Published in Canada Tabloid (page 44) July 2015 issue
Since early 2015, I’ve been writing a regular article that focuses on art for a local, South Asian-focused magazine called "Canada Tabloid." This article, called “She Doesn't Speak For us” is about women writers who challenge the status quo. It starts off talking about the great African-American Nobel prize-winning author, Toni Morrison.
I hope you enjoy it.
Since early 2015, I’ve been writing a regular article that focuses on art for a local, South Asian-focused magazine called "Canada Tabloid." This article, called “She Doesn't Speak For us” is about women writers who challenge the status quo. It starts off talking about the great African-American Nobel prize-winning author, Toni Morrison.
I hope you enjoy it.
“For [Morrison], the claim that art is somehow divorced from the political arena—what she has called “the art/politics fake debate” (“Preface” ix)—is absurd; like Ellison, she is committed to an art that is both aesthetically powerful and politically effective: “For me,” she states, “a novel has to be socially responsible as well as beautiful.” (Jones and Vinson 183).
The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable
Toni Morrison often complains that critics don’t look at the aesthetic style of her work; in other words, its “Black Style.” The musical rhythm of the black walk and black talk. And the black song. Her most powerful work in three books are sometimes called the ‘Great Afro-American Triology’, spanning between the three great openings in African-American history: Emancipation (Beloved), the Harlem Renaissance (Jazz) and the Civil Rights Movement (Paradise). Morrison is a master of the great opening paragraph, and the third book in the series, ‘Paradise,’ starts like this:
"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun."
You see it immediately. Black men attacking a group of displaced, strong women who have taken up residence in an abandoned convent. Shooting the white woman first is very telling. Throughout the trilogy it has been the other way around; whites enslaving blacks, blacks living in segregation After years of domination by white people is one reason, but also because the white woman would be the one who had the most self-preservation having not experienced generations of oppression. The few pages that follow of the first chapter are filled with brutality and cowardice of the culling. Yet, it reads like a dance. And that makes it all the more powerful, and disturbing.
In the last issue, I spoke about art as transcendence. Morrison has claimed that “All good art is political!” It really is true that the art of telling a story reaches us from beyond our borders. It may sound cynical, hard and offensive, but art is not there so that your pain and anguish can be soothed, or pushed just a little bit further down in our minds, hearts and soul. If there is any soothing, it only takes place in a paradoxical way.
It is high octane. The real deal. Right or wrong. Unfiltered. Unconventional. It digs at the questions and doubts inside us with stories about real, imperfect people in really messed up situations. The unacceptable things about life blurted out to this world, a tearing off the veneer of so called sanity and cold sanitation. But the inner life and questions live inside us, and the reality of numbing trauma, pain and misery, exists.
Note that two major prize-winning authors who sometimes have drawn fire from their own cultures are both women: Toni Morrison and Arundhuti Roy. Both have been accused of sensationalizing or painting their respective cultures or nationalities in negative ways and emphasizing brutalities. Some, in both their cultures, have protested and said, “She doesn’t speak for us.” And, although both are active in social and political ways, their fiction is focused on the words and rhythms of life, as much as its structure and design.
South Asian writers also have a walk, talk, and swagger, and their own types of musical dance. There is a mixture of styles within multicultural India, where many types of people have lived in close proximity for centuries with differing regions, religious and social backgrounds, including the European influence and the language coming from the British. It’s a big melding pot. However, in that amazing melding pot of beauty and cultures, there is also a stagnant brutality that people would rather not even have a glimpse of. Change – after generations of social conditioning – is not something people know how to process, or adapt themselves to, especially when the incentive is not to do so. The oppressors and the oppressed. The high and the low. The haves and the should-not-haves. Not under any circumstances!
In her home state of Kerala, a raging debate over obscenity was stirred up over Arundhuti Roy and her Man Booker Prize winning novel, “The God of Small Things”. Ms. Roy is clearly political in all her other writing, but there is artistic and literary merit in this one and only fiction novel to date. Funny that her political works are more readily accepted. She is like Morrison that she merely creates a language, a design, illustrating the socio-cultural aspects of only a small section of India’s diverse religious and cultural truths. “The God of Small things” is more brutal than her writings about the many displaced from their ancestral homes by the dams being built in “The Cost of Living.” There, the victims are many and faceless, and it’s almost as if the fiction is more factual than the non-fiction.
In literature, the reader is taken deeper. The reader is put there to see how it plays out with the people, the families, the thoughts and feelings. The pain of witnessing a of crossing of our very own man-made taboos turning on our own religious truths, across our own culture, is deep and generational. A part of us. And so we take it very personally. In the case of Dalits, or paravans, whatever name you give one who is born, by some weird twist of fate as an ‘untouchable,’ the social structures and beliefs are held deeper than the religions people claim to be so adherent to. So deep, that people are blinded to their similarities and only see the lines of lineage of birth. Ms. Roy takes us to a moment that rents the historically thickly-woven veil that keeps people separated; from seeing each other as kindred.
In the last issue, I spoke about art as transcendence. Morrison has claimed that “All good art is political!” It really is true that the art of telling a story reaches us from beyond our borders. It may sound cynical, hard and offensive, but art is not there so that your pain and anguish can be soothed, or pushed just a little bit further down in our minds, hearts and soul. If there is any soothing, it only takes place in a paradoxical way.
It is high octane. The real deal. Right or wrong. Unfiltered. Unconventional. It digs at the questions and doubts inside us with stories about real, imperfect people in really messed up situations. The unacceptable things about life blurted out to this world, a tearing off the veneer of so called sanity and cold sanitation. But the inner life and questions live inside us, and the reality of numbing trauma, pain and misery, exists.
Note that two major prize-winning authors who sometimes have drawn fire from their own cultures are both women: Toni Morrison and Arundhuti Roy. Both have been accused of sensationalizing or painting their respective cultures or nationalities in negative ways and emphasizing brutalities. Some, in both their cultures, have protested and said, “She doesn’t speak for us.” And, although both are active in social and political ways, their fiction is focused on the words and rhythms of life, as much as its structure and design.
South Asian writers also have a walk, talk, and swagger, and their own types of musical dance. There is a mixture of styles within multicultural India, where many types of people have lived in close proximity for centuries with differing regions, religious and social backgrounds, including the European influence and the language coming from the British. It’s a big melding pot. However, in that amazing melding pot of beauty and cultures, there is also a stagnant brutality that people would rather not even have a glimpse of. Change – after generations of social conditioning – is not something people know how to process, or adapt themselves to, especially when the incentive is not to do so. The oppressors and the oppressed. The high and the low. The haves and the should-not-haves. Not under any circumstances!
In her home state of Kerala, a raging debate over obscenity was stirred up over Arundhuti Roy and her Man Booker Prize winning novel, “The God of Small Things”. Ms. Roy is clearly political in all her other writing, but there is artistic and literary merit in this one and only fiction novel to date. Funny that her political works are more readily accepted. She is like Morrison that she merely creates a language, a design, illustrating the socio-cultural aspects of only a small section of India’s diverse religious and cultural truths. “The God of Small things” is more brutal than her writings about the many displaced from their ancestral homes by the dams being built in “The Cost of Living.” There, the victims are many and faceless, and it’s almost as if the fiction is more factual than the non-fiction.
In literature, the reader is taken deeper. The reader is put there to see how it plays out with the people, the families, the thoughts and feelings. The pain of witnessing a of crossing of our very own man-made taboos turning on our own religious truths, across our own culture, is deep and generational. A part of us. And so we take it very personally. In the case of Dalits, or paravans, whatever name you give one who is born, by some weird twist of fate as an ‘untouchable,’ the social structures and beliefs are held deeper than the religions people claim to be so adherent to. So deep, that people are blinded to their similarities and only see the lines of lineage of birth. Ms. Roy takes us to a moment that rents the historically thickly-woven veil that keeps people separated; from seeing each other as kindred.
“The man standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body, holding her daughter in his arms, glanced up and caught Ammu’s gaze. centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. It’s marks, its scars, it’s wounds from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away.”
Amu, a high caste Syrian Christian woman, and Velutha, the son of their paravan servant, whose family has served Ammu’s family for generations. No one is friend to such an alliance but Ammu’s young, innocent two-egg twins, Rahael and Estha, who bring their divorced and lonely mother and the quietly rebellious paravan man who, at one time made her gifts when she was a little girl, but never touched her hands as he gave them to her. The double-standard that her brother, Chacko has a revolving door in which he brings untouchable women in to ease his manly needs. No one bats an eye.
“But what was there to say?
...
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.”
The acceptance of what men do and what women do is thrown up for us to see by Ms. Roy; acts that happen in everyday life, but are repugnant to read about in literature. Some claim that they weren’t upset by the subject matter of a high caste woman making love to a low caste man, but instead blame the fragmented writing. The one word sentences. “A lack of flowing sentences. Incompleteness.” That ambiguity where the mind can go, if prejudice and self-reproach don’t close the gate.
The cost of taking control and giving over to the spirit and want of one’s own life is revolutionary, and is promptly stamped out as a warning to others. But, again, although Ms. Morrison and Ms. Roy are both outspoken in their writing, their novels’ writing belongs in the domain of art.
Art is bigger and wider, ever expanding and comes from life. It is transcendent of social norms and propriety. A breaking of silence sends ripples that filters out to the mass consciousness. If not shut down, the spiritual movement –an attempt to shake us out of our complacency – challenges us to take our eyes off the road we were so sure was the right one, and it’s disturbing to think that maybe our whole lives we’ve been doing something that was completely foolish, and not only wrong but possibly against the spirit of humanity.
NK Johel
The cost of taking control and giving over to the spirit and want of one’s own life is revolutionary, and is promptly stamped out as a warning to others. But, again, although Ms. Morrison and Ms. Roy are both outspoken in their writing, their novels’ writing belongs in the domain of art.
Art is bigger and wider, ever expanding and comes from life. It is transcendent of social norms and propriety. A breaking of silence sends ripples that filters out to the mass consciousness. If not shut down, the spiritual movement –an attempt to shake us out of our complacency – challenges us to take our eyes off the road we were so sure was the right one, and it’s disturbing to think that maybe our whole lives we’ve been doing something that was completely foolish, and not only wrong but possibly against the spirit of humanity.
NK Johel