UGC-DRS-Phase II for the tenure of June 2011June 2012. She has written As You Like It: A Retelling of Shakespearean Plays in Prose (pub. Scholastic India). Stephen Newton is Associate Professor of English at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. He was a Fulbright Scholar in 2005-06 at the Institute for American Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. As a younger man he pumped gas in Alamosa, Colorado, drove a fork lift in a cement factory in Cleveland, was a nightshift janitor at the Grand Ole Opry, and one memorable Christmas was Santa Claus in a shopping mall outside Nashville.
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Editorial Board
EDITOR Arup K Chatterjee Poet, Critic and Researcher Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, India
ASSISTANT EDITOR Amrita Ajay Researcher, and Teacher of English University of Delhi, India
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS K Satchidanandan Poet, and Former Professor of English, University of Calicut Former Editor of Indian Literature, the Journal of Sahitya Akademi New Delhi, India Lisa Thatcher Writer Sydney, Australia Sudeep Sen Poet, and Editor of Atlas Magazine Editorial Director of Aark Arts Publishers New Delhi, India, London UK
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GJV Prasad Poet, Novelist, and Critic Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University Vice Chair, Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Editor of Journal of the School of Languages New Delhi, India Sebastien Doubinsky Poet, Novelist, and Critic Researcher, and Lecturer, Aesthetics and Communication Editor of Le Zaporogue Journal (pub. in French & English) Aarhus University, Denmark
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