Montreal Serai

            

 

Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art.  Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. By Ruud Priem and others. Vancouver Art Gallery and D & M Publishers Inc, 2009. 

 

             Art is often likened to a gadfly hovering over society’s dung heap. Conversely, it is also universally recognized as society’s most sublime expression. The latter is particularly true for the Golden Age of Dutch art, a five-decade period during the 17^th Century that produced painters such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hal. It was the confluence of political events and the advent of mercantilism, banking and maritime exploration that led to the creation of unprecedented wealth in cities like Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leiden and Utrecht. Not to mention, of course, the infamous slave trade that flourished later on.   This wealth, in turn, was invested in art, not in land, a scarce resource in tiny water-logged Holland. Moreover, unlike other European countries, power in the Netherlands was vested in the hands of merchants and craftsmen and not in the landed aristocracy, a not surprising phenomenon in a country that had become a republic.

             The Netherlands had been part of the Spanish Empire until William I of Orange revolted against  Philip II of Spain. This revolt led to the formation of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. In this republic, cities and provinces had a greater say in local as well as international policies. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602 and the first commodity exchange opened in Amsterdam in 1611. Well-crafted household goods and art, mainly in the form of paintings, were objects of great value and were considered investments, not goods to be consumed. Artists were well paid although some of them, like Rembrandt, became victims of financial mismanagement.

             In this new democratic (for the historical period in question) society, the artists organized themselves into professional guilds to protect the quality of their products and their own professional worth. These guilds also served as educational as well as social security institutions. Artists did not depend on the patronage of the nobility or the church. It was City Hall or other artists or members of the bourgeoisie who commissioned their work. Many artists painted their self-portraits in which they documented their own success as part of the composition of the painting.

             The Rijksmuseum has lent many of these masterpieces to the Vancouver Art Gallery to be exhibited from May 9, 2009 to September 13, 2009. This book is a beautifully annotated and printed introduction to this collection as well as an overview of how democracy in 17^th Century Holland gave rise to such masterpieces.

 

غزوة غزة

  

بأكتبلَك

من جوه حصار

بأكتبلَك من تحت جدار

كان يوم شايل سقف الدار

بأكتبلك من أرضي الحِبلى بالأحرار

بأسمي وبأسم الشهدا والثوار

… بأكتبلَك

… وفي حلقي مرار

   ***

غزوة غزة

غارسة في قلبي سيف من نار

جيش جرار

كل سلاحه جبن وعار

وشعبي الأعزل واقف صامد

وإنتوا بتختلقوا الأعذار

   ***

أنده لك

ألاقيك محتار

أسيادك ماسكينلك ذِلة

وإنتَ حمار

لا بتحسب إيه أخرة صمتك

ولا عارف مين اللي بياكلك

ولا بكره مين راح يحتلك

ما هو لازم حيجيلك الدور :

مرسوملنا كلنا إدوار

   ***

الأخت الكبرى

بايعة شرفها ، ويّا الغاز ، للسمسار

وولادها لو ولّعوا شمعة

أو قالوا بصوت عالي كلمتهم

العسكر يحرقوا دنيتهم :

أسوار جواها أسوار

   ***

غزوة غزة

شاهدة عليكوا ليوم الدين

مساكين

باصين لكن مش شايفيين

طول ما إنتوا في ليل الخوف مساجين

على فين رايحيين ما إنتوش عارفيين

   ***

غزة يا أخويا مش حتموت

ولا حتسلم

ولا تنهار

أقفل بابك ، سد ودانك

الّف الف حكاية خسيسة

مهما حتكدب

مهما حتهرب

حتماً برضه حيجي نهار

 

 

The Invasion of Gaza

  

Besieged

I write

From underneath my collapsed roof

I write

From my persistent land

I write

In my name

and for the fighters

and the martyrs

I write

 

Bitter …

I write

 

***

 

The invasion of Gaza

pierced my heart

with a poisoned spear:

Planes and bombs

Unarmed people

A world

that doesn’t see or hear

 

***

 

I call on you

You are confused

Clueless, manipulated, used

For you too they have a plan

but you can’t see your time is near

 

***

 

The invasion of Gaza

will scar you

to the end of days

You can’t move

and you can’t think

You’re stuck in fear

 

***

 

Gaza, my friend,

will not collapse

surrender

or die

Plug your ears

Close your eyes

Believe their lies

No matter how long

falsehood survives

the sun shall rise

 

 

 

 

Kolkata Dreams

K. Gandhar Chakravarty

8^th House Publishing, Montreal Canada

2009, 75 pages

“I wonder what it must be like

To fuck with a severed penis.”

 
Montrealer K. Gandhar ‘Ginsburg’ Chakravarty knows his penis from his elbow.  He knows the stuff that Bengalis shy away from. He knows that he must say what should not be said. Yeah! Because expatriate Bengalis are just that.

Well! He calls a dick, a dick. Plain and simple. No fig leaves to spare. He did the road trip thing to Calcutta, now Kolkata, lived there for half a year at the age of twenty one and probably did the stuff his parents would not be proud of and probably would have made Allen Ginsburg squirm with delight. (PS: You may want to know that Allen Ginsburg and his partner Peter Orlovsky spent a lot of time in Calcutta and here is a blog about the famous Calcutta Coffee House’s 50^th anniversary. It was in Calcutta that the Beat Generation found their contemporaries in The Hungry Poets -http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/calcutta-college-street-coffee-house.html).  But Gandhar did what every Bengali of Montreal origins or every hyphenated Canadian of Indian origins should have done when they realized the smells, the decay, the blessed protuberances in the body and mind of the Indo-Canadian entity. Travel alone, without your parents, without advice, avoid your kakas (uncle in Bengali) and pishis (Aunt in Bengali) and give a wide berth to the maternal and paternal well-wishers.  Sounds like this Montreal PhD student in religion and prolific musician as well, hogged the streets and suburbs of Kolkata and got neck deep in its noises, filth, poetry, religious absurdity and the ranking insensitivity of its middle-class. In verses and shout-outs that ring out a thunderous simplicity, Gandhar says this in one of his poems -

Ode to a Riksha-Ola

Oie Riksha-Ola!How much to take me to Chuchra station?

That much!?

No, I’ll give you only twelve.

Yes, I know that you can barely feed your family,

And your feet have calluses two inches thick,

And I know that it must hurt your back

To keep peddling around these fat cat pricks

And, sure, you can barely feel your own ass

After each day’s work.

But three rupees mean just that to me.

 Hell! This sounds so familiar. It is just the type of riposte one would hear from a CPI(M) (the Communist Party in West Bengal has ruled for thirty years)  supporting, raging bull Calcutta middle-class charlatan liberal.

 Gandhar Chakravarty covers a wide spectrum of Kolkata reality in a mordant, acerbic  and extremely entertaining style.  He picks up on Kolkata, where the Hungry Poets left off. And he is only in his twenties.

 “Öne poem, two poems, Under a tree he sat, Finding Rhymes To pass the time.”

Starting out from Kalifornia, slowly Gandhar winds his way into Kolkata, right past Dom Dom– that is how Bengalis pronounce Dum Dum, the Airport town where the Brits developed the bullet with the same name.   

Kolkata is falling apart.

Destruction would be a welcome fresh start

To resurrect a city that’s falling apart.

A welcome relief

From years of breathing

Diesel grief.

Chakravarty covers it all from the cutting of Coconuts for life-giving fresh water inside, the marauding mosquitoes, the topsy-turvy world of Park Street discotheques, roadkill, Gandhi on bills, the green suburbs and the inevitable Ma Kali-

Now the tongue,

Stuck out and bitten,

Serves as the nation’s expression

For wrath and shame,

All the same,

Almost blood red

When stained by Paan.

Kolkata Dreams is a great read, especially for those who are always looking for new voices  in Montreal’s various spoken word scenes.

 

June 04, 2009

 

Note for readers of Serai: I recently composed this poem in homage to my dear Cuban friend Celia Hart for a book being published in her memory by Havana’s Martí Studies Center. The poem’s title in English is “With the soul ablaze with new lights,” a phrase coined by Celia in an E-mail to me to describe the inspiration she felt after a stroll through the blossoming lilacs of Montreal’s Botanical Garden in May 2008, a few months before she and her brother Abel died in an automobile accident in Havana, at ages 45 and 48 respectively. The reference in the poem to Celia’s “padres” (parents) is to Armando Hart and Haydée Santamaría, famed revolutionaries of the July 26th Movement that led the Cuban Revolution of 1959. As Minister of Education, Armando launched the UN-praised “Yes I Can” literacy campaign now used throughout the world, including some of Canada’s First Nation communities. Haydée (d. 1980) founded the Casa de las Américas, a publishing and cultural center currently celebrating its 50^th anniversary. Celia Hart is a widely published revolutionary intellectual whose last public address and interview outside of Cuba took place in Montreal’s Centro Cultural Simón Bolivar and was carried live by Montreal’s Radio Centre Ville. In my poem, the phrases in quotation marks are the words of Celia, with the exception of George W. Bush’s “los rincones oscuros” (“the dark corners” of the world used by Bush as a racist caricature of supposed backward less developed nations suspected of harboring terrorists).

 

Celia Hart, ¡presente!                                  – James Cockcroft

 

 

“CON EL ALMA ENCENDIDA CON NUEVAS LUCES” (homenaje a Celia Hart)

por James Cockcroft

 

 

“Con el alma encendida con nuevas luces”

me escribiste en un E-mail de junio,

tu típica manera de ver y vivir…

 

Desde aquel baile hace tantos años

tu sonrisa explosiva e ideas revolucionarias

enardecieron y desafiaron mi ser.

 

Durante nuestro paseo de mayo en le Jardin botanique de Montréal,

sin saber del futuro, las lilas radiantes encendieron nuestras almas…

y me di cuenta de que tu ser tan vital encandila a todo el mundo.

 

Demasiado fácil sería atribuir a tus padres revolucionarios y ejemplares

tus calidades excepcionales, incluso tu pasión,

sin sospechar ni un segundito de la complejidad de lo originario en ti misma.

 

Fiel hasta la muerte a la Revolución que te creó,

amaste a tus padres tal cual a esa “cofradía comunista…

los niños en Cuba… los únicos que saben querer”.

 

Cuando no estaba de moda,

rescataste el pensamiento de León Trotsky

de la condena terrorista estalinista…

 

Para agregarlo al legajo invalorable de

Maceo, Martí, y Mella,

de nuestro Haydée, de nuestro Che.

 

Caminabas, mejor dicho corrías, con “nuestros Cinco” y Fidel,

para que la gente en “los rincones oscuros” del Occidente

supieran de la belleza de la siempre imperfectiva Revolución Cubana…

 

Y para que se la defendieran en la mejor forma posible:

crear dos, tres, muchas revoluciones,

e internacionalizarlas.

 

Ofreciste tus críticas, tus sentimientos, y tu amor

a todas y todos en la única manera que conocías:

honestamente desde el corazón.

 

Seis días antes de tu muerte inesperada

respondiste a mi preocupación acerca del Huracán Gustav:

“¡Solo una revolución puede salvar vidas frente a esta herrumbre del consumismo!”

 

Te honro, mi pasionaria,

“mi amor de lilas”…

¡Celia Hart, siempre presente!

 

“SoundPark” was developed at the Shared Reality Lab at McGill University (http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/sre/), with funding from the NSERC/Canada Council for the Arts New Media Initiative.

 

 

Art by David Duchow -  The New Mexico Desert