The Harem

Safia Fazlul

 TSAR’s 2012 fall launch was grand and exciting – an occasion to meet and make friends.

Of the bunch of fiction and poetry collections released at the launch, I picked up Safia Fazlul’s TheHarem.

It is a boldly told story of a young woman’s daring attempt to escape poverty and family restrictions.

Farina is a Canadian of Bangladeshi origin. She has grown up with nothing but contempt for her constrictive upbringing, her parents, their regressive ways, and her ghetto where women are abused by their men.

She runs away from this unending nightmare as soon as she turns 18. But it isn’t easy making money on survival wage jobs.

Sabrina, her childhood friend, with whom she was forced to attend the Islamic school, has turned into a stripper, not out of choice, but willing to make the most of her adversity to push her way out of poverty.

An exchange between the friends brings alive the dilemma they face - the stranglehold of tradition that keeps them poor but also helps retain their sense of dignity.

 “The bare-knuckled punches to my pride, Farina – that’s my big problem.” (Sabrina tells Farina)

I hear her loud and clear. Although I’m desperate for money, I’d never risk hurting my pride over it. For two insignificant brown girls like us, pride is much more important than money. We’re born to please our parents, raised to please our neighbours, and married off to please our husbands. Pride is all there is to remind us that we belong to ourselves.

For Farina, Sabrina’s decision to be a stripper is the ultimate surrender, and she can’t help but observe, 

“Our nudity – the shell of our sex – was the only thing we always had complete control over. While our parents and neighbours could watch what we wore, they couldn’t watch whom we got naked for. If Sabrina’s going to give up this control, then she might as well as settle for an arranged marriage and learn how to make samosas.”

She and her friends Sabrina and Imrana have nothing but disdain for their Islamic rearing and go out of their way to defy the traditions their parents hold dear and revere. In an act of ultimate defiance, they start Harem – an escort agency.

Money flows in, and with prosperity comes a sense of freedom. However, notwithstanding the derision she reserve for the values her parents tried to inculcate in her, ultimately there is no escaping these values.

So, even as she makes more money than she can keep track of, Farina is besieged with guilt. She also can’t avoid the ghetto completely, and falls in love with a boy who is nearly a mirror image of her father.

Harem is graphic and leaves little to imagination. It is also a sensitive and touching portrayal of Farina’s frailties that are normal for any 18-year-old. The relationship between the mother and daughter is raw, emotional and heart wrenching, for instance, when narrating her family history, Farina’s mother tells her, “We didn’t realize then that there is more than one way to lose a child.”

Many of the passages in the book are biting, pithy and depict with unrelenting accuracy the unbending social realities of the ethnic ghettos in Canada’s cities. 

Adrift

There is a timeless quality to a quietly flowing stream. 

It encapsulates time in one free-flowing moment – the continuously flowing water has the past, the present, and the future all subsumed into one perpetual motion.

Loren Edizel

This also true for our lives where the overlap of the past, the present and the future is an everyday occurrence.

One seldom sees this seamless continuity in any narrative piece.

Loren Edizel’s Adrift (Tsar) is like that stream – it doesn’t categorises life in to distinct compartments of the earlier, the now and the then.

It weaves the stories of the characters in the novel in an uneven, overlapping, non-linear and multidimensional narrative that is at once breathtaking and profound.

The novel is about John, who is a new immigrant in Montreal, working the graveyard shift in a hospital. 

He seems mysterious because he aloof and alone. In reality he is like anyone else who is new to Canada and has done a night shift survival job.

In the bitterly cold nights, when one battles to stay awake, imagination can be a dangerous thing – it’s better to make it work for you can work (as John does) rather than letting it harm you.

Also, one prefers to keep the baggage of the past to oneself, and avoids small chatter about the past one has left behind. You come to a new land to restart your life, not to re-live your past.

In so many different ways, the novel redefines loneliness – no man (woman) is ever lonely in the mind – every moment in one’s life is a confluence of all that has happened, is happening, and will happen.  

The novel is also about the unceasing little tragedies that make up our lives – melancholy is the generally prevailing norm in everyone’s life.

A gentle reminder that while we may all be happy (briefly) in our different ways, when it comes to gloom there isn't much to distinguish between yours and mine.

Adrift is one of the best novels I’ve read in 2011.

Image (Author's photo): http://www.levantineheritage.com/achiev2.htm

Lantana Strangling Ixora

The Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) is an influential organisation that helps shape  the Indian Government’s policies on the Indian Diaspora. It has presence all over the world and has a special significance for the Indian Diaspora, more so in North America.

Its e-newsletter is a much-awaited monthly bulletin that gives a roundup of activities of the Indian Diaspora across the world; preoccupied with policy matters, it doesn't usually have any significant mention about culture, and almost never about poetry.

However, the December e-newsletter that I got earlier this week surprised me.

It had a whole paragraph on my friend Sasenarine Persaud (Sase).

“Guyanese born PIO Dr. Sasenarine Persaud has released his most recent collection of poems titled Lantana Strangling Ixora. The poems provide a ready metaphor for the consciousness of the Americas overcoming that of India in the Americas – the main streaming and divesting of yoga from its Hindu origins being the most visible manifestation. This collection ranges widely in its geographical and historical concerns, from Canada to Guyana to India and places in between, exploring the contradictions in our lives: familial influences, terrorism, literature, politics, race, and the power of language and representation.”

I met Sase in the strangest of circumstances. He was attending the Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts (FSALA-11) and I was to pick him up from the airport.

But a misreading of flight schedules resulted in two participants reaching Toronto almost simultaneously from different places and at different terminals.

I couldn’t go to pick him, but met him a day later at the festival and we turned friends instantly.

Sase has an easy charm and wears his creativity quite lightly.

His collection of poems Lantana Strangling Ixora (published by TSAR) was released during the festival, and he read a few poems from his new collection.

I particularly liked this one:

Marco Polo at Rama-Sethu.

Silken threads known

before his journey

to the Emperor’s court

recording on that passage

Rama’s bridge across the ocean

from Tamil Nadu to Lanka

Raghu’s vanaar army – how inebriated

can you be if monkeys talk

in an underwater crocodile wife’s

yearning for monkey-liver soup

to cure an ailment: man shooting

too much breeze with another

must be curbed – building a stone

causeway to confront Ravana –

You do not negotiate with terrorists.

Lantana Strangling Ixora – the poem that gives the collection its name has stunning imagery.

Lantana is a South American flower and Ixora is an Asian flower; Sase is a Guyanese of Indian descent.

Lantana Strangling Ixora

There were times in the morning

we questioned the bloom

of the previous evening, watering

cana lilies, clearing the live oak

acorns from our white wrought-iron bench

How do ripe plantains smell?

Like ripe bananas. You could laugh

until after dinner. I will hold

Radhakrishnan’s interpretations of the Upanishads

until you snap on the ceiling fan

And we swirl on the sheets of a different seeking

scented like lilacs in a north-of-Toronto park

or in the Arnold Arboretum. If you conjure

a dead British poet with the same last name

would you be wrong? American literature

Or flowers in a Florida garden

are all we need to know except

if “papa” is hunting in the “Green Hills of Africa”

or Buck is observing Chinese. You drift

off into a naked sleep where snores sing

And a mouth that has taught us Kali’s secrets

falls open to accommodate blocked passages

or water the definition of a flower cluster

or the naming of a southern plant: datura

as prickly as that morning when the alarm

failed to startle sexed sleep and you are hurried

For a meeting and we barely have time

to glance at the golden marigolds—left foot

right foot brake and accelerate through amber

lights impatient with ancient drivers gaping

At dew on the St. Augustine grass and the aroused

ficus leaves, a replica of Rama’s arrow tips, and

we barely have time to see lantana strangling ixora

Image: TSAR Books

Bleeding Light

Sheniz Janmohamed

Earlier this month I attended the annual book launch of TSAR. This year, I knew a few more people than last year. This was my second year and as last year, I was again in the midst of innumerable writers.


My friend Dawn Promislow read from her collection Jewels and Other Stories, Ava Homa read a passage from Glass Slippers, probably the best story in her collection Echoes from the Other Land, Sheniz Janmohamed read from her book of ghazals and H Nigel Thomas read an extract from his novel Lives: Whole and Otherwise.

This blog is about Sheniz Janmohamed’s book of ghazals Bleeding Light.

The ghazal is a unique concept in poetry where the singer is as important as (or perhaps more important than) the poet. This amazing confluence of words and music makes ghazals not merely a pleasant experience, but a transcendental, even spiritual one.

Two of the best contemporary ghazal singers are Jagjit Singh and Ghulam Ali and the best ghazals they have sung are:

Jagjit Singh: Tum ko dekh to (poet: Javed Akhtar)
Ghulam Ali: Hangama hai (poet: Akbar Allahabadi).

I had never read ghazals in English before and quite frankly, it took some getting used to and re-readings before I began to enjoy Sheniz’s ghazals. All the ghazals are refreshing and make you see the world differently. Once the light touches your soul, you can’t remain unmoved.

Here’s one that I liked the most because it evokes so many images.


In Crimson


A man sells packets of socks in a gully where most men walk barefoot.
What can he do but rest his head on that ledge, hastily painted crimson?

In Old Town, Allah hu Akbar pounds the walls of crumbling Fort Jesus.
A taxi cuts us off, Allah is Great plastered on his window – in crimson.

At the Coast, we bargain shillings for bags and kisii stone elephants.
Indians are not good customers. The seller brands our skin crimson.

Bombs detonate at the steps of every mosque, in the throat of every believer.
If Allah is a war cry, how can we lift Bismillah from asphalt stained crimson.


If only we planted a thousand trees for each page we discard and crumple.
When her last pen snaps, Israh will draw blood and scrawl words in crimson.


Israh is Sheniz’s takhallus
Image: http://www.philosufi.com/blog/2010/11/sheniz-janmohamed.html

Echoes from the Other Land

Recently, I attended the launch of Ava Homa’s collection of stories Echoes from the Other Land. Ava is an immigrant to Canada and her collection of stories set post-Islamic revolution Iran are at once deeply personal and political.

TSAR has published the book.

Echoes from the Other Land’s launch was at Beit Zatoun, a meeting place with a Palestine heart and a global soul. It was my second visit to this fascinating place, with a pronouncedly political milieu.

Homa read an excerpt from a story in her collection – A River of Milk and Honey.
It’s a story of Sharmin, a teenager with Down’s syndrome (although this is never explicitly stated) and her muted pain of growing up into a lonely woman without any hope of getting Azad, the boy she silently loves.

Launch event; Ava (author) in blue jacket

Sharmin is homebound and fantasises about a perfect world where she is without a blemish and emerges from a river of milk and honey.

“I close my eyes. It’s not hard to imagine myself emerging from the River of Milk and Honey, luminous wings open. Azad passes by and stares. Gathering my wings behind me, I walk elegantly in a white dress towards a garden of red roses, pretending not to see him. A breeze blows through my hair. When I get to the garden, I turn and beckon to him; he has a look of adoration in his eyes. He runs to me. We walk together through the garden, hand in hand.”

Azad loves Kazhal, Sharimn’s beautiful neighbour, who everyone desires – from teenagers like Azad, to grown men such as neighbour Shilan’s father.

Kazhal has “Rhythmical step, appealing makeup, large breasts, flat belly, big lips.” She’s everything that Sharmin wants to be but isn’t and can’t be. Sharmin’s aunt tells her that beauty is misery, but she’s unconvinced.

When Kazhal tells her that she has no friends with whom she can converse, Sharmin realises that a beautiful young woman can be as lonely as one with Down’s syndrome. They become friends. Later Kazhal gets married to someone who claims to be rich, but before the marriage is consummated, her family discovers that he isn't.

“Kazhal does not know what to do. She tells me that she actually hates him, and hates her mother for making all the decisions on her behalf and then blaming her. Sometimes she even hates herself for being so wretched and sometimes she hates all women for being such miserable creatures. I hold her hands in mine.”

Images: http://ava-homa.blogspot.com/

Of Hockey and Hijab

I don’t consider myself religious, although I’ve begun to shy away from describing myself as an atheist; agnostic perhaps better describes me and millions of others who don’t quite belong to the category of true believers (of any religion) and clearly abhor secular determinism as an idea of the past.

Secularism like democracy is a constantly evolving concept that takes different forms in different regions of the world. There is no right fix that can possibly be applied to everyone. As Sheema Khan explains, “To you your way, to me mine.”

In 1988, Sheema Khan “got religion” seemingly an affliction that turned this average Canadian Muslism of South Asian origin into a hijab wearing Woman in Muslim Dress (WMD).

Although everyone she knew didn’t react in quite the same way George Bush reacted when he heard that Saddam Hussein had WMD, they still couldn't figure what had gotten into her. They sympathised with her condition because they were convinced she was “brain-washed” and that she “had no choice.”

On the contrary, it was a personal decision that emerged from within as she tried to fill a spiritual void by relying on faith.

Khan explains she found secularism dissatisfying. “Many of us have experienced a purely secular outlook and found it to be thoroughly unsatisfying, for it fails to address the dynamic of one’s spiritual core. That inner voice, hidden to all except to the One who created it and who alone can respond.”

Of Hockey and Hijab Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman (TSAR Books) is a slim yet important contribution in understanding the Muslim mind.

Khan is a feisty, fearless woman and clearly a product of the Western society. She’s a patent agent in Ottawa, holds a doctorate from Harvard.

As with any one who has spent some time at such institutions, she’s intelligent and articulate; they inculcate everyone at Harvard with these qualities. Khan also has qualities that aren’t taught at Harvard: deep-rooted compassion, tolerance, empathy, understanding, patience – qualities that come from contemplation and looking inwards.

The essays in Hockey and Hijab touch upon several issues that are constantly being debated in today’s newspapers across the world.

They deal with the idea of Islam in a frank and non-didactic manner. Khan handles a range of topics right from global issues such the ‘clash of civilisations’ to Canadian controversies such as the horrific treatment meted out to some Muslims by the Canadian establishment.

In discussing all these issues, she adopts a candid yet non-confrontational style. While upholding the values espoused in Islam, she doesn’t mince words in focusing on the ills that beset her religion.

Khan’s style opens doors because her writing is sincere and straight from the heart. She doesn’t want you to change your views; all she expects is that you open your mind and free it of preconceived notions about her religion.

Image: http://www.noorculturalcentre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/sheema-khan2.jpg

Meeting writers

MG Vassanji, Dionne Brand, Olive Senior, Nurjehan Aziz, Priscila Uppal, Jasmine D’Costa, Tasleem Thawar, Dawn Promislow.

There were more writers per square foot at The Gladstone Hotel last Tuesday at Tsar’s annual book launch than I had seen in a long time.

And so many others that I didn’t know. Not that I know all of those I've listed here.

It was my first visit to Gladstone. I can't think of an equivalent institution in Mumbai.

I wanted to hear Sheema Khan read from her Hockey and Hijab – a book that has become a talking point everywhere in Toronto. She wasn’t there, but there were many other – equally interesting – writers.

I particularly liked the short passage Tasleem Thawar read from her work published in Her Mother's Ashes 3 (edited by Nurjehan Aziz), the translation by Chelva Kanaganayakam of a Tamil poem and Olive Senior’s passage from her book Arrival of the Snake-Woman.

For me the highpoint of the event was to be able to exchange a few guarded words with MG Vassanji. And to meet Dionne Brand. I went up to both of them and introduced myself.

Believe me, that is unusual; even though I sometimes do come across as a shameless self-promoter.

Thankfully, Vassanji remembered me. It'd have been rather embarrassing if he didn't. He's generally reticent, I guess. So exchanging a few pleasantries with him, especially after he had just won the Governor General’s prize for non-fiction, should count as a major achievement.

I told Brand that I had written about her book A Map to the Door of No Return (Notes to Belonging) on this blog and that I hadn’t read a more succinct explanation of VS Naipaul’s lifelong anxiety as a writer than her's. Brand said she had read my blog recently. That should count as another major achievement. Brand is Toronto's poet laureate.

Dawn Promislow introduced me to Olive Senior. I told her about my discovery of the Indo-Caribbean culture in Canada. Jasmine D’Costa introduced me to Fraser Sutherland, an editor of literary works and to Mariellen Ward, whose Hindi is as beautiful as she is.

A young woman walked up to me and asked whether I was a poet. I answered, “Yes. All my submissions have been rejected so far.” She laughed. I laughed, too. What can’t be cured has to be endured.

Everyone had a great time.

Image: Book Covers + Adobe Photoshop