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.

“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.

Picture from "Urban Iran"

Urban Iran

Mark Batty Publisher

www.markbattypublisher.com

130 pages, hard cover, $27.95 US/ $32.95 CA/

Urban Iran is a beautiful book. Its eye-catching stark black and white hard cover with embossed lettering and mixed patterns invites the hand to a pleasant touch. A large part of the book is devoted to the art of a children’s book illustrator who was admired by the artistic director of the book. The images are magnificent examples of the art of an era that saw a splash of the creative scene in art galleries, books, and on the stage.

The book is a celebration of the “golden age” of the arts in Iran; the days when beautiful art and music flourished. Those were the 60s and 70s of course. Under the vigilant eyes and ears of the Shah’s oppressive regime there was little that could grow and flourish. Books were censored, arts and writers jailed and tortured, publishing houses shut down and voices silenced. For a brief period in the last two decades of Shah, oil revenues and international interest gave rise to an active art scene.  It was a short-lived burst of creative energy that was suddenly aborted when the men of cloth pronounced it un-Islamic. With the end of that era, people went back to decorating their homes with cheap Chinese posters of Eagle Brand tea imitating the art of Gainsborough and postcards of the prophet and his successor saints.

In 1979 there was a change. Shah’s monarchy ended and the Islamic Republic took the throne. Over the past 30 years, the Islamic regime has failed to prove it is any more open to intellectual freedoms than Shah was. As a matter of fact, decrees from factions in power at times have openly opposed the idea of democratic freedoms based on the “ideological” argument that democracy is a western concept and is not mentioned in the Qur’an.

Music became “corrupt” and art became simply “blasphemy”. If you had something to say, you should whisper it in your daily prayers. The middleclass intelligentsia that had critiqued the undue influence of the west on the Iranian culture, was now bullied out of the political scene by the clergymen who had not read the books, nor had they heard the music, but had deep roots in the neighbourhood mosques. They promoted themselves as the only option out of the “modern corruption” and rode the waves of the rebellion into the royal palaces.

 The book is a testimony to the fact that despite the regime’s best effort at closely controlling all modes of cultural expression, the young under-thirty generation, naturally thirsty for inspiration and ways of expression, is looking for models to emulate or icons to unseat. Bored and unhappy with the deserted scene, some of them look to the bygone years. And for others, emerging from the fanatic repression means reaching for the West for inspiration; ironically the opposite of the very same thing that had united their “revolutionary” fathers for a while. Heavy metal, Goth style, and graffiti have taken root in the land of meditative music and tiled architecture. Various artists desperately seek validation and a sense of belonging by producing work that would win in festivals abroad but is soon forgotten at home. Alone, the spray-paint artist somewhat glorified in the book, uses English words or slang in his street graffiti. How widely is he understood? Does he keep his message private in a public realm to show off his membership in the elite club of those who “dig it”?

 In other words, Urban Iran is in part a brief and hasty report on the art and music produced in basements or back alleys by those rejected by the mainstream media and in part a shallow social commentary. These artists find company in the long line of those the masses on the street never adopted as their own; from the medieval illuminators of the Islamic texts to the avant-garde urban artists under the Shah, to the hiphop/metal/graffiti art/music scene mentioned in the book. It is ironic that most of the art and music discussed in the book bear strong cultural meanings for the Westerner; whether the artists manage to use the existing popular art forms for fresh and locally significant content remains to be seen. For now, private basements hold the practice sites for metal and hiphop, or for risky graffiti, or riské parties.

Unembedded. Two Decades of Maverick War Reporting. By Scott Taylor.  Douglass & McIntyre, 2009.

Review by Maya Khankhoje

Unembedded is the mid-life autobiography of a toy-soldier-playing boy turned real soldier, of a soldier  turned journalist, of a fervent admirer of the military turned its acerbic critic, of a proud Canadian turned whistle blower on  his own  armed forces. It is a riveting book which can be read at two levels: as a personal account of a  man’s life and  as a journalistic account of  life on the other side of the trenches. When the publisher’s representative expressed the hope that I would enjoy reading this book, I cringed. After all, how can one enjoy reading about duplicity, death and desolation?  She was partially right and I was partially wrong. I enjoyed reading the story of  Taylor’s  journey through life as much as I enjoyed reading his clear and honest prose. What I did not enjoy was the insight he gives his readers  into Canadian defence policy  “what we see in them [Americans and their militaristic nationalism] we do not wish to see in ourselves; yet the Canadian government continues to largely follow in lockstep with the US State Department’s directions”.

            Scott Taylor was born into a working class family whose parents skimped so that the children could travel all over the world. They wanted their children to understand otherness. This wide-open childhood gave Scott a desire to join the military to continue seeing the world. What he saw was that the world was not black and white, but different shades of grey. After three and a half years of soldiering he and his wife became publishers (both had a background in arts and writing) and ultimately established Esprit de Corps, a military magazine originally aimed at providing entertainment and information.  It morphed into the voice of the rank and file and then into the conscience of  decision makers of  Canadian military practices and policies.

            Taylor exposed the double standard of the Canadian Armed Forces:  one for the rank and file and one for the officers. He decried the injustice of a system that denied pensions to some veterans while providing some officers all-expenses-paid golf vacations in the Caribbean. Taylor rejected the corruption of an autocratic hierarchy and the blatant racism of some soldiers who belonged to white supremacist groups. And his heart went out to all victims of war, whether victors or vanquished.

            Taylor’s journalistic career has taken him to many hot spots in the world including the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. He interviewed, or rather was  interviewed by Slobodan Milosevic as a potential witness for the defence (Taylor’s take favors Milosevic) in Milosevic’s trial for genocide. He believes that  Louise Arbour undermined the credibility of  The Hague Tribunal by  indicting  Milosevic as a war criminal without supporting forensic evidence.  He criticizes Kim Campbell’s performance as Minister of Defence in the Somalia cover-up and  holds Michael Ignatieff responsible for  the misunderstandings that led to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo.  Taylor also holds the mainstream media accountable for perpetrating myths.

            Since Scott Taylor has warned his readers that they should not believe everything  they read and hear, why should his readers believe him?   Especially since he has let them know  that he is savvy in military intelligence yet denies having been a spy.  We should believe him because he writes about what he saw with his own eyes and felt with his own heart. We should take him seriously because he writes from the perspective of a man who has hobnobbed with the powerful and shared the extreme conditions of  the man in the trenches. We should honour him because he has risked his own life to live up to his own dictum: “Knowing the truth is not enough. We must have the conviction to act upon it.”  In his quest for the truth, he was held  captive, tortured and sentenced to beheading in Iraq. Apparently it was his record as an honest journalist that  in the end saved his life.

            Regardless of our feelings about all things military,  we should  read Unembedded, because at the end of the day Taylor had the courage to trade his heavy machine gun for a light  but powerful quill.

[In 1996 Scott Taylor was awarded the Quill Award for his outstanding contribution to Canadian communications. In 2009 he received the “Unembedded Reporter” award.]

Chef by Jaspreet Singh, 2008, Vehicule Press, Montreal.

Jaspreet Singh drips tomato juice from his lips and sucks on mangoes, in a delicious  and  intricate exercise in culinary commitment and infatuation with an unrequited sexuality that runs through his new novel, Chef. Nearly every chapter if not every other page recounts the brush of a fumbling non-performer, the chef-in-training, with the dominationist sexual advances of a counterfoil character, male or female, while the political and debilitating complexity of India, Kashmir race through the novel in all its bleakness. Cuisine as sexual metaphor, the act of preparation of food, as foreplay, has been used indiscriminately over the years both in fiction and cinema, but Jaspreet uses it with a delectable north Indian ecoutez-moi bien rudeness. A precision military foulness makes gali (abusive language) depravedly sexy, lucid and yet poignantly craving for secularity in the cultural mess that is India. Nothing vibrates more in India’s cathartic duel with itself, than the sexual metaphor of communities screwing each other and deriving absolutist pleasure out of it. And the majority Hindu community excels in berating, deriding and generally second-classing all others including of course Muslims, and then Sikhs and then Christians and so on and then lamenting the loss of Kashmir to Pakistan-inspired militants.

The forlorn beauty of Kashmir, so often depicted in photographic essays, has never been portrayed so elegantly as in this novel. And being a despondent Sikh, Kirpal or Kip, the sous-chef on the rise, portrays Kashmir with an intelligent sentimentality. In the final analysis, India’s attempts to cling on to Kashmir while  endlessly and brutally controlling its people has led to all the mindless acts going on in India, including the latest carnage in Mumbai. Jaspreet Singh  meticulously portrays the nearly silly and decadent lifestyle of the British nurtured colonial Indian Army, whose class hierarchy and servant-lord dichotomy remains an impediment to its ability to perform and in effect be taken by surprise by both the Kashmiri militants and the Pakistani military’s hide and seek games.

Somewhere in the Siachen glacier in a dark cavernous black hole, aptly illustrated on the cover, the Head chef ultimately douses himself in kerosene and takes his life, somewhat inexplicably. A suicidal “screw you!” act that could have been better developed.

In essence, an excellently luscious novel that fritters away towards the end with the hope that newer and younger people with intelligent secular notions and a sense of poetry could perhaps turn the tables on the colonel-sahib/saffron nexus that has occupied the Indian mindset towards Kashmir.

The Case for Literature. By Gao Xingjian. Yale University Press, 2006.

Gao Xingjian, playwright, novelist, essayist and painter born in eastern China and self-exiled in Paris, was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1992. In 2000 he went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the words of Mabel Lee, his translator, The Case for Literature, the title of Gao’s Nobel lecture and of this present book of essays, is a demonstration of “the intellectual and aesthetic dimensions of the thinking that informs Gao’s creative writings.” It is also precisely what the author claims it is: a plea for the centrality of literature as the “universal observation on the dilemmas of human existence and nothing is taboo”. Gao explains that “restrictions on literature are always externally imposed, by politics, society, ethics and customs, which set out to tailor literature into decorations for their various agendas.”

Gao’s thesis is deceptively simple. The writer is neither a hero nor an idol. Conversely, he is certainly not a criminal nor an enemy of the people. Literature “has to do battle with the subversive commercial values of consumerist society”. He reminds us that writers like Kafka and Cao Xueqin were never published in their lifetimes, that they lived mostly on the margins and seams of society, expecting neither recompense nor social approval. He also warns us against thinking that writers are prophets. In fact, he stresses the importance for the writer to live in the present, to cast off delusions and to shed light on his own self.

What has all this to do with the loss of human rights, the subject of this Montreal Serai issue? A lot. By the mere fact of living in a highly collectivized society, call it communist China, Confucian China or just plain racist and nationalistic China, the author suggests that he lost his freedom of expression, a most basic right in any humanistic society. Gao believes that a writer can only speak for himself and never for a group. He never decries political participation by the writer, but warns his readers that the only “responsibility a writer has is to the language he writes in.” In fact, he laments the tendency of societies to expect writers to be spokespersons for the dominant ideology. He very strongly believes that a writer should “return to being an ordinary person, born in original sin and without special privileges or powers, because this is the most appropriate position from which to observe the human world.”

A word about truth. For Gao, the search for truth can never be exhausted, and that search can take place through fact or fiction or a mixture of both. What matters is that “literature is a refuge for the free spirit and the last bastion of human dignity”.

Since this is a collection of essays, the content of this book does not add up to a cohesive whole. In “The Modern Chinese Language and Literary Creation”, Gao explains the difficulties involved in translating a highly dialectical language like Chinese which is contextual and includes calligraphy in its aesthetic sensibility into European languages which are Cartesian and hence clearer, but more limited. “Another Kind of Theatre” is an outstanding exploration of the meaning of theatre. “Theatre is action”, Gao says succinctly.

Towards the end of the book, in “The Voice of the Individual”, the author finally touches the subject of Chinese intellectuals and individual rights. In his opinion, before the 1911 revolution, China’s intellectual class was peopled by scholars or gentry who were only concerned with Confucian morality. Daoist intellectuals were oriented towards nature, hence non-action and Buddhist intellectuals, by striving for Nirvana, further eroded individualism. Individualism, posits Gao, is “a recent product of the rationalist traditions of Western Protestant culture and the subsequent flourishing of capitalism”. In the past Chinese intellectuals found it hard “to separate learning and literary creation from politics” and contemporary intellectuals continue to do so. In China, “There is still no guarantee of basic human rights such as freedom of speech, publishing and news reporting”. Gao urges writers to just try to save themselves instead of trying to save monolithic China, which is what he did by hiding in the forest for six months. He is also talking about himself when he says “Chinese intellectuals have suffered extreme hardship”. However, he carefully differentiates between true individualism and “a tragic belief in the supremacy of the individual”. For Gao, basic human rights involve limited freedom, since “responsibility and cooperation, respect and tolerance are necessary preconditions for realizing the will of the individual and the expression of the self in modern societies”.

Gao’s lapidary conclusion is that “the existence of literature” – and of writers- “depends on the writer’s willingness to endure loneliness.”

For information on writers imprisoned or exiled, from China or elsewhere, please consult: http://www.pencanada.ca
Maya Khankhoje is a Montreal-based short story writer, poet, essayist and reviewer. Her English translation of Paulina y la Golondrina Azul, (Paulina Wonders) by Carmen Cordero, was published last November in Madrid, Spain.