Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut – Mar 26, 2024

 

Slaughterhouse-Five  First Edition, First Printing 

One of the strange facets of the novel is that there is no vivid description of the central event, the Dresden fire-bombing carried out by American and British bombers on the nights of Feb 13-15, 1945 when hundreds of planes dropped thousands of tons of bombs and incendiary explosives that destroyed the city of Dresden, and killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants. 

Vonnegut perhaps found himself unequal to describing the horror directly that was visited on the city when he was there. They went down  two floors below the pavement into the big meat locker Schlachthöf-funf. Vonnegut said “It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone.”

He continues:

“Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A firestorm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large, open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease.”

This is the view we do NOT get from the novel. Instead it is irony, satire, the gentle comedy of a soldier who has lost his marbles in the war, and hallucinates about aliens who have captured and taken him to their distant planet, and shown him how to do time travel, which allows him to go back and forth in an imagined fourth dimension. 

The trauma of Dresden is filtered through the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) of an American enlisted soldier, Billy Pilgrim. There is absolutely nothing about the trauma of the civilians who were burnt alive in Dresden, while Billy Pilgrim and his cohorts were cooling off two floors below in the cellar of the meat locker.

Of course, there is a lot of humour which Vonnegut extracts from the crazy situations in which war puts people:

“Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. 

An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. 

Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains.”

Some have called it an anti-war novel. Perhaps it is better to characterise it as a novel that shows how people who have to endure war come out of it twisted and shattered by its horrors, and will possibly lose the equanimity needed to live a normal life, even if they end up on the victorious side. It is doubtful that Vonnegut takes a negative view of WWII at all, seeing as he enlisted and joined the war on his own. Recall that WWII in the European theatre was seen as pitting the forces of good against the Nazi evil.

These two pics will suffice to capture what Dresden was for centuries, and what it became within two days in February 1945. 

Dresden before the allied fire-bombing

Dresden after the allied fire-bombing on Feb 13-15, 1945

Poetry Session, 26 February, 2024

Kuttippuram Bridge over the Bharatapuzha is in the Ponnani region of Malappuram in Kerala. It was inaugurated in 1953 and built at a cost of Rs 23 Lakhs.

When readers at KRG choose their poems they cast a wide net. On this occasion we had a Malayalam poet, Edasseri Govindan Nair, represented by a poem. Malayalam poems are usually sung or chanted as chollal, but here it was delivered as the English translation of a modern poem of hope and longing; hope for the future made possible by a new bridge to transform the countryside, and longing for the old days. Other Malayalam poets who have been recited at KRG are K. Satchidanandan, Balachandran Chullikad, O.N.V. Kurup, Sugatha Kumari, Balamani Amma (mother of the poet Kamala Das), Kumaran Asan, and Chemmanam Chacko.

When one of our readers, Kavita, chose the ever popular Maya Angelou, Joe raised the question of who has been the most recited poet at KRG – after William Shakespeare, of course. The answer is Keats (13), then Eliot (11) and numerous Romantic poets with 8 occurrences. But how is it that Rumi, the most widely published poet in modern times, scarcely finds mention in the pages of KRG’s blog? He wrote lines like this (translated by Farrukh Dhondy)

Tomorrow is a hope – the dreamer’s way

The Sufi lives the moment, rejoices in today!

Amal Ahmed Albaz, born 1994, Canadian performance poet of Egyptian descent

Benjamin Zephaniah was the first performance poet we heard recited at KRG, way back in 2011 by Amita Palat. The music and rhythm of speaking comes naturally to someone of Barbadian-Jamaican descent. Britain has had a bright new wave of performance poets, for example, Kae West. At the session we heard a Canadian poet of Egyptian origin lament the bombing of Gaza in rap rhythm. When she recited it in Dec 2023 the destruction had been going on for 3 months, killing close to 20,000 Palestinians (mostly women and children), reducing much of the enclave to rubble and making the people homeless, facing starvation.

T.S. Eliot portrait by Gerald Festus Kelly, 1962

T.S. Eliot, ever popular at KRG was represented by two short poems that did not require the usual annotation to lay bare obscure meanings. In the first poem the poet hears the noise of plates in a basement kitchen rattling somewhere as he gazes on the street from a window, and then

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,

The second poem featured a fictional cousin of modern mores who smokes and dances all the fashionable dances. The poet holds up the censorious sight of Matthew and Waldo (that is, Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson) trained on Nancy Ellicott – not that she cares. The last line (‘The army of unalterable law.’) is taken from another poet, Meredith, but Eliot is contrasting his reference ironically with modern devil-may-care attitudes.

Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet whose rapturous odes to nature and animal life brought her critical acclaim

Mary Oliver was another outstanding presence at the session when Saras chose two of her poems. We know her poems from three earlier occasions when she has been presented. She is also the marvellous author of a handbook of poetry, that lays bare the mechanics of how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, being imbued with sound and sense. Mary Oliver employs wonderful examples, ancient and new, to illustrate her exposition. It will surprise no one that six of the ten poets chosen at this session were women.

Most prominent of these is The New Colossus, a Petrarchan sonnet (rhyming abba abba cdc dcd). The entire sonnet is engraved on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour and lines 10 and 11 are often quoted:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free


                                                                             

1903 bronze plaque engraved with ‘The New Colossus’ sonnet by Emma Lazarus is located in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

These words are a tribute to the diversity of America, which has been under threat from the masses who seek to enter America from its southern border. The press of poor people entering from Mexico is no longer a welcome sight to Democrats or Republicans. The original Colossus of Rhodes was a towering statue of Helios the sun god, built in 280 BCE to commemorate the defence of Rhodes against the attack of Demetrius. The sonnet of Emma Lazarus contrasts this ancient colossus with the Statue of Liberty presented by France as a symbol of liberty illuminating the world (La Liberté éclairant le monde).

Mother of 1084 by Mahasweta Devi, Jan 30, 2024

Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) front cover, 1974.

The central event of the novel Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) is an atrocity in which a youthful group of friends is attacked and killed by a gang of partisans from an opposing group. They were working to liberate poor people from domination and impoverishment by the wealthy strata of society.
                                                                           

Mahasweta Devi, Mother of 1084, translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay, 1997.

Calcutta is the scene and the time is 1970 when followers of Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, two left wing leaders of factions of the Communist Party of India led a struggle based on the Naxalbari Uprising of 1967 in North Bengal. That uprising was an armed revolt by tribals instigated by ideologues of the communist movement:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalbari_uprising

The Naxalbari Uprising of 1967 led to a splintered future among multiple factions.

Naxalism and Naxalites were terms in use at the time, and spread to some cities, where violence took the form of killing persons in power and snatching rifles from armed policemen deployed to quell the violence on streets. Joe used to live at the time in the area named as relatively calm in the novel (Park Street and Camac Street) but it was common to see policemen holding rifles chained to their waist lest Naxaals attack them and wrest the weapons from their hands.

Mahasweta Devi (1926 – 2016) was an eminent Indian writer and social activist. She is a prominent literary personality and best-selling Bengali author of short fiction and novels.

Mahasweta Devi may not have been violent herself, but her lifelong sympathies were with the tribals whom she worked to educate, uplift, and write about. Why she wrote this novella, at first a play, is no mystery. She wanted to depict the empty veneer of materialism that paraded as culture among educated upper-class urbanites, and contrast it with the idealism of those who revolted and led movements to bring justice to the poor. As she wrote:
“In the seventies, in the Naxalite movement, I saw exemplary integrity, selflessness, and the guts to die for a cause. I thought I saw history in the making, and decided that as a writer it would be my mission to document it. As a writer, I feel a commitment to my times, to mankind, and to myself. I did not consider the Naxalite movement an isolated happening.”

Nelson Mandela honours Mahasweta Devi with the Jnanpith Award in 1997.

The violence was not only by the government on the Naxal participants; it took place as bloody warfare between opposing groups of leftist partisans which Mahashweta Devi recounts:
“A bloody cycle of interminable assaults and counter-assaults, murders and vendetta, was initiated. The ranks of both the CPI(M) and CPI (M-L) dissipated their militancy in mutual fightings leading to the elimination of a large number of their activists, and leaving the field open to the police and the hoodlums. It was a senseless orgy of murders, misplaced fury, sadistic tortures, acted out with the vicious norms of the underworld, and dictated by the decadent and cunning values of the petit bourgeois leaders.”

In Mother of 1084 (published serially in a periodical in 1973, and later as a novella in 1974) Mahasweta re-enacts the senseless killings of the Naxalites. The author does it evoking the intense love of a mother (Sujata) for her son (Brati) whose motivations and struggles she does not understand. Much of the novel is given to the mother’s search for the secret life of her son with his comrades, including a lover (Nandini) who is tortured by the police to extract information about others in the movement. The third woman who suffers is the mother of Somu, a comrade of Brati, who is also killed in the internecine warfare; but she can wail her loss openly, in a way Sujata cannot.

The passage of time is referred to often in the pages of the novel by the women who bear the suffering of past grief, the unbearable grief of losing a beloved son, and the poignant loss of a comrade in arms at the flowering of his youth.

In the first simile on p.61 Time is likened to the flowing of a river, Grief is the bank of the river where sorrow accumulates. As the river flows, the alluvium carried by the river water is heaped on the accumulated grief on the bank, submerges it, and soon new shoots of hope grow to mitigate the sorrow.

In a second simile on p.77, Time is seen firstly as the compression of loss: the past is gone forever. Secondly time is seen (as above) through the same prism of flowing water carrying fresh alluvial soil to cover the mudbanks of grief heaped by the past. And that brings new hope.

In yet a third simile on p.79, Time is cast as an ‘arch fugitive, always on the run.’ It reminds one of the Latin maxim tempus fugit (time flies) which is shortened from Virgil's Georgics, where it appears as fugit inreparabile tempus: “it escapes, irretrievable time.” In the novel Sujata ‘would never be able to retrieve the moment when Brati in his blue shirt stood at the foot of the stairs.’ Will the two women, Sujata and Nandini, be always in search of lost time, like Swann in Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past?

Samik Bandyopadhyay, the translator, says he had the privilege of working with the author who contributed her own notes on the translation.

Humorous Poems – Dec 16, 2023

This year’s gathering for our annual year-end Humorous Poems session had many invitees, among them past readers Geeta Joseph; and Gopa Joseph with her husband Michael. We also had visitors – Joe and KumKum’s daughters, Michal and Rachel; and Rachel’s friend, Amy Cotter, who was visiting Kochi after attending COP28 in Dubai. Arundhaty’s kind neighbours, Ramesh Tharakan and his wife Rani, were also there to participate. Another neighbour, a Sri Lankan named Shirani, also came to enjoy.

People arrived in all sorts of costumes to give everyone a peek at literature lovers during playtime. At one end was the spooky garb of ghosts in white, at the other end the formal fashion of young college girls in olden days dressed in colourful half sarees. In between were those who dressed in pyjamas with unmatched legs and odd slippers as though in search of their missing half. We had queens – the Queen of Hearts and the Queen of the Nagas; odd guys dressed in keffiyehs (to commiserate with the devastated Palestinians) and dapper men dressed in dark suits wearing fedoras like gangsters.

The poems were bright, nonsensical  and witty ranging from the whimsical lines of Ogden Nash to the lyrics of a Cole Porter song from one of his shows, Kiss Me Kate, a 1948 show that had over 1,000 performances on Broadway. Of course, one could not miss Edward Lear represented at this session by The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo with its memorable opening lines:

On the Coast of Coromandel

   Where the early pumpkins blow,

      In the middle of the woods

   Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

Lewis Carroll could not be missed either; we had an unusually long poem of his called Phantasmagoria. And nobody had heard of Andrew Jefferson until we encountered his One-Eyed Love:

She’s charming and witty and jolly and jocular

Not what you’d expect from a girl who’s monocular.

Wit could also inform the minds of poets seven centuries ago as we learned from the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym who tells a good one on himself, when he made an assignation with a bar-maid at an inn and came a cropper because other hostellers at the inn sent him packing from bed.

After the merry evening of poetry we had lively conversations among friends and a wonderful contributed dinner with Arundhaty playing the generous host at her house, a magnificent abode designed by her with her late husband, Reggie.