Flanagan's Wake

I like Richard Flanagan already. He has won this year’s Booker Prize for ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ that I have not read. I have read nothing by him, but following the award the search has yielded some wonderful insights.

Of course, I like him for saying that he is “ashamed to be Australian” because of the environmental policies of the government. But, what is more interesting is how he gets into the mind of another real person. A good writer does not only create characers out of thin air. S/he can make the most simple reality appear profound or mystical or mythical.

Flanagan has done it with David Walsh that I now know so much about Walsh and so little about Flanagan. This he manages to do without any self-effacing sophistry. In fact, he pushes the boundaries of language to create something out of somebody. In the essay for The New Yorker, he wrote:

Attempting to describe Boltanski’s devil is like trying to pick up mercury with a pair of pliers. At fifty-one, Walsh has the manner of a boy pharaoh and the accent of a working-class Tasmanian who grew up in Glenorchy, one of the poorest suburbs of the poorest state in the Australian federation. His silver hair is sometimes rocker-length long, sometimes short. Walsh talks in torrents or not at all. He jerks, he scratches, and his pigeon-toed gait is so pronounced that he bobs as he walks. He is alternately charming, bullying, or silent. As he looks away, he laughs.

This comes somewhere in the beginning, so it has to be tantalising. Flanagan certainly knows about a good way to grab attention. From his subject as arriviste, to his perversities, his enterpreneurship of the arts and his inner demons, it is a sheer treat.

Walsh’s favorite novel is “Crime and Punishment,” and conversations with him can sometimes feel like talking to the deranged narrator of Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground”: possessed, but rarely less than compelling. His obsessive desire to explain makes his thoughts sometimes seem to proceed algorithmically. Though the condition has never been diagnosed, Walsh and those around him believe that he has Asperger’s. It would explain his extraordinary gift with numbers, but it is hard to know where the condition ends and bad manners start. Walsh’s rudeness is legendary. “Let’s face it,” a close friend told me. “David can be a complete cunt. But he is also the kindest and most generous man you will meet.” Walsh funds a major tennis tournament, the Moorilla Hobart International, as well as Hobart’s MOFO music festival. There are also many and ongoing private kindnesses: kids he sponsors at Hobart’s Quaker school, support of several families, and friends he constantly helps. Pointing out that Walsh has always spent more than he has earned, Ranogajec said, “David was never motivated by money.”

I doubt if the idea behind the Booker Prize is to make you fall in love with a person the writer writes about, but here you have it. I am in love with David Walsh and I couldn’t be bothered about finding out anything more than I know about him through Richard Flanagan.

3 Readers in Search of a Writer

X, Y, Z belong to three nationalities and do not live in their homelands. We first ‘met’ on the page and the monitor screen. I was a byline. There was communication beyond that, but I remained a Person Who Wrote (PWW).

One day I met them in person. It was not the first time I was meeting readers, but the first time I was meeting such disparate people within a span of days in one city.

X and I had the longest correspondence and talks and he knew quite a bit about me; he also knew what was not there. In effect, I came away feeling like a curiosity that had been satiated. I was still the writer, the metaphor for a person. I was familiar but that sense of familiarity was black on white. I never became grey or blue or red or pink…and if I did it was as a ‘colourful’ character. The writer became a character. If my blood had been drunk it would have only congealed into ink.

Y is a new recruit! We exchanged only two notes; the first time he was ticking me off because I had written something about his area of expertise and he felt I was wrong. I said I was right about my right to be wrong, and he agreed. So, we were okay. Then, we met. It was nearing sunset and I was dying to look at the sky in all its flaming brilliance. I sipped iced tea; he stuck to Earl Grey. It was an amazing chat, completely metaphysical, and he did what I often do – drew various patterns with his hands on the table: pyramids, squares, other shapes to highlight a point. I don’t know when exactly, but he mentioned a personal incident from my life in passing. I immediately reacted, “How do you know?” He laughed, “You wrote about it!” I did not expect that as someone new he would have read this. More importantly, those pyramids and squares, so meaningful in our debate, now became me. I was also an atom, a molecule, something you brought to the table. I was a PWW.

Z knew me from my book, primarily. He had written a few times, and had got fairly acquainted with my work. He invited me home and I would have met his wife and child, but it was too short a notice. So it was dinner at a club without them. Fun insights about his life, about the diaspora. He asked little. Towards the end of the meeting, he said, “The moment I saw you, I said this is F. Frankly, if you were not what I had imagined, I would have been devastated.” Again, I was the writer, except that he had imbued me with the flesh and blood of his imagination. Yet, the imagination was about what I wrote. During the conversation he had said, “I see you as completely liberated…” I paused. I knew what he meant. As an Indian woman writing on certain subjects I am seen as a bit of a rarity, especially the language I use. In fact, I am told it has little to do with my nationality. I am bold and far too upfront even by normal western standards. Z was, like many others, projecting that onto me as a person.
The parting shot, just before I left, was most amusing and interesting. “But, you can also be quite frightening. There is a divinity about you that seems to go contrary to that other image.”

I chortled. I began to think of a halo around me, but again it was either as a writer or as an imagined person going a bit against that which he said he had also thought about.

It has made me contemplate about whether I want to be seen as just that. Recently, I did not write for a while. One of the reasons was, as I mentioned in Who moved my bubble?, to unwrite myself.

From being a curiosity, a pattern made on the table, an imagined entity, a bagful of words seeping out on the sand, leaving small little imprints and occasionally metamorphosing into crabs clinging to what will be washed away.

Even more importantly, in this supposed bonfire of the vanities I was in fact trying to reclaim my person. I realised only later that although I knew all along that these three people are hugely accomplished in their fields, have interesting experiences – professional and personal – by seeing them see me as only a writer, was I not seeing them only as readers? The difference is that I know them from what they say or do; they know me from what I write.

What sort of synergy is possible in such sharing? It also makes me wonder whether there can be any equitable understanding. Different perceptions aside, does the reader not have the upper hand? S/he can see you as you are, as you could be, as you may not be, as they think you are, as they want you to be, as they hear you are. There is no room for factual analysis at all. Strangely, the subjective makes you into an object.

I used to crave the company of people who had not read me. One friend would boast that she had met me without having read a word and wanted to stay away from my writing as much as possible to see the real me.

As the friendship evolved, she often remarked, “You are so transparent. I can read you like a book.”

Murder, She Said?

I do not recall reading any book on rape, murder and serial killers specifically because of the subjects. I am, therefore, a bit surprised to find a study that states women fear becoming victims of crime so they turn to true crime books in an effort to learn strategies and techniques to prevent being murdered.

Reported in the inaugural issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science (Sage), Amanda Vicary and R Chris Fraley go on to say that by understanding why an individual decides to kill, a woman can learn the warning signs to watch for in a jealous lover or stranger. By learning escape tips women learn survival strategies they can use if actually kidnapped or held captive. It is possible that reading these books may actually increase the very fear that drives women toward them in the first place.

Unless these books are specifically of the ‘How To’ variety, this sort of assertion, and even the flipside of it, is quite disingenuous. We may imbibe by reading and characters do settle in our psyche if they are potent. But these rarely apply to how we conduct our lives. There may be people we meet who seem like someone we have read about; it is often the intriguing qualities that stay with us. I don’t think when we see an orphan we think of Oliver Twist or everytime we find a thief we go, “Ah, Fagin”. I have chosen a simple example to show just how simplistic such studies can be.

There may be books on rape that a woman reads about but she will not be prepared for it. Have they talked to rape victims? Did they see the signals? If not, does it mean they don’t read the right books?

About being drawn to such “gory” stuff, there appears to be an element of negativity attached to it, as though this is not quite a woman’s thing to do. Even more appalling is the assertion, “But we do know that women, compared to men, have a heightened fear of crime despite the fact that they are less likely to become a victim.”

Less likely according to what yardstick? On what basis is this heightened fear measured? This is not a competition of who is victimised more and on what basis. The fact is that crimes are committed and both women and men are killed, maimed and psychologically and physically abused.

It appears we are a bunch of crime-fearing females. Imagine a woman enters a bookstore wearing a long jacket, all covered up, riffles through the pages of some romance novels and then stealthily her feet take her towards the gore. She sees knives, blood, and bodies on the cover and thinks, hey, this just might save me as she reads the back jacket. At home, she lounges on the sofa – after bolting all the doors and windows – and then gets drawn into the thriller. Instead of just reading it and perhaps getting a little spooked out, she makes mental notes of what to look for and what to avoid.

And then the bell rings and the child she has given birth to stands there with muddied clothes and she lets out a scream, “Help!”

The study reveals that women learn to be very very careful because women don’t understand something called mystery.

Oh, duh. Give me a break or I’ll bite.

Was it bad for you?

What exactly is bad sex writing? Is it having bad sex while writing? Or is it bad to write about sex…cluck, cluck? Of course, all of you know about the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Many really good writers have ‘won’ it. No one has ever thought about giving a good sex in fiction award, it must therefore follow that it’s all just bad. The worse and the worst do not count. Just bad is good enough.

Auberon Waugh, the English writer, must have been reading something on a grey dry day, which is really about unrealised possibilities in case you have missed the metaphor, and decided to set up this award. I believe it was to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”.

Those who are subtle would not really indulge in such careless passages, and if they do then perhaps they genuinely mean to be crude, tasteless and perfunctory. The modern novel, as opposed to classics (or is it conservative?), does use sexual descriptions. It might be redundant to certain readers and the only thing worth reading to others.

As a teenager my female friends would be given books by the boys that had specifically marked out portions of writing from the point of view of hormones. It worked as a learning experience as well as succeeded in conveying the intent of the one rewarding them with these precious jewels.

I say 'them' because I did not read those books, and when on occasion I was asked to “at least try” I took it up with the assiduousness of an experiment, looking for syntax where I ought to have been examining the possibilities of sin.

This year’s shortlist includes Philip Roth for something he has written in his latest book The Humbling – “the story of the seduction of a ‘full breasted’ lesbian by an ageing stage actor. The novel includes a threesome scene and has several references to a green-coloured sex toy”.

I am a bit perturbed by this. It suggests that lesbians may not be full-breasted and if they are their seduction is wont to take place only by ageing stage actors. Has the threesome scene been written from the point of view of one individual or all three? Would Roth manage a balanced perspective giving three sides of the sex coin, the third being upright and poised to roll?


Use of sex toys is fairly common among the living, so I assume characters in fiction might emulate real people. I am confused about the green colour, though. Is Al Gore still at it? Green is also associated with Martians, which again expresses that it could be an out-of-world experience. All good. However, since men are supposed to be from Mars, then political correctness would unfold its wrath on Roth for assuming that women cannot really enjoy such blissful moments on their own. Green is also the colour of nature, at least when it is not autumn in some parts of the world. To refer to nature and toy in the same breath is to take the breath out of nature.

The passage, however, does not have those twists and turns:

“There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be.”

Paul Theroux’s attempt in A Dead Hand has also been nominated:

“Her hands were all over me, four hands it seemed, or more than four, and as she touched she made me weightless, lifting me off the table in a prolonged ritual of levitation.”

What does all this convey? I know it isn’t quite easy to write about how characters one has created would behave in bed. But authors do base personalities on people they know or read about. And they do have the power of imagination.


Now, what happens to the much-touted Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian manual on sex? It was written by the celibate sage Vatsyayana. It is considered a path-breaking work, and I suspect it has to do with it being an old text and less due to its inherent practical merits. Take this passage:

When a woman, having placed one of her feet on the foot of her lover, and the other on one of his thighs, passes one of her arms round his back, and the other on his shoulders, makes slightly the sounds of singing and cooing, and wishes, as it were, to climb up him in order to have a kiss, it is called an embrace like the 'climbing of a tree'.

Why would a woman stand on a man’s foot and place the other one on his thighs? Were all women way shorter than the men? And why must she sing and coo all to get a little hug?

Don’t ask questions. Visit any bookstore and this volume is around. Everyone has heard about this book.

The point is: Do readers give a damn? As Roth himself had once said, “When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.”

Therefore, it depends on us. The bad sex is in our heads.

Taking it on the chin

There are some articles that get people to respond either very sharply or emotionally, as the case may be. There are far too many and I had said I would put them up but realised most of those people may not be genuine even about the abuses!

It is a set pattern if the issue is Indo-Pak. In one pithy sentence: Pakistani saying, "Why write on Pakistan?"; Indian saying, "Why write on Pakistan?"; I thinking...at least they are reading. I get good idea from all this.

I have merely emphasised some points in the excerpts below that made me smile or laugh aloud or well...

Do not forget to scroll down for the finale…the only one I replied to from this lot because the person is a known number.

Views from Pakistan

Farzana, don’t comment basing on your fantasies. There is more filth in your country try to clean that first. I know this is no argument but what you see in Pakistan is mostly projected and propagation. You ask me any thing and I can reply that regarding society here. Now edit and read yourself whatever I could write. There are mistakes but I have to do other jobs as well.

Out side America the UE is not satisfied even. You have watched the flogging and not the way they humiliate women in their society. They don't spare sick idea to materialize practically.`
I know Britni and Miley and Jolie very well but would not like our society to go after there foot print as we would need a good stock of morning afters!.

- - -
Why don't you give Pakistanis the real face of India and write about that in the news papers?

Killing of Muslims everyday, Muslims are not allowed to go to mosques, poverty, farmer suicides, filthy cites, army raping Kashmiri girls and mothers and castrating Kashmiri men? You could write about it and break up India into small pieces which we will then conquer by jihad.


View from India

Missus,
I am thinking that your articles is too much pessimistic. Elections are the good things that we are having and the rest are not having. You are telling the communal forces are not destroyed that is for you sad. But that is the true it will never be. You are the expecting that every one problem must be solved otherwise it is not good, and you must to thinking that one by one all the problem it will be solved. I am to much happy that the winning is Congress because the future will be good. I am thinking that to many our people they are not understan the english and they cannot getting job or business.
I am liking your writing also that kagazkalam is to much clever. Are you having the children?
- - -
Hi Farzana,

I read your article on Manmohan singh and all that he could 'not do' and how he showed it as achievement, for things that were not really achievement.

However, why do you feel that PM has to be some one who has won an election.

Mother teresa was not married to father of children she adopted, and she is still a mother.

With due respect for your expereince of journalism, I would have appreicated if you could have taken more holistic view. At the end of day you create perceptions in the minds of reader, but then there are some like me hard to convince.

But some where you are also fighting with the perception of elegibility for a person to be PM, rather than what he should do.

He is lot better than many, isnt he?
IF he listens to all, doesnt it means he is all encompassing. If he listen to sonia doesnt that he mean, he knows his limitations.

Farzana its dynamic democracy, where 2+2 = 4 will not be case always.

Regards,

- - -

The final one here in response to Imagining the Taliban:

Hi Farzana,

Having read your article three times over, I STILL have absolutely no idea what you're trying to get at - tum kehna kya chahti ho? It seems to me you're a muslim who can't reconcile to being an Indian (or vice versa) - either way, you seem to carrry HUGE chips on your shoulders, which make you attack the Bollywood Khans, Azim Premji and even the venerable Dr Abdul Kalam for no particular reason, and with no particular logic. Your statement that the Bombayites were not angry, but only `mildly irritated' at the 26/11 carnage was pure poppycock, to say the least.

Anyway, this is not about your identity crisis, but your other references...

As a muslim, if you feel the Taliban doesn't need to be stopped, then we are on different pages altogether, and there's no point in having this exchange at all..

As an `incidental' Hindu, I am terribly proud of the pluralism of India (I prefer the word to secularism), and take great comfort in the fact that the saffron brigade is peripheral to the concept of INDIA - fringe elements that pose no threat to this great nation and what it stands for..

Regards,
X

My reply:

Assalamalaikum:

I should hope this form of greeting fits in with a certain stereotype you seem to harbour, never mind the fact that I am an “accidental Muslim”, as opposed to your “incidental Hindu”.

It is rare for anyone to read my article these many times, though I do wonder why you, or anyone for that matter, respond to something so obtuse. Thank you for dignifying my “not particular reason”, “no particular logic”. You are very kind.

You ask, “tum kehna kya chahti ho?” Jo aap theek samje, kyonki aap samajh hi nahin rahe hain.

You bring in the old thing about Muslim vs. Indian and the Premji brigade. My “poppycock” has turned out to be almost like a prophecy. I hope you do not blame this on my ashubh (inauspicious) Muslim blood.

And why should I respond to the Taliban only as a Muslim? Then, may I ask if you are responding as a Hindu?

Regarding the pluralism of India, that cannot go away as long as some of us live it, rather than live with it. I do not wish to flaunt anything, but my upbringing and my family are examples of it. To reiterate it everytime I write anything that goes against the tide would be to reduce myself. I refuse to do so even after the continual questioning of my nationality (forget nationalism).

However, it is interesting that you see the saffron brigade that has caused havoc several times in our own country as “fringe elements” but the Taliban as a threat. What more can I say?

I do hope the light tone has not offended you. I did not want this to be one more exercise where you waste your time trying to figure out what I am saying. Thanks for writing in, anyway.

Khuda Hafiz before I run out of Muslim phrases…

Regards,
F

Want to grill me?

An inland letter arrived from Srinagar. An old reader. He says he was overjoyed to find my book in a store there. So am I.

I did not think I would end up answering queries by readers. Curiosity. Anger. Interest. Amusement. Sadness. They express it all.

It struck me that I should let those of you who wish to pose your queries do so. Right here. If you have read the book, then great. But don't get too specific and personal about the details. Those who have not may also ask what they want.

There are some restrictions. No abuses, just as I am not seeking flattery. Also each query, even if anonymously posted, must have a name/nick and country of residence. Mention whether you have read or not read.

Use the comment box on this post. I will compile them (if need be use the ones I have got via email too) and post it as an interview with your names and nicks.

Am not sure if it's a good idea but given that I am answering via email I may as well choose this space.

The initial posts on the Journey blog (linked on the sidebar) have some details.

Let's see how it goes.

- - -

This post may not be formatted as I am not at the PC. Hope technology works for me better than humans have done.

- - -

For Saturday

Song:

"Mujhe tum se kuchch bhi na chahiye
Mujhe mere haal pe chhod do..."

Weather:

November summer.

Mood:

Despondent.

Forecast:

I shall look into a kaleidoscope.

Be nice:

Hmm...er...ok...tomorrow is Sunday. Happy?

Such a long journey...

So, it happened. The formal book launch. And we forgot to launch the book!

There were some people already there and I reached by 6.30 PM for the 7 PM function.

Someone had told me before, “Oh, what is this discussion nonsense? I have been to 120 book readings. Authors get someone famous to read or read it themselves. Discussion!”

Yes, we had this interesting discussion. At first I read out Parveen Shakir’s poem. Then the Prologue. Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt and academician and Indo-Pak peace activist Ritu Dewan, flanking me, co-read a few portions with me.

Detailed report will follow in the Journey Interrupted blog with more pictures.

Here, let me mention a few sidelights:

I did not know my co-panellists until the day I called to ask them two days prior to participate. May I add that several people did want to be a part of this debate; some are well-known names. I did not call them for that. If that were the case, it would have happened long ago. These are people who are known for being committed to the issues they stand up for. I shall therefore not flaunt those names here. It is more important to highlight that my city has the right attitude. None of them knew me personally. Just as I cold called Mahesh and Ritu. Both agreed and read most of the book before they got there. This shows just how seriously they took it; they could have chosen to take the easy way out and talk ‘generally’.

At the event, when I responded to something about people’s animosity and added that “There are nasty people everywhere…(pause) I too can be nasty”, this former MLA immediately shot back, “Farzana, that is such an understatement!”

Interestingly, on the crucial issue of peace measures and Kashmir, we – Mahesh, Ritu and I – disagreed; I was alone…and do believe that most in the audience was with them on this.

It was touching to see a very old man come up to me with a wrinkled piece of paper that had his name and address. “I have great respect for writers and I know your work,” he said as he handed me the chit. Or the other elderly gentleman who remembered Lahore.

The SMS I got later that said, “I was the young man with the persistent questions. I freelance and want to do a Q & A with you.” I called back the next day; he was surprised; he did not expect a call so soon. I always call back strangers (this is lest some of my friends jump in to say ‘Boo’). The reason was that he had not written his name. Later I got another SMS apologising for the oversight: “Had it been any other author it would have been the end of my fledgling career.” How could I tell him I had made many such goof-ups in my early days?

And I continue to make them. People must have wondered why I would not let go of my handbag and kept it near my feet. The reason is that I was carrying medicines and was in fact not feeling too well at all. Or the time I dropped the papers...

I could not talk to most of the people I have known; some left their visiting cards. It was touching, since I had not even personally invited them.

When the discussion was over, someone pointed out that I had not formally launched the book. So the copy wrapped in red with a satin ribbon had to be opened. The ribbon part was easy; I was gingerly trying to prise the tape when Mahesh said, “Just tear it”.

I tried and mumbled, “Must make this copy feel like Draupadi.”

It had been about two hours of reading, talking, answering…and I wanted to slump down. A Doordarshan camera appeared in front of my eyes and I had to say something; then some other channel walla wanted to know if I could speak Hindi, I said “Bilkul”, and then kept using words like “Nazariya”, “Daayra” and I thought it was quite impressive. He quickly finished his queries and said, “Bas, theek hai”. Earnest kid. Wanted me to sign a copy. I wrote his first name. “Khan bhi…” he reminded.

“Woh khud likh dena.” My pen was not quite in great shape.

I don’t know if anyone who reads this blog was there, but my thanks to every single person who attended. And to Ritu and Mahesh. I knew we are all different people and that was the idea.