Literary Safari

Ricardo Cortes and F. Bowman Hastie, the authors of children’s coloring book, I Don’t Want to Blow You Up, were sitting on a pier along the Hudson River last summer, with their buddy Naeem, when they came up with the idea for their recently published children’s book which has been receiving a fair amount of attention (good and bad). WHAT? A coloring book for kids and adults. [preview the book]

WHO? In an age of yellow, orange, and red terror alerts, the book draws attention to the myriad people of different colors and cultures who are living peaceful and meaningful lives. It’s narrated by Naeem, a political artist. (“Hello, my name is Naeem. I was born in London. I grew up in Pakistan, Libya, and Bangladesh. Now I live in Brooklyn, New York. I blow up tires on my bicycle, but I don’t want to blow you up. Now let’s go meet some people …)

WHY? To counter the terrifying messages transmitted in the name of the “War on Terror.”

WHEN? In a post 9/11 society. In the words of the authors, “We really just wanted to so SOMETHING to try to temper the terror hysteria that has gripped this country, and especially New York, since 9/11. We also wanted to address the epidemic of identity profiling that affects not just Muslims and Arabs, but an entire suspect community that has developed based on people’s appearance, name, country of origin, or faith.”

WHERE? At the airport, on the subway, in a shopping mall, on the school playground, in New York City, in the United States of America, in the world.

HOW? There are children in the U.S. and other western countries who are taunted as “terrorists” and “osama bin ladin” simply because they look Middle Eastern or have an Arabic name. It is the authors’ hope that kids might feel empowered when reading the stories of other inspiring and impressive people like themselves. At the same time, the children out there who have been enlisted into perpetuating the terror myth might gain some new perspective by seeing some of their heroes in a different light, or by discovering new heroes in unexpected places.

Personally, I can see this book being used as a mediated tool for promoting tolerance and discussing post 9/11 reactions to terrorism, both by children and adults. Explains why I just finished writing a reading guide for parents and educators for this book [available for free online, courtesy of the book's authors here], which the authors envision “as a tool for addressing a difficult and sensitive topic of discussion with kids who have already indicated some degree of concern or fear themselves, or who have had the experience of being the “suspect.”

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To mark Women’s History Month, I’ve been featuring works by desi women poets in a “Poetry Friday” series at Sepia Mutiny all month long. Here’s the last of four installments (1, 2, and 3.)

Songs are poetry, and singer-songwriter Rupa Marya has been on my radar for the past couple of weeks, ever since I found out about her world music band Rupa and the April Fishes (think the Indigo Girls meets traces of Natalie Merchant meets “classic French chanson, Argentinean tango, Gypsy swing, American folk, Latin cumbias, and even hints of Indian ragas”). [It turns out that Abhi wrote about them last year. link]

The group’s debut album “Extraordinary Rendition” has been picked up by Cumbancha, a record label founded by the head of music research and product development at Putomayo World Music, Jacob Edgar. It releases on May 1, and Rupa and her gang are in the middle of a North American tour that includes NYC and the Montreal Jazz Festival.

A musician, songwriter, and (yes!) physician, the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants spent part of her childhood in France. Many of the songs on the band’s new album are in French. From an article in the SF Chronicle:

The years between the World Trade Center attacks in 2001 and the 2004 presidential election changed her outlook on life and prompted [Marya] to alter her sound completely, by writing in French.“What happens if you communicate … in a way that people who don’t speak that language can understand what you’re saying?” Marya says. “Especially when the world was becoming much more afraid of differences. That’s when everything sort of took off into another place.

Her song Une Américaine à Paris, I think, conveys some of her post 9/11 reflections. The lyrics (reprinted with permission of Rupa and the April Fishes) follow, both in the original French and in Rupa’s English translation.

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“Everyone has a story. Can you tell yours in six words?” Take this question that SMITH magazine posed to its readers and throw it out to a room full of teen writers — and what do you get? A bunch of pretty amazing six-word memoirs, many of which are certainly worthy of being published in the SMITH’s next six-word memoir book. (Part I, Not Quite What I Was Planning, has gotten lots of press lately.)

Last week, I had the pleasure of teaching my workshop, Flash Memoir: Write Your Life, One Story at a Time, at the annual Young Authors Conference, organized by BOCES-NY. Each year, enthusiastic and talented high school writers from Rockland, Putnam, and Westchester counties in NY are invited to spend a day attending writing workshops. Organizer and teacher Cathy Greenwood likes to call it a “pep rally for writers.” I like the sound of that.

In the Flash Memoir workshop, we read samples of six-word memoirs that were published in Not Quite What I Was Planning, inspired by Hemingway’s story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Then, we wrote our own six-word memoirs. The participants in my first session were so eager to read each other’s work and to have a memento of their creative writing activity that we decided to post and share their memoirs here.

Simple things were never made complicated.

In a moment, this one ends.

The American dream swallowed me whole.

With your lemons, make Italian ice.

Jeans too tight from baby fat.

Fascination becomes habitual in chem class.

Writing teacher. More latter, than former.

I will never be as lost.

I like goldfish better than people.

If you want, I’ll smile too.
When we meet at the crossroad.

Misanthropic teen seeks someone who understands.

In the end, we’re still here.

Don’t forget to pack clean underwear.

Sight and sand and feeling.

Big smile, broken heel, fading pictures.

Not a great student, been laid.

Cheering for the wrong, who cares?

The beauty of an unborn flower.

Take the pain. Make success. Struggle.

The world is changing, not me.

I’m glad I’m not in school.

Eat vegetables. Eat your cake too.

No longer nymph. Now a goddess.

Unplanned situations are sometimes wished upon.

Smeared mascara, salty droplets, losing you.

Learning not to wait till tomorrow.

Walking with one light, through darkness.

I found what I was after.

Best friend, one guy, who’s gonna win?

(Great work, young writers! Thank you for sharing your work. I hope that some of you will go here to submit your work.)

You can read the debate this post generated over at Sepia Mutiny, where I’m guest blogging this month.

OK, Enid Blyton fans, get your hankies out. The Famous Five are getting a 21st century makeover, courtesy of Disney. Think multicultural meets technology in the new animated series “Famous Five: On the Case” which premieres in the UK next month. The crime busting gang of George, Dick, Julian, Anne, and Timmy the dog that Enid Blyton created in 1942 with the bestselling book Five on a Treasure Island is going to be replaced with characters who are the children of the original Famous Five, including a lead Anglo-Indian character.

That’s right, the team leader is the daughter of George (the tomboy and the original gang’s leader), Jo, short for Jyoti. According to Jeff Norton at Chorion, which owns the rights to Blyton’s books,

“We tried to imagine where the original Famous Five would go in their lives …Because George was such an intrepid explorer in the original novels we thought it would be only natural that she travelled to India, to the Himalayas, where she fell in love with Ravvi. That’s the back story (to Jo). We spoke to Enid Blyton’s daughter and she thought her mother would love what we have done …” [source: BBC News]

Don’t anyone try to tell me that the Disney executives don’t know how wildly popular Enid Blyton’s books are in India. I’m sure that the decision to have the lead protagonist be connected to the subcontinent somehow had a little something to do with this fact.

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To mark Women’s History Month, I’ve been featuring works by desi women poets all month long [catch up on past week’s poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Shailja Patel]. Today’s featured work is “Corona, Queens,” by Bushra Rehman, a bi-coastal, Pakistani-American poet whose words sing of place, family, religion, and identity with an honest, insightful, and poignant sensibility.

A few years ago, the Bowery Poetry Club and City Lore asked a bunch of NYC poets to write an epic poem about New York. Bushra was one of them, and of course, she wrote about Corona, Queens, the neighborhood where she lived as a child.

Corona, Queens

Fitzgerald called Corona the valley of ashes
when the Great Gatsby drove past it, but
we didn’t know about any valley of ashes
because by then it had been topped off by our houses,
the kind made from brick this tan color,
no self-respecting brick would be at all.

We knew Corona,
home of World’s Fair relics
where it felt as if some ancient tribe
of white people had lived there long ago.
It was our own Stonehenge,
our own Easter Island sculptures
made from a time when New York City
and all the country
was imagining the world’s future.

Read the rest of this poem and find out why I think it’s a perfect accompaniment to the (currently showing) multimedia exhibit Crossing the Blvd: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America over at Sepia Mutiny, where I’m guest blogging this month.

I take my duties as an aunt very seriously. Ever since I became a massi (maternal aunt) a year ago, I’ve started reflecting more and more on the important role that my aunts and aunties (the female family friends and mothers of friends) played in my life, both when I was a kid and in many cases, now.

So, I’m not exaggerating when I say that one of my life goals is to be the best massi ever. I can’t help it that I want to be adored and worshiped by my nephew in the same way that I adored and worshiped my aunts (the sisters of my mom and dad who I called tata-French for aunt—or simply by their first names, as in Dipika or Poupee) and aunties (I can never forget the glamorous Auntie Veena in Ghana who baked cheese sticks for our picnic at the Tesano Sports Club in Accra when I was 10) throughout my childhood.

Which is why when I first heard about the UK bestselling tribute to the institution of aunty-dom, The Complete Book of Aunts, by Rupert Christiansen with Beth Brophy, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. It even includes “ten golden rules for aunts”! From the book jacket:

Of all our blood relations, an aunt offers the most potential for uncomplicated friendship. THE COMPLETE BOOK OF AUNTS is an entertaining and touching exploration of aunts in all their guises and varieties, culled from real-life, literary and historical sources.

The book was inspired by a kid’s question to the author: “Why are there aunts?” In response, Christiansen takes a thorough look at the etymology of the word aunt, the many words for it that exist in world languages, and great aunts in (mostly Victorian) literature. He also highlights various aunt types: Bargain Aunts, Mothering Aunts, Damned Bad Aunts, X-Rated Aunts, and Honorary Aunties (think of all the older desi ladies you call ‘auntie’).

Read the rest of this review (and the conversations it generated) over at Sepia Mutiny, where I’m guest blogging this month.

In honor of Women’s History Month, I thought I’d feature South Asian women poets on Poetry Fridays for the remainder of March. Today’s selection is “Shilling Love,” by Kenyan-Indian-American spoken word artist Shailja Patel. Her work “Migritude” premiered last fall in the San Francisco Bay area to packed audiences—it uses her collection of saris, passed down by her mother (another take on Mama’s Saris!), to unfold hidden histories of women’s lives “in the bootprint of Empire, from India to East Africa.”

“Shilling Love” is the first poem from “Migritude” that I came across a couple of years ago, and it has stayed with me since.

Shilling Love
By Shailja Patel

They never said / they loved us

Those words were not / in any language / spoken by my parents I love you honey was the dribbled caramel / of Hollywood movies / Dallas / Dynasty / where hot water gushed / at the touch of gleaming taps / electricity surged / 24 hours a day / through skyscrapers banquets obscene as the Pentagon / were mere backdrops / where emotions had no consequences words / cost nothing meant nothing would never / have to be redeemed

My parents / didn’t speak / that / language

1975 / 15 Kenyan shillings to the British pound / my mother speaks battle

Storms the bastions of Nairobi’s / most exclusive prep schools / shoots our cowering / six-year old bodies like cannonballs / into the all-white classrooms / scales the ramparts of class distinction / around Loreto Convent / where the president / sends his daughter / the foreign diplomats send / their daughters / because my mother’s daughters / will / have world-class educations

Read the rest of this post over at Sepia Mutiny, where I’m guest blogging this month.

The following interview with Indra Sinha, author of “Animal’s People,” was conducted over e-mail while he was in India on his recent book tour. He lives in a wine-making region of France, and was kind enough to indulge my questions about “Animal’s People,” his writing childhood, and the art of making wine, amongst other things. He also told me that Animal, the main character of his novel, would be happy to answer a few questions, so that interview is also included. [read my review of the Booker-shortlisted novel.]

What is the one thing that Animal’s People was never supposed to be? A polemic.

How long did you take to write the book? Were its origins a short story? It grew out of notes I was making for a screenplay. But did not come to life as prose fiction until the character of Animal appeared. He immediately began haranguing me and I learned eventually that the best course was just to write down everything he said. The actual writing took about three years, over a five year period.

Obviously your work with the Bhopal Medical Appeal and their newsletter was your research basis. In the first place, how did you get involved with the cause? A man from Bhopal approached me on the basis of the work I had done with Amnesty International and asked if I would help raise funds to start a clinic in Bhopal. You can’t just start something then walk away, so I then became involved in fundraising to keep it going. The clinic is now in its thirteenth year and we have given free medical care to more than 30,000 people.

In 1994, you “published an appeal in The Guardian asking for funds to start a free clinic for the still-suffering survivors of the Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal. This led to the founding of the Bhopal Medical Appeal. The clinic opened in 1996 and has so far helped nearly 30,000 people.” Is a little bit of Elli in you? Nothing at all.

Why did you choose to set this book in a fictional town, rather than in Bhopal itself? Because I wanted to free my imagination and to concentrate on the characters. This book is about people, not about issues. The disaster that overtook the city of Khaufpur is always kept sketchy, the Kampani is never explicitly named, it is just the Kampani, and as such is not simply Union Carbide or Dow Chemical, but stands for all those ruthless, greedy corporations which are wreaking havoc all over the world. In Jaipur at the literary festival Vickie and I met Alexis Wright, who has written of the aboriginal peoples’ struggle against Rio Tinto Zinc, in Bombay we spent time with Sudeep Chakravarti who has written a powerful book called Red Sun, about the Naxali and Maoist movement in India – again tribal peoples forced off their land by mining corporations and steel companies, including Tata, which is trying to get Dow off the Bhopal hook.

Read the rest of this Q&A over at Sepia Mutiny where I have a guest stint this month.

The US edition of Indra Sinha’s Booker-shortlisted novel Animal’s People was just published this week by HarperCollins. Last fall, when I first heard about the book which focuses on the effects of a chemical company explosion in a contemporary Indian city, I didn’t want to wait … so, I immediately ordered my copy from Amazon UK. (I’m glad I did because now I have a paperback copy with a cover that I much prefer over the American edition. See for yourself below.)Set in the fictional city of Khaufpur—home to a catastrophic gas explosion caused by an unnamed Kampani (if you’re thinking Union Carbide and Bhopal already, you’re not alone)—Animal’s People is the first-person account of Animal, a 19 year old, who walks on all fours, his back twisted by a disaster he is barely old enough to remember. Animal was born just a few days before “That Night” (his Apocalypse) when a chemical factory owned by Americans exploded, killing his parents, totalling his slum, and virtually destroying the health of many of the city’s poorer inhabitants. The Kampani changed his life before he really even knew what his life could be:

“I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being … Ask people they’ll tell you I’m the same as ever, anyone in Khaufpur will point me out, ‘There he is! Look! It’s Animal. Goes on four feet, that one. See, that’s him, bent double by his own bitterness …”

This is the powerful first line of a novel that I ripped through it at breath neck speed, simultaneously refreshed by Sinha’s raw voice and haunted by the events and images that were unfolding in the novel itself.

Read the rest of this review over at Sepia Mutiny, where I’m guest blogging this month. 

“The eye of the tiger” takes on new symbolism on the cover of this week’s Economist which asks the question: “What’s Holding India Back?”Using India’s finance minister P. Chidambaram’s recent statement that the “tiger is under grave threat” as a clever segue, the Economist takes a close look at India’s “tigerish economy,” arguing that it’s 9% a year average growth is under threat “because it has failed to reform its public sector.” Here’s a quickie roundup of the news package to start off your week.

The lead story “India’s Civil Service: Battling the babu raj” takes a critical look at India’s hardworking “armies of clerks” (IAS officers), concluding that “India’s malfunctioning public sector (and civil service adminstration) is India’s biggest obstacle to growth”:

Indeed, all India’s administration is inefficient. According to the Congress-led government’s own estimate, most development spending fails to reach its intended recipients. Instead it is sponged up, or siphoned off, by a vast, tumorous bureaucracy.

This is not new news. Rajiv Gandhi,, as Prime Minister of India, once lamented helplessly that out of every rupee spent for development only 17 per cent actually reached the poor. But the following explanation about the ineffective reforms of India’s bureaucracy from author of an IAS history, Sanjoy Bagchi, certainly caught my attention:

“Overwhelmed by the constant feed of adulatory ambrosia, the maturing entrant tends to lose his head and balance. The diffident youngster of early idealistic years, in course of time, is transformed into an arrogant senior fond of throwing his weight around; he becomes a conceited prig.”

I can just imagine the reporters writing this piece, going “Wow, we really have to find a way to use that quote!”

Read the rest of this post  and the conversation it generated over at Sepia Mutiny where I have a guest stint this month.

I’ve always had a thing for elephants. My first (and favorite) stuffed animal was a gray elephant. In those days, stuffed animals were not very soft or fuzzy. Mine is rough andhttp://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/mohan.jpg tough, but he has survived three decades, and continues to thrive (despite his half-fallen off trunk) alongside my collection of elephant kurtis; shell, glass, and metal elephants (including Ganeshas); elephant paintings and silkscreens, elephant magazine holder … yeah, OK, you get the point!

So, today’s poem—which I recently discovered in Billy Collins’ anthology 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day—is (brace yourselves for the long title) “Aanabhrandhanmar Means ‘Mad About Elephants’” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Nez for short).

I like to pair literary and artistic selections the way people pair wine and cheese, so when I read this poem, it seemed to me a perfect accompaniment to Australia-based photojournalist Palani Mohan’s images in his new book, Vanishing Giants: Elephants of Asia.

Aanabhrandhanmar Means ‘Mad About Elephants’
Forget trying to pronounce it. What matters
is that in southern India, thousands are afflicted.
And who wouldn’t be? Children play with them
in courtyards, slap their gray skin with cupfuls
of water, shoo flies with paper pompoms.

Read the rest of this post and the conversation it generated over at Sepia Mutiny where I have a guest stint this month.

I’m enjoying a one-month guest stint over at one of my favorite daily reads, Sepia Mutiny.

I’ll keep providing regular updates here with links to my individual posts, and occasionally write here as well (though not as often).But, while I have you here, just thought I’d point you to three book reviews in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, all of which focus on South Asian authors:

• Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha (I’ll be reviewing this Booker-nominated novel about a gas explosion in Bhopal later this month, and posting a Q&A with the author)
• Intern, by Sandeep Jauhar (this memoir is sitting on my bookshelf, waiting to be read. I’m more eager than ever to read it)
• The Match, by Romesh Gunesekera (a novel about a Sri Lankan expat. V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage comes out next month, and I’m gearing up to read it, but I hadn’t heard about this book.)