god's country in granta
Via Moorishgirl, I discover that the new issue of Granta is out, and the theme is "God's Own Countries." And yet they haven't included a single writer from Kerala!
This unforgivable omission aside, though, the list of contributors and the topics make it look very much worthwhile. On the website you can read several of the short "God and Me" essays that comprise the bulk of the volume--the excerpts are from John McGahern (possibly one of the last things he wrote), Nell Freudenberger, Richard Mabey, and Nadeem Aslam. The last, on how Aslam's perception of faith was shaped by a fervently and cruelly fundamentalist uncle, is very good. I'm especially struck by these lines:
In the end, Aslam makes his peace with Arabic by means of its capacity for beauty, and leaves open a small window of hope that beauty may also prove the undoing of the joyless notion of faith espoused by his uncle: Go read. And if you like this, find yourself a copy of his beautiful and unsettling novel Maps for Last Lovers, which has just been shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin prize.
(And yes, this song has been freewheeling through my head since I typed the title to this post.)
This unforgivable omission aside, though, the list of contributors and the topics make it look very much worthwhile. On the website you can read several of the short "God and Me" essays that comprise the bulk of the volume--the excerpts are from John McGahern (possibly one of the last things he wrote), Nell Freudenberger, Richard Mabey, and Nadeem Aslam. The last, on how Aslam's perception of faith was shaped by a fervently and cruelly fundamentalist uncle, is very good. I'm especially struck by these lines:
In Turin, Italy, in the spring of 2005, I went to a reading given by the Syrian poet Adonis. He would read a few verses in Arabic and then pause while they were translated into Italian for the audience. I know neither language and yet, not long into the reading, I discovered that my eyes were full of tears and realized that if I did not exert control I would be weeping openly. I was puzzled and when I told my friends about it later, they were amused. It is only now, months later, that I think I know what made me cry....because they bring back, suddenly, a conversation with dear S. in the Parisian baguette place in North Parade (ages ago, before we were truly friends) when she was just starting to study Arabic, and she said something very similar about the alienated familiarity of a language previously known only through uncomprehending rote memory. The recollection of this discussion is as vivid to me as if it had taken place last week; in the course of it we also established that the Urdu word for rain and the Turkish word for peace are the same: barış.
As a child I was made to read the Qur'an without any understanding of the grammar or idiom of Arabic. I had to learn the words by heart simply because they were sacred. My mind, even then, did not work like that, and I was regularly slapped or beaten with a cane on the hands and body by the clerics for not having memorized the verses. Even more frightening than the thought of being punished myself, was the thought that my brother would be beaten. I remember him crying out under the blows one day at the mosque. My uncle, who was feared by everyone, including my mother, would sometimes wake me at dawn with his loud chanting of the Qur'an. As a result of such associations, the very sound of Arabic came to sicken me.
In the end, Aslam makes his peace with Arabic by means of its capacity for beauty, and leaves open a small window of hope that beauty may also prove the undoing of the joyless notion of faith espoused by his uncle: Go read. And if you like this, find yourself a copy of his beautiful and unsettling novel Maps for Last Lovers, which has just been shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin prize.
(And yes, this song has been freewheeling through my head since I typed the title to this post.)
posted by kitabet at 8:50 PM
2 Comments:
Immersed in dense autobiographical and narrative theory at the Rad Cam, I come across an article which uses Ondaatje's The English Patient as an example ... it delights me, simply and sentimentally! ... and links, at least 'literally', to the title of the book you recommend. So allow me to quote:
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swim up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to upon such a earth that had no maps.
oh yes...it pleases me to think of myself as a communal history, or book. and he is preoccupied with this mapping of the body, no?
'what good is it
to be the lime-burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar'
...there's some other poem of his too, about bodily scars and love and his wife, which i cannot find. but this makes me smile, in light of my particular mental associations with that book ;) i would go back to it and look up this passage but my copy has gone awol; it may be in the same house as you, in fact.
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