Of art and men

LANDSCAPE and portrait artist Clifton Pugh died in October 1990. In the same week, Melbourne newspaper The Age ran a front page article that included a warm tribute from his former wife Judith. It's not often that ex-wives receive such prominent media attention when their prominent former spouse dies. But the relationship between Clifton Pugh and the Melbourne schoolteacher he met in 1970 and divorced 10 years later was no ordinary one.

With her husband Clifton, Judith Pugh was an outspoken agitator for political and social change.

During their years together, Judith and Clifton Pugh were outspoken agitators for political and social change. They were media celebrities in a city that craved accessible talking heads. As high-profile ALP supporters, they counted several ministers in Gough Whitlam's government (including Whitlam) as friends.

The Pughs championed the artist's cause, yet comfortably moved beyond the cliquey art circles of the time. After their break-up in 1980, Clifton Pugh had several relationships, including a highly publicised one with fashion designer Prue Acton. Yet his third wife, Judith, continues to be the one most connected to his work, his politics and his love of the Australian bush.

In her new book, Unstill Life: Art, Politics and Living with Clifton Pugh, Judith Pugh recalls her years as the artist's partner.

Was writing the book therapeutic? "In a sense it was a case of defining it (their relationship and the times) to myself," she says. "I wouldn't want to use the word therapy, but it's a coming to an understanding."

Their decade together was exciting and, at times, tumultuous. Both Pughs had lovers (including, in Judith's case, South Australian premier Don Dunstan).

Clifton was plagued by memories of executing Japanese prisoners in World War II, and sometimes he drank heavily. In her memoir, Judith Pugh writes that during these bouts he sometimes hit her.

Eighteen years after Clifton Pugh's death, and two marriages later, Judith Pugh is still linked to her former husband. While writing the book she has been anchored in the past, ploughing through her memory bank, researching details of Clifton's life and trying to recall events as he would have liked them to be told.

"Often I would be thinking, 'How should I put this?' and I would then think, 'Well how would he want me to put it?"' she says.

Pugh lives in a timber house in Melbourne's inner north with her third husband, Joe Kinsela, an opera singer. Their walls are covered with paintings by some of the artists Pugh has represented during her 20-year career as an art dealer. Among the group are a couple of Clifton Pugh's works.

Given the booming art market and increased interest in local artists and their work, the publication of Pugh's memoir is timely.

"In order to tell my story I have to tell (Clifton's) story, because we were so close and did so much together," she says. "I also wanted to tell the story of the times."

Judith Ley grew up in suburban Melbourne. The oldest of eight children, she attended a private Catholic girls school. From 1962 to 1964 she studied law at the University of Melbourne, but dropped out when she decided she didn't want to be a lawyer.

She switched to teaching and was sent to a secondary school in outer Melbourne where she taught English and history.

Working in resource-poor schools had a profound impact on the young woman and the experience galvanised Judith's political thinking. Until that point, she says, "I had noparticular ideological commitment except those values which came out of a small-l liberal, British ethical system that I suppose informed our parents".

She met Clifton Pugh in 1970 at an ALP branch barbecue after the Vietnam moratorium. Over the fire's low embers, the artist talked about pacifism to the gathering. It was then, Judith Pugh recalls, that "I took him on".

"I can't remember what I said, I just began to point out the logical flaws in his position," she writes. He responded: "You're intelligent. Do you want to have dinner on Monday night?"

Within days the 25-year-old teacher had moved in with the artist, who lived at Dunmoochin, his bush property in Melbourne's outer east. Not long after, she changed her surname from Ley to Pugh, and they got married in London in 1976, with Whitlam as their best man.

Dunmoochin, artist Rick Amor recalled recently, "was a magic place, a fun place that people always wanted to come back to". It was here that Judith Pugh settled into the role of artist's wife. She kept house, she entertained and cooked, and she helped her husband with the business side of creating and selling art.

She was also an assiduous networker, both within the commercial art world and among Melbourne's social, political and intellectual circles. It was a fascinating life, Pugh recalls. "One of the things that's terrific about artists is that they're home during the day, they're small business people, really," she says.

Pugh's social and political awakening coincided with the women's movement of the late 1960s and early '70s. Why, then, did she feel compelled to adopt the surname of a man who, initially, was not her husband? "I changed it at his suggestion," she says. Clifton was still married to his second wife, Marlene, "and because in those days to live with somebody was such an issue, Clif said it would be easier".

Putting her own career on hold was not unusual for women at that time, she argues. In the book she extrapolates: "Clif and I shared physical intimacy, political views, and the culture that formed us. We both wanted a comfortable and beautiful space in which to live, to nourish us, our friends and our ideas.

"Twenty years apart in age, we were at either end of that last generation in Western culture to take for granted that the man earned money and the woman kept house."

Clifton Pugh's drinking, and the verbal and physical attacks it would trigger, was a dark cloud over his relationship with Judith. More than 30 years later she can see several possible catalysts. An important retrospective in London in 1970 had stirred up old memories. The Vietnam War had caused him to reflect on his army service. And then there was Judith's passivity, as she describes it, which she believes encouraged Pugh to vent to a listening audience.

At the core of his anger, she says, were the World WarII experiences in New Guinea, in particular, his involvement in the killing of Japanese prisoners of war.

"I don't remember when I was certain that Clif had been the murderer," writes the forthright Pugh of her ex-husband's third-person account of the executions. "The story became personalised slowly, amid a chaos of anguish and fear ... Once I understood what he had done, I knew I should stay; to help him through it and to face it."

The one constant in their relationship was Clifton's work. In the early '70s the landscape artist started to focus on portraiture, a genre for which he became famous (several of his works hang in Canberra's National Portrait Gallery).

He won the Archibald Prize in 1965, 1971 and 1972 (for a portrait of Gough Whitlam), and he painted many famous Australians, including Melbourne society matron Mabel Brookes, Country Party leader John McEwan, Victorian premier Dick Hamer, philosopher David Armstrong, actor Barry Humphries and, during a visit to Britain, the Duke of Edinburgh.

A few months after the 1971 Archibald win, the Pughs went to Adelaide, where they met Dunstan. "The most capable and visionary state premier in the country, he distilled all the possibilities of progressive, decent and exciting government," writes the woman who was to become his lover.

"He was attractive, it is wonderful to be the object of such a man's attention," Pugh writes. "Of all the men in the country, he was the one as capable and intelligent as Clif."

During our interview, Pugh says her affair with Dunstan offered a way out of her stormy relationship with the artist. Besides, "the man was terribly interesting and intelligent. He wasthe most charismatic man in the country."

In late 1972 Pugh discovered she was pregnant. Dunstan's response was pragmatic: he arranged for her to have an abortion. On the morning of the procedure -- the same day as Clifton's divorce hearing with Marlene -- the artist confronted her.

According to the book, Clifton said: "You're having an affair with Dunstan, you're pregnant, and you don't know whose it is, so you're having an abortion. Judith, I know you've been unhappy but this isn't good. I don't like it."

He then called Dunstan and suggested an alternative: once his divorce from Marlene had come through, he and Judith would marry. The baby would be born and after a suitable period the Pughs would divorce, enabling Judith and Dunstan to marry. The pregnancy continued, and so did her affair with Dunstan. A few months later she went into early labour and the baby was stillborn. Soon after, "we all understood that neither Don nor I wanted to be more than friends", she writes.

By 1980 the Pughs' marriage had broken down. Although they had agreed to visit a marriage counsellor, Judith Pugh decided she would move to Melbourne and her husband would remain at Dunmoochin. There was some anguish over issues such as money and assets, but the two remained friends. On the day of their divorce in 1982, they had lunch together.

Five days before he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1990, Judith visited her former husband at Dunmoochin. She has happy memories of that day: "I'd gone up with Joe and we had a nice time together," she recalls. "He (Clifton) said, 'I want to tell you all the things you did for me."' She pauses, then smiles. "He had not acknowledged that before."

Unstill Life: Art, Politics and Living with Clifton Pugh by Judith Pugh (Allen & Unwin, $32.95).

source: www.theaustralian.news.com.au

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Geraldine Brooks won Australian Book of the Year

EXPATRIATE Geraldine Brooks has won the Australian Book of the Year award for a novel that explores the tortured history of Jews, Christians and Muslims involved in the preservation of a real medieval Jewish book, the Sarajevo Haggadah.

The win by Brooks's People of the Book at the Australian Book Industry Awards in Melbourne last night came as her sister, Darleen Bungey, won the biography prize for Arthur Boyd: a Life.

Publishers and booksellers voted in a crop of winners dominated by memoirs, cross-culture, food and the ever popular fantasy.

Sydney chef Pauline Nguyen was named newcomer of the year for Secrets of the Red Lantern, an emotional memoir of her family's flight from Vietnam and adjusting to life in Sydney's Cabramatta, including the recipes that link them together.

Ms Nguyen owns and runs the Red Lantern restaurant in Sydney's Surry Hills along with her chef-husband, Mark Jensen, and her brother, Luke, who both worked on the recipes.

The awards come as Australia's book industry faces some tough times ahead in the face of weakening retail sales and rising competition from digital media.

But Australian Publishers Association president Juliet Rogers said the Australian industry was in better shape than either that of the US or UK.

"No one would say it is easy, but I think we are weathering things better than some others in the US and UK," she told The Australian.

"We have a broader market and customer base that is really interested in Australian books."

Melbourne-based former Chinese dance star Li Cunxin's illustrated children's book, The Peasant Prince, was voted book of the year for younger children.

The Peasant Prince, illustrated by Anne Spudvilas, is a fairy tale version of Li's autobiography, Mao's Last Dancer, which charts his journey from Chinese peasantry to ballet stardom and defection to the US, and eventually to the Australian Ballet.

Brooks, who is based in the US, is a former Middle East bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and is well known as the author of the 1994 non-fiction book, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. People of the Book was also named the literary fiction book of the year.

Brooks beat out competition for book of the year from the likes of Don Watson's travel meditation on the US, American Journeys, and Melbourne cartoonist and author Kaz Cooke's guide for young girls, Girl Stuff, which was named general non-fiction book of the year.

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When fiction is not enough

Martin Amis and Susan Faludi are brave enough to face up to some of the realities of 9/11

IN his otherwise disappointing new novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (Cannongate, $32.95), British journalist and author James Meek includes one marvellous page. A wannabe novelist, the protagonist Adam Kellas, is so stricken by 9/11 that his journalistic colleagues imagine he must have had a friend die in the towers. But no. He's devastated because the headlines have almost perfectly reiterated the climax of the would-be bestseller that Kellas has already outlined, and beaten him to the punch:

He'd known the thriller market was crowded. He'd allowed for the danger that he might have to compete with a book with the same plot as his. But he had not foreseen the extent to which naive idealists might persuade real people to act out their lousy plots in the real world. It hadn't occurred to Kellas that men might find it easier to sell their thrilling, unlikely narratives to the masses by asking armies of believers to perform them than to vend their imaginations at airport bookstalls in the accepted fashion.

Thus Meek identifies that the events of September 11, 2001, were so over the top, so improbable and invented-sounding, that the hijackers essentially co-opted the fiction writer's job. A group of Islamic firebrands driving airliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre is not a matter of you-could-not-make-this-up; you could make this up. Because reality has taken the form of fiction, novelists have had a wicked time competing. A subtle, literary treatment of 9/11 has genre problems. How do you couch nuanced relationships within the context of a cheap thriller? In comparison to the history of that day, a fiction writer's sad embellishments are bound to look lame.

In the main with The Second Plane, British novelist Martin Amis has taken on 9/11 in nonfiction. In this collection of essays, Amis characterises himself frankly, if not as an "Islamaphobe", at least as an "Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you". I would characterise his bristling outrage as brave, but what is interesting -- and what Amis finds interesting -- is how odd it is that any Westerner's unbridled disgust with 9/11 and the forces and people that gave rise to it should ever come to seem brave.

Amis is keen to call our attention to the fact that, in our drive to understand 9/11 -- to find logic in unreason, to impose order on chaos and achieve an illusion of control, for if we grasp the cause and effect we make subsequent such tragedies preventable -- we have changed. We have moved far from the shocked, horrified, incredulous indignation that almost universally characterised our immediate reaction, and that continues to constitute the only sane response to violence so vicious, nihilistic, pointless, gratuitous and lunatic that each sorry little adjective grows more impotent than the last.

In an era when we are meant to be meekly respectful of other people's faiths, what is especially refreshing for this fellow agnostic-cum-atheist is the fact that Amis holds not only Islam but all religion in undisguised contempt:

To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatsoever.

With no apology, Amis asserts: "Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief -- unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses."

He characterises the pious zealot as having retreated to the "dependent mind" -- Islam means submission in Arabic -- in perfect opposition to the West's emphasis on free thinking and individual judgment. Islamic terrorists are "fabulists crazed with blood and death; and reality, for them, is just something to manoeuvre around in order to destroy it".

Immediately after 9/11, statements like that would have sounded merely by the by. Yet to read these essays now is to appreciate the truth in Amis's charge that in the years since 2001 we have grown cowed, chronically guilty and cravenly cautious. When he observes that "Islamic states lag behind the West in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life expectancy, human development and intellectual vitality", a little voice in me pipes up: "Shut up! Don't say that! You'll make them mad!" Admittedly, there is a danger in decrying fanaticism so fanatically that one grows shrill or strident, meeting hatred with hatred to reach a stalemate of antipathy. But Amis would claim he is meeting irrational hatred (or perhaps rational envy) with rational hatred. Moreover, his uncompromising revulsion serves as a welcome corrective to the West's increasing drift toward fearfulness and appeasement.

Amis makes the mistake of including two short stories, neither distinguished, which formally jar. But his final essay alone is worth the price of admission. Titled simply September 11, this piece best encapsulates Amis's central message about religion ("The rolling creed we call Islamism is also an embrace of illusion, as indeed is religion itself: a massive and multiform rearguard action, so to speak, against the fact of human mortality"), and the trap we have set for ourselves in so straining to comprehend that we risk justification:

We are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishisation of "balance", the ground rule of "moral equivalence" in all conflicts between West and East, the ... inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel), ... thus becoming the appeaser of an armed doctrine with the following tenets: it is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist and genocidal.

In The Terror Dream, American journalist Susan Faludi also makes an argument that, according to her thesis, her country is in no mood to hear. Faludi addresses how 9/11 affected American relations between sexes. In her view, the US went retro, bungee-cording back to a pre-feminist, 1950s absorption with helpless damsels in distress (illustrated in the media frenzy surrounding the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from the supposed custody of Iraqi insurgents), old-fashioned John Wayne masculinity (embodied in the swashbuckling persona of the President) and traditional motherhood (iconified by the "security mom", obsessed with the safety of her family, which Faludi exposes as a media myth).

Taking a feminist angle on 9/11 when the tragedy occasioned immediate hostility to feminism -- a culture-wide conviction that feminism was, in a time that demanded national unity and conventionally male qualities of strength and fortitude, irrelevant and petty -- requires a bravery akin to Amis's. While overdrawn, Faludi's point is well taken: that Americans sought to bulwark the myth of America's he-man invincibility in reaction to what was really a nationwide experience of naked helplessness; after all, the whole country was caught with its pants down.

Likewise, she astutely observes that the elevation of the beefy "heroes" of 9/11, the police officers and firefighters at the World Trade Centre, was largely wishful thinking, a hasty historical rewrite. Heroes have to do something, and when those towers came down there was little to do, and no one left to save.

So far, most of Amis's fellow novelists have chosen to tackle 9/11, unsurprisingly, in novels. In Jay McInerney's The Good Life (2006), two well-off, married New Yorkers meet while assisting a soup kitchen at ground zero and begin an affair. This is a good example of how sometimes making use of American history's Big Kahuna can backfire. In comparison to 9/11, the romance pales to soap opera. Attaching a rather ordinary story to such extraordinary circumstances risked making the setting seem a ploy, a device to cast the commonplace bed-hopping of his characters as more momentous and relevant.

Perhaps humbled by the material, McInerney keeps the gloves on when it comes to satirising local reactions to the cataclysm, which is a pity. Greater temporal distance might have allowed him to take the mickey out of New Yorkers' moral grandstanding and theatrical grief: their social competition over who was closer to the towers when they fell, and the giddy intoxications of altruism from which the city's citizens would all too soon recover, as if from a vial of crack. Some day an author may feel free enough to write a 9/11 novel that is gleefully brutal, or even funny.

My least favourite 9/11 novel so far is Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which is Extremely Gimmicky and Incredibly Irritating. It is littered with graphic pyrotechnics: photos (not of trade centre rubble but of keys, a tennis star, early man -- don't ask), whole pages of numbers and finally a flipbook of a man falling from one of the towers. The narrator is a boy who lost his father on 9/11, his voice oh-so-wise and riddled with weak whimsy ("Does a cave have no ceiling, or is a cave all ceiling?"). Given the novel's inexplicable critical acclaim, one wonders if the respectful, hands-off rule that has applied to 9/11 itself extended, for a time, to books about 9/11 too.

By contrast, Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) is deserving of its praise. Considering the impact of 9/11 on a constellation of ordinary people, DeLillo successfully bridges the public and the private, one of the things the novel form is good for. Less remarked upon, however, is Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World (2004), which defies the truism that you can never write well about such a considerable event until achieving the perspective born of time. The Frenchman admits that in the immediate wake of the disaster, "It is impossible to write about this subject, and yet impossible to write about anything else."

Beigbeder anticipates the accusations that McInerney would soon invite with The Good Life: "... in leaning on the first great hyperterrorist attack, my prose takes on a power it would not otherwise have. This novel uses tragedy as a literary crutch." Alternating between authorial commentary and the story of an advertising agent who has brought his two boys for breakfast at the north tower's chic roof-top restaurant Windows on the World, Beigbeder's novel is elegiac, rueful and suitably embarrassed. Moreover, this, Mr Foer, is successful whimsy: When previous to the attacks a huffy Windows patron is ejected with his lit cigar, the author cracks, "They should put a new health warning on cigarette packs: SMOKING CAN CAUSE YOU TO LEAVE BUILDINGS BEFORE THEY BLOW UP."

Declaration of interest: I, too, included 9/11 in The Post-Birthday World, briefly, as an event in passing. I reasoned that in any realistic novel taking place in 2001 the news would arrive in the lives of its characters, much as we all remember where we were and how we learned of the events of that day. Moreover, I conceived of a scene in which a couple bickers long and bitterly, for days absorbed in a petty private hell without turning on the television, and meantime the rest of the world is falling apart. Capturing the scale of their chagrin on learning of 9/11 days after everyone else was irresistible.

Yet I've not written "a 9/11 novel", nor do I plan to. I may have been in New York that day, but so were eight million other people. This is not a subject that I especially own, and the competition is already fierce. Certainly there should be no cordon around September 11; if we can write about Pol Pot or Rwanda, 9/11 is fair game too. But the risks are several: the appearance of me-too-ism, or make-weight; seeming trendy, or, not long from now, seeming passe; simply not being up to the material. And chances are high that the number of available 9/11 novels will soon exceed the public's appetite for reading them.

Meanwhile, Amis's opting for nonfiction commentary is probably sound. When real life displaces fiction, a savvy novelist switches sides to become the critic.


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The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007
By Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape, 214pp, $39.95 (HB)
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America
By Susan Faludi
Scribe, 351pp, $49.95 (HB)

source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au

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Power rises in the east

Asia is being created before our eyes, and so is the 21st-century world.

DESPITE the understandable focus on the Middle East and Central Asia in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist atrocities, the most important long-term trend in world affairs is the shift in economic and political power to Asia.

As countless books have put it, China's growth is doing what Napoleon forecast two centuries ago and is "shaking the world".

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that coined the acronym BRICs to connote the future impact of four big emerging economies -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- believes China is on track to overtake the US as the world's biggest economy as soon as the late 2020s, while India could pass the US by 2050.

The direction is clear: Asia will get richer and stronger, probably for a long time to come. Asian companies will become more prominent in international business, as competitors for Western ones, as purchasers of Western assets and as sources of new technology.

That will be painted as a threat to Western livelihoods by many politicians, but in truth the effect will be positive: the trade and innovation generated will make the West richer and stronger too, just as the rapid post-war growth of western Europe and Japan helped enrich the US during the half-century that followed. But it will change the global balance of power. Neither the US nor Europe will be able to dominate world affairs any longer; Asia will demand an equal seat at the table. Yet this trend is not as simple as it looks. There is no single entity called Asia. Asia is divided and the process of rapid economic development is going to divide it further in political terms.

The rise of Asia is not just, or even mainly, going to pit Asia against the West, shifting power from the latter to the former. It is going to pit Asians against Asians. This is the first time in history when there have been three powerful countries in Asia at the same time: China, India and Japan. That might not matter if they liked each other, or were somehow naturally compatible. But they do not, and are not. Far from it, in fact.

Asia is becoming an arena of balance-of-power politics, with no clear leader, rather as Europe was during the 19th century. China may emerge as the most powerful of the three, but as with 19th-century Britain it is unlikely to be capable of dominating its continent. A new power game is under way, in which all must seek to be as friendly as possible to all, for fear of the consequences if they are not, but in which the friendship is only skin deep. All are manoeuvring to strengthen their positions and maximise their long-term advantages.

The relationship between China, India and Japan is going to become increasingly difficult during the next decade. An array of disputes, historical bitternesses and regional flashpoints surround or weigh down on all three. Conflict is not inevitable but nor is it inconceivable. If it were to occur -- over Taiwan, say, or the Korean Peninsula, or Tibet or Pakistan -- it would not simply be an intra-Asian affair. The outside world inevitably would be drawn in, and especially the US, given its extensive military deployments and alliances in Asia. Such a conflict could break out very suddenly.

Managing the relationship between China, India and Japan promises to be one of the most important tasks in global affairs during the next decade and beyond, comparable to the need to find peaceful ways to manage the relationships between Europe's great powers during the 20th century. The opportunity, in terms of commerce and of human welfare, is tremendous, if the relationship is handled well. But so is the danger if the relationship goes wrong.

Managing this relationship will also be difficult because as India and China grow and expand their trade and overseas investment, their economic and political interests are going to overlap more and more, with each encroaching increasingly on what the other considers to be its natural backyard. The overlapping of interests is already happening, as China reaches across to Africa through the Indian Ocean for resources and as India reaches across to East Asia, through the Malacca Strait between Indonesia and Malaysia, for markets and commercial partners.

The most basic point, though, is that even without overt hostility the politicians and strategic planners of all three countries will feel obliged, by their sense of national responsibility and of historic opportunity, to compete for advantage, to prepare for the worst, to build alliances and networks against each other, just in case circumstances change. A senior official at India's Ministry of External Affairs, one of the least hostile men possible, put this especially appositely in an interview in March 2007: "The thing you have to understand is that both of us (India and China) think that the future belongs to us. We can't both be right."

Asia is being created, before our eyes. So is the 21st-century world.

A FAVOURITE topic among columnists and scholars during the past five years has been the fact that the world's politics and economics seem to have been inhabiting different planets. Politically, the world has been going to hell in a handbasket ever since September 11: wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, confrontation with Iran, friction with Russia, further terrorist attacks all over the globe. The US, patron saint of globalisation, democracy and free-market capitalism, has lost prestige and influence.

Yet in 2003-07 the world enjoyed the best four years of growth of any time in the past four decades. Trade has boomed and the fruits of that growth have been shared on every continent, with even sub-Saharan Africa expanding gross domestic product at annual rates of 5 per cent-plus. Asia has led the way, with average annual growth for the region, including Japan but excluding the Middle East, of 8.7 per cent.

Even the US, troubled by Iraq and divided in its domestic politics, has had a surprisingly buoyant economy.

How can this be, columnists and scholars ask? Surely bad politics eventually will have an economic impact? When turmoil broke out in the financial markets on both sides of the Atlantic in August 2007, making a US recession look a real prospect, they appeared to be getting their answer. Except for one thing: the turmoil had no obvious link to the world's bad politics, unless in some peculiar way the actions of al-Qa'ida in Iraq had weighed down on the US sub-prime mortgage market and on a suddenly weakened British bank, Northern Rock. They hadn't, of course. Economics had remained separate from politics and had passed through its own cycle of confidence, excess and readjustment. The real explanation for why political woes and economic joy could coexist for so long should be divided into two halves.

One half is the fact that the war in Iraq has helped to amplify global growth and to share it more widely than before: it did so by contributing to the trebling, quadrupling and eventually quintupling of oil prices, which caused a huge boom in oil-producing countries, including (but not only) the Middle East. At the same time, shortages of mines and worries about political instability interrupting supply helped bring about sharp rises in commodity prices, with the costs of materials such as copper, nickel, iron ore, zinc and uranium soaring. That in turn has boosted growth in commodity-producing countries.

In the past, economists would have called a rapid rise in oil prices a shock, one that, together with costly commodities, would hurt growth in the rich, consuming countries and probably cause inflation. But that hasn't happened because energy and commodities matter less in rich, developed economies that are led by the services sector because control over inflation by central banks is more secure and credible and because the open markets of globalisation have restrained overall price rises and enabled economies to be more flexible and adaptable. Only now, in 2008, is inflation coming to be a global problem, as those commodity price rises combine with abundant Asian savings to produce a new money-fuelled inflationary bubble.

That is the first half of the story: political turmoil boosted growth by making resources scarcer, rather than harming it. The other half depended on luck, geography and history.

The turmoil has taken place in parts of the world -- the Middle East and Central Asia -- in which today's great powers are either neutral or on the same side, and none is located nearby. There has been war, terrorism, instability and a lot of name calling, but it has not pitted the big economic powers against each other. Those big economic powers are the US, the European Union, Japan, China and increasingly India, Russia and Brazil.

They may have had disagreements about Iraq, and even more about Iran, but not ones that threatened conflict or, crucially, that put investors and traders in any doubt about the future openness of these economies to one another. The world was lucky that Osama bin Laden had set up headquarters in Afghanistan rather than in North Korea, Burma or Pakistan, next door to China or India; and it was lucky that Iraq and the rest of the Middle East are no longer scenes of superpower rivalry, as was the case during the Cold War. So the political and economic planets have remained separate.

Such fortunate separation is likely to continue for as long as the main arenas of political tension or conflict remain distant from the main arenas of growth, trade and investment. Essentially, that means for as long as political tension stays away from Asia.

THE war on terror, or by terrorists, will wax and wane. The first year in office of whoever is elected as the US's 44th president will be a nightmarish one, devoted principally to extricating the US from Iraq and finding some way to pacify or contain that region, including Iran. But while the 43rd President's principal legacy will be that nightmare, the true long-term task for the next president, the probable source of their legacy, will lie in Asia.

"Asian drama", the phrase that Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal used for the title of his 1968 book was, as his subtitle put it, "An inquiry into the poverty of nations". Myrdal's drama was about overpopulation, poverty and the danger of what we now call failed states. Today's Asian drama is an inquiry into the prosperity of nations, and into what happens when several big neighbouring countries become prosperous at the same time. They have done so in a process that is associated less with Myrdal's ideas than with those of the man with whom he shared the 1974 Nobel prize for economics, Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist who settled in London in the 1930s and who in the '70s and '80s became the intellectual idol of Margaret Thatcher.

Today's Asian drama is a much more upbeat and inspiring story than the one that preoccupied Myrdal, for it is lifting hundreds of millions (eventually it will be billions) of people out of the squalor in which they and their forebears have lived for centuries, it is lengthening and enriching lives and generating new wealth, ideas and confidence. It is knitting Asia into a single, vibrant market for goods, services and capital, one that stretches from Tokyo to Tehran.

If that process of integration and economic growth continues, as it should, it will form the single biggest and most beneficial economic development in the 21st century, providing dynamism, trade, technological innovation and growth that will help us all. In the second half of the 20th century, the world's most advanced country and biggest economy, the US, benefited hugely from the growth and development of western Europe and Japan. Now, in these early decades of the new century, the rich countries can expect to enjoy a similar boost from the growth and extra trade provided by Asia.

As well as knitting them, however, this drama is also grinding together Asian powers that had previously kept a strict economic and political separation from one another. China, India and Japan are bumping against each other because their national interests are overlapping and in part competing. Each is suspicious of the others' motives and intentions and all three hope to get their own way in Asia and further afield.

To have three great powers at the same time may be unprecedented for Asia but it is not for the world. There was a similar situation in Europe during the 19th century, when Britain, France, Russia, Austria and, until German unification, Prussia, existed in an uneasy balance in which none was dominant and none was entirely comfortable, but which nevertheless coincided with a period during which Europe prospered and became firmly established as the world's dominant region.

Whether you consider Europe's 19th-century experience with balance-of-power politics as a good or bad omen for Asia depends on how long a sweep of history you consider and on what you think are the most crucial differences between modern times and the world of 150 years ago. If you take a long sweep, then the precedent is bad, since Europe's power balance ended in two devastating world wars. On the other hand, it kept the peace on the continent for about half a century, which would count as an optimistic prospect today.

Today the barriers against the use of war as a tool of national policy are far higher: nuclear weapons, public opinion, international law, instant communication and transparency all militate against conflict, though they do not rule it out altogether. The barriers against colonial or quasi-colonial ambitions are higher still. China and India may battle for influence over Burma, but neither is likely to invade it and turn it into a colony. Nevertheless, Asia is piled high with historical bitterness, unresolved territorial disputes, potential flashpoints and strategic competition that could readily ignite. There are at least five known flashpoints where it is already clear that any could involve the major powers: the Sino-Indian border and Tibet, North and South Korea, the East China Sea and the Senkaku-Diaoyutai islands, Taiwan and Pakistan.

Imagine that you are a senior defence strategist or planning official in India, China or Japan. You know your government is professing friendship towards all its neighbours, pursuing "smile diplomacy" all around. You also know that your country's economic interests are spreading and deepening, that so are your neighbours' and that they are likely to get stronger in future. What would you do?

The answer is that, while acknowledging your fellow great powers' intentions may prove to be honourable and amicable, you would propose that your country build up its military and technological capabilities and strengthen its military and diplomatic alliances as a form of insurance policy, recognising that times change.

With an eye on the distant future, you would propose that your country should have a space program, taking in rockets, satellite launches and, for prestige purposes, moon landings. With an eye on the medium term, you would propose a strengthening of your navy, especially by adding aircraft carriers and submarines to project power throughout the Indian Ocean, China seas and the Pacific; and you would seek to invest in the development of an indigenous aircraft manufacturing industry in case supplies of imported aircraft and components became harder to obtain.

For the shorter term, you would propose that your country order more of the most advanced aircraft that your foreign suppliers are willing to sell and that you should keep on improving your offensive and defensive capabilities with and against short and longer-range missiles.

That is what China and India are doing. It would be too strong to say they are in an arms race, but it could reasonably be described as a strategic insurance policy race. Most recently, China has been expanding its military spending at almost 18 per cent a year while India's defence budget has risen by 8 per cent. Most likely, China's rate of spending growth will ease somewhat while India's will accelerate, as and when its public finances permit.

Japan would also pursue such strategic insurance if it did not have constitutional constraints on the size and nature of its military, and a close alliance with the US to depend on. But like China and India, Japan has a space program, is doing everything it can to upgrade its navy short of buying aircraft carriers and is doing the same for its air force. It will be quite a surprise if China does not have aircraft carriers by 2020 or so, and India has already announced that it will have at least three. Both are energetically engaged in buying and improving their fighter-aircraft fleets and their missile capabilities. All three are taking part in joint military exercises and sending observers to each other's war games.

In November 2007 China even sent one of its naval ships on a visit to Japan, a first for the Chinese navy. Japan and India, though, have been working on a stronger insurance policy by building a military network among the democracies and quasi-democracies of Asia and the Pacific, formally in Japan's case, informally in India's, linking the forces of Australia, the US, Singapore, India and Japan in exercises, inter-operability programs and the like. The network is not aimed explicitly at China, but the Chinese are fully aware of what is driving it.

The newest element in Asia is the emergence of three regional powers simultaneously. But the biggest single element is China's rise, as it forms the centrepiece around which all else is taking shape. China, thanks to its open economy and low labour costs, is the hub of an Asian production and trading network.

The new strength of its public finances and its newly confident and sophisticated foreign policy means China is playing a central role in providing development aid to poorer Asian countries.

Japan's aid program is far larger, but it is less strategically focused and is more constrained by the apparatus of multilateral aid channels such as the World Bank. India's acceleration of economic growth and trade is likely to impinge on China's focal position, but for the moment it is China's growth and the extension of its interests through the Indian Ocean and into Africa that are impinging more on India. Above all, however, China's political system makes it Asia's centrepiece. An authoritarian government can be more decisive and is freer to act strategically, especially in aid and arms sales. But it also gives rise to greater fears and more mistrust.

Such fears do not arise because China has acted or even spoken aggressively in recent years: it hasn't, except towards Taiwan. They arise because of China's sheer size, because of its millennium-long history as a regional hegemon that treated many other states as vassals and, most of all, because its political system and decision-making processes are opaque. Mistrust and suspicion about China's political intentions are echoed, too, in mistrust about its corporate activities, especially given the involvement of the state and state-owned companies in the sectors in which China has been investing heavily overseas, such as natural resources.

There is suspicion, at times, about Japan, largely because of its 20th-century history, but that suspicion is mitigated by its democracy and by its close relations with the US. Suspicion of India is held only by its closest neighbours in South Asia.

The main problem in Asia is fear and suspicion of China. It is not going to go away.

WHAT, then, can be done about it? What can be done to ensure that, in this new balance-of-power politics that is arising in Asia, suspicion of China does not provoke tension that damages economic and societal relations between the region's main powers or even actual conflict over one of the many flashpoints and border disputes? What can be done, in other words, to manage the inevitable rivalry between China, India and Japan, and those three powers' relationships with strong, involved outsiders such as the US and Russia? In my new book. Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, I offer nine recommendations about what outsiders in the US and Europe and insiders in Japan, China and India should do during the next few years to manage the situation and, it is hoped, to benefit from it. These proposals -- their adoption or rejection -- might also be used as indicators of whether, during the next decade or so, Asia's powers are heading towards a constructive, co-operative relationship or a more destructive, competitive one.

How will this Asian drama end? The answer is that it won't: it is going to be a permanent feature of world affairs, and arguably the most important single determinant of whether those affairs proceed peacefully and prosperously or not. The drama will pit new, rising powers against the world's long-established Western powers; and it will pit Asia's new powers against each other and against the region's first moderniser, Japan. In economics and business, the competition will have overwhelmingly positive results. In politics, we cannot be so sure. The implications of this new Asian drama can be summed up in two different images of how Asia might look in 2020: the first could be termed plausible pessimism and the second called credible optimism.

The plausibly pessimistic view begins with the risk that China will go through its Japanese-style adjustment to a lower investment economy in a rocky rather than a smoothly handled manner. (By Japanese-style, this means following Japan's example in the '70s, when Japan absorbed a currency revaluation and the aftermath of the oil shock by moving sharply up-market and becoming energy-efficient.)

Recovery will eventually come and the Chinese growth story will resume, but only after a recession and asset price collapse, perhaps exacerbated by a recession in the US. Such a bruising experience will lead to public pressure for political reform, posing the biggest challenge to Communist Party rule since the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. But that pressure will again be violently rebuffed and the party will accentuate its nationalist credentials to retain its grip on power. Such a nationalist move would produce increased tension with Japan, a reduction in co-operation with the US over North Korea, and a spate of mutual truculence between China and India over their border disputes and over Chinese support for Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Lord only knows what would happen if a terrorist attack on the US were to prompt a US invasion of Pakistan, since India would be tempted to cross Pakistan's southern border while the US was crossing from the west.

In these awkward times, the deaths of Kim Jong-il and the Dalai Lama might occur, prompting China to install a new military government in North Korea, rejecting proposals for unification of the peninsula, and to use brutal methods to suppress an uprising by Buddhist monks in Tibet that would make the one in March look like a picnic. Pan-Asian institutions would be stillborn in this fractious environment, as would efforts at serious co-operation over global warming.

Japan, becoming even more worried about North Korea and China, would finally revise its constitution to permit expanded military capabilities. Taiwan would be an ever-present source of worry over an imminent conflict between China, Japan and the US. There could even be a short, exploratory exchange of fire over that very issue. The warm glow of the 2008 Beijing Olympics would then be remembered only through a thick smog of tension.

Now look on the brighter side. The credibly optimistic view is that perhaps China will take its economic adjustment in its stride, after merely a short, sharp pause in growth, resuming expansion, albeit at a slower rate than the 10 per cent to 12 per cent of recent years. By 2020 its economy could be at least three times larger than it is today, and the same could well apply to India, too, as it uses its rising tax revenues to build modern infrastructure and a proper system of primary and secondary education. More open trade with other South Asian countries, initiated by a more confident India, would help lift hundreds of millions of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis out of poverty in the second decade of the 21st century, and hundreds of millions of Indians would be better off, too.

Japan, with more market-oriented reforms and a corporate sector galvanised by the prospect of Chinese competition, could experience a productivity surge similar to that enjoyed by the US during the '90s, enabling it to overcome the burden of an ageing population and, more important still, to become more confident in international affairs.

In such a climate, China, Japan and India, encouraged by the Americans and Europeans, would work together to build pan-Asian institutions within which to manage their disputes and differences. All would be made permanent members of the UN Security Council. When the North Korean regime collapses and the Dalai Lama dies, the three Asian powers' first instincts would be to talk and exchange ideas rather than to act unilaterally. A plan would be struck to unify the two Koreas under the supervision of international peacekeepers and with the help of aid from Japan, China, the US and the EU, among others.

The introduction of the election of Hong Kong's chief executive by universal suffrage after 2017, a step made possible by this harmonious atmosphere, could then increase interest in the use of democracy in China itself as a way to ease tensions and resolve disputes. The emerging middle class in China, irritated by its rising tax burden and lack of political rights, will begin to put pressure on the Communist Party, through protests and the media, to follow Hong Kong's example. The party's fifth and sixth generations of leaders decide it is time to make concessions, reasoning they can now repeat the success of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party since 1955 and seek to maintain power even in a multiparty system.

Whatever happens, in some ways, Asia already is one, to echo the famous first sentence of Kakuzo Okakura's 1903 book, The Ideals of the East. In other ways, it is becoming a single entity. How it does so, with three of the world's most powerful countries sitting side by side, undergoing disruptive transformations and subject to huge domestic and international pressures, is going to be quite an adventure. The stakes in Asia are enormous for all of us.

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This is an edited extract from Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, by Bill Emmott. Published this month by Penguin Australia, 314pp, $49.95 (HB). Copyright Bill Emmott 2008.

source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au

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Theology and Imagination

Ring Lardner, upon the occasion of his first visit to the Grand Canyon, remarked, "What a marvelous place to throw old razor blades." He was not usually a disrespectful person. But the sight of that incredible canyon, with the amazing riot of color and space, so overwhelmed him that he could not find words to match the experience. A wry, humorous aside sufficed. Most awe-inspiring events are so vast that words are inadequate for our response. So it is that preachers and pastors, who risk growing familiar with the mysteries of God, often are reduced to speech that may sound trite or at least (what is the word?) preachy. Words are the tools of our trade, so to speak. We are frequently invited to "say a few words." At public gatherings, we are expected to be profound and clever at the same time. Often we retreat into the formulae and well-tested expressions, the language of the religious professional.

The persistent dilemma of religious thought and speech is the struggle for adequacy in forming language about the things of God. This may be called the "Moses Syndrome" -- the more overwhelming the task of preaching the more inadequate we feel (Exodus 4:11-17). But speak we must. Experience of God requires reflection on the things of God, and reflection requires communication of the power of experience. Some religious traditions are moved to silence and speechlessness. Advanced forms of some eastern religion focus on sounds without voice -- like the "oom" or the tinkle of temple brass. But theology to westerners necessarily has been expressed in verbal statement.

In this mode of communication we are a part of the larger western sense of knowing. Because the western way of knowing and speaking has involved philosophical models and the use of syllogism, story, metaphor, and propositional statement, theology has followed these forms, especially the latter. Experience reduced to propositional language has led to propositional theology. To affirm the creed is to affirm the existence of the Holy One. To deny the creed is to place oneself outside the community of faith. Orthodoxy becomes agreement with propositional statements, often conditioned by less than ultimate considerations. The enormous philosophical reliance of theology can be noted in the dependence of Augustine on neo-platonism, Aquinas on Aristotle, Luther on nominalism, Lutheran confessionalism on scholasticism, and, since 1800, liberal theology on Kant.

Yet, by and large, theology is "church theology," that is, despite the fact that it draws heavily on general philosophy, it tends to become the speech of the confessional enclave. Gerhard Ebeling has said that people have a "troubled relation with a speech they do not understand." To the extent that religious speech in our time is a speech of the enclave, the evangelistic (telling the story) mission is going to be difficult.

Yet there has been a resurgence of cultic or enclave-type speech in recent times. The revival of Islam is startling because of the political possibilities inherent in strident fundamentalism. The Vatican also has attempted to interfere in the theological work of Hans K. Kung and other prominent liberal Roman Catholic theologians. We have seen a woman excommunicated from the Mormon Church because she challenged its theological traditions. The growing political power of American fundamentalism is also a part of this phenomenon.

While the religious groups seem to be speaking more stridently in their own languages, there is a realization that the grant of authority to the churches to speak definitively about the "things of God" has largely been wit·hdrawn. Someone has said, "A few groups huddle closely around a creed, but, for the most part, creeds have no standing." Church leaders, bureaucrats, opportunists, use those occasions to reassert the ancient authority of their dogmas.

The way out is not to abandon the theological enterprise, but to reflect on the appropriate language for and forms of talking about God. Given the history of western philosophy, words have been thought to be not simply the most appropriate language for theology, but the only language in which communication is possible. For the West, the Word is exhausted in words. But much of life is lived beyond words. In this vast web of our common life words are seized and shaped to the expressions required of them. They are indispensable instruments of our being human. But human life is not exhausted in words. Marianne Moore once remarked: "Expanded explanation tends to spoil the lion's leap."

In a fine essay in Theology Today, Roland M. Frye notes that the Renaissance's great achievements in perspective and mathematical precision created a condition in which it became possible to make literal descriptions of reality. Inevitably, where it was impossible to provide a literal description of reality, it became fashionable to assume that one should stay silent, or deal only in abstractions. (Frye recalls a television show in which David Frost was interviewing the Archbishop of Canterbury. Asked to describe God, the Archbishop began by citing, "Something with one and beyond one that fills one with awe, and reverence, and gives one a sense of supreme obligation. . . ." At this point Frost interrupted to comment, "That could be the Internal Revenue Service.") In that cultural setting, understanding was largely narrowed to a choice between expression in a literal sense or through cloudy abstraction. Large areas of meaningful human experience were thus relegated to over-simplification either through blatant literalism or vague transcendentalism. Metaphor, analogy, image, music, had all lost credibility.

The closer we get to the edges of the mystery of things, the less adequate our explanations become. The word mystery has its root in a Greek word that means "to shut one's mouth." There is no way we can abandon words in theology, but there may be required of us a new modesty about the meanings of words. That is, what Frye calls "blatant literalism" and "vague transcendentalism" must be replaced by a new sense of the vitality of words and their use in other contexts than propositional arguments. Meaning becomes attached to words. Dictionaries are codified collections, not of meanings, but of uses of words. We assume that we find meanings in dictionaries. We find only the consensus of the uses of words. How words are used is the problem of preaching and theology. Paul Valery once remarked that "words are planks of wood we place over chasms to cross over. If we try to dance on them in the middle of the journey, we will not cross over. Words have more uses than meanings."

That phrase of Valery's suggests the poet's conviction that the vocation of the poet is to create language, not to codify it. The root of the word poetry is the Greek word to make and it has reference to the making of pots and pans and houses and barns and fences and other utilitarian objects. How have we understood poetry to be a matter of abstractions? The poet and the preacher! theologian have a common vocation of finding the words to communicate the power of experience without codifying it and bending it into dictionary definitions.

The religion of Israel exercises this modesty in its care for the naming of God. To name something is to own it, to control it (cf. the Genesis story). Also, the prophetic tradition in Israel seemed consistently to treat Yahweh as subject rather than object -- that is, words from God expressed the will of God, not the shapes or meaning of God. So iconoclasm -- the abhorrence of the use of opaque images -- became a permanent feature of the religious tradition. And it continues in our period as a Protestant principle (e.g., Tillich).

The dominance of word in our religious history has led us to the conclusion that people without history (words to explain themselves) are no people at all. One of the important achievements of recent scholarship has been the recovery of religious traditions of subdued cultures. What we may once have held triumphantly to be unique elements in our Judeo-Christian tradition now can be seen to have roots in despised cultures like Ugarit. These discoveries do not damage the power of religious insights. They do, however, suggest a new joy at the discovery of the human religious enterprise. So liberation theology has on its agenda the recovery of a history of religious identity that had become obscured or erased by the dominant culture. The intense current interest in the history of women in religion is not an idea exercise, but of the essence in establishing the integrity of our religious history. Part of our new modesty about the authority of word in theology is the willingness to live into the experience of other traditions as we plumb our own theological sensibilities.

The role of imagination in religious thought and experience therefore takes on new urgency. In addition to words, form and movement and sensibility and sound shape our vision of the world. Most human experience is affected by these modalities. We make images with these elements, we draw analogies, we tell stories, and we grow uneasy with religious language that seems sometimes to contradict these modalities.

Imagination is the process by which we make a language out of the shapes of events -- the concrete elements of our own experience and the experience of our communities. Often it accomplishes this by using overlooked and even despised fragments of personal and cultural experience. As John Dixon has suggested, a part of Israel's tradition was blood and smoke, not only prophecy.

What was forming and decisive for religion in that understanding is also part of who we are. We are more likely to find such themes in dance or music or poetry than in systematic theology. Innovators like Stravinsky relied not so much on breaking with convention and tradition, but with identifying the power of discarded traditions. He once remarked that his work was built on the detrita -- abandoned ideas of others who went before. The innovating newness is a recalling to our senses of a wider world than our current orthodoxies normally permit. This has been the special vocation of the artist in a post-Reformation history of religion. R. G. Collingwood, in a famous phrase, has suggested that "the artist prophesies, not in the sense of foretelling, but by telling us the secrets of our own hearts, at the risk of our displeasure. Art is the medicine for the worst disease of the mind -- the corruption of the consciousness."

Beyond the use of the imagination in widening our experience of the world and refining our consciousness, the use of the imagination in religion can save us from another problem -- namely, the tendency to take pleasure in cruel things. Abstractions are the refuge of the scoundrel. Concreteness is the environment of human sympathy. Vietnam was the season of growing up for most of us Americans. We were saturated with euphemism -- body count, mega-death, and a hundred other cruel words to separate us from our humanness. To get inside the other's world is to share something of a wider humanness than one's own. We are then candidates for what the hymn writer called the "wideness in God's mercy."

Another use of the imagination is the recovery of narrative and story as the mode of religious expression. For Christians to speak of God only in precise descriptions and formulations is to risk making the formulations God. Borden Parker Bowne, one of my early heroes, was once asked if he had the "second blessing." He replied, "No. I have had the first, the third, the fourth, the fifth, but I'll be damned if I've had the second." The statement of the experience of American Wesleyan holiness had become an absolute; and, although he profoundly exercised piety, Bowne refused to be told what forms of piety were normative. So the re-telling of the story gets us on our way behind normative stopping points and suggests fresh beginnings. There is a fine Hasidic tale of a rabbi who went to a place in the forest, lit a candle, said a prayer, and told a story. His student could not find the place in the forest, but did light a candle, say a prayer, and told a story. His student could not find a candle, but he said a prayer and told the story. His student forgot the prayer, but he told the story.

Flannery O'Connor, remarkable in that she was at once profoundly orthodox and imaginative, suggested that her vocation as an artist was to re-tell the gospel parables in startling and shocking ways. "For the blind one has to write in large figures and for the deaf, one has to shout," she said. Her letters, recently published, have been named by Sally Fitzgerald, the editor, The Habit of Being. The word habit is used in its Catholic meaning -- the discipline of life -- a life focused on the being of things as primary revelation.

Our time has a passion for surety, for security, for simplicity. These things probably have never existed -- save for brief moments when they were established by denying them to some other community. Theology in these days is risky business. It walks between the presumed at-homeness of the past and the anxieties of the future. Our concern for opening the boundaries of the mind in our religious language requires love and imagination. Our theological work in the school and parish will be informed, hopefully, by a new modesty that values imagination.

Wallace Stevens was one of the remarkable poets of our period. In his poem "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," Stevens suggests that religionists "Take the moral law and make a nave of it/And from the nave build haunted heaven." But the rationalists "Take the opposing law and make a peristyle,/And from the peristyle project a masque/Beyond the planets." But "fictive things," says Stevens, "wink as they will." What wry humor. Despite all our energetic efforts to organize the universe and human events, those wonderful things simply are there, in their concreteness, winking at us!

This habit (to use O'Connor's phrase) is present in the biblical tradition and has been lifted into systematic theological method by the United Methodist Church itself. The latter is to be noted in the quadrilateral definition in the Disciplinary statement that insists on scripture, tradition, reason, and experience as elements of our theological work. I think this 1972 statement will have long-range influence in our work in coming generations in the church. But it did not blossom full-blown from abstraction. It grew out of the creative concentration of the ways we perceive the things of God. And that perception (itself an act of imagination) is a frequent accent in both tradition and scripture. Hearing and seeing, speaking and keeping silent, building and tearing down -- the rhythms of faith seeking understanding.

Once Flannery O'Connor was attending an affair with what she called "big intellecturals," Catholic writers and commentators. This is what she remembers in her letter to a friend:

Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but, overcome with inadequacy, had forgotten them. Well, toward morning, the conversation turned on the Eucharist which I, being a Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mary McCarthy said when she was a child she had received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, being the most portable person of the Trinity. Now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it is a symbol, to Hell with it." That was all the defense I was capable of, but now I realize that this is all I will ever be able to say about it outside of a story except that it is the center of existence for me. All the rest of life is expendable.

Dogma that is not experienced in one's guts is not helpful -- it is abstraction. Concreteness is the beginning of poetry. Experience is the context of imagination. Scripture is the seedbed of language of faith. Religious speech ought to keep us in reality, not otherworldliness.

The words of Jesus to the theologians and bureaucrats in the Temple are instructive. The gospel story recorded in Mark 12 includes the elements of the uses and misuses of religious speech. Jesus was involved in a discussion the purpose of which was entrapment. That remains a lower form of the uses of religious speech. To the Herodian, how he replied to the question about taxes was politically interesting. To the Sadducee and Pharisee, how he responded to the question about the woman married to seven brothers was professionally perilous. To the proof-texter, how he responded to the question "What is the greatest commandment?" would test his orthodoxy. Jesus first suggested modestly that his colleagues did not understand either the scriptures or the power of God. Bound to the tradition, they could not be free of the tradition to experience the power latent in trust in God.

But Jesus did recite the great Deuteronomic confession. There is one God, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. (And the second is equal to this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.)

In Deuteronomy 5:45, from which Jesus was quoting, the phrase "love God with all one's mind" does not appear. How more serious researchers provide reasons for this puzzle is for further research. But what about this as a possibility? Frustrated with theological method as entrapment and proof-texting, and dogmatic self-assurance, Jesus inserted a new word by adding "loving God with one's mind." That made the proof-texters and traditionalists sit up and take notice! The Greek word here is dianoia -- a word with more uses than meanings. It has more to do with coherence, seeing through the poetic mode, putting events and concepts together. It is not simply rational work, although it includes that. That would be the appropriate response to folk who had grown unimaginative in sensing both the scripture and the power of God.

Then, for good measure, recalling the questioners to the genius of prophetic Judaism, he said: The second commandment is this: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. All this enterprise is focused finally on the love of God aimed through the faithful toward the neighbor. And who is my neighbor? "The poor, the broken-hearted, the captives, the blind, the bruised, the outcasts, the persons who have no hope" (cf. Luke 4:18).

Notably, this Markan episode ends with the phrase, "No one dared ask him any more questions."

Jesus' method was to call us to the uses of imagination in crafting the meanings of words. That is why the religious community must do its own research and imagining and forming because it necessarily grows out of the context of encounter of faith.

How risky this always is. Joseph Heller's comic novel Good and Gold suggests our human equivocation:

Gold never doubted that racial discrimination was atrocious, unjust and despicably cruel and degrading. But he knew in his heart that he much preferred it to the old way, when he was safer. Things were much better for him when they had been much worse.

All his words had a starkly humanitarian cast; yet he no longer liked people.

Theology in our time will require more, not less, scope. Problems will be increasingly angular. Shapes will inform and frustrate. But we will in faith continue to shape new ways of speaking about the things of God informed by events that spill out of our own histories and self-consciousness. Our pastoral theology will find allies in other modes of seeing and hearing the Word of God, and we will wait with patience and modesty for the appropriate definitions of what it means to love God in the world.

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about the author:

F. Thomas Trotter. A graduate of Occidental College (AB) and Boston University (STB, Ph.D), Trotter was Dean and Professor of Theology at the Claremont School of Theology. Later he was General Secretary of the Board of Higher Education and Ministry of The United Methodist Church and President of Alaska Pacific University. His special interests are in religion and the arts and religion in higher education. This essay appeared in Loving God With One's Mind, by F. Thomas Trotter, copyright 1987 by the Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church. Used by permission. This document was prepared for Religion Online by William E. Chapman.

source: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=424

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Indian Philosophy and Religion

India is the home of Philosophy, Religion and Spirituality. Every age, she provides the world with her armies of spiritual masters. She uses every means to reach the people of various parts of the world to enlighten them to the grand avenues of a meaningful life. The world wide web is no exception. There are several sites which give very indepth information of the various concepts and various schools of Indian Religion.

Here are a few sites which give general information on religions of direct Indian origin. (More specific links follow in the course of this article.)

In India, spirituality is basically tuning one's mind to consider one's self and others as different from the gross physical body and the subtle mental body, and to be beyond the limitations of space, time and causation. Philosophy is the theory aspect and religion is the practical aspect of this principle.

The beauty of the Indian philosophy is the grand unification of a Metaphysical God who is the Absolute Reality and the substratum of all existence, and a Personal God who is the basis of all morality, ethics and the inspiration to lead a meaningful life. This grand unification makes the Indian religious temper one of the most tolerant and all consuming of the religions, and also the mother of many religions of the world today.

The Indian religious temper, called Hinduism, is more ancient than the oldest known Rig Vedic hymn, which is dated to about 5000 BC, and yet is as modern as the school of thought sprung yesterday. This dynamic nature of the religion, based on a firm foundation makes it one of the most sagacious and vibrant of religions.

Here are a few articles which give the fundamental concepts of Indian religions in general and Hinduism in particular.
Here is an FAQ on Hinduism, which may answer most of your questions.

Hinduism was not originated by any person. Its fundamental principles are accepted by the Indian people from time immemorial. Several spiritual teachers have put down in words their thoughts about the concepts and their perception of spiritual life based on these concepts. These serve as guiding lights for several generations of the future.

The books of Hinduism are classified into two catagories, namely, Srutis and Smritis. Srutis are mere records of the fundamental principles of spiritual life and the experiences of spiritual giants. They do not try to fit their experiences into any model to explain them. They are just a statement of facts. This makes them totally impersonal and independant of the cultural and intellectual background of their authors. For this reason, Hinduism which is based on these texts as the foundation is known by the name Sanathana Dharma -- the eternal way. These texts are the Vedas. The portions of the Vedas which describe the principles of spiritual life are the Upanisads. Though there are innumerable Upanisads, all the concepts explained in them can be found in 10 of them, for which Sri Sankara, one of the brightest stars in the Indian spiritual sky, has written explanatory notes. All the other Upanisads put the same concepts covered in these, in different words.

The Smritis are also written by great authorities in this field. These propose models of God, Man and the Universe to fit into the general principles laid down by the Srutis. These are coloured by the cultural background of the author, and so cannot be taken at their face value for an age, place and cultural background different from those for which they were originally written.

Here are a few texts which are considered authoritative. Their translations may not be authoritative. So, one has to be very careful while going through such translations.

As mentioned before, Hinduism allows various schools of thought under its broad principles. This has resulted in innumerable sects and cults. Some of them stay active for hundreds of years, while some form and vanish like bubbles. Most of them get merged into other existing sects, thus strengthening them.

Here are a few long living schools which are a few centuries, and some of them even a few millenia old.

Here are a few schools which have come up within the past one or two centuries.

The Indian view is to see all religions as various ways to reach the same goal of manifesting the intrinsic divinity in man. So a follower of the Indian spiritual tradition accepts all religions to be true and suited for people with various mental structures, if followed in the right spirit. This was explicitly demonstrated by Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) in his life. He took up various religions and spiritual paths like Vaishnavism, Shaaktha, Advaitism, Christianity and Islam, one after the other, one at a time, followed them in full ernest and showed that they all lead to the same goal.

Here are a few links to religious traditions, not directly of Indian origin.

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The Wisdom of Emptiness

'I am not, I will not be.
I have not, I will not have.
This frightens all children,
And kills fear in the wise.'
Nagarjuna

Although Albert Einstein was certainly not a Buddhist, these statements sound much like it:

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'universe', a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest
- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affectation for a few people near us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

From Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh:

"Enlightenment for a wave in the ocean is the moment the wave realises that it is water."

read more at http://buddhism.kalachakranet.org/wisdom_emptiness.html

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Guides to Philosophy on the Internet (1)

Guides in Czech

Filosofové. Anonymous.

Guides in Chinese

Taiwan Super Logos Philosophy Web. Also available in English.

Guides in Danish

Filosofi på Internettet. From Keld B. Jessen.

Lade's Guide til Filosofi. From Thomas Ladegaard. link dead; alternate link, http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1104/filosofi/filo1.htm not working either -->

Guides in Dutch

Filosofiebeoefening in Nederland en België. From Lidie Koeneman.

Filosofie op het Internet. Anonymous.

Guides in English

Björn's Guide to Philosophy. One of the best early web guides to philosophy, no longer updated. From Björn Christensson.

Blackwell Publishers' Guide to On-line Philosophy Resources

Chinese University of Hong Kong Guide to Philosophy. From the CUHK's Research Institute for the Humanities.

DynaWeb's Philosophy Aide. From DynaWeb creations.

Eastern and Western Philosophy. From Prakash Arumugam.

EINet Galaxy Guide to Philosophy

Episteme Links. From Tom Stone. One of the larger collections of philosophy links. (Based in part on this Guide.)

Field Nodes, Philosophy. From Phil Hughes.

Guide to Philosophy and Logic. From Paul Wong.

Learning and Teaching Support Network. Subject center for philosophy and religious studies. From Nik Jewell and David Mossley.

My Virtual Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Religion. From Bob Drudge. Searchable.

Nerd World Philosophy

Net-Resources in Philosophy. From the University of Vienna.

Noesis. "Philosophical Research On-Line." Structured searching of a database of online philosophy texts. The future of scholarly web searching, browsing, and organizing. From Anthony Beavers and his IALab. (Disclaimer: I am a co-editor.)

Philosopher's Almanac. Philosophy Department of Miami University of Ohio.

Philosophia. From Douglas Portmore.

Philosophy. Philosophy section of About.com. Edited by Rich Gray.

Philosophy. From LookSmart.

Philosophy. From Sirius Forensiks.

Philosophy and Theory. From the Eclectic Diner.

Philosophy Around the Web. From Peter King.

Philosophy at Large. From Stephen Clark, University of Liverpool. Also available in French.

Philosophy in Cyberspace. From Dey Alexander. Includes online updates to the book of the same title. Very thorough and well-organized. If speed is a problem, try the U.S. Mirror.

Philosophy Links. From the System of Life Institute.

Philosophy Links. From Frederik Boven.

Philosophy Meta-Links. From Leslie Jones. Links to general guides to philosophy on the internet.

Philosophy on the Web. From Arno Wouters. No longer updated.

Philosophy Pages. From Dieter Köhler. Also available in German.

Philosophy Portal. From Philosophical Services. Registration required.

Philosophy Related Resources on the Internet. From Peter Morville and Stephen Clark.

Philosophy Research Base. From ErraticImpact.com and Villanova University. Large, well-annotated, searchable.

Philosophy Resources on the Internet. From Frank Edler.

Philosophy Resources on the Network

The Philosophy Site. From David Thunder.

Philosophy Sites on the Internet. From Yossi Mamroud for the Philosophy Department of Tel-Aviv University.

Philosophy Sources on the Internet. From Fiona Steinkamp.

Public Sphere. From Paul Ashton.

RBJ's Philosophy Page. From Roger B. Jones.

Routledge's Guide to Philosophy Resources on the Internet

Sean's One-Stop Philosophy Shop. From Sean Cearley. Formerly one of the best, but no longer regularly updated.

The Source. From Mary Long.

Voice of the Shuttle Philosophy Page. From Alan Liu.

Virtual Library Guide to Philosophy

A Window to Philosophy. From Sandro Reis. Also available in Portuguese. (Based in part on this Guide.)

The Window: Philosophy On The Internet. From Chris Marvin and Frank Sikernitsky.

The World of Street Philosophers. From Jian-Hui Tjong. Large, but much is in Chinese.

WWW Philosophy Sites.

WWW Resources in Philosophy

Yahoo Guide to Philosophy

Zeroland. From Adrian Hart.

Guides in Finnish

Filosofia Internetissä. From Petri Ylikoski

Filosofinen Aikakauslehti. From the journal, Niin & Näin.

Ulkomaiset Linkit Filosofia. -->

Guides in French

Choix de sites philosophiques. A section within the site, Philosophie, Informatique, Mathématiques, from Patrick Peccatte. Based in part on this Guide.

Petit guide de ressources en philosophie . From Stephen Clark, University of Liverpool. A larger version is also available in English.

La Philosophie sur Internet. From Josette Lanteigne.

Guides in German

Annettes Philosophenstübchen. From Annette Schlemm.

The Camillo Schrimpf Page. Especially on philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis. From Camillo Schrimpf.

Deutscher Philosophie-Knoten

Philosophie, Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie. From Herbert Huber.

Nützliche Adressen für Philosophen. From Armin Fingerhut.

PhilNet. From the University of Hamburg. Very thorough.

Philosophers Today. Despite the English name, this is a German guide. "Der Philosophie-Bahnhof für jeden." From Joachim Koch.

Philosophie. A section within the larger Wissenschaftliches InformationsSystem (WIS). From Wolfgang Melchior.

Philosophie im Internet. From Karsten Wilkens.

Philosophie-Ressourcen. From Haimar-Supriatno Staib. Very thorough.

Philosophie-Sieten. From Dieter Köhler. Very thorough.

Philosophisches Internet. From Claus Oszuszky. Large and searchable.

Philosophy. From Uwe Wiedemann. Very thorough.

Wortwaal.de. Links on philosophy, literature, and culture. From Joerg Wittkewitz.

ZAS — Agentur für Philosophie und Wissenstransfer. From ZAS, Agentur für Philosophie und Wissenstransfer.

Guides in Italian

Altre risorse di Filosofia in Rete. From the Laboratorio Autogestito di Filosofia. -->

E'Tempo di Filosofia. From Pierpaolo Redondo.

Filosofia in Italia. From Davide Fasolo.

Filosofia morale. From Giuseppe Modica.

Internet Italia: Filosofia

Le risorse filosofiche in Internet. From Alessandro Bazziga. -->

Risorse Filosofiche in Rete. From University of Genoa Department of Philosophy.

Servizio Web Italiano per la Filosofia (SWIF). From Luciano Floridi.

Guides in Japanese

Philosophy Web Sites in Japan. From K. Nagasaki. Also available in English.

Guides in Norwegian

Filosofi - Idehistorie. From Nils P. Lie-Gjeseth. Also available in English

Guides in Polish

Polska Siec Filozoficzna. From Krzysztof Kudlacik.

Guides in Portuguese

Conexões filosóficas. From Desidério Murcho.

Consciência. From Miguel Duclós.

Filosofia. From Desidério Murcho.

Filosofia. From Paulo Francisco Slomp.

Guia da Filosofia na Internet. From António Rodrigues Gomes. (Based on this Guide.)

Katalog Filozofia w Internecie. From Maciej Soin. (Based in part on this Guide.)

Uma Janela para a Filosofia. From Sandro Reis. Also available in English. (Based in part on this Guide.)

Guides in Romanian

The Romanian Philosophical Portal on Higher Education. From Viorel Guliciuc. Under construction. All pages will be published in Romanian, English, and French.

Guides in Russian

Philosophical Resources on the Internet. Portions available in English. If speed is a problem, try this mirror site. From Rinat Ischakov.

Philosophy in Russia. From Maxim Lebedev.

Guides in Spanish

Anábasis digital Portal Bibliográfico de Filosofía. From Anábasis. (Annoying music.)

Guía de Recursos de Filosofía en Internet. From Jesús Hernández Reynés. Also available in in Catalan.

Proyecto Filosofía en Español. From Gustavo Bueno.

Recursos de Filosofía en Español. From José Filgueiras.

Red Filosofica Peruana. From a growing group of Peruvian philosophers.

Guides in Swedish

Filosofi. From Yiva Holm.

The Philosophy Net. From Daniel Rönnedal. Portions available in English.

source: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/philinks.htm

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Arts courses will be offered as planned for the fall semester

University of Iowa News Release

The University of Iowa will be back in business in the fall, and that will include the departments most affected by the flooding: the School of Music, Theater Department and School of Art and Art History, all of which are located next to the Iowa River on the arts campus.

University of Iowa President Sally Mason noted, "This university is known for its commitment to the arts, and we will honor that commitment to the fullest."

Among the buildings closest to the river are the UI Art Building and Art Building West. John Scott, summer director of the School of Art and Art History, said that no classes or courses had been canceled for the summer, and there are no plans to cancel any courses for the fall.

Some of the school's facilities have been harder hit than others -- particularly the photography, ceramics, metalsmithing and sculpture studios, which were under 6 or 7 feet of water. Those studios will not be available in the fall, and the first floor of Art Building West will also not be available until recovery and repair work is completed. Classes and administrative offices will be moved to other buildings on campus, Scott said, and the school is currently identifying suitable space for the affected studio areas.

Scott said no other details are available at this time. "We are already planning for the fall, while recovery gets under way," he said.

The Division of Performing Arts has also been hit by flooding, particularly the School of Music and the Department of Theatre Arts. Conditions are not yet known in the Theatre Building; it is fairly certain that Clapp Recital Hall and the Voxman Music Building will have to be closed in the fall. Currently, the division staff is housed in Halsey Hall with the Department of Dance. Their primary mission this summer is to identify locations on and around the UI campus for classes that have been displaced by the flood damage.

Kayt Conrad, director of operations for the division, said, "There is much to be grateful for. We were able to save much of our costume collection, many of our musical instruments and the majority of our technology from the floodwaters.

"Ensuring the continuity of our academic missions in Theatre Arts and the School of Music is our highest priority," Conrad added. "As of today, no classes in the Division of Performing Arts have been canceled, and there are no plans to cancel any classes due to flooding. Scheduling staff in theater and music are working on relocating fall classes, performances and recitals, a process that will take several weeks to complete. The Dance Department was largely unaffected by flooding and will continue classes as usual in Halsey Hall.

"We plan to have a full schedule of School of Music, Theatre Arts and Dance events posted on departmental Web sites and on the ArtsIowa Calendar in August. We ask students to check ISIS for information on classes that have been relocated from arts campus buildings."

The School of Art and Art History and the Division of Performing Arts are academic units of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

PHOTOS: Buildings described in this release are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/uinews/.

STORY SOURCE: University of Iowa Arts Center Relations, 300 Plaza Centre One, Suite 351, Iowa City, IA 52242-2500

MEDIA CONTACT: Peter Alexander, Arts Center Relations, 319-384-0072 (office), 319-541-2846 (cell), peter-alexander@uiowa.edu

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Art, Fact, and Artifact: The Book in Time and Place

College Book Art Association Biennial Conference – Call for Proposals

January 8-10, 2009

hosted by the University of Iowa Center for the Book


The art of the book has been at once visionary and documentary, imagining a future that has yet to exist while finding inspiration from the resources of the past. The first biennial conference of the College Book Art Association seeks to bridge the worlds of book art, book history, cultural criticism, and curatorial work through appreciation of the book as an aesthetic sensorium. Scholarship, artistic practice, and the digital age have evoked for us the multimedia nature of the book experience. Animated by practices that define anew the cultural record, contemporary book creators unsettle the categories whereby art is valued and appreciated, making new objects that express the range of human experience. Roused by research into the materiality of texts, humanities scholars and institutional curators have summoned new facts to explain communication technologies, writing an alternative history of word and image in the book format. Pressed by political urgencies, artists and researchers have measured the meanings of art and fact through bookwork that serves as cultural criticism. At a time when the book arts have never been more vital, “Art, Fact, and Artifact” builds from these energies and seeks presentations, papers, and studio demonstrations from artists and scholars interested in the future, present, and past of the book as an expressive form.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Randall McLeod, Department of English, University of Toronto
Tate Shaw, Preacher’s Biscuit Books and Visual Studies Workshop, University of Rochester

Along with session programming, the conference agenda will include exhibits, tours of facilities, open discussion time, and portfolio review. Further details will be forthcoming.

For the conference program, the organizers invite submissions for individual presentations, pre-formed panels, and studio demonstrations.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

Artist presentations of current work or work-in-progress

Studio demonstrations: process/experimentation/resurgence

Questions of materiality: the actual, the physical, the virtual, the digital

The book as document

Curating and collecting: what do we want? how do we know?

The procedural turn, then and now

Flat art, spatial art, temporal art, book art

Intimacy and the book: sex, touch, the private, the public

Institutions and theories of value

The book as witness

Questions of practice: modeling methods

Ideologies of the book

Craft perspectives: the hand in the work

History and documentation: writing our history and our now

Humble books and an aesthetics of the ordinary

Conceptualism, bookwork, and installation

The role of criticism

Space, pace, and plane

The theory and practice of exhibition

Reading and the hand-operated codex

The archive as muse

**DEADLINE: PROPOSALS DUE JUNE 1, 2008**

Send proposals as email attachments to:

center-for-the-book@uiowa.edu

or

University of Iowa Center for the Book
216 North Hall
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
Attn: Art, Fact, and Artifact

All proposal submissions should include: proposal title; name and contact information; a biography or vita of participants; audio-visual needs.

Individual proposals: A 200-250 word description of a paper (abstract for a 20-minute talk), of an artist presentation (20 minutes), or of a studio demonstration (include time requirements for demonstrations).

Organized sessions: a 250-word overview of proposal. Organizers should assemble 3 speakers for a paper session (include individual paper abstracts in addition to overview), 3-4 presenters for an artist presentation (include individual descriptions in addition to overview), 1 moderator and up to 4 contributors for a panel/roundtable discussion, and 2-3 studio specialists for a demonstration.

For artist presentations, along with the description please include 5-10 representative examples of work to be shown (jpegs, pdf or powerpoint).

For studio demonstrations, detail facilities requirements, including equipment, materials & supplies, and space requirements. Please be specific.

Alternative formats encouraged.

Graduate students: the CBAA encourages graduate student participation. The UICB has secured funding to help defray costs for student presenters. To apply, include a brief letter describing your need for assistance.

Presenters must be members of the College Book Art Association. To join, visit the CBAA website at http://www.collegebookart.org/ or you may join when registering for the conference.

For more information, contact Matthew P. Brown (matthew-p-brown@uiowa.edu) or Julia Leonard (julia-leonard@uiowa.edu)


source: http://www.uiowa.edu/~ctrbook/events/CBAA_conference.shtml

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Gender, Postcoloniality and Orality

Hasna Lebbady, Department of English, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

I would like to begin by sharing a problem with you, which has troubled me for many years. As a Moroccan teacher of English, was I simply doing the work of others for them? As a 'Europeanist by training' (Spivak 1993: 145), was I just submitting myself to the structures of a language that imposed its identity on me? Furthermore, how could I articulate myself through a predominantly imperialist and patriarchal medium that defined my ancestors as 'hideous Moor[s]' (quoted in Fiedler 1960: 40) and where, in Alice Walker's words: 'there are only Moors (defined as men) and no Moresses' (1987: 191). The effect of all this was to silence me, for although I had crossed cultures, crossed backgrounds even, while remaining very much at home, I could not find a space for myself within this language. Furthermore, how could I make English my subject without appearing to advocate Westernisation at the expense of my own cultural traditions?

Paradoxically, a possible answer to these questions was to be found in the very subject that appeared to bear such a controversial relationship to my self. The recent developments in English Studies, including Women's Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Studies have endowed the prospect of teaching English with exciting new possibilities for me. These theories have enabled me to perceive that I am not alone to face this type of dilemma and to begin to envisage some ways out of it. They have enabled me to realize that it is possible for those who have been marginalized to begin to forge a space for themselves within this alienating medium. I have now begun to appreciate the different shades involved in reading English, such as that suggested by Gayatri Spivak when she claims that:

the postcolonial as the outside/insider translates white theory as she reads, so that she can discriminate on the terrain of the original. (1993: 197)

The white theory she refers to is that informed by postmodernism and poststructuralism which she suggests that postcolonialists need to transform to their own ends.

In fact, there appear to me to be numerous similarities between what different theorists are attempting to do. They all question the centrality of the dominant discourses, which claim to be universal. Postmodernism, both in its theory and in its fiction, calls into question the norms of the center, and, in Linda Hutcheon's words: "challenge[s] their transparency" (1980: 53). Those master narratives are challenged by ex-centrics since they are perceived as: "tool[s] of ideological control" (Lee 1990: 27). Using a similar mode of thinking, but writing within a postcolonial context, Homi Bhabha advocates hybridity, which he describes as being: 'at once a mode of appropriation and of resistance' (1997: 120). What he upholds is a discourse that appears to mimic the one at the center, in this case colonial discourse, but which in fact serves to disrupt it. This is very similar to what Angela Carter proposes when she says that:

It is so enormously important for women to write fiction as women‹it is part of the process of de-colonizing our language and our basic habits of thoughtŠit is to do with the creation of a means of expression for an infinitely greater variety of experience than has been possible heretofore, to say things for which no language previously existed. (1983: 75)

What Carter recommends is a mode of writing which would enable women to represent themselves differently from the way they have been represented within patriarchal discourse. In her novel, The Passion of New Eve (1977), she depicts the way women have been viewed as castrated males by having Evelyn, the male protagonist and first person narrator, reduced at the hands of Mother and her woman's group into Eve. Mother and her group make use of the phallic symbolic‹a knife‹to construct this version of femininity. The being they produce is a 'biological woman' who can only think like a man, as she retains Evelyn's consciousness. In this way Carter foregrounds the extent to which women who conform to the constructs imposed on them by patriarchal norms are trapped within extreme versions of femininity and predominantly masculine views of the self. Such constructions of femininity rely on the binary logic either/or, which is not the one Carter advocates. What she upholds is a sense of gender identity, which acknowledges both masculine and feminine elements at once, without viewing them as extreme oppositions of each other.

Feminist theory has begun to enable some women to conceive of ways out of dilemmas similar to the one that faced me. It has now become a commonplace within this theory to perceive patriarchy as having reduced woman to the Other as Simone de Beauvoir (1949) has argued. This process of Othering, which is also dependent on the binary logic either/or, has been depicted by a number of women writers in terms of the physical reconstruction of women. For example, Fay Weldon in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) depicts this construction of femininity in terms of cosmetic surgery that her protagonist, Ruth, undergoes in her attempt to reduce her 'monstrous' body into the petite shape of her husband Bobbo's mistress, Mary Fisher. The pain involved in such a process is compared to that of

Hans Anderson's little mermaid [who] wanted legs instead of a tail, so that she could be properly loved by her Prince. She was given legs, and by inference the gap where they join at the top and after that every step she took was like stepping on knives. [1983: 173]

Only by thus reducing herself and confining her movement can Ruth begin to be valued within her predominantly patriarchal context.

One process which combines both the idea of castration and reduction in size, and which has been practiced on an inordinate number of women, is genital mutilation. Alice Walker, in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), portrays the construction of femininity in terms of this mutilation. It is what her African American protagonist, Tashi, undergoes in her efforts to return to her roots and become a woman in her tribe:

The operation she'd had done to herself joined her, she felt, to these women, whom she envisaged as strong, invincible. Completely woman, Completely African. Completely Olinka . . . It was only when she at last was told by M'Lissa, who one day unbound her legs, that she might sit up and walk a few steps that she noticed her proud walk had become a shuffle. [61]

Both Weldon and Walker depict the literal construction of femininity and point out the extreme pain with which it is associated. What is of particular relevance to my argument here is the fact that Tashi's wound is the result of her desire to return to the roots, a desire to form an integral part of her African culture. This process is greatly sanctioned by the culture she aspires to form part of, but it is also the process which has led to her sister Dura's death and which Walker reveals as involving even more confinement within the exceedingly patriarchal structures of that culture. It is revelations of this kind which have led Walker to claim, within a different context, that there is a:

connection between mutilation and enslavement that is at the heart of the domination of women in the world. [1992: 131]

Nawal El Saadawi would corroborate this statement as she makes numerous references to genital mutilation in her novels. In Two Women in One (1975), the protagonist Bahiah takes note of what has happened to her sister.

The cries of Fawziah still rang in her ears; there was a red pool of blood under her. Every day she waited for her turn. The door would open and Umm Mohammed would enter with the sharp razor in her hand, ready to cut that small thing between her thighs. [97]

p>In El Saadawi's writing, genital mutilation is revealed to be the threat that serves to ensure women's submission. Its aim is to reduce them to what patriarchy dictates that women should be, about which Bahiah wonders:

And what do you consider a normal woman? One with beaten eyes who walks with closely-bound feet, obedient and submissive, with amputated sexual organs? [1975: 112]

In The Circling Song (1989), El Saadawi carries her argument a step further when she refers to Hamida's genital mutilation as 'a hard metal belt' (67), which she claims is the original chastity belt. However, it is only in The Hidden Face of Eve (1980) that El Saadawi describes her sister's and her own genital mutilation. And it is in that book that she spells out some of the significances of that barbaric act.

In the final analysis we can safely say that female circumcision, the chastity belt and other savage practices applied to women are basically the result of the economic interests that govern society. The continued existence of such practices in our society today signifies that these economic interests are still operative. [41]

Female genital mutilation, like foot binding in ancient China, is what some women feel they must submit to in order to truly belong to their societies, but it is also one way in which women are effectively reduced to the Other, in order, among other things, to ensure the economic aims of their societies. What these women writers foreground is the extent to which patriarchal culture colonizes female sexuality, ensuring that women's bodies are transformed to conform to patriarchal and capitalist aims.

The way patriarchy reduces women to the Other is similar to how colonial discourse reduces people of different races and cultures to Others, as Edward Said (1978) has argued. This process is quite effectively symbolized in J.M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) by the fact that Friday has had his tongue cut off by a knife. This method of Othering is another illustration of the connection made by Walker between mutilation and enslavement. The knife is furthermore reminiscent of the one Evelyn is submitted to in Carter's The Passion of New Eve. In Foe too it is representative of the symbolic order, which serves to maintain the slave dealer in power by effectively silencing the Other, or rendering him incapable of speech.

The fact that his tongue has been removed spurs the female narrator, Susan, to wonder if they have not cut off more than the tongue, suggesting that this too is a form of castration. Friday is castrated within this colonial context to the extent that he is effectively prevented from taking part in the symbolic order in which, according to Lacan, the phallus is 'le signifiant privilégié' (1971: 111). That Friday's oral capacity has been denied further suggests that the oral tradition that may form part of his cultural heritage has been effectively suppressed so that he is reduced to the position of being represented by a European woman narrator who continuously seeks the authority of a male writer in an attempt to accomplish her task. The fact that the Other has been deprived of the possibility of representing himself, and has to be represented through a predominantly imperial and capitalist medium, further suggests the extent to which writing is valorised within this context. Unlike traditional cultures, based on orality, in which narratives belong to society at large, within cultures based on literacy, narratives‹and ideas in general‹become capital assets. In this way orality and literacy come to form another binary opposition, which needs to be subverted.

Subversion is what Friday becomes capable of in the novel. Significantly, despite the slave dealers' efforts, he never becomes reduced to impotence. The way he manages this is by never attempting to make use of the authoritative English at all. Although only he can provide Susan with the closure she seeks in order to represent him, he continuously fails to comply with her wishes. It is, in fact, his refusal to partake in her desired mode of narrativity, which becomes indicative of Friday's power. He mocks Susan's efforts at representation and her desire to become a writer. Furthermore, he succeeds in signifying in ways other than through the use of language. By doing so, Friday defies the capacity of English to impose an identity on him and becomes endowed with a sense of empowerment and potency, which are not dependent on the structures of that language.

Significantly, Susan is prevented from obtaining a similar form of transcendence. By bestowing on her the task of representation, which he himself steers clear of, Coetzee in fact bestows on her a futile task. Although her tongue remains intact, she too has problems taking part in the symbolic. In a novel where writing in general and representation in particular are viewed as authoritative processes, her efforts appear to be particularly useless. What is stressed is her complete impotence in view of the task facing her. Susan, for Coetzee, becomes not so much a narrating character as a way of characterizing the narrative‹a way of feminising it. By making her the narrator, Coetzee's aim is not to empower women but to re-inscribe them into the inferior position to which they have always been relegated. And, in a way, this too is a form of castration, revealing the female narrator to be lacking in the phallic potency, which she aspires to by continuously seeking the authority of the male writer. Whereas Friday is depicted as capable of signifying outside the structures of language, Susan is trapped within the compulsion to conform to the authoritative mode of the male writer, be it Foe or Coetzee himself. Women, even English women, have never had their own tongues. It is such realizations, which have prompted Helen Cixous to point out that:

If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to disclose this 'within', to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it into her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside it. [1980: 275]

In this way, Cixous encourages women to take hold of language and make it their own, without having to rely on the authority of male writing.

The way the writers I've mentioned depict different constructions of identity imposed on those in the margins by the various discourses at the center raises numerous questions. Can women escape from their confinement only by aspiring to male positions? Must postcolonials, like Moors, be conceived of only as males? In order to avoid being subsumed under rampant Westernisation, must one necessarily resort to extreme forms of traditionalism? Is it necessary to continue to valorise literacy at the expense of our rich oral traditions? Should we continue to operate within the binary logic, which is at the heart of these different oppositions?

One could begin to deal with the issues raised in these questions by advocating a refusal to conform to the logic either/or. This is neither a matter of androgyny as advocated by some feminists, nor is it a matter of multiculturalism. It is neither a return to the roots, as Tashi attempts to do in Possessing the Secret of Joy, nor integration into the culture of imperialism. It does not even imply having to make a choice between literacy and orality. What is involved is a whole new process that must be undertaken and a whole new identity that must be arrived at. It is more a matter of taking hold of language, as Cixous advocates, and transforming it from within. We should force it to truly articulate us and not simply enable it to speak us. We must refuse to be confined by its meanings and creatively transform it so that it no longer conforms to the logic either/or. This new space should enable women to be women without feeling any compulsion either to conform to extreme norms of femininity or to ape the norms of male authority. Within this space, postcolonials need not feel compelled to adhere either to extreme forms of traditionalism or to those of Westernisation. Such a space could enable female Fridays to signify and to conceive of themselves differently from the Other to which they have been reduced within the patriarchal colonial discourse. It could even enable Moroccan English teachers to teach the texts of their culture which have not been written before and which have hitherto been marginalized. What is involved, in fact, is not a matter of conforming to a predefined category whether it be that of gender, race, or nation, but of taking the process of construction into one's own hands in an effort to go beyond those categories and creatively come to terms with a new identity that transgresses the boundaries set by those in the center. This would require dismantling the logic either/or and adhering to a different logic; it could involve conforming to the logic neither/both.
Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. The Second Sex. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1988.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge

Carter, Angela. 1977. The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago, 1990.

__________. 1983. 'Notes from the Front Line'. In Michelene Wandor, ed. On Gender and Writing. London: Pandora Press: 69-77.

Cixous, Hélène. 1980. 'The Laugh of the Medusa'. In Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusettes Press: 245-264.

El Saadawi, Nawal. 1975. Two Women in One. London: Al Saqi Books, 1985.

__________. 1980. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. London and New Jersey: Zed Books.

__________. 1989. The Circling Song. London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd.

Fiedler, Leslie. 1960. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1992

Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge.

Lacan, Jacques. 1971. Ecrits 2. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Lee, Alison. 1990. Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London and New York: Routledge.

Walker, Alice. 1989. The Temple of My Familiar. London: The Women's Press.

__________. 1992. Possessing the Secret of Joy. London: The Women's Press.

Weldon, Fay. 1983. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1987.

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source: http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/poldiscourse/casablanca/lebbady2.html

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The Uses of Imagination in Religious Experience

There are signs that we are living in an intensely "religious" period. That is not to say that this is a time of ascendency of the classical Judeo-Christian western religious institutions, but rather that a vast new interest in and experimentation in a whole new range f religious options may be identified. Many of these are eastern -- especially Zen Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism. Others are part of the drug scene. Others have to do with new forms of social existence. Still others are related to ancient and vestigial religions such as astrology. The common denominator in this vastly pluralistic phenomenon is difficult to find. At the same time that the phenomenon represents some forms of disenchantment with western traditions, it also may be seen as simply a period of experimentation. This is not necessarily to be deplored or praised. The fact that we live in that time in history when the Judeo-Christian synthesis is breaking up gives us the impression that religion is in for difficult times. What is more likely, a period of intense exploration and restatement in religion and religious experience is upon us and it will profoundly shape the direction of American religion for some generations to come.

It is in such a pluralistic environment that I wish to focus my remarks. In a sense, they are a defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in another they are a critique of that tradition. My premise is the suggestion that what we call imagination is a central ingredient in any religious experience and that the proper uses of he imagination save religion from being either a mere system of rational statements on the one hand or an unsystematized mélange of experiences on the other.

My definition of imagination is this: It is the act of making images that convey through their shapes, form, and emotional authority a power of reality that lies at the heart of things. It is, further, the act of apprehending the power of events by way of their shapes, forms, and emotional authority so that the ordinary events of life are held in some accountability to a vision of truth. In a real sense, the principle use of imagination is to inform and vitalize human life. It is to create life itself, certainly to create human communities, probably to create all of the informed gestures of love that we know.

In a remarkable little book, The Educated Imagination, Northrup Frye suggests that there are three levels to the understanding and each of the three has its appropriate language. These levels of human understanding are the level of consciousness, the level of social participation, and the level of imagination. Let's look briefly at Northrup's types: Ordinary speech is the language of the level of consciousness. That is speech which requires little use of metaphor, certainly no embellishment, and it may be reduced to a vocabulary of words sufficient for the most primitive life-support function. I find it interesting that in the counter-culture (at least that represented by certain teenage life style) language is almost missing. It is certainly inarticulate, probably because it has been reduced to such a narrow horizon of idealism and hope. I suggest for your consideration that one of the most pathetic indicators that something serious is happening to our culture is the evidence and persistence of this kind of non-language. You are familiar with it: sentences without verbs, sentences punctuated by the phrase "you know" -- which assumes a common experience but which cannot be expressed in metaphors. I find this ironic at the time when the hardware of communications has arrived at such a peak of sophistication. A possibly apocryphal story has Thoreau standing by his pond and watching the first telegraph lines from Maine to Boston being strung and saying, "What if they have nothing to say to each other?" We know how to communicate but not what to say. In the sentimentalism of some psychotherapy, speech is actually derided as somehow not capable of revealing how we "really" feel.

It is a hopeful fact that the many artists in our time do not find this merely ironic but maybe even tragic. In this perception there lurks a latent terror in such situations. Itemember Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The play is a story of a day in the life of an "average" university couple who have been reduced by disappointment and circumstance to the level of consciousness only -- a condition in which there is no landmark, no horizon, no hope, no glory, no victory. Albee mobilizes our attention to the terror of this environment by inviting us to sit in their home for twelve hours and listen to ordinary speech composed of banalities and trivialities -- the ultimate reduction of speech to the most primitive needs of consciousness: survival, taunts, grunts, mimicry, and hate.

Frye's second level of speech he calls the level of social participation, and the appropriate language there is "technological language." Again let me suggest how accurate this typology is. In a world that is increasingly being crowded together, we ascertain curious evidence that the widening effects of overpopulation and social inequity are creating frightening shapes of self-consciousness. We live in a world of social problems so vast that they require a new language. How does one even comprehend something like the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews in World War II? How does one deal with the scope of the problem of 9,000,000 Pakistani refugees spilling over the border into India during the past few months? We invent a technological language -- that is one way of dealing with the problem. In Vietnam it was the "body count." One felt somehow justified when it could be reported like the baseball scores. In the speculation on the misuses of atomic weapons, we began to hear things like mega-deaths; more reassuring to say "one mega death" than 1,000,000 deaths.

With this necessity to invent collective nouns, there is a pressure toward efficiency in technological language that creates its own monsters. When McLuhan said "the medium is the message" he was not kidding. In profound ways, the media of communication shape the language and form of the substance of communication. When the students at Berkeley struck back by folding their IBM cards, they were making a picaresque counter-attack on the language system that ultimately determines the meaning of language. Now it is trite to satirize this, because the computers and data processing hardware already with us and, in significant ways, will be useful. What disturbs some humanists is the possibility that the mode of language will effect changes in the communicator. That is, we may ourselves become machines: consumers, robots, soldiers, students, categories a, b, c, and d -- an image that has been with us in the utopian writer for some time now. Technical language is reduced to the simplest unmetaphorical, unimaginative shapes by the fact that it has to conform to a delivery system. My name is Thomas Trotter, a name, incidentally, that carries both my maternal and paternal lines. It is a biblical name, it has historical meaning for many Trotters and a few non-Trotters. But I am more efficiently known as 567-32-2066 and 149008. My past is best described as 10286314 and, with reference to a possible traffic violation, I am Y809703. This is a game, but what is precarious in this form of technological speech is its possibility that efficiency sooner or later begins to impinge upon our understanding of selfhood and it leads us into the risks of the loss of self. It is no coincidence that the near unanimous judgment of science fiction writers is that a world dominated by technological hardware is a world in which individual human self-identity is missing. Stanley Kubrick's film 2001 is a lyrical statement of a world that is dominated by technological speech. In that beautiful film, the computers are so sophisticated that they, in fact, dominate human beings, even to the point of experiencing basic human emotions like spite, jealousy, and, unfortunately, revenge.

Now the third level of consciousness that I want to lift out of Frye's analysis he calls the level of imagination, and the appropriate speech for this level is what he calls "poetic language." This is the only level of communication in which there is some sort of transcendence implied in the mode of communication. It is the only mode of communication that does not presuppose the ultimacy of one's present environment. Ordinary speech and technological speech are measured by the necessary shapes of one's furniture. Therefore they are co-terminal with one's sensory environment. Poetic speech, on the other hand, is transcendent speech. It is speech which creates its own environment. It is speech that makes its own horizons. It is eschatological speech. It is faithful speech. It is vocational speech. It is speech that sees the inner and outer connection between events because it can make metaphors, draw analogies. It is a speech that is humane and not dehumanizing.

Ordinary speech and technological speech that dominate so much of our life have as their primary purpose the description of the world in which we live. Poetic speech has as its purpose the description of the world we hope for, a world of our hope in the perceived shape of a humane future. That is why a poet has been a shaper of the world. It is commonly held that the artists (particularly the poets) are hopeless and helpless visionaries, drifting about on the fringes of events. But the derivation of the word poet reminds us that it comes from the Greek root of the verb to make -- and it was used in Greek times to describe people who made pots and roads and laws and walls. So Shelley says that the poet is the unacknowledged legislator of mankind. The language of the poet is the language of the wider horizons and shapes of the future. It is my profound conviction that this perception of the role of language in describing our situation in this century of survival is something to which we must increasingly direct our attention. In a time of the triumph of doubletalk, the substitution of statistics for facts, the exaltation of the medium over the message, and the erosion of a sense of the future, the role of the imagination and its uses in our common life, particularly religion, needs our continuing attention.

Let me now suggest three ways in which the role of imagination in religion will open to us a new sense of the uses of the present.

1. Imagination is necessary in religion to develop something we desperately need in a crowded planet, namely, tolerance and love in our human society. Through imagination, we are able to suspend our own passionately held beliefs and to treat them as possibilities and even options, so that we may understand the possibilities and beliefs of others. It is no coincidence that totalitarians have no use for art and a profound suspicion of vital religion. The imagination has a bothersome habit of challenging treasured positions. Political and religious totalitarians are so preoccupied with their own positions that they cannot see them as possibilities. They see them as necessities. Therefore they must be imposed instead of enjoyed or observed.

In the public scene, tolerance is an extraordinary achievement. Without tolerance on a crowded planet, the future is problematic. Imagination enables us to step back from self-assurance, to entertain another's beliefs and values sufficiently removed from action so that mutuality becomes a possibility. Disinterestedness through imagination has the facility of tremendously increasing the sense of the dignity of life and the exhilaration of life. Thus the ethic of the New Testament is properly described as "disinterested love," that is, love that is not calculating. It is not love with a built-in agenda. It is an ethic that requires imaginative response. When Jesus was asked "Who is my neighbor?" he responded to that ironic question with a story about a man set upon by thieves and left beside the road. Christian existence requires imaginative acts. The beginning of love is the sense of the transparency of words and the selfless act of disinterested love. The end of love is the resort to the opaqueness of words that hide our vision from our neighbor's need.

2. A second use of the imagination in religion in our time has to do with removing from us the taking of pleasure in cruel things. There is a fine 18th-century phrase, "literature and art refine our sensibilities." I suppose that a modern restatement of this might be that "imagination sensitizes us." Imagination performs the function of helping us, through reflection, to live out of the depths of existence and to sense the possible shapes of our future without the necessity of experimentation. Joseph Conrad once suggested that the purpose of literature was to render the highest possible justice to the physical universe. In other words, imagination may help us to accept the world as it is, in its grandeur and misery, its beauty and its cruelty. But the world's language has been desensitized, lost its ability to separate cruelty and responsibility and justice and love. Well-worn phrases repeated and dinned into our consciousness by the phrase mongers and TV manipulators have eroded language. Flannery O'Connor, the extraordinary story-teller of the rural South, once spoke of the vocation of the religious artist. She saw the religious artist as living in a world in which imagination had so badly eroded that signs of hope and transcendence were just barely perceivable. One had to look hard for them. So she turned her attention to the grotesque, the perverse, the unacceptable -- as a way of talking about religious questions.

The novelist with (religious) concerns will find in modern life distortions which are cruel and which are repugnant to him and his problem will be (through imagination) to make these appear as distortions to an audience which has grown accustomed to seeing these things as natural. And he may well be forced to take ever new and violent means to get his vision across to a hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use the normal means of talking. When you have to assume that it does not hold those views, then you make your vision apparent by shock. To the hard of hearing you shout and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

Ultimately this has bearing on the widely debated distinctions between pornography and art. The pornographic exploits, demeans, turns in on itself, has no redeeming social value, is cruel; and possibly the worst thing that can be said about it is, it is unimaginative. Real art, however, requires imagination. Imagination offers all the suggestion of the endless delights of human love, the metaphysics of love, the recurrent surprises of the human condition. Imagination can redeem memory, it can kindle love. So Keats writes in one of his last letters of Fanny Brown these words: "Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear." What more can one say with words? What technical language is more adequate than that? Pornography, whether exploitation of sex or violence or cruelty, in its private forms and in its social forms such as war, is the language of cruelty. Imagination may guard us from taking pleasure thoughtlessly in the cruelty around us in this world and instruct us in seeking out the contours of love in a crowded planet.

3. Finally, imagination is a necessary ingredient in perceiving our sense of future. The use of the imagination in assisting us in living tout the future that is often so dim and conditioned by prophecies of loom and despair may well be the primary task of art and religion in ur time. Northrup Frye has said,

The fundamental task of imagination in ordinary life is to produce out of the society we have to live in a vision of the society we want to live in.

For a truly religious person, faith is no settled world view or place or comfortable station. The most powerful metaphors in the Judeo-Christian tradition are metaphors of the way, the journey, the exodus, the road, the highway. Imagination and faith make unnecessary self-conscious posturing. Imagination and faith despise rhetoric and prefer direct statements.

Properly to understand Israel in biblical times, one must sense immense power of imaginative speech to evoke images, compel attention, and direct action. Just take one example, the so-called Exodus event -- the memory of rescue from slavery and of guidance through years of desert wandering into the promised land of Canaan. Whenever the religious leaders of Israel wanted to sensitize the nation, to call it back into faithfulness and obedience to the Torah, those leaders turned to the poetry of metaphor. So Hosea spoke of Israel and Yahweh in extraordinary touching language.

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
And out of Egypt I called my son.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took (him) up in my arms;
But (he) did not know that I healed (him).
I led them with cords of compassion,
with the bands of love
and I became to them as one
who eases the yoke on their jaws,
And I bent down to them and fed them. (Hosea 11:1-4, RSV)

Still later, the Deuteronomist, continuing to recall the metaphor of the Exodus event, wrote a description of life lived without the comfort of a lively trust in Yahweh. How modern this sounds to our ears!

There shall be no rest for the sole of your foot; but the Lord will give you there a trembling heart, and failing eyes, and a languishing soul; your life shall hang in doubt before you; night and day you shall be in dread, and have no assurance of your life. In the morning you shall say, "Would it were evening!" and at evening you shall say, "Would it were morning!" because of the dread which your heart shall fear, and the sights which your eyes shall see. And the Lord will bring you back in ships to Egypt, a journey which I promised that you should never make again; and there you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no man will buy you. (Deuteronomy 28:65-68)

Imagination and faith propel men into a future, that is, into a living engagement with concrete experience under some vision of reality that binds together the present.

What we are seeing in our time, I think, is a recovery of the interest in and even the delight in the poets and the artists of vitality, enchantment, imagination, hope, and joy. God has come to be thought of in terms that are static. Poets (imagists) have come to view God as active and alive and moving in our future. History itself, in the recent western past, had come to be voided of novelty, of possibility, and enchantment. Visions of the future and particularly visions of heaven, reflected this joyless, flat, and unimaginative terminus ad quem of Christian existence. The poet Rupert Brooke wrote a poem some years ago called "The Song of the Children in Heaven." I read this simply as a footnote to what I am saying:

And when on whistles and toy drums we make a loud, amusing noise,
Some large official seraph comes and scolds, and takes away our toys,
Bids us sit still and be good boys.
And when a baby laughs up here or rolls his crown about in play,
There is a pause. God looks severe; The Angels frown, and sigh and pray,
And some-one takes the crown away.

That is a rather imaginative and somewhat satirical statement of a future that has lost its enchantment, its vitality, its hope, its imaginative possibility.

It is my conviction that imagination can create a language of exaltation and hope that will not be found in common speech or technological speech. That is why such events as the new theater and other mind-boggling statements of our future are so important to us. They represent positive statements of hope in a world in which the possibilities of hope are now obscured by other forms of language and other visions of the future. They are functionally identical with biblical visions of joy and hope -- the eschatological sense that language and faith may indeed convert and convict and lead men and women to that great imaginative vision of the New Testament: a new heaven and a new earth in place of a crowded and tired planet.


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about the author:

F. Thomas Trotter. A graduate of Occidental College (AB) and Boston University (STB, Ph.D), Trotter was Dean and Professor of Theology at the Claremont School of Theology. Later he was General Secretary of the Board of Higher Education and Ministry of The United Methodist Church and President of Alaska Pacific University. His special interests are in religion and the arts and religion in higher education. This essay appeared in Loving God With One's Mind, by F. Thomas Trotter, copyright 1987 by the Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church. Used by permission. This document was prepared for Religion Online by William E. Chapman.

source: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=425

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Loading the canon

When it comes to great books, lists are useful but should also be open to challenge and the element of surprise.


IF someone had told me in my 20s that Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is a story that debates the nature of God, I would have reached for it on the library shelf. I would have reached even faster if I had known the debate opens with a conversation between two brothers, one a sceptic, the other a monk, in the corner of a tavern over tea, preserves and soup. My interest would have been keener still if I had been told that this theodicy is wrapped in a murder mystery.

As it was, I came to the book late, when I was about 45, reading the first English translation, by Constance Garnett, republished in a fine 1961 edition of the Heritage Press, illustrated with lithographs. It has generous font size, something sadly that could not be said about any of the new translations.

When I told someone I was writing a book of recommended reading, published this week as My Reading Life (Penguin, 432pp, $35), his reply was: "What an old-fashioned idea." The opposite is true. In my 20s and 30s, I was restless about my reading choices -- too heavy on current affairs, political biography and contemporary fiction. I needed lists, recommendations, guidance. The barrier to reading the classics, certainly for me, was a fear of being bored. Guides such as Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why (2000) or David Denby's Great Books (1996) are relatively recent.

Not that every reader needs prodding. Friends told me of their 14-year-old daughter, who sailed through War and Peace, identifying with Natasha Rostov. As a result, Tolstoy's novel settled into the girl's bloodstream from an early age. Another mother told me of a teenage girl who read and loved what I have found to be Dostoyevsky's most bewildering novel, The Idiot.

We arrive in our own ways.

Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker, returned to Columbia University 30 years after he had first studied there to enrol in the two great books courses he had completed as a youngster. Sitting with 19-year-olds, he read again the literary masterpieces. In the story of this experience, Great Books, he celebrates Homer, Sophocles, the Bible, Austen, Kant and Virginia Woolf.

But with Goethe's Faust he "could make no more than a spurious connection with a great work that I did not genuinely enjoy". And Don Quixote left the reader "unhappy, even a little bored". Yet a banker recently told me Cervantes' novel had made him laugh out loud.

That's the litmus test for comic fiction and one I use for recommendations in Chapter Two of My Reading Life: Anthony Powell figures largely in my choice of comic writing, as do Chekhov, Isaac Bashevis Singer and -- this might surprise -- Patrick White. Contemporary readers are only likely to warm to White in books that show his corrosive satirical wit, such as The Eye of the Storm or The Twyborn Affair, rather than in his 1950s modernist experiments. The banker who liked Don Quixote had never touched my Russian friends, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov. By contrast, I view them as a whole lot less scary than Cervantes.

I heard an interview with Federico Fellini in which he said he had never read Marcel Proust or James Joyce but he had still absorbed them nonetheless: "It is not necessary to have read books or to have seen paintings: life by now is conditioned by these works; they are the spirit of the time. So it is enough to live."

This is rubbish, and lazy rubbish. The joy is to know these works first hand, make them friends, not know them by hearsay or Fellini-like osmosis. I found serious reading was the best respite from the gritty demands of being NSW Opposition leader and then premier. In those years I read not always for the absorption in easy pleasure you get from an Alan Furst spy novel set in occupied France or a James Ellroy thriller set in art deco Los Angeles (I include them in my recommendations) but for the longer-term pleasure of self-education or stretching one's consciousness. And, then, of revisiting Homer and Tolstoy or Joyce for a second or third time when a once-formidable clunky classic has been rendered translucent, even playful.

Susan Sontag said she was a different person because she had read Dostoyevsky. Different, yes, not necessarily better. We know from Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2004) that the mass murderer was awesomely well read from a personal library of heavily annotated literature. Abraham Lincoln, who spared the lives of deserters and emancipated the slaves, was narrowly read, although deeply.

Thinking through my reading choices drove me to Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature (1980). What a university teacher he was! I liked his observation that as infants we read to identify with characters, as adolescents we read to learn about life. But as adults we read books "for the sake of their form, their visions, their art".

Especially in rereadings. I found myself back in Joyce's Dubliners, savouring his art, lingering over a story such as The Boarding House. On a summer Sunday in Dublin, the lace curtains "ballooned gently towards the street beneath the raised sashes" and the breakfast plates bear the "yellow streaks of eggs with morsels of bacon fat". There are crusts of bread that will make Tuesday's bread pudding.

Here is Mrs Mooney's boarding house, 15 shillings a week for board and lodgings. There is gentle Joycean precision in the language but not just in the language, in etching the little world in which Mrs Mooney and her daughter trap a male resident into a dubious marriage.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce was to write about the "sordid tide of life", one of my favourite phrases from books; in Dubliners I admire the deft delineation of dingy, urban existences -- to invoke Nabokov, the form, the vision, the art.

As for the notion of great books, I've concluded I'm mostly on the side of lists but inclined to think we must challenge and not congeal a canon. To start with, I'm puzzled there aren't great books courses at Australian universities. They would draw students from the arid disciplines of law and maths. They would appeal to mature-age students who feel, as Denby or I feel, that our reading has slackened off. A list -- a canon -- of books disciplines our choices and provokes us. My university education was mediocre. The best thing about it was those reading lists in English: four novels by William Faulkner, six Shakespeare plays, a brace of D.H. Lawrence and so on.

But you can question and chop up a canon. I begin the first chapter of My Reading Life with Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, an account of Auschwitz survival and in my view the most searing testimony out of the horrors of the previous century. I match it with Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel, Silence, the title of which refers to the silence of God in the face of the suffering of missionaries tortured in medieval Japan. And I link it with a third book, The Brothers Karamazov. Each book handles the teasing question of a deity who allows suffering.

Yes, I favour challenging the canon. In my recommendations on politics I hold up books from which a reader can learn more about politics than from Aristotle or Machiavelli.

Take a charming book published in 1961, The Earl of Louisiana, by A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker. It's a study of Earl Long, governor of Louisiana and brother of Democratic Party populist Huey Long. Liebling writes:

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavour with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas -- stale and unprofitable.

So much like Joh for Canberra.

To a hardliner who wanted to stop Washington forcing racial desegregation on the south, Earl Long said: "What are you going to do now, Leander? The feds have got the atom bomb." No truer words have been spoken or written about the centripetal tendencies of modern federalism. And you won't learn that in Aristotle's Politics.

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this article was written by Bob Carr, published at www.theaustralian.news.com.au

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Evolution in sacred tradition

HOW can it be that the most tradition-bound Aboriginal art centre in Australia, Buku-Larrnggay, at Yirrkala on the tip of northeast Arnhem Land, is pouring forth the nation's boldest and most innovative indigenous paintings and three-dimensional works?

Visitors to the startling new exhibitions of Yirrkala art on view this month in Sydney and Darwin could be forgiven for imagining themselves caught up in a whirlwind, so startling are the experiments in form and technique being explored by the established masters of bark painting in the far north. Sculpted stringybark trunks, painted ceremonial poles with natural cavities freely incorporated into the traditional patterns, cross-hatched depictions of waves in motion: there seems no limit to the inventions being pioneered within the strict grid of the region's clan designs.

The reputation of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land for conservatism in their art was always slightly overdone: even in the 1960s the leaders of the different clans at the Yirrkala mission were willing to display their sacred stories in the form of painted panels at the local church, and throughout the past two decades the best-known Yolngu artists have forged distinctive, highly recognisable styles.

Nothing, though, in the gradual development of the art of the region gave any clue to the creative explosion that began five years ago, with the launch of a movement known simply as Buwayak, the word for invisibility in the local Yolngu Matha language group.

The first Buwayak paintings, shown in an exhibition at Sydney's Annandale Galleries in 2003, were an act of disclosure. They presented not just veils of pattern but glimpses of the totemic creatures implicit in the landscape. They were works that at once concealed and revealed, and launched an exploration, through Yolngu eyes, of the limits to what can be seen or shown. Light, the light of transformation and illumination, pulsed through this work: the shimmer of sunlight on tropical waves, the blaze of bushfire, lightning's jagged strike. That brilliant light is still much in evidence in the two latest exhibitions from Yirrkala.

Raft Artspace in Darwin and Annandale Galleries in Sydney's inner west have long associations with Buku-Larrnggay and have staged remarkable, museum-grade shows of its work in recent years. Both have done so again this season with very different material.

Raft's show explores the tradition of figure carving. Some of the new pieces are dazzling departures from convention; some remain close to the sculpted ranga objects used in ceremony. Annandale offers a suite of drastically experimental works by established artist Wanyubi Marika, together with a selection of barks and decorated poles by six young guns full of promise. Annandale's Bill Gregory believes that young artists from the traditional indigenous world are finding their styles early, in a way that would have been impossible a few years ago.

"Previously, young men would have been almost wholly restricted to helping their elders," Gregory says. "There's a great deal more freedom today. These artists have already found a way of expressing themselves that's unique to them. Their own voices are telling the timeless and age-old sacred stories from which the art derives. They're coming up with the most remarkable work I've seen in the 12 years I've been representing Yirrkala. If there's a golden age in this movement, it's now, or looming just over the horizon."

These are big claims. Do they stand up? And if so, what explains the continuing vitality of the tradition in Yirrkala and its surrounding outstations?

A glance at the Darwin exhibition suggests some leads. The show's title, Bitpit, comes from the word for a new shoot or bud springing from an established tree, and the carvings that fill Raft Artspace are at once familiar and fresh.

There are bird totems with long, thin beaks that reach down to their pattern-covered breasts; there are gaunt spirit sculptures from the domain of mortuary ritual; there is a lovely, black-painted figure, fondly known as the handsome man: he is Barama, the ancestral creator of the Gangan waterhole, and he was made by one of the principal Yolngu artist-philosophers of the older generation, Gawirrin Gumana. His face is austerely sketched, his expression hieratic; symbolic meanings lurk like genetic code within the patterns drawn on his body.

Close by him stands a much more active sculpture: this is Baru, the ancestral figure whose anger burned him so brightly he changed into a crocodile, with rough fire-blazed scales upon his back. The carving, by celebrated bark painter Djambawa Marawili, shows the instant of transformation: it is a Yolngu equivalent to Bernini's marble version of Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel tree.

This is art that has travelled far from the prescribed ceremonial forms that gave it birth: the well-buried sacred element is being brought closer to the surface and subjected to a procedure of constant modification. The templates of bark painting are being tested and stretched.

In the Sydney exhibition, this tendency becomes even more pronounced.

Wanyubi, whose barks were the triumph of the first Buwayak show, here attempts to capture, in the gleam of rippled cross-hatching, the effect of canoe paddles dipping into water.

Water - fresh, salt, still, flowing - is the medium for clan definition in northeast Arnhem Land, where alliances and interrelations reach baroque levels of intricacy: the moment of Yolngu world creation came when the ancestors first dipped their canoe paddles in the shallow waters off Port Bradshaw and defined the pattern of the coastal seas.

Wanyubi's paintings, then, are a version of that primal act: the artist's whirling vortex forms dance on the curved surface of the poles in the suite and twist heavily on the large boards with their repeating wreaths of brownish paint.

Wanyubi's works stand guard before a gallery full of pieces from the student generation of Buku-Larrnggay, several of whom are still in their 20s. Dhurrumuwuy Marika's nested arcs, Yilpirr Wanambi's tight, divided geometric planes, Yalanba Wanambi's dark contrast backgrounds: all are painstakingly executed, all convey a sense of personal tone.

But the master of the exhibition is Gunybi Ganambarr, 35, a member of the tiny Ngaymil clan, who lives in his mother's community of Gangan and is son-in-law to Djambawa Marawili. The long-serving art co-ordinators at Buku-Larrnggay, Andrew Blake and Will Stubbs, regard Gunybi's entry for this year's Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award as the finest new bark painting that has come their way.

All the works by Gunybi on view at Annandale are creations of the utmost finesse and finish. His ceremonial poles bear traditional Gangan markings, but they are incised, rather than merely painted, and animal forms seem to writhe amid the matrix of clan patterns and shapes. It is his barks, though, that most hold the eye: they are double-sided, rather like medieval portable altars, and the designs on recto and verso relate. The figure drawings on these wooden panels are of exceptional elegance. His diving birds may be the most beautiful creatures painted on a stringybark surface; they loop and curve against the diamonds and cross-hatched gleaming designs. Gunybi's capacity to fuse narrative, form and colour sets these four double-sided pieces among the jewels of the Yolngu painting tradition.

New work of this kind testifies to something much deeper than mere cultural survival or even innovation within a pre-determined model.

It marks an evolution, and that development seems bound up with the message-bearing role of the bark painters working in and around Yirrkala in recent decades. Since the days of the church panels and the pioneering Gove land rights case, brought to court by Wanyubi's father Milirrpum, painting has been a means for the Yolngu to speak to Australia at large, to convey the depth and splendour of their world.

What exactly do we want from Aboriginal art? Tradition and authenticity, or beauty and originality? These two exhibitions, on view at different ends of the continent, suggest that a living, fully realised creative current can offer both, and that there may be many further twists and turns in the journey of ceremonial art into the contemporary market.

A further, intriguing question arises, lurking insistently within the contours of these barks and smoothly sculpted statues and ceremonial poles. They all adhere to their rigid code: only certain colours are admissible; the subject must be a story from the ritual system that explains the cosmos and sets out the relationships between clans and groups; the gleam of the sacred must underpin each work. This is an unyielding tradition, yet works of grace and fluency are being made within it. Can it be that, in the chains and cords of such a rule-bound system, beauty and transcendence are most freely born?


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About Author:
Wanyubi Marika and Young Guns II is at Annandale Galleries, Sydney, until May 10. Bitpit: Carving Project from Northeast Arnhem Land is at Raft Artspace, Darwin, until May 31.

source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23661313-16947,00.html

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Regional Arts Australia Volunteer Awards

Nominations for Regional Arts Australia Volunteer Awards are now open.
The regional Arts Australia Volunteer Awards aim to recognise, reward and encourage regionally- based arts and cultural volunteers who have made a substantial contribution to the arts in regional communities in Australia.

Contact Jo McDonald on (08) 8444 0428 or 0423 290 436 or e: info@regionalarts.com.au

more information please visit http://www.topendarts.com.au/opportunities/133.html

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We need the Spirituality to resist Imperialism

Interview of Jaihoon, by Husain Kodinhi. Published in Pravasi Doothan, Dec 2006

YOUR ENGLISH POEMS ARE BEING TRANSLATED TO MALAYALAM FOR THE FIRST TIME. WHAT IS YOUR REACTION TO THIS?

It was my long-cherished wish to have my English poems translated. Since I began writing, my family and Malayalee readers had constantly demanded the same. Though a Malayalee, it was my handicap of the language which delayed such an attempt. This was beautifully accomplished by my friend Alavi Al Hudawi, who is currently a lecturer at the Darul Huda Islamic Academy. Dedicated to the late Islamic scholar, Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, this work was published by Islamic Sahitya Academy.

Selected poems from earlier published ?Egoptics? and ?Henna for the Heart? were included in this collection. Affinity with the Spiritual Friend, Love, protest against the System, eulogy of the Holy Prophet are the topics discussed. These poems are different from the traditional themes and strive to instill love and hope in the hearts of the readers.

WHY WERE THE POEMS SELECTED FOR MALAYALAM TRANSLATION INSTEAD OF THE NOVEL WHICH WAS WRITTEN IN THE KERALA CONTEXT?

The contribution of Malayalam poetry for Islamic Sufism is very scarce. The reason maybe cultural as well as religious. Metaphors and symbols evolved in one social and religious order is hard to translate into another unless such similar environment is created. But the Malabar environment was much more than conductive for the birth of such literary works. Besides, the Sufi masters present in cities like Ponnani, Mampuram and Kondotty could have produced a golden era of Mystic Malayalam literature.

What developed instead of Malayalam poetry were the verses in the melodious Arabi-Malayalam. Such literary genius filled with historic anecdotes and spirituality was unique in the entire Muslim world. After the death of it as a living language, such writings became part of history. Considering the above scenario, the relevance for mystic works bearing a spiritual touch would not be out of place. Besides, the onslaught of Consumerism is gaining an upper hand over the efforts of preachers of formal religion. I believe this collection of poems can be a wake-up call in the context of the increasing influence of consumerism in the community.

The lack of spiritual progress brews impatience and intolerance in the hearts of the youth. The spiritual vacuum is a major reason for the increasing suicide and consumerism in the Keralite society. Religious zeal minus spirituality breeds terrorism.

I believe that the goal of my poems is a spiritual catwalk for cleaning our heart of all the filth of hatred towards our fellow humans.

YOU LIVE AN EXPATRIATE LIFE IN SHARJAH. WRITE IN ENGLISH. MALAYALAM IS YOUR MOTHER TONGUE. HOW DO YOU HANDLE THESE CONFLICTING ASPECTS?

Born in Edappal, Malappuram district of Kerala, my primary education was in Malayalam. After family migrated to Sharjah, education transformed into English. The writing medium automatically became English. But my thoughts were set afire by the ideas of the East; expressed in the language of the West. The metaphors and symbols in my poems were of Eastern mystic literature. I cannot think of a poem parting from such symbolisms. The expatriate life in Sharjah has enabled me to closely interact with other cultures and thereby broaden my thinking. I could have access to a wide range of writers and works.

YOU ARE AMONG THE FEW WRITERS WHO HAVE CHOSEN INTERNET AS THEIR WRITING CANVAS. HOW DO YOU EVALUATE THIS TOOL AS A MEDIUM FOR LITERARY EXPRESSION?

All my writings saw light on the internet for the first time. Jaihoon.com is my portal where I showcase my writings. Though not an IT professional, I am able to interact and get simultaneous response from readers from all over the world by utilizing the limitless potentialities of the Web. It is through this medium that I was able to gain readership across North Americas, Europe and Africa. My second book, Henna for the Heart, was published from the U.S. Recently I have begun a blog as well in the cyberspace.

Internet has paved way for the democratization of art and knowledge. It crosses the man-made boundaries and challenges the credibility of mainstream media as well as the lordship of intellectual mafia.

Strong influences of Sufi thoughts are apparent in all your writings. How did Sufism become an inspiration for you?

The influence of Sufism is not deliberate at many times. Even while as a young student, I have tried to closely understand the poetry of Allama Iqbal. As a youth, I began to read Jalaludhin Rumi. It was their Sufi thoughts that saved my identity from the bestial aspects of Western culture. Imam Sirhindi?s works convinced me the limitations of human intellect. Teachings of Shah Waliyullah and Syed Abul Hasan Nadwi were real inspirations. How could I liberate myself from the influence of these great teachers?

MANY OF YOUR POEMS CONTAIN A CALL FOR RESISTANCE AGAINST CULTURAL INVASION AND IMPERIALISM. WHAT MESSAGE ARE YOU TRYING TO DELIVER?

Imperialism and consumerism are enemies of humanity. It is the duty of a writer to protest against them. It is in the interest of humanity to voice support for those who are hunted unjustly. Humanity has become cheap in the eyes of those who see everything in a material way. Woman has become the best commodity of sale. I wish to share the message of Divine Love in place of the love expressed for purely selfish ends. Love is no love at all, if for God is not a role.

WHAT IS YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON THE KERALA MUSLIMS?
The community, despite closely associated with Islamic history and knowledge, is yet to wake up from slumber. The clergy is still hesitant to debate contemporary problems and resolve them as per the demand of modern man. Although progress has been made on many fronts, the intellectual contribution of the leadership is scarce. While religious movements are active, it doesn?t broaden their horizon.

Although celebrations are in full swing on bygone saints like Abdul Qadir Jilani, there were no noticeable protests when the Imperialist forces were destroying the hometowns of such noble sages. The problem is there is no universal perspective about the Muslim world.

source: http://www.jaihoon.com/we-need-the-spirituality-to-resist-imperialism.htm

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ADVY Photo Expo C4C

Photography: Lucky Djoko

Opening:
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
at 7:30 pm

Discussion:
Agus Leonardus (photographer)
Tubagus P. Svarajati (art critic)
Friday, June 20, 2008
at 7:00 pm

Exhibition: June 12—28, 2008

Open daily: 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Except holidays

Free, No Admission
Welcome!

more info contact Rumah Seni Yaitu

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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The devil's appeal

I'm somewhat stumped by Wuthering Heights. It's solidly ensconced in the literary canon and inflicted on classes of students. And plenty of people—readers and writers alike—claim to love it.

But three readings at various times in my life have left me as indifferent as my first exposure to it in high school.

It's not that I think it's bad. It's not that I don't recognize how cleverly it's structured—with the story being told by several narrators, often second and third-hand, so we cannot entirely rely on any one person's impressions, and with the various symmetries of plot that commentators are always pointing out. (Though I'm not sure why this latter point is so exemplary—life is not so neatly balanced, so why should our literature be?) And it's not that I don't recognize that one great enigmatic character is created in the figure of Heathcliff.

But the problem is that I find it all so (and here's the worst thing that can be said about any novel) boring.

Now those who love Wuthering Heights are gasping at the use of this word. They have become entirely wrapped up in the emotional intensity of this novel and cannot understand how anyone could be left cold by it.

But mine is not the kind of boredom that comes from nothing of significance happening. Rather the kind that arises from things happening—the same things happening, over and over. Yes, it's all very dense, tense and intense. But enough already. I really don't care enough about the characters to put up with their endless whinging, their continual longings and upheavals. I can't believe in them, and so I cannot participate in their emotional wringing, any more than I can stand to watch more than fifteen minutes of a soap opera on television.

Yes, there's a germ of interest near the beginning, when the wretched little Heathcliff is adopted into the Earnshaw family of country gentlefolk. His mistreatment at the hands of young Hindley Earnshaw, among others, and his closeness to Hindley's sister Catherine set up a tension similar to that found in some of Dickens's stories of abused youth. But the rest of the novel consists of Heathcliff's revenge on everyone, well into the next generation. He's as villainous as they come, the men folk he opposes are weak and insipid, and the women folk are stronger but also stupid. Especially the second half of the novel, after his original antagonists have died off, just drags and drags through the inevitable steps of his eventual victory over all. And then it all ends anticlimactically and goodness is restored.

Emily Brontë, along with her sisters, was much influenced by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Gothic strain is strong in Wuthering Heights, as in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights also shares with Shelley's book the creation of a unique (at the time) central figure who both repels and attracts. Heathcliff is repeatedly presented as a devil, a man of almost darkly inhuman drive and power. He's evil, no doubt, but we are drawn to him, fascinated by him.

At least that's the experience of those who fall in love with this book, for whom it is a great romance of dark passions.

Sorry, I've never been able to buy into it. As I'm reading it I just wish someone would shoot Heathcliff and get it over with. Or someone would shake the idiotic men and women around him to their senses, so they would act like real people in real life for a change. I can't help suspecting Emily Brontë had no concept of how other people live, love and think.

But of course if this is your kind of novel, you're probably not interested in how real people live, love and think. Or rather, to be fair, you may feel that the heightened, almost ecstatic, sensibilities in such art can reveal something profound about what's really going on behind how we appear to live, love and think in the real world.

I can appreciate that. I might even get into it with certain books. Just not with Wuthering Heights.

source: www.editoreric.com

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The Diviners by Margaret Laurence

Only in Canada, you say? Pity

Write what you know, they tell beginning writers. And even veteran, successful authors tend to stick to this advice. Which is why we get so many novels about people trying to write novels. And which is one of the reasons why so many people are turned off serious modern writing. Too self-indulgently intellectual and irrelevant to most people's lives.

Granted there are some very good and popular novels featuring writers. Works by several great authors come to mind. The thing is though that, while these may feature writers, they are not about the writers trying to write. Rather, writing just happens to be the profession of the characters who are engaged in more important issues of life.

This is happily the case with The Diviners. The protagonist Morag Gunn is obviously based on Margaret Laurence herself, being raised in a small Manitoba town, working on a local newspaper, marrying a professional man, separating, becoming a novelist, living for stretches in Vancouver and Britain. Many differences too however. In the final analysis it's a work of imagination, as Morag deals with her scarring childhood, the men in her life, a footloose daughter, and her quest to discover where she belongs.

Now here's where it gets dicey. Parts of the novel just seem too made-up. You can see the secondary characters being introduced, given their requisite quirks and moved around to fulfill their roles in the narrative. You can see the thinking that went into the dialogue that each character is provided.

Not always though. The greatest character is Morag's adopted father Christie, the town's garbage man, or Scavenger as he's called, seen mainly in flashbacks to her youth. A brown-toothed, uneducated, impoverished embarrassment to the young Morag in public but a loving, beloved storyteller to her in private, he's the life of the novel whether he's present or not. Also, the once-love of Morag's life, a ne'er-do-well Métis country singer named Jules "Skinner" Tonnerre is a natural character we want to see more of.

But too many other people, especially those in Morag's present life are ciphers. Her daughter and daughters' companions are stereotypical hippies of the time. Her professor husband, her own friends and neighbours and assorted landladies all seem to perform their narrative functions and then shuffle offstage.

This is not necessarily a fatal flaw. You can often see the story-telling contrivances at play in works by great writers from Homer to Shakespeare to Dickens and Irving. But in those works you are soon transported into that contrived world and no longer care how you got there. In The Diviners however we are not enraptured enough by Morag's existential crisis, whatever it is, to take our eyes off the mechanics of the whole production.

Now, if you had asked me a few years ago about The Diviners, I would have offered a far different assessment. I might have rhapsodized about how much I loved Margaret Laurence's work. I night have gone about her honestly drawn characters and her understated writing style with its emotional undertow. I might have decried a certain Canadian critic who recently put down Laurence's revered work as not being world-class.

But I've just re-read The Diviners. In the time between readings, I've been exposed to the greatest works of world literature. And with my better-trained eyes I see that The Diviners is not in that class of good. There's a certain flatness to it, a refusal to go for the big, difficult questions. It prefers to settle for the easier, more comforting conclusions about how story and mythology determine our place in the world. (A lot of CanLit does this, come to think of it. Why is this?)

A Canadian classic perhaps. We'll have to settle for that.

source: www.editoreric.com

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Online casino guide at Gamblecraft

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Free Writer Blog

Having a blog for a writer is a must. With a blog a writer can express his expression, and his work will be read by the audience anywhere at anytime. This is the excitement of blogging. You have freedom to express your own oppinion and interact with other blogger.

Some people use their blog as a diary online, note their daily life, and other use their blog to save their data on the net. Blogging is a simple way and cheapest way for anyone to have personal website, because blogger do not need to master the html or php, with the ready template, blogger can manage their blog easily.

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Create a Free Blog or personal online journal at Thoughts.com. Upload photos, videos, podcasts, chat in the community forums and bookmark the latest news. Thoughts.com allows you to decide for each blog post if you want it to be public, private, or only viewable by your friends and family. Free unlimited bandwidth.

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Toni Morrison: The Salon Interview

I met Toni Morrison at her apartment in SoHo. She hung up my coat and offered me a drink, and we settled in for a conversation. I was immediately aware of the gentleness in that room -- her listening presence. Morrison's seventh novel, "Paradise," had just been published by Knopf, and throughout our talk her phone rang continually with news -- from her son, her sister, a friend -- of the reviews the book was getting. An unhurried and thoughtful speaker, she took it all in stride. "Paradise" -- which opens with the startling sentence "They shoot the white girl first" -- involves the murder of several women in the 1970s by a group of black men, intent on preserving the honor of their small Oklahoma town; they see the women as bad, a wayward influence on their moral lives. It's an intense, deeply felt book that easily ranks with her best work.

Toni Morrison was born in Loraine, Ohio, in 1931. She attended Howard University, then received a master's degree in English at Cornell University, where she wrote a thesis on William Faulkner. Her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," was published in 1969, followed by "Sula" in 1973. Then came "Song of Solomon" (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, "Tar Baby" (1981), the play "Dreaming Emmett" (1985) and "Beloved" (1987), which received the Pulitzer in 1988. Her novel "Jazz" appeared in 1992, and in 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Last year she was the co-editor, along with Claudia Brodsky Lacour, of a volume called "Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson case." An editor at Random House for many years, Morrison now teaches fiction writing at Princeton University.

Do you read your reviews?

Oh, yes.

What did you think of Michiko Kakutani's strongly negative review of "Paradise" in the New York Times?

Well, I would imagine there would be some difference of opinion on what the book is like or what it meant. Some people are maybe more invested in reading it from a certain point of view. The daily review in The New York Times was extremely unflattering about this book. And I thought, more to the point, it was not well written. The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

You don't feel you need to protect yourself from listening to critics?

You can't.

You need to know what's being said?

I know there are authors who find it healthier for them, in their creative process, to just not look at any reviews, or bad reviews, or they have them filtered, because sometimes they are toxic for them. I don't agree with that kind of isolation. I'm very much interested in how African-American literature is perceived in this country, and written about, and viewed. It's been a long, hard struggle, and there's a lot of work yet to be done. I'm especially interested in how women's fiction is reviewed and understood. And the best way to do that is to read my own reviews, for reasons that are not about how I write. I mean, it doesn't have anything to do with the work. I'm not entangled at all in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it, how I succeeded at doing it. So it doesn't have that kind of effect on me at all. But I'm very interested in the responses in general. And there have been some very curious and interesting things in the reviews so far.

"Paradise" has been called a "feminist" novel. Would you agree with that?

Not at all. I would never write any "ist." I don't write "ist" novels.

Why distance oneself from feminism?

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. I detest and loathe [those categories]. I think it's off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.

Because the book has so many women characters, it's easy to label.

Yes. That doesn't happen with white male writers. No one says Solzhenitsyn is writing only about those Russians, I mean, what is the matter with him? Why doesn't he write about Vermont? If you have a book full of men, and minor female characters --

No one even notices. No one blinks that Hemingway has this massive problem with women.

No one blinks at all.

Many of the male characters in "Paradise" have severe problems. I was wondering if you yourself identified with any of them as morally strong characters?

I suppose the one that is closest to my own sensibility about moral problems would be the young minister, Rev. Maisner. He's struggling mightily with the tenets of his religion, the pressures of the civil rights, the dissolution of the civil rights.

And he's worried about the young.

And the young. He's very concerned that they're being cut off, at a time when, in fact, he probably was right, there was some high expectations laid out for them, and suddenly there was a silence, and they were cut off.

He's like Lev in "Anna Karenina."

Right.

Struggling with the moral --

He's not positive about all of it, but he wants to open up the discussion. He wants to do this terrible thing, which is listen to the children. Twice it's been mentioned or suggested that "Paradise" will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

"Paradise" has also been called a "difficult" book.

That always strikes me -- it makes me breathless -- to be told that this is "difficult" writing. That nobody in the schools is going to want to talk about all of these issues that are not going on now.

Do they say that about Don DeLillo's "Mao II," because it involves cults?

No, there's a different kind of slant, I think. Different expectations. Different yearnings, I think, for black literature.

You mean, they want you to step into what they've already heard?

And say, once again, "It's going to be all right, nobody was to blame." And I'm not casting blame. I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.

Did you have any relationship to the word "feminism" when you were growing up, or did you have a sense of yourself first as black and then as female?

I think I merged those two words, black and feminist, growing up, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and very aggressive and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. They had enormously high expectations of their daughters, and cut no quarter with us; it never occurred to me that that was feminist activity. You know, my mother would walk down to a theater in that little town that had just opened, to make sure that they were not segregating the population -- black on this side, white on that. And as soon as it opened up, she would go in there first, and see where the usher put her, and look around and complain to someone. That was just daily activity for her, and the men as well. So it never occurred to me that she should withdraw from that kind of confrontation with the world at large. And the fact that she was a woman wouldn't deter her. She was interested in what was going to happen to the children who went to the movies -- the black children -- and her daughters, as well as her sons. So I was surrounded by people who took both of those roles seriously. Later, it was called "feminist" behavior. I had a lot of trouble with those definitions, early on. And I wrote some articles about that, and I wrote "Sula," really, based on this theoretically brand new idea, which was: Women should be friends with one another. And in the community in which I grew up, there were women who would choose the company of a female friend over a man, anytime. They were really "sisters," in that sense.

Do you keep the company of female writers? Do you find a need for that?

I really have very few friends who are writers. I have some close friends who are writers, but that's because they're such extraordinary people. The writing is almost incidental to the friendship, I think. It was interesting to me that when books by black women first began to be popular, there was a non-articulated, undiscussed, umbrella rule that seemed to operate, which was: Never go into print damning one another. We were obviously free to loathe each other's work. But no one played into the "who is best." There was this marvelous absence of competition among us. And every now and then I'd see a review -- a black woman reviewer take another black woman writer, a critic usually, on -- but usually it's in that field of cultural criticism. Because it was always understood that this was a plateau that had a lot of space on it. [salon.com]

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Cheap car rentals in Hoston

There are many things to do in Hoston. You can see the popular pttractions in Houston, such as Water Wall, Children's Museum of Houston, Space Center Houston, Houston Museum of Natural Science, Asian American Festival, Bayou Bend, Houston Holocaust Museum, Laser Quest, Museum of Fine Arts and Tunnel Walks.

Hoston is an ungainly beast of a city, confused by overdevelopment during the oil boom and then traumatized by the sudden slump of the early 1980s. It's a suffocating place, choking with traffic and high on humidity, yet for all this, its sheer energy, its relentless Texan pride, and above all its refusal to take itself totally seriously, give it a perverse appeal, while its well-endowed museums and rich nightlife mean there is always something to do. That Howard Hughes came from Houston makes absolute sense; eccentric, domineering and sordid, the millionaire typified all that makes the city intriguing.

Among the most famous of the philanthropists responsible for the development of downtown Houston was the cruelly named Ima Hogg. Her city improvement projects were largely cosmetic, however, and the contradictions of urban life are still writ large here, where abject poverty (not least among the blacks who migrated here from the rural South in the 1960s) coexists with ostentatious wealth.

When you are travelling in Hoston, Rental Cars will be a good idea. rent a car in houston will save your time than you use public transportation, and rental cars also recommended if you are visiting Hongkong at the first time, so the driver will guide your travelling in Hoston.

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Asian American Literature: Leaving the Mosaic

By Shirley Geok-lin Lim


U.S. novelist Henry James once noted that it takes a lot of history to produce the flowering of literature. In that light, the speed with which new Asian American literature is surfacing might be considered a form of encapsulated history, an enthusiastic response from mainstream U.S. literary circles to the belated appearance of Asian Americans on the U.S. consciousness. At the same time, it suggests that the task of evaluation is both urgent and complex.

Evaluation of a marginal yet emerging and rapidly transforming tradition should avoid definitive criteria drawn from different literary traditions. This does not imply that evaluation is not useful or possible. On the contrary, because emerging literatures are more conflict-situated, provisional and transitory, they must incorporate their own self-reflexive, interrogative, critical discourses -- in other words, a self-evaluation.

A survey of the publishers' lists on Asian American writing shows that in the 1990s, this discipline became, to use a colloquial phrase, a "hot property." Its popularity in the early days of the new century can be generally linked to the success of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to such African American authors as W.E.B. Du Bois of the early 20th century and Toni Morrison of more recent vintage, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1978), the first Asian American work to receive wide acclaim, and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), which established that writer as a best-selling author, have given rise to other writers whose works are of such a range of appeal as to be found in supermarkets and college bookstores alike.

Scholarly and popular interest in Asian American literature is of recent vintage, finding its direct roots in student activism at San Francisco State and the University of California at Berkeley, among other places in the United States in the late 1960s, that led to the creation of interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Today, courses in Asian American literature are common throughout U.S. higher education. As a result, this body of writing has expanded not only in visibility, but also -- more significantly -- in achievement.

Journals such as Bridge in New York City, and Amerasia, created at the University of California at Los Angeles, were vital forces in increasing awareness of selected Asian American writers. This interest, which intensified in the last two decades among mainstream U.S. readers and publishing houses, has brought with it renewed opportunities and, ironically, a crisis of representation. One sign of this crisis is the internal debate that swirls around efforts to define a "canon" of texts -- a list of the best or most significant writing -- and to agree upon a fixed curriculum. In that regard, as discussions revolve around provisionality and temporality, Asian American literature is a particularly shifting, oft-contested field.

How, at the outset, does one define the boundaries of Asian American literature? Three early anthologies, Asian-American Authors (1972), Asian-American Heritage (1974) and Aiiieeeee! (1975), suggested that the "melting pot" paradigm was inadequate to an understanding of Asian American cultural identity. At the same time, influenced by the 1960s black civil rights movement, the editors of Aiiieeeee! -- who later published plays, novels, short stories and poetry -- argued that Asian American "sensibility" was an American phenomenon distinctively different from and unrelated to Asian cultural sources. But this point of view evaporated over the years, in the face of increased Asian immigration during the last quarter of the 20th century.

Thanks to that influx, the Asian percentage of the U.S. population has increased from 0.5 percent to more than three percent. Interestingly, Aiiieeeee! focused only on Chinese and Japanese-American authors, almost all of them male. By comparison, in the 25 years since the groundbreaking anthology appeared, U.S. bookstores have been filled with the works of Americans of Filipino, Malaysian, Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Korean and other descents, with women widely and notably represented.

Usually, Asian American literature has been assessed by reviewers and critics from the single perspective of race. In other words, the literature is read as centered on the identity position of Americans of Asian descent and within the context of Asian American immigration histories and legislative struggles against unjust policies and racial violence. The truth is that different immigration histories of national-origin communities give rise to writings reflective of cross-generational concerns and styles. Chinese-language poems written by immigrant Chinese on the barracks walls of Angel Island (the site of immigrants' arrivals on the U.S. West Coast) between 1910 and 1940, and Issei (first-generation Japanese American) tankas (Japanese verse form) have been translated. Each has added to the archival "canon" of Asian American literature. The stories and essays of Edith Eaton (Mrs. Spring Fragrance, 1910), who took the pen name of Sui Sin Far to signify her adoption of the Chinese half of her ancestry, focused on the problems facing Chinese and those of "mixed race," or as she calls them "Eurasians," in the United States of the early 20th-century. Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946) follows a Filipino immigrant as he and other migrant workers struggle for social justice and acceptance. Each is part of the Asian American tradition.

In the period before the burst of new writing of the postwar era and even later, memoirs were the favored genre with immigrant and first-generation writers. (This is true of other ethnic literature as well.) Younghill Kang's The Grass Roof (1931), Pardee Lowe's Father and Glorious Descendant (1943), and Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) satisfied a mainstream audience's curiosity about the strangers in its midst. Indeed, Japanese American World War II internment experiences were a major subject for memoirs and autobiographical poetry across the postwar decades, as reflected in Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter (1956), Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston's Farewell to Manzanar (1973), and Mitsuye Yamada's poems in Desert Run (1988).

But the Asian American writing communities were far from limited to one era and venue, and to one discipline of literature. Writers communicated, and continue to communicate, across a range of genres -- including fiction, poetry, drama and oral history.

The first novel published by a U.S.-born Japanese American (or Nisei) was John Okada's No No Boy (1957), one year after Chinese American Diana Chang's The Frontiers of Love received respectful attention. The swift pace of literary production since then indicates that the trajectory of the Asian American literary tradition is still in formation -- imaginatively so.

The range of achievement in recent years is quite impressive. After the awards garnered by Kingston's The Woman Warrior, other Asian American works found welcome readers and audiences. Cathy Song's novel Picture Bride and Garrett Hongo's collection of verse, The River of Heaven, helped solidify the reputation of the Asian American writing community in the 1980s, as did M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang's startling theatrical piece, and Philip K. Gotanda's drama, The Wash.

As Tan emerged with The Joy Luck Club and Kingston continued her rise with Tripmaster Monkey (1989), other writers like Bharati Mukherjee (Jasmine) came to the fore. Debut novels by Chinese American Gish Jen (Typical American), Korean American Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker) and Vietnamese American Lan Cao (Monkey Bridge) all were warmly received. In 1999, Chinese American writer Ha Jin won the National Book Award for Waiting, his first novel, set against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution. In short fiction, such writers as David Wong Louie (Pangs of Love, and Other Stories 1991), Wakako Yamauchi (Songs My Mother Taught Me, 1994) and Lan Samantha Chang (Hunger, 1998) have been similarly acclaimed.

This range of achievement speaks to the diversity of thematic concerns in Asian American literature that parallels contemporary Asian American heterogeneity. Asian American works are not situated in, nor do they contribute to, a cohesive and united tradition. Rather, certain cultural elements appear to be shared by authors from varying histories and origins. Similar concerns may be seen to arise from a particular East Asian world view, from patriarchal constructions of kinship and gender, and from shared experiences of struggle and isolation in the new world of the United States. And yet, no single tradition underlies the variant strategies and techniques that characterize the achievement of Asian American literature.

The fact is that heterogeneous representations -- in literature as in society -- help to overturn the stereotype of "inscrutable" Asian Americans. (When Filipina-American Jessica Hagedorn titled her recent anthology of Asian American literature Charlie Chan Is Dead, there was more than a touch of irony in this reference to the heroic, yet stereotypical Asian American detective protagonist in the 1930s era novels of Anglo-American writer Earl Derr Biggers and their film adaptations.)

Until recently, Asian American studies accepted a limited psychosocial notion of the stereotype. Psychologists such as Stanley Sue argued that Euro-Americans historically justified their discrimination against Asian Americans on popular prejudices that denigrated immigrants as inferior, diseased, and unwelcome. This unfortunate 19th-century negative stereotype has given way in our day to a positive stereotype of the Asian American as educated, hard-working and successful, a model minority, a depiction that is finding a growing presence in literature as well, even as it is the subject of continued debate within the community.

Another theme, operating alongside race analysis, is gender analysis, with many works recounting Asian American women's struggles against traditional patriarchal attitudes. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is one example -- a complex series of narratives about growing up in a community structured along gender and race lines.

As in most traditional societies, gender roles in Asian American communities have tended to be fixed and communally scrutinized. The tensions these strictures have caused surfaced over the past decade in such anthologies of Asian American writing as Home to Stay (1990) and Our Feet Walk the Sky (1993). Generally, the high esteem centering on male children brought loftier economic and social expectation of sons. Daughters were expected to marry and to become part of their husbands' households. Indeed, the dominant view throughout East Asian societies was that women were subject first to fathers, then to husbands, and then -- if widowed -- to their sons.

Immigration to the United States, a society in which male and female roles are more fluidly and more freely defined, put traditional social values under stress. It follows that this development has affected literature. The works of the younger generation, such as Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land (1996) and Vietnamese-American writer Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge (1997), express the confusions arising from the gap between their desires for self-reliance and individual happiness and their immigrant mothers' expectations. But even at an earlier date, just after World War II, Jade Snow Wong and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, in writing about growing up female, had made similar reflections about gender bias in their families.

It is true, of course, that gender roles often are presented as a function of culture. South Asian American women writers such as Bharati Mukherjee and Bapsi Sidhwa (An American Brat, 1994) have focused on the cross-cultural tensions that arise when crossing national borders. Asian American male characters face a crisis in understanding the significance of manhood -- in books such as Louie's Pangs of Love and Gus Lee's China Boy (1991). In love or in the family unit, therefore, Asian Americans have had to negotiate conflicting ideals of male and female identities.

Another major theme in Asian American writing is the relationship between parents and children. This, too, has an historical and social underpinning. In years past, because of the language barriers that faced immigrant Asian Americans, the point of view of the American-born, second-generation Asian American sons and daughters usually prevailed in their literature. As early as 1943, Lowe's autobiography, Father and Glorious Descendant, gave U.S. readers the character of a dominant father within a strong, cohesive ethnic community.

While second-generation children often reject their parents' social expectations, immigrant parents are not simply flat representations of static societies. They are also individuals who had broken away from their original communities in moving to the United States. As a result, the U.S.-born Asian American writers portray complex parental characters who are themselves double figures. Works by Yamamoto and Yamauchi depict mother-daughter relationships that are prone to conflict and tensions that are not only familial, but also gender-based. Lan Samantha Chang's evocative short stories in Hunger further exemplify such writing.

Parent-child relationships are not merely signified as a set of themes but also as patterns of narrative strategies -- points of view, plots, characters, voices and language choices. Who the center of consciousness is in the poem or story affects the flow of identity for the reader. The range of voices and tones given to the speakers tells us whether the parents are non-English-speaking immigrants or bilingual speakers, and whether or not the children differ vastly from their parents in cultural attitudes and values. What is seldom in doubt is the central significance of the parent-child relationship in these works, illuminating the primary social role that families play in Asian American communities.

Some of these works are also pegged to regions. For example, the narratives of Okada, Toshio Mori and Kingston are set specifically in enclaves on the U.S. West Coast, while Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) takes place in New York City's Chinatown, a continent away. Works emanating from Hawaii, such as Milton Murayama's novel All I Asking for Is My Body (1975), and Lois-Ann Yamanaka's poems and fictions in Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) and Blu's Hanging (1998), express a strong island identity and use English registers and dialect resources specific to Hawaiian colloquialism. Similar island-identified themes and stylistic registers are evident in anthologies and titles published by Hawaii's Bamboo Ridge Press.

Invariably, there has been a move toward postmodernist techniques present as well in recent years. Works by younger contemporary authors, such as novelist Cynthia Kadohata's In the Valley of the Heart (1993) and the dramas of playwrights Hwang and Gotanda match Kingston's tour-de-force novel Tripmaster Monkey (1989). They experiment with such on-the-edge techniques as parody, irony and pastiche to challenge the interlocking categories of race, class and gender, and to include sexual identity as one of the central themes of identity. Using similar techniques, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters (1990), set in the Philippines, critiques historical U.S. colonialism and the Marcos regime while celebrating Filipino cultural fusions.

Single-genre anthologies offer a wide spectrum of styles and voices. The Open Boat (1993) and Premonitions (1995) indicate new directions in poetry. Charlie Chan Is Dead (1993) and Into the Fire (1996) introduce readers to recent fiction. And two 1993 anthologies, The Politics of Life and Unbroken Thread, record what is happening in drama. There is a healthy heterogeneity evident as well in recent anthologies focusing on individual national origins, such as Living In America (1995), the reflections of South Asian Americans, and Watermark (1998), a collection of writings by Vietnamese Americans, as well as a newly-published volume, Southeast Asian American Writing: Tilting the Continent (2000). And certainly there is a rich variety of communal identities, genres and styles to be found in recent general anthologies, including Shawn Wong's Asian American Literature (1996).

Taken together, the goal of these anthologies is to provide satisfactory access to the provocative, challenging and original works produced in the last century. Striking a balance between well-known, acclaimed works and newer writing, the selections typically reflect considerations of both historical and thematic significance and literary quality, a criterion that often is the subject of healthy and vociferous debate. Together, though, the diversity of styles, genres, and voices testifies to the vitality of Asian American writing.

Ultimately, this diversity has, at its core, transnationalism -- a global movement of cultures, people and capital. This new phenomenon has caused writers to create new identities for people -- and for themselves. The Asian American rubric is a melange of emigres, refugees, exiles and immigrants who have been coming to the United States for decades, continuing to write and be published here. Until recently, though, a number had maintained their identities of origin and even had returned to their native lands later in life. An example is the well-known Chinese writer and Columbia University scholar Lin Yu-Tang, who returned to Taiwan after his retirement from teaching. Despite having written a novel set in the United States, Chinatown Family, a half-century ago, he has not been classified as an Asian American author.

Today, clearly, these national identity borders are viewed as more porous, a result of and contributing factor toward a globalization of cultures and of the world's economies under the forces of free market operations, paralleled by a shift toward a greater transnational construction of U.S. identity. Émigré, migrant or transnational writers such as Korean Americans Chang-rae Lee and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Indonesian American Li-Young Lee, Malaysian American Shirley Geok-lin Lim, South Asian Americans Meena Alexander, Chitra Davakaruni and Bapsi Sidhwa - as well as Hagedorn and Cao - are constructing strikingly new American identities that contrast sharply with, for example, the Eurocentric model of capitalism in its early stages that J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur described more than 200 years ago in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). The transnational identities of the 21st century emerge, by contrast, at a moment of capitalism in its maturity, and are dependent upon global exchanges.

The novels of Lee, Cao and Jin require consciousness of bicultural, binational aesthetics and linguistic formation. The fictions of Jin (who arrived in the United States in 1985), for example, set in China of the past 30 years, while new, are different from the newness of U.S.-born writers such as Kingston, whose attempts to recover an ethnic history result in explorations of reverse migrations, from the United States to a China she had never seen.

In reading Asian American literature, then, we are reminded that critics and teachers must mediate between new texts and historically constructed U.S. literary traditions, between social locations and literary identities of the communities for and to which the texts are speaking. Together, recent works of Asian American authors -- transnational, immigrant and native Americans alike -- underscore the phenomenon of rapid publication and the continuous reinvention of Asian American cultural identity. In deliberately placing these writers of varied origins together, the growing canon of Asian American writing suggests a collective set of new American identities that are flexibly transnational and multicultural and that help leaven the multinational mosaic that has historically shaped the United States.

----------

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, currently on a leave of absence from her professorship at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is serving as chair professor of English at the University of Hong Kong.

source: http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/0200/ijse/shirley.htm

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The Problem of Implementing Iqbal’s Ideas in Pakistan

by Dr. Javid Iqbal

Iqbal had a vision of a new Muslim Society. It was for realizing this objective that he advanced the concept of a separate Muslim state to be carved out from the territories in North West India where the Muslims constituted majorities. The separate Muslim state was created in the shape of Pakistan by Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. But what are the possibilities of implementing some of Iqbal’s ideas for bringing into being the new Muslim society in Pakistan.

Iqbal’s Perception of Islam

Iqbal has not defined Islam as a theologian but as a philosopher. In his view:

Islam is not a religion in the ancient sense of the word. It is an attitude – an attitude, that is to say, of freedom and even of defiance of universe. It is really a protest against the entire outlook of the ancient world. Briefly, it is the discovery of man. (Stray Reflections, p. 139)

From the historical prospective, he argues that religion in the primitive times was national. Judaism affirmed that it was racial. Christianity preached that it was personal. But Islam teaches us that religion is neither national, nor racial, nor personal, but purely human.

Iqbal further points out that as a culture Islam has no specific country, no specific language, no specific script and no specific mode of dress. (Statements and Speeches ed. by A.R. Tariq, p.131)

In the light of these observations it is evident that Iqbal’s perception of Islam was humanistic and egalitarian. Any interpretation of Islam which approved feudalism and discriminated between man and man, was not acceptable to him.

Iqbal’s Concept of Islamic State

Like many other political scientists Iqbal has criticized democracy because of its defects as a political system. But since there was no other acceptable alternative to it, he regarded the establishment of popular legislative assemblies in some Muslim countries as a return to the original purity of Islam. According to him the Caliphate, Imamate or Sultanate were the outmoded Muslim forms of rulership of the past. He believed that the essence of TauÁâd (Unity of God) as a working idea, was human equality, human solidarity and human freedom. For him the state, from the Islamic standpoint:

“is an endeavour to transform these ideal principles into space-time forces, an aspiration to realize them in a definite human organization.” (Reconstruction, Lectures p.154).

Treatment of Minorities

In his Allahabad Address of 1930 when he presented his concept of a Muslim state, Iqbal categorically proclaimed:

“I entertain the highest respect for the customs, laws, religious and social institutions of other communities. Nay, it is my duty according to the teachings of the Qur’«n, to defend their places of worship.” (Statements and Speeches, Ed. A.R. Tariq p.10)

This assertion of Iqbal respecting the responsibility of a Muslim state for safeguarding the rights of the minorities is based on Surah 20: Verse 40 of the Qur’«n in which God commands:

“If Allah had not created the group (of Muslims) to ward off the others from aggression, then churches, synagogues, oratories and mosques where Allah is worshipped most, would have been destroyed.”

In the early stages of Islamic history this Quranic verse was interpreted as a legal provision for the protection of the places of worship of the “People of the Book” (Jews and Christians). But after the conquest of Iran this protection was extended by the jurists to the Zoroastrians who were considered as “like the people of the Book” (Ka-mithl-Ahle-Kitab) The same protection was made available to the Hindu temples in the times of the Mughal emperors in India after Humayun.

Iqbal’s View on Separate or Joint Electorates

According to Iqbal the provision of separate electorates for the Muslims was necessary for the protection of the rights of the Muslim community before Partition. Otherwise the maintenance of separate electorates was not sacrosanct in the eyes of Iqbal. He stated:

The Muslims of India can have no objection to purely territorial electorates if provinces are so demarcated as to secure comparatively homogeneous communities possessing linguistic, racial, cultural and religious unity. (Discourses of Iqbal, ed by S. H. Razzaqi, pp. 65-66).

Therefore Iqbal had no doubt in his mind that the maintenance of separate electorates was not a requirement or a religious obligation of Islam but merely a device for the protection of the Muslims’ rights in undivided India. If in Pakistan the non-Muslims do not demand the provision of separate electorates and want joint or mixed electorates, then, according to Iqbal, the Muslims may have no objection to it.

Iqbal’s View on Territorial Nationalism and Patriotism

Despite Iqbal’s criticism of territorial nationalism and patriotism in his poems on philosophical grounds, he was of the view that Islam had no quarrel with nationalism in Muslim majority countries. Similarly readiness to lay down one’s life for his country was a part of a Muslim’s faith. He maintained:

In Muslim majority countries Islam accommodates nationalism for there Islam and nationalism are practically identical; but in Muslim minority countries (if the community has majority in a viable territory) it is justified in seeking self-determination as a distinct cultural unit. …..Patriotism in the sense of love for one’s country and even readiness to die for its honour is a part of the Muslim’s faith. (Statements and Speeches, Ed. A.R. Tariq, p.136)

Thus according to Iqbal the development of Pakistani nationalism must not be considered as something in conflict with Islamic ideology.

Iqbal’s View on Secularism

In the contemporary world the Western civilization has developed two types of “Secularism” as an essential part of its political philosophy. Secularism adopted in the capitalist democracies is based on the principle of “indifference towards religion.” This thinking is the product of market societies which are mainly interested in the sale of their merchandise. Therefore, the type of secularism evolved by these societies is a means to serve their own materialistic ends.

The other variety of secularism was evolved by the socialist countries which meant the imposition of atheism as a state policy. However after the collapse of the Soviet Union this form of secularism has ceased to exist, and at present the Russian Federation and the other former socialist countries have adopted the capitalist version of this doctrine.

Iqbal, as a deeply religious man, advances the argument that the discoveries of modern physics, particularly respecting matter and nature, are very revealing for the materialists and the secularists. His argument proceeds like this:

The ultimate reality, according to the Qur’«n, is spiritual and its life consists in its temporal activities. The spirit finds its opportunities in the natural, material and the secular. All that is secualr is therefore sacred in the roots of its being. The greatest service that modern thought has rendered to Islam and as a matter of fact to all religions, consists in its criticism of what we call material or natural, a criticism which discloses that the merely material has no substance until we discover it rooted in the spirit. There is no such thing as profane world. All this immensity of matter constitutes a scope for the self-realization of the spirit. All is holy ground. (Reconstruction, Lectures, p.155)

In the light of the above analysis and in Iqbalian terms to consider secularism as profane is a Christian way of talking and not Islamic. Therefore, the Muslims are not justified to regard “secularism” as something bad, wicked, profane or anti-God.

Separation of the Department of Religion

Iqbal takes pains in explaining that the division of the religious and the political functions of the state in Islam must not be confounded with the Western idea of the separation of church and state. According to Iqbal in a Muslim state it is only a division of functions whereas in the other case the division is based on the metaphysical dualism of spirit and matter or sacred and profane. Since a separate religious organisation (as church organization) cannot be contemplated, Iqbal recommends the establishment of a separate Ministry of Religious Affairs which should, among other things, control the mad«ris (institutions of religious instruction) and mosques. It should appoint qualified Imams and Preachers (KhaÇâbs) for them. He also recommends that no one should be permitted to preach in the mosque without holding a licence from the state. When a reform to that effect was implemented in modern Turkey by Kemal Ataturk, Iqbal hailed it in the following words:

As to licentiate the Ulema, I will certainly introduce it in Muslim India if I had the power to do so. The stupidity of the average Muslim is largely due to the inventions of the myth making Mullah. In excluding him from the religious life of the people, Ataturk has done what would have delighted the heart of an Ibn Taimiyah or Shah Waliullah. There is a tradition of the Holy Prophet reported in the Mishk«t to the effect that only the Amir of a Muslim state and the persons appointed by him are entitled to preach to the people. I do not know whether the Ataturk ever knew this tradition, yet it is striking how the light of his Islamic conscience has illuminated the zone of his actions in this important matter. (Statements and Speeches, Ed. A.R. Tariq, pp 131-132).

This contention is supported by the history of Islam. Even when the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad was at its lowest ebb, the Caliph retained the power of appointing the Qadis (Judges) and the Mosque Imams (preachers). As for the objection that the introduction of this measure in a modern Muslim state would amount to the control of thought, it should be realized that that was a method which the Islamic polity in the past had adopted for curbing those who were inclined to dissiminate sectarian hatred among the Muslims. Therefore, the enforcement of such a provision today cannot violate any fundamental right.

Legislation of Islamic Laws

Iqbal is of the considered view that Ijtih«d should be adopted as legislative process in modern times in the elected Assemblies. This is the form which Ijm«‘ (Consensus of the Community) can take in a modern democratic Muslim state. It is interesting to note that according to Maulana Shibli Naum«nâ,s decision in Ijm«‘ on the majority principle was recognized as correct during the times of Caliph Umar.

Iqbal also held that the claim of the modern Muslim liberals to re-interpret that foundational legal principles of Islam, in the light of their own experience and the altered conditions of modern life, was perfectly justified. He was convinced that the world of Islam was confronted and effected by new forces set free by the extraordinary development of human knowledge in all its directions. Therefore, he suggested that each and every generation of Muslims, guided but unhampered, by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems. He maintains:

The growth of a republican spirit and the gradual formation of legislative assemblies in Muslim lands constitutes a great step forward to transfer the power of Ijtih«d from individual representatives of Schools to a Muslim legislative assembly. This is the only possible form which Ijm«‘ can take in modern times. It will secure contributions to legal discussion from laymen who happened to possess a keen insight into affairs. In this way alone we can stir into activity the dormant spirit of life in our legal system and give it an evolutionary outlook (Reconstruction, Lectures, pp 163, 173-176).

In answer to the question as to how the present legislators, with no knowledge of Islamic law, would interpret and make laws without committing grave mistakes, Iqbal recommended that a Board of Ulema should be nominated to form part of the Muslim legislative assembly, helping and guiding free discussion on questions of law-making, but without any power to vote. This measure can be adopted only temporarily. The effective remedy for the safeguard against erroneous interpretation was to reform the present system of legal instruction, to extend its sphere and to study the conventional Islamic Fiqh in the light of modern jurisprudence.

It is unfortunate that the bulk of the so-called Islamic provisions have been enforced in Pakistan arbitrarily by the military dictator and without a discussion in any legislative assembly. The crux of Iqbal’s message on this point is that Islamic law is to be interpreted and legislated by each generation of the Muslims in the light of their own needs and requirements and the changed conditions of modern life. Thus it is evident that the prevalent islamization of laws in Pakistan which the democratic assembly was coerced to adopt is not what Iqbal would have liked to see.

The Ultimate Aim of Iqbal’s Islamic State

Iqbal maintains that the real object of Islam is to establish a “spiritual democracy”. He talks of “spiritual slavery” and also of “spiritual emancipation”. He was the first Muslim in the subcontinent to define the state in Islam as a spiritual democracy. It is a pity that no indepth study has been undertaken on Iqbal in Pakistan and no Iqbal scholar has attempted to explain as to what he meant by these terms. The contention of Iqbal is as follows:

In view of the basic idea of Islam that there can be no further revelation binding on man, we ought to be spiritually one of the most emancipated people on earth. Early Muslims emerging out of the spiritual slavery of pre-Islamic Asia were not in a position to realize the true significance of this basic idea. Let the Muslim of today appreciate his position, reconstruct his social life in the light of ultimate principles and evolve out of the hitherto partially revealed purpose of Islam that spiritual democracy which is the ultimate aim of Islam.” (Reconstruction, Lectures, pp. 179-180).

It is a passage of Iqbal which requires careful examination as it is apparently based on an unconventional approach to Islam. An orthodox Muslim may not readily accept this contention of Iqbal. From where did Iqbal pick up this idea? Would it be correct to say that he picked up the idea of “spiritual democracy as the ultimate aim of Islam” from Surah 5 Verse 58 of the Qur’«n? He does not say so. In the said verse Allah addressing mankind commands:

For each of you We have given a law and a way (of life) and if Allah hath willed He would have made you one religious community. But (He hath willed it otherwise) so that He may put you to the test in what He hath given you. Therefore compete with one another in good works. To Allah will ye be brought back. And He will inform you about that wherein ye differed.

If this verse of the Qur’«n was in the mind of Iqbal when he advanced the idea of “spiritual democracy” then the question arises as to how should it be established in practical terms? He probably contemplated that state as genuinely Islamic in which all religions were equally free, authentically tolerated, respected and accepted. Such an ideal state would certainly be superior to the two known varieties of secularism.

Fifty years have passed since Pakistan came into being, but owing to the dearth of intellectually imaginative and actively courageous leadership, the ideas of Iqbal have not been implemented. The result is that Iqbal’s dream of the creation of a new Muslim society in this country remains unfulfilled and we continue to drift as an “undisciplined mass of believers” (Hujëm-i-Mominân).

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Native American Literature: Remembrance, Renewal (part 2)

In 1992, a group of Native American scholars and activists created an international writers' festival, bringing together 360 artists from nine countries, chiefly the United States. Nearly half their number already had published at least one volume -- fiction, drama, memoirs, even cookbooks. Out of that convocation came two organizations -- the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, and a mentoring group, Wordcraft Circle, bringing established Native American writers together with apprentice talents.

Each year since 1992, the Native Writers' Circle has presented awards for "first books" in poetry and fiction. For anyone wondering about the future of Native American writing, these prize-winning volumes offer an ample, positive response. Look, for example, to a young artist like Chippewa poet Blaeser - whose evocative debut collection of verse, Trailing You (1995), was followed by a well-regarded piece of scholarship, a study of the complex, even puzzling prose of fellow Native American writer, postmodernist satirist Gerald Vizenor.

Indeed, the expansion of creativity and interest in Native American literature is much more than a "boom." It represents, collectively, a renascence. More than a generation after it began, it is a part of American literature as a renewal, a continuance. It is remembering.

One can best illustrate the phenomenon of renascence through a classroom experience going back many years. My students had been reading copies of poems by Mohawk Indians from the upper sector of New York State, and the subject turned to the various Native American writers in other parts of the country. One student, probably reflecting the thinking of many in the room, marveled, "Isn't it amazing how Native American literature has just burst so suddenly upon the scene?"

The question was stunning at the time -- and remains so in my memory. For Native American literature did not merely "spring up." Like the life and culture of which it is a part, it is centuries old. Its roots are deep in the land -- too deep for a mere five centuries of influence by other civilizations to upturn in any lasting, complete and irrevocable way.

Remembering, continuance, renewal. Native Americans have been accustomed to recounting their histories and their ways of life through intricate time-proven processes of storytelling. It is only during recent decades that scholars have identified these ways of storytelling as "oral tradition." For millennia, Native Americans carried on their traditions in that fashion. Never more than a generation from extinction, as Momaday has written, it is all the more to be cherished by the people because of that tenuous link. In remembering, there has been strength and continuance and renewal throughout the generations.

In the words of Acoma Pueblo poet Simon J. Ortiz, "Indians are everywhere." From Refugio Savala of Sonora, Mexico, to Mary Tall Mountain of the Alaska Koyukon tribe; from the Navajo country of Geraldine Keams and Larry Emerson to the northeastern Maine of Joseph Bruchac, Native Americans are writing about themselves and their people. Their writings are based on firm ground, nurtured by strong roots, and are growing indomitable flowers.

It is interesting to note that even in written form, in English, Native American literature is quite venerable within the framework of U.S. literature itself, going back to the early 19th century, when early writers -- among them William Apess of the Pequod tribe, George Copway (Ojibway) and Chief Elias Johnson (Tuscarora) -- published books relating to their tribal cultures. There is evidence, too, that many tribes had variants of written language long before Sequoyah made his Cherokee nation literate virtually overnight. Even if the books of the Delaware Indians and Iroquois Confederacy were handed down orally for many generations, at an early date they were reproduced in various written ways. Ironically, even when U.S. writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow presented the American Indian from their perspectives, Native Americans were writing their own books and in the process, developing a literature.

If, in early periods, Native American writing consisted of storytelling -- or, as we would term it, fiction -- a sea change took place in the second half of the 19th century, chiefly with the development of the Indian reservations system in the 1870s and 1880s. Autobiography and biography became the most popular form, and continued to dominate well into the 20th century.

These memoirs were often written by others -- anthropologists or poets recording and editing the life stories of Native Americans who were standing at the crossroads of the 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps the most famous of these is John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932). According to Neihardt, Black Elk told his story to his son in the Oglala Lakota language. The son then translated it into English for Neihardt, who then rewrote it. This was a common practice, with many examples in the middle years of the past century, ranging among the tribes, from Crows and Cheyenne of the northern tier of the United States to the Apaches and Navajos in the Southwest.

Of course, not every personal account was "told to" someone else. Some individual authors appeared, among them Charles A. Eastman, a Santee Sioux and university-trained medical doctor who wrote such books as Indian Boyhood (1902) and The Soul of the Indian (1911) -- and Chief Luther Standing Bear, author of My People The Sioux (1928) and Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933). Momaday's 1975 volume, The Names, was part of this tradition.

As the 20th century progressed, Native American literature broadened beyond memoir and biography into fiction, journalism and even playwriting. D'Arcy McNickle was the best writer of fiction of the period from the 1930s to 1970s, with books such as The Surrounded (1936) and Runner in the Sun (1954). He was also extremely active as a proponent of Indian Affairs. Will Rogers, the beloved U.S. newspaper columnist turned humorist whose heyday was the 1920s and 1930s, was a Cherokee Indian, as was playwright Lynn Riggs, whose most famous drama, Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), was transformed into the classic Broadway musical of the 1940s, Oklahoma!

In the early decades of the century's second half, chiefly from the 1960s on, Native American literature's blossoming was indebted to a variety of periodicals -- more established publications such as the South Dakota Review and Cimarron Review, and several smaller presses and magazines and publishing houses, among them Sun Tracks, Blue Cloud Quarterly and Strawberry Press. The poems of Hogan, Joy Harjo, William Oandasan and many others first appeared in these and other journals.

Many Native American writers and scholars first made their marks writing about non-Indian subjects. Momaday's first venture was a collection of the works of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, a lesser-known poet of the Emersonian circle in mid-19th-century Massachusetts. Louis Owens, who has expansively reconsidered and affirmed his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage in his later writings, started out with scholarship on the works of John Steinbeck. (As an aside, I began my career in education, poetry and writing as a specialist in Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville.)

Who are Native American writers? This question has preoccupied me for years, even before I compiled my 1979 anthology, The Remembered Earth. For that volume, I decided to maintain as broad a spectrum of definition as possible. For instance, I included Dana Naone, a young and gifted native-born Hawaiian writer, because we "mainland" Native Americans are becoming increasingly aware that while Hawaiians are not, properly speaking, American Indians, they are, nonetheless, Native Americans, in a real sense. Unsurprisingly, Naone's verse contains themes and concerns similar to those of Allen and Silko.

Anthropologists and historians have postulated that inclusion as Native Americans depends on three essential criteria: genetic, cultural and social. The genetic distinction is "full-blood," "half-blood," "one-fourths" and so on. Culturally, a person is characterized in terms of where he or she emanates, and their distinctive ways of life, religion and language. Socially, someone is adjudged to be Native American because of how he or she views the world, land, home, family and other aspects of life.

But as the years progress, identity has become less of a motivating factor among literary themes than sovereignty, and as part of it, reclaiming the past. Native Americans are concerned about who they are as a people, and write from the community's perspective -- whether the setting is urban or rural -- and that sense of community reaffirms and bolsters sovereignty.

Novelists Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie and poets Linda Hogan and Ray Young Bear are examples of writers who, truly, are doing what Charles Dickens did in London more than a century ago. That is, they are creating a sense of place. Literature, invariably, emerges from that, and even though the best writers strive to be universal, it is the sense of place with which they are deeply imbued. Erdrich, a poet and writer of fiction, is best known for her Native American tetralogy -- Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988) and The Bingo Palace(1994). She recently brought her Ojibwa roots to the foreground in The Antelope Wife (1999), a portrait of two contemporary urban Native American families against a tapestry of 100 years of history. Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan's verse -- bonded to south central Oklahoma -- has focused on the landscape and on history. More recently, though, as she has grown and developed, she has dealt with such issues as animal preservation and feminism.

Alexie, one of the finer young writers who blends realism and sardonic humor with a strong lyricism in writing fiction, poetry and screenplays, is most noted for Indian Killer (1996), a dark novel about the search for a serial killer against a contemporary urban setting. Greg Sarris, a native-born Californian writer of Miwok and Pomo extraction, found a wide readership for his first volume, Grand Avenue (1994), a collection of short stories set within his native multicultural neighborhood in urban Santa Rosa, California -- populated by generations of Pomo Indians as well as Portuguese, Mexican and African Americans. His first novel, Watermelon Nights (1998), is an urgent glimpse of tradition, crisis and renewal within a Native American family. Lately, he has moved into playwriting as well.

In the final analysis, though, the most important concern is not whether one is more or less Indian than his or her fellow American Indian. It is much more imperative that both recognize their common heritage, and strive together for the betterment of Native Americans as an entity. After all, in the end, the writing we leave behind us will be there for the people who come after us. And yet, it is the individual writer's duty to comment on things he or she feels to be important, regardless of whether the subject of the writing deals exclusively with Native American concerns. If we didn't have Momaday's writings on Russia, Aaron Carr's short poems about outer space or Russell Bates' science fiction tales and television scripts, Native American literature would be poorer for their absence.

(As Indians write about subjects other than their community, a wealth of non-native authors -- before and after Oliver LaFarge's Laughing Boy -- have probed Native American life, some quite successfully. More than a half-century ago, Frank Waters fashioned what may be the finest such novel, The Man Who Killed The Deer (1942), a study of cultural conflicts among the Taos Indians of northern New Mexico. These days, in writing his series of best-selling novels centered on Navajo tribal police, Tony Hillerman has taken pains to learn the culture and lore as he creates his stories.)

Ultimately, then, Native American writers are those of Native American blood and background who affirm their heritage in individual ways -- as do writers of any culture. Some write of reservation life, others depict urban surroundings. Some delve into history, others are fiercely contemporary. Joseph Bruchac, who has had an enormous influence on a generation of younger writers as a mentor and enabler, is noted today as a writer of children's stories, such as Between Earth and Sky (1996) and The Arrow Over the Door (1998), presenting tribal legends in a modern context for new audiences.

"Literature is a facet of a culture," Paula Gunn Allen writes, and as such, gives something of value back to the people of which she is a part.

Heritage is people. People are the earth. Earth is heritage. In remembering these relationships -- to the people, the past, the land -- we renew in strength our continuance as a people. Literature, in all its forms, is our most durable way of carrying on this continuance. By making literature, like the singers and storytellers of earlier times, we serve the people as well as ourselves in an abiding sense of remembrance.

We must never forget these relationships. Our land is our strength, and our people the land -- one and the same -- as it always has been and always will be.

Remembering is all.

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Geary Hobson, a poet and essayist of Cherokee-Quapaw heritage, is a member of the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. This article is an expansion of Professor Hobson's introduction to an anthology, The Remembered Earth, originally published by Red Earth Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1979, and reprinted by the University of New Mexico Press, 1981. It has been used by permission of the author.

this article is originally published at http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/0200/ijse/geary.htm

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Native American Literature: Remembrance, Renewal

By Geary Hobson

In 1969, the fiction committee for the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes in literature awarded its annual honor to N. Scott Momaday, a young professor of English at Stanford University in California, for a book entitled House Made of Dawn.

The fact that Momaday's novel dealt almost entirely with Native Americans did not escape the attention of the news media or of readers and scholars of contemporary literature. Neither did the author's Kiowa Indian background. As news articles pointed out, not since Oliver LaFarge received the same honor for Laughing Boy, exactly 40 years earlier, had a so-called "Indian" novel been so honored. But whereas LaFarge was a white man writing about Indians, Momaday was an Indian -- the first Native American Pulitzer laureate.

That same year, 1969, another young writer, a Sioux attorney named Vine Deloria, Jr., published Custer Died For Your Sins, subtitled "an Indian Manifesto." It examined, incisively, U.S. attitudes at the time towards Native American matters, and appeared almost simultaneously with The American Indian Speaks, an anthology of writings by various promising young American Indians -- among them Simon J. Ortiz, James Welch, Phil George, Janet Campbell and Grey Cohoe, all of whom had been only fitfully published at that point.

These developments that spurred renewed -- or new -- interest in contemporary Native American writing were accompanied by the appearance around that time of two works of general scholarship on the subject, Peter Farb's Man's Rise to Civilization (1968) and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (1970). Each struck a responsive chord in U.S. popular taste, and statistics show that even today, some 30 years later, their popularity has not abated.

Steadily, other volumes, and other writers, surfaced. Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Welch's A Winter in the Blood, Gerald Vizenor's postmodern fictions, and the poetry of Paula Gunn Allen, Simon J. Ortiz and Linda Hogan have led in turn, over the years, to newer writers like novelists Sherman Alexie, Greg Sarris and Thomas King, and poets Kimberly Blaeser, Janice Gould and Janet McAdams.

Profile: LINDA HOGAN -- WATCHING OVER THE WORLD

"I have considered my writing to come from close observation of the life around me," Native American poet Linda Hogan suggests, "a spoken connection with the earth and with the histories of the earth."

There is rarely a discussion of Native American writing -- and never an anthology -- that does not include the expansive, and forceful creativity of this writer of Chickasaw descent whose life has been totally encompassed by the goings and comings of the natural elements of her native Colorado, where she was born in 1947, and its surrounding regions and denizens, both human and animal.

"More and more I find that my writing comes from a sense of traditional indigenous relationship with the land and its peoples, from the animals and plants of tribal histories, stories and knowledge," she has said. "I am trying to speak this connection, stating its spirit, adding to it the old stories that have come to a new language."

Writing gracefully in free verse (a 1985 poetry collection, Seeing Through the Sun, won the American Book Award), she has also written fiction of note, focusing on the clash between nature and contemporaneity, in novels such as Mean Spirit (1990) -- which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize -- and two subsequent books, Storms (1995) and Power (1998). She has also written a lilting volume of nonfiction, Dwellings (1995), a study of the idea of what constitutes home, be it a residence or the earth itself. For her, once more, it was about "a coming together of traditional systems, of ways of seeing the world, of years thinking about where our systems of belief have led us," she said at the time of its publication.

"Writing is how I process life," she told an interviewer in 1994. "It gives you access to a part of yourself you can't usually get to. Writing shows me what's going on inside." But, she added, she tries not to be too esoteric. "I want my work to be accessible, but I want it to have layers beneath the story. I want people to feel it."

Hogan is the child of working-class parents. Her father, a carpenter, is descended from Indians who traveled from Mississippi to Oklahoma in the 1830s as part of a torturous journey known as the Trail of Tears, and her mother is white, or, as Hogan wryly terms it, "pink." Shy as a child, young Linda left home at 17 to begin what was to be a peripatetic lifestyle, working first as a teacher's aide with handicapped children, then in a nursing home, then as a clerk. She enrolled in the University of Colorado at 26, continuing her education at the University of Maryland, where she began writing in earnest. Eventually, her writing enabled her to learn more about her heritage, as she elicited stories from relatives and friends. Her first collection, Calling Myself Home, was published in 1978.

Over time, she has worked as a teacher, as a specialist in wildlife rehabilitation, and in various capacities with her own tribe and others. She hasn't worked in a classroom in years, though, and misses it sorely. "There was such satisfaction," she reflected in a recent conversation. "When someone would learn a word, or when somebody's writing would take off through the use of words, it's the happiest thing -- incredible! There's nothing better for a teacher than to see a student `get it,' to be able to expand."

She is spending most of her time these days working with her own tribe, commuting regularly from her Colorado home to the tribal land in Oklahoma, taking on the editorship of its quarterly magazine, The Journal of Chickasaw History. She has just completed her latest book, a family memoir she has titled The Woman Who Watches Over the World .

Writing this personal history is not distracting her from her fundamental goal. "I love the earth and everything on it," she says firmly. "And everywhere I can, I am trying to have that feeling reinforced by writing about it."

-- Michael J. Bandler

to be continued part 2


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Geary Hobson, a poet and essayist of Cherokee-Quapaw heritage, is a member of the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. This article is an expansion of Professor Hobson's introduction to an anthology, The Remembered Earth, originally published by Red Earth Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1979, and reprinted by the University of New Mexico Press, 1981. It has been used by permission of the author.

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Black American Literature at Year 2000: A New Presence (Part 2)

Equally fascinating is the rise of black American writers in the so-called sub-genres such as science fiction and crime thrillers. Octavia Butler -- in books such as Kindred (1988), mixing 20th-century black sensibilities with 19th-century history in a time warp -- has brought a new perspective to black American literature. Walter Mosley has advanced the status of the black American mystery story beyond the earlier work of George Schuyler, Chester Himes and Ishmael Reed by combining that form with the black migration narrative. With Easy Rawlins as his protagonist in books such as Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), Mosley's novels are vivid because of the confrontation of black migrants from Texas and Louisiana with present-day Los Angeles, California. Striking within the mystery genre is the presence of several women writers. In books such as Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1994), Barbara Neely deftly transforms a familiar black character in popular culture -- the maid -- into the savvy, observant sleuth housekeepers often are or can be. Valerie Wilson Wesley's novels, including Where Evil Sleeps (1996), focus on Tamara Hayle, a private investigator who -- through her particular circumstances of being black and a single parent -- finds both insight and personal motivation. And Pamela Thomas-Graham, in A Darker Shade of Crimson (1998) and other novels, has brought the mystery novel, and a black heroine, into the hallowed campuses of Ivy League universities.

Black Americans traditionally have made significant contributions to poetry and drama, and they are doing so today as well. Rita Dove -- honored with a term as poet laureate of the United States in the early 1990s as well as a Pulitzer Prize -- certainly is one of the more exceptional poets of the current generation. Her latest collection, On the Bus With Rosa Parks (1999), her seventh, is a wide-ranging venture into family relationships, building upon the motif and affection that is at the heart of her earlier volume, Mother Love (1995). Dove has distinguished herself recently as a playwright, with The Darker Face of the Earth, her take on Sophocles' Oedipus, set on a Southern U.S. plantation during the 19th-century slave era. It is being staged at various venues across the United States. In collections such as Thieves of Paradise (1998) and his earlier Neon Vernacular (1993), among others, Yusef Komunyakaa, another Pulitzer Prize-winning black American poet, has distinguished himself through fierce takes on war and race, even as he is caught up in images of art and music, with a style that resonates with hints of blues and jazz. And Marilyn Nelson, whose poetry invariably has reached deep into memories of her own childhood as she focuses on interfamilial relationships and women's status in society, deals with freedom and status and black American heroism in a recent volume, The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997).

In drama, the issue is frequently not just what is new and important but also what is accessible in written text form. Fortunately, publishers retain in print many of Langston Hughes' timeless dramas of years ago, and continue to publish the ongoing series of works by Pulitzer drama honoree August Wilson, a cycle of 20th-century dramas -- one set in, and reflecting, each decade -- that includes The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars and Fences. These pieces overflow with memory and history, strong characters and intergenerational lessons. His latest work, King Hedley II, recently had its world premiere at a resident professional theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, even as his last piece, Jitney, is making its way to Broadway.

For the first time since the 1960s and 1970s, when works by James Baldwin, Charles Gordone, Joseph Walker, Amiri Baraka, Ron Milner and others found their way to the printed page, publishers are amenable to issuing play texts. As a result, besides Wilson, readers can turn to collections by Pearl Cleage (Flying West and Other Plays, 1999) and Suzan-Lori Parks (The American Play and Other Works, 1995) and the quite riveting performance art pieces by Anna Deavere Smith. Smith worked first in the aftermath of racial tensions in Brooklyn, New York, in 1991, and similar strife in Los Angeles, California, in 1992, to produce two pieces of documentary theater -- blending journalism, oral history and drama -- that she has taken to a number of theaters across the United States. She reproduced these one-person stagings in two volumes, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1993), and Twilight Los Angeles, 1992: On the Road: A Search for American Character (1994).

Some young playwrights, about whom favorable word of mouth is spreading, have yet to see their works on the printed page for mass audiences. One of the more gifted of these writers is Cheryl L. West, a onetime social worker, whose early piece centering on an AIDS patient, Before It Hits Home, was followed by Jar the Floor, a hearty, hilarious and yet heartbreaking piece about four generations of African American women gathering for the 90th birthday of the oldest of their number. West is decidedly in the tradition of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson in her embracing of family and in the contemporaneity of her work.

No discussion of black American literature can ignore the literature of the public forum -- both the achievements of black writers in nonfiction and the rise of the black public intellectual and the books accompanying that ascent. The academy has played a role in this, since many intellectuals and authors have held academic positions and are in the forefront of developing courses in African American studies. Still, these individuals would not have such public personae without the new venues now available in our generation -- in print journalism, electronic media and other outlets. The jazz expertise and social commentary of Stanley Crouch (Always In Pursuit, 1999), the complexities of feminism and love in the writings of bell hooks (All About Love, 2000), personal family histories such as the blended heritage of journalist James McBride (The Color of Water, 1996) and the erudition of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on diverse components of African American history and experience (Colored People: A Memoir, 1994; Ten Ways of Looking at a Black Man, 1998), all are components of black American literature as it flourishes today.

In assessing how black American literature has taken on the significance it currently boasts, we should note that it is prominent and pervasive because it has a full life of its own outside the academy. Toni Morrison clearly is not dependent on an academic audience. August Wilson no longer needs a drama school environment for initially mounting his plays. A raft of writers -- including Barbara Neely, Walter Mosley, Terry McMillan -- are highly popular while remaining outside the "canon" of black American literature. One factor is the proliferation of book clubs in the United States in the past decade; enrollment is as pervasive in African American communities as elsewhere, and African Americans tend to read the works of their fellow African Americans. To be sure, many book clubs are seeking out books that can be regarded as life-changing or inspiring, rather than works for the college course outlines.

Thanks to one particular book club, sponsored by television personality and actress Oprah Winfrey, debuting books by African American novelists Breena Clarke and Cleage received unprecedented publicity. In River, Cross My Heart (1999), a story centered on the politics and power of faith-based communities, Clarke, a young Washington, D.C., native, depicts the dynamics of her native city during the 1920s, in the throes of segregation. Dramatist Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1998) is an offbeat, unexpectedly humorous look at some of life's crises and tragedies, dappled with its author's inherently pungent imagery. The same held true for Breath, Eyes, Memory, a story about the impact of a family's transit from Haiti to the United States. This first novel by Edwidge Danticat -- a Haitian American writer who, in a span of less than a half-decade, has become known by a wide readership as a luminous portrayer of the recent history of her native country -- also was a selection of Oprah's Book Club. This one, however, is destined to have a second life among students, for its critical and artistic value.

Indeed, in a tentative way, Danticat's writings are evidence that while black American literature now has a robust life beyond the academy, it also has a continually evolving place within it. Think here less of the courses in place, some since the 1960s, but rather of the certain conviction that black American literature is vital as a field of study for anyone seeking to know the literature of the United States. The number of graduate students including black American literature among their oral examination fields is rising; so, too, are the numbers of dissertations addressing black American authors -- particularly when combined, intriguingly, with writers representing various groupings. And the roster of universities in other countries granting higher degrees for the study of black American literature is also on the ascent.

What of the future? Two issues readily appear. First, will black American literature continue to be mainstreamed? How will promising works continue to become the stuff of conversation in the marketplace? Second, how "national" will black American literature remain in a world that is increasingly more global in approach and transnational in outlook? In part, this will depend on how, or whether, the definition of black American writer will evolve. Will the writer be an inhabitant of the Americas as a whole, of the circum-Atlantic world, or just of the United States?

The issue may have been with us for some time, but this might be a propitious time to reframe and renew the debate.


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Robert B. Stepto is professor of African American studies, American studies and English at Yale University. He is the author of Blue As The Lake: A Personal Geography (1998, Beacon Press), and From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1991, University of Illinois Press).

this article originally taken from http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/0200/ijse/stepto.htm

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Black American Literature at Year 2000: A New Presence

by By Robert B. Stepto

During the 1960s, as the civil rights movement expanded, there was a feeling in U.S. literary circles that black American literature was in the midst of a second renaissance, following the Harlem Renaissance of the pre-World War II era.

A case certainly could be made for this view. The 1960s saw the emergence of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York City, and countless smaller theater troupes across the country, as well as the more radical black arts movement in both drama and poetry. Publications proliferated, from new titles from major publishing houses to new journals to extensive efforts to republish hundreds of out-of-print titles -- such as the reissuance, in 1969, of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Furthermore, the first courses in black American literature appeared in the catalogs of a number of colleges and universities. On the one hand, students worked toward graduation by studying black American literature; on the other hand, a demand suddenly sprang up for qualified teachers of this literature.

What began in the 1960s surged in the decades that followed, and surely appears to be continuing as a movement and as a literary tradition at the turn of the new century. This expansion has been so dramatic that one is tempted to say that the second renaissance is over, not because "the Negro is no longer in vogue" (the fate of the Harlem Renaissance), but because the black American is both in vogue and in the mainstream. It is fair to say that if the Depression of the 1930s killed the Renaissance of that era, prosperity has enabled the second renaissance to thrive. Today, black American literature is no longer so marginal, so novel or so limited in its readerships that its fate is uncertain. Today, virtually every strand of writing in the United States includes a wealth of prominent black American authors, to the extent that no one definition of the black American writer prevails.

While it is obvious that black American talents are working in all major literary genres, what may be less obvious is what new directions they are taking within those disciplines. In fiction, for example, while historical accounts are not new, what does seem intriguing is the fresh effort to write the stories of slavery. Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), for instance -- which may have been the catalyst for her Nobel Prize for Literature -- is a striking example of the new imagining of slavery. Rather than offering the familiar tale of the revolt-leading male slave (versions of which began in 1853 with Frederick Douglass' The Heroic Slave), it presents the story of Sethe, a female ex-slave who killed her child rather than see her subjugated. Then, too, Charles Johnson's stories and novels are fresh in terms of vision and sensibility. The opening premise in his National Book Award-winning 1990 novel, The Middle Passage, is that the Negro hero is so hapless that when he stows away aboard a ship to avoid marriage he unwittingly chooses a slave ship. This is the essence of blues humor, born of slavery. Yet it took until a decade ago for an author to risk finding that humor in the story of the agonizing middle passage from Africa to the Americas that was at the heart of the slave trade.

In other words, black American writers of literature are self-confident enough these days to be able to come at a well-worn subject in a different way -- even expressing criticism of something they might not have criticized before. In that sense, they are following in the wake of historians of the African American experience of the last quarter of the past century who paved the way for new perspectives.

In keeping with the adage that new experiences occasion new stories, black American writers of late have been writing about new venues and neighborhoods, new schools, friends and work situations. This may be part of the reason why they are reaching new audiences. As a result, Terry McMillan -- in books like Waiting to Exhale (1992) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998) -- can depict successful black women finding love in varied surroundings and gain a wide readership as well. Darryl Pinckney, in High Cotton (1992), can attract and amuse readers with his take on the corporate lunchroom. Andrea Lee's Sarah Phillips (1984), Trey Ellis' Home Repairs (1993) and Right Here, Right Now (1999) and Connie Porter's All-Bright Court (1991) represent the work of three young writers who, in symbolizing a middle-class milieu, incisively render relatively new black situations.

Profile: JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN -- HIS OWN MAN

At a time when black American literature is thriving, when authors of long standing are lionized as they run familiar courses and new writers surface to be categorized into well-worn compartments, there -- sui generis -- is John Edgar Wideman.

It is difficult to itemize the disparate elements of his personal history without seeming to strain credibility. Consider: Born in Washington, D.C., in 1941, and raised in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), he is the son of a working-class family, a onetime basketball hero at the University of Pennsylvania, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, holder of a degree in 18th-century literature, a novelist and memoirist with an endless string of enviable critical successes and a faithful readership, a married man and the father of a star player in the U.S. professional women's basketball league. He is an esteemed professor of English at the University of Massachusetts. Among other honors, he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his fifth novel, Sent For You Yesterday (1983), the only prize judged and funded by writers. Indeed, he has been called "the black William Faulkner," and "the softcover Shakespeare" -- a reference to the folio of paperback editions of his various titles.

And then there is the other side of the frame.

He is the author of Brothers and Keepers (1984), centering on the relationship between a successful man and his imprisoned sibling, convicted of murder and sentenced to life behind bars. It is not a novel. It is a family memoir. And he is the author, among other magazine articles, of a searing piece in Esquire some years ago about a father and a son who, having gone astray, killed a classmate. It, too, is nonfiction.

Two lives lived. It's the stuff of stories. But it's all true.

His personal traumas, one can imagine, have enriched his creative gifts. But the reader will not know anything more than the writer wants revealed, in books such as Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (1994). As he said in a Washington Post interview, "I'm not putting up my life as material to explain anything to anyone. I'll put it this way. It's a formulation. My life is a closed book. My fiction is an open book. They may seem like the same book -- but I know the difference."

Most likely, this writer -- because of his literary gifts -- would have been as profound, as impassioned and as insightful if none of the tragedies had befallen his family, no matter what subjects he might have explored. What his eyes have seen, what his ears have heard in the inner cities of Pittsburgh and elsewhere, including the music, have given his fiction a depth and a fragmented beauty that few of his peers can match.

In novels such as Damballah (1981), Hiding Place (1981) and Sent For You Yesterday -- familiarly known as The Homewood Trilogy -- he penetrates, incisively, the Pittsburgh neighborhood of his youth as it was and as it is. The Cattle Killing (1996) is a period piece, centered on a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Two Cities (1999), his most recent novel, it set against a backdrop of present-day Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and constructed along musical lines -- blues, jazz, Motown, gospel, classical and funk.

Wideman has observed that he once yearned to write books that both his family in Pittsburgh and literary scholars could read and enjoy. The fact that his books have a wide following in the mass-market audience, and that a two-day international celebration of his work was slated for April 2000 at the University of Virginia, indicates that he may have achieved that seemingly elusive objective.

-- M.J.B

to be continued....

Robert B. Stepto is professor of African American studies, American studies and English at Yale University. He is the author of Blue As The Lake: A Personal Geography (1998, Beacon Press), and From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1991, University of Illinois Press).

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