'The rhythm of writing transforms absence into an enduring presence'

The bonds of memory that bind us to the past | Crumpled Paper Boat

Seminars are meant to be platforms of advanced study on a specific subject, with the avowed aim of getting better insights on the subject through intense and productive discussions! 

Added, if the conveners to the Seminar are reasonably convinced that the insights thus gained, gleaned and garnered are a real value addition to the already existing body of knowledge, then academic propriety demands that the organizers either video the entire event, or better, publish the papers presented in the Seminar with a good publisher, as soon as possible and have them disseminated across academia across the world!

One such Advanced Seminar of five days, was held at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the topic, “Literary Anthropology”, and the Conveners were Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean. [from Sunday, April 21, to Friday, April 25, 2013].

The impactful observations that emanated during the five long days of intense deliberations and presentations were then promptly made available in the form of a 265-page book, edited by the conveners themselves.

I happened to read a few interesting articles from this lovely book titled, Crumpled Paper Boat edited by the conveners of the Seminar, Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean.

‘There has always been something peculiar about the genre of ethnography, claimed by anthropology as its own, yet forever edging close to travelogue, literature, and memoir’, say Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean in their delightful prologue to the book.

And I quote from their prologue – just kutty little snippets for y’all -

The relationship between reality and fiction has become ever more fraught in the United States in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, widely seen to herald an alarming new era of deliberate falsehoods peddled as “alternative facts.”

The Oxford English Dictionary actually declared post-truth the word of the year in 2016, “denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Critics have rightly challenged such claims in the political sphere, insisting on the objective reality of things like climate change, or the absence of any evidence tying refugees from certain countries to terrorism in the United States.

For it is undeniable that such tales have the capacity to remake reality itself, to reshape the very substance of the here-and-now and the ways in which human actors engage the world at hand.

And for once, I could see Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean doing a discourse on writing about the art of writing!

Here they go again –

If writing involves risk, does it not also entail responsibility? If the possible and the impossible, the factual and the counterfactual, the present and the absent, the living and the dead all belong equally to life’s reality, where does this leave our responsibility to be faithful? In what ways are we responsible, for example, to those whose lives we seek to write about?

Should our writing emerge, in the first instance, out of our solidarity with our informants, as a response to the demands they place upon us? Should those demands set limits on the writerly impulses we are willing to arrogate to ourselves? Or should they be taken as an impetus to push boundaries, to explore to the fullest extent the possibilities of writing differently?

It is not exactly the same to say “I witnessed this” (as classic ethnographies often do) and “I could have witnessed something like this” (as a fiction writer might claim). Not being sure if you saw something and knowing that you didn’t are also different from each other. Passing fiction off as fact in a court of law is perjury; passing it off as truth to your lover’s demand is betrayal. Then again the lover and the court of law expect very different things when it comes to reality.

In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau notes, ‘Writing speaks of the past only to inter it.” The rhythm of writing is the rhythm of mourning, which transforms absence into an enduring presence’.

Anand then talks about the mystery of human bonds - the bonds of love between family or friends; the bonds of memory that bind us to the past, connect us to a natal place or certain landscapes; ties with a homeland or heirloom; the bonds we form with religious or political figures, imaginary friends, utopian ideals, ancestors, mentors, and guides; or the double binds that oblige us to recapitulate the prejudices of the class or culture in which we were raised, even as we pay lip service to another worldview.

It is also about how we sometimes break such bonds - in leaving home, in forging a life for ourselves, in converting to a new faith or losing an old one - or cope with the trauma of events we would not wish on anyone, when the bonds that define our identity and give us security are shattered by the loss of a loved one, a war that turns us into refugees, or a natural disaster, events that mark forever a line between life before and life after.

But the impact of life-altering and earth-shattering events may be both terrible and wonderful, and I had explored the theme of human resilience: how new growth may follow destruction and life can be renewed through death.

I shall then wind up on this little post with an intense poem that I’ve read in a long time written for this book by one of the contributors Adrie Kusserow himself!

Well, the chapter is titled, ‘Anthropoetry’ and it’s by Adrie Kusserow.

Kusserow here talks about how poems, through the use of metaphor and simile and the movement from recent past, present, and future, depict the multiple and jockeying selves that exist within any human! Amazing isn’t it? Especially those who cross borders, split identities, experience a push and pull between tradition and acculturation—that especially need the temporal flexibility of poetry?

Kusserow hence supports the view that ethnographic poetry is not just about accurately describing an experience, but using the insight of its acutely nuanced language and artistic aesthetic to bring a wider array of meanings to these facts than conventional wisdom offers.

And then he goes on to write down an intense ‘trauma’ poem that goes thus -

War Metaphysics For A Sudanese Girl

by Arie Kusserow

For Aciek Arok Deng

I leave the camp, unable to breathe,

me Freud girl, after

her interior,

she “Lost Girl,” after

my purse,

her face:

dark as eggplant,

her gaze:

unpinnable, untraceable,

floating, open, defying the gravity

I was told keeps pain in place.

Maybe trauma doesn’t

harden,

packed tight as sediment at the bottom of her psyche,

dry and cracked as the desert she crossed,

maybe memory doesn’t

stalk her

with its bulging eyes.

Once inside the body, does war move up or down?

Maybe the body pisses it out,

maybe it dissipates, like sweat and fog

under

the heat of yet another colonial God?

In America,

we say Tell us your story, Lost Girl

you’ll feel lighter,

it’s the memories you must expel,

the bumpy ones, the tortures, the rapes, the burnt huts.

So Aciek brings forth all the war she can muster,

and the doctors lay it on a table,

like a stillbirth,

and pick through the sharpest details

bombs, glass, machetes

and because

she wants to please them

she coughs up more and more,

dutifully emptying the sticky war

like any grateful Lost Girl in America

should

when faced with a flock of white coats.

This is how it goes at the Trauma Center:

all day the hot poultice of talk therapy,

coaxing out the infection,

at night, her host family

trying not to gawk,

their veins pumping neon fascination,

deep in the suburbs, her life flavoring dull muzungu lives,

spicing up supper, really,

each Lost Girl a bouillon cube of horror.

Hence, ethnographic poetry, according to Kusserow, is not just about accurately describing an experience, but using the insight of its acutely nuanced language and artistic aesthetic to bring a wider array of meanings to these facts than conventional wisdom offers, he says.

For more of such profound insights on the book, i’d recommend that you’d read the book! ;-) Thank you.

Here’s me signing off for now!

And for those of y’all interested in meeting up with Anand Pandian, who currently teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, you may want to turn your eyes slightly to the right of this article, where you can browse for a mention of his name!

Yes! He’s there at MIDS, Adyar, on Friday, 10 January 2020, at 3.30 pm.

Do join us over a cuppa! Thank you!