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Book Review: Jallianwala Bagh Literary Responses in Prose and Poetry (2019) by Rakshanda Jalil

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Publisher: Niyogi Books Private Limited (Under the Imprint: Thornbird); First edition (1 April 2019)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 9386906929

ISBN-13: 978-9386906922

Reviewed by

Revathy Hemachandran

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus. Email:   p20170018@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in 

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.20

The Jallianwala Bagh incident has remained a spectral and contrite event in the collective memory of Indian sub-continent over decades. It echoes unhealed ruptures and gets rekindled as a result of public and political expectations in the form of official apology from the erstwhile colonisers. On the eve of the centennial anniversary of Jallianwala Bagh incident, literary historian, translator and critic Rakshanda Jalil, has published her book, Jallianwala Bagh Literary Responses in Prose and Poetry. The book occupies a crucial position as there is discernible dearth of literature and historic fiction surrounding the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh in April, 1919. Literary contributions on the subservient life under the East India Company allow for a study on not just the experiences of the colonial subjects but also the imagined realities they had of their colonisers. The narratives of this traumatic experience cannot be solely attributed to the events of the Jallianwala Massacre but also to the events which preceded the hot summer afternoon of Baisakhi in April 1919.

Punjab has always been one of the main platforms of turbulence even before the colonisation of India by British East India Company. The people from Punjab were preferred over other provinces, for military recruitment during the World War I because of the British theory of ‘martial races’ (Jalil, 10) where they ranked people from various provinces on their superiority in war front. Writings from Punjab is quite rich in authentic regional flavours and that is reflected in their cultural production.  One can always see the presence of ‘Punjab’ or what it means to be ‘Punjabi’ in their writings. Punjab has not only contributed to the nation, great revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Lala Lajpat Rai, Udham Singh, Harnam Singh Saini for the Independence movement, also writers of great calibre like Manto, Bhisham Sahni, Josh Malihabadi, Ghulam Abbas and such who have encapsulated the residual scars of the traumatic events of the past in literary fiction and poetry.

In the introduction to her book, Jalil talks about her interest in literature arising from the interstices between collective conscience and history. Being a seminal moment in the history of Independence of India and the subsequent partition of the Indian sub-continent; the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre has led to a wide emotional unrest amongst the population which effervesced into a nationwide political unrest. Critical analysis of the incident has been taken up for scholarly pursuits in varying contexts across time and space, while responses to it in Indian Literature across regional literature and in English have been overlooked. In the book, Jalil also points to the nature of censorship imposed by the British on literature. Even letters from Indian soldiers who served in the World War was subjected to scrutiny; which portrays the extent of the British regimentation and surveillance on narratives which documented the colonial regime and the discontent it generated.

This collection which includes eleven prose writings, eleven poems and an excerpt from a play is intended to represent the popular imagination. It portrays how the masses responded to the event, the reasons led to the event and the consequences of the event. The prose writings featured here are windows into the imaginations of survivors, victims and the perpetrators. Jalil has managed to explore various avenues in which the psyche of grief-stricken Punjab could traverse into, at the wake of this particularly ghastly chapter of Indian Independence movement. The writers are able to bring in the experience of the victims and survivors and how the physical nature of this trauma has transcended to become an emotional scar in the history of East India Company’s rule in India. A few of the poems included in this collection of literary responses to the event are Jallianwala Bagh by Muhammad Iqbal, A Complaint to The Hunter (Shikwa-e Saiyyad) by Tirlok Chand Mahroom, The Tyrannies in the Punjab (Mazalim-e Punjab) by Zafar Ali Khan, An address to the Sons of the East India Company (East India Company ke Farzanaon Se) by Josh Malihabadi. When read side by side, these poems evoke a sense of an experience left behind in the memory of the horrendous event. These reflect and ruminate on the reasons, conscience and consequences of being occupied by the East India company. The modernity that percolated into the social lives of the population had started getting scrutinisations under the shadow left behind this massacre. The poets through heart rendering words have been able to separate the civilising mission’s visage off of the coloniser for the readers to witness. The literature of this period thus critically expressed their dissatisfaction against the dictatorial measures of General Dyer and the British Government. The repressive attitude of General Dyer and his fellow soldiers was denounced unequivocally in these literary works published between 1919 and 1923 in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and English languages and these writings were highly ‘seditious’ in character. Many of these literatures were proscribed by the Government of Punjab and later on these received similar fate in all provincial governments.

The fiction has been an outlet to channelize the emotions that Jallianwala Bagh let loose in the hearts of the colonised subjects and also has in retrospect left the readers with an opening to look back into the psyche of the survivors of this gruesome event. The eleven poems featured in this collection are odes to the lives that were laid down in Jallianwala Bagh. It raises questions pertinent to the nature of humanity. An elaborate introduction in the beginning of the book illuminates the history building to the incident and how it was represented in several languages across numerous genres and the social context of each. The nature and location the gazes from which these responses are also mentioned in this introduction.

The incident of Jallianwala Bagh predicated the final days of British rule in India. Furthermore, the literary responses post-Jallianwala Bagh which originated nationwide unveiled the imperialistic intent of the British beneath the mask of the civilizing mission for the Indian population to witness.

When considered as a whole, the prose and poems in this book meticulously explores the following themes. Firstly, the role nationalist policies and colonial regime played in the (Jalil, 2019) activities of the Indian public and the confusion it unfurled into their domestic lives, when politics intermingled with the socio-cultural practices; secondly, the thought process of the natives who were confronted with conflict of power structures, for instance a social obligation v/s adherence to the colonial dictum, and thirdly, the native’s inability to discern the extent of the catastrophic measures taken by the British to keep up their colonial superiority (crawling order and shooting on Baisakhi) and the experience of being subjected to this unearned violence. Finally, the Jallianwala Bagh incident has played an important role in understanding the nature of humanity in power transactions that existed between colonised and colonisers.

Many contemporary debates discuss the ramifications this event has elicited and the nature of accountability it deserves. Moreover, these discussions are yet to result in an agreeable acknowledgement of the nature of events that transpired between the coloniser and colonised. An inclusion of the evolution of multiple reflective voices from both Indian and British contexts, rather than a collection of the immediate response would offer much to the scholarship on the literature of Jallianwala Bagh. It would result in more engaging academic debates in trauma literature, protest literature and studies on imperialism and colonialism. Besides the introduction that elaborated on the history and context of every literary response in this compilation will help the readers further to ruminate on the representations of this event and its relevance for the present times.

References

Jalil, R. (2019). Jallianwala Bagh, Literary responses in Prose and Poetry. Niyogi Books.

Kolsky, E. (2010). Colonial Justice in British India : White Violence and the Rule of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sarkar, S. (1983). Modern India, 1885-1947. London.

Tharoor, S. (2016). An Era of Darkness : The British Empire in India. New Delhi: Aleph.

Revathy Hemachandran is currently pursuing her Ph.D in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS-Pilani (Hyderabad Campus). Her research interests include examining the representation of Agrarian unrests in literature, Contemporary Indian English fiction and South Asian Fiction.

 

Editorial: Reflections on Literature and Art at a Time of Pandemic

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Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay

Profesor Titular, Miembro de Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (Nivel I), CONACyT, Mexico, Departamento de Arte y Empresa, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico. Chief Editor, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. Email: chiefeditor@rupkatha.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.00

Imagine the dystopia created by this viral holocaust. Incendiary piers start, burning bodies in wastelands. At night wastelands reportedly turn into a mass crematorium. At a University hospital in New Jersey, the bell rings every half an hour, announcing the passing away of a Covid victim. Ideas of nation states, frontiers, countries have only enclosed people in prisons of illusion.  Such unreal lineations become fault lines for nationalism, migrations, war and hierarchical exclusion. The Corona virus however is not impeded by such boundaries. It transmits from human to human; it affects people without distinction of nationality, economics, franchise, and turns humans into targets with a kind of Dawkinsian indifference.

On the other hand, though, the virus innervates solidarity in humans, which is manifest as the indivisibility of the herd. Yet, we are only capable of ignorant and conflicted response towards the possible evolution of, what Petrashov called, ‘noocenosic’ ecosystems. For Petrashov, biological agents like humans would have to compromise to co-exist or live with other powerful collectives like the virus and similar nanometrical entities that percolate through this wide world. On several occasions we may not have adequate knowledge about coping with threats that are so microscopic and intangible. Various respond activities have been proposed. Contrasted to proposals of precautionary survival aided by statistical indicators, we hear of views like that of some Swedish administrators who say that forced quarantine strategies are already conditioned by biopolitical responses to acts of war and terrorism. Epidemiological caution is supposedly built on a politics of panoptical surveillance. Hence it is not an indispensable tool in the management of the pandemic. Social evolutionary thinkers like Stephen Goundry speaks of the physically interactive gestures tht are necessary for social life and survival, and say that quarantining goes against natural human evolution.

2.

But the virus has forced us to reconsider what it means to live under the fear of death or even speciate extinction. This is where the artist’s personality comes at stake – since the artist, like all other human beings, is just another human being who has to respond to signals in its immediate environment, sometimes erroneously drifting, and sometimes doing the right thing. The virus has also generally coerced us to recognize true human worth out of the consciousness of our fragile life in the biological world. This global pandemic gives us a moment to reflect on the nervous and weedy layers of artifice that we have used to cover life’s raw and beautiful texture. The virus has instigated a psychosis in terms of not just statistical effects of disease and precipitant mental depression but from its threats to creative life. Biological virulence, is linked to media virulence, it turns human creativity into a whimpering shot in the dark. On a daily basis, we seem to be trapped in a world constantly manipulated by media pseudologies. There is little scope of independent thinking. Good examples of independent thinking are not hard to find though. Pepe Mujica, the former president of Uruguay, who was called “the poorest President” by the BBC, has a wonderful precept from Montevideo, where he tried to experiment with a lifestyle statement that was aimed at a distant and long-term amelioration of narcotic traffic in Central America. Mujica’s lessons were easy and difficult to achieve at the same time – he demonstrated that narcotic economy results from human greed of material things, not for substance abusers, which is another problem elsewhere, but for poor people in Uruguay, El Salvador, Colombia and other countries, who participated in the trade. Mujica’s own life, like Gandhi’s, was a demonstrable proof of this grand simplicity that touches the core of our humanity.

In a world where ‘art’ has become a product of investment economy, it is now time to acknowledge that anonymous art is better than art of the genius. Folk art is superior to masterpieces. Ritual is superior to art in a show-case. True novels are lived rather than parcelled out by the giant media. Neatness is more beautiful than décor and an unassuming home is more divinely aesthetic than a furnished salon with books printed by the media houses.

The project hence is to liberate humane expression from cinders of decadent royalty and big business, and from the fantasies spotlighted by newspapers and TV news. The virus forces us to confide in the warmth and love of home. It is the same love that preserves us at any time of want or hardship. Anthropophilia causes us to care for each other. It makes us committed and risk our life for others.  It is this capacity to empathise that saves us. Empathy, care, regard for others and for kin, are more important than any art that the media celebrates. The human being sacrifices love in order to become a monster of one’s passion – but no good comes out of it. The friendship of working class people is more precious than the social prestige commanded by the elite. The painted face of the news presenter secretly mocks at the ineptitude of the common man.

3.

The virus cannot be taken as an incentive to create “viral poetry”, as a testament of human art, like an Instagram post without any meaning beyond the instant. Browsing through the poetry section of last week’s Vanity Fair, we see on its page, the same incongruous union of contemporary “vanity” and “art”. The very title is pompous and instantaneous: “Why Poetry Is Having a Moment Amid the Global Quarantine”. As we read further we are introduced to the post-marketing world: “The poem is enjoying a bump in cultural relevance as the world sits at home and considers its surroundings. Why your timeline is possibly suddenly sprinkled with verse”. The Vanity Fair article is a precise reminder of how the same interweaving wealth of media magnate, collector, consumer and wealthy business personnel, fashion industry, ‘art’ is also actively spreading an idea of its own self-organizing poetry or art. The obnoxious twitter, the rigmarole of all things flashy and apple, blend wirh the empty tragedy of people locked at home.

The University in America, and many countries of Europe, has become a votary of the same class culture that prepares you for this world of quick sensations. In such times as now, we are compelled to ask “How does a novel apprised in New York impact the life of a villager in East Africa, or a lemon picker in Michoacan, or the trash collector in Kolkata’s marshlands. The media novelist, so gorgeously fetishized in the academy, is no more than a colonial and pseudo-progessive metrosexual. Museums worldwide have become abominable machines of the destruction of human spirit. The Metropoitan Museum of Modern Art once exhibited works of an indigenous artist. After the exhibition, the artist asked for a little compensation for transport and installation of the exhibits. The museum said, that they displayed his work was a lot of investmet in itself – and that he should be grateful for that. The MOMA arrogance exposes the real values of the art world. Consider the invisible way in which a critic in The New Yorker creates these neocolonial evaluations for a piece of painting. She says on the home page, “Museums know the desires of our hands. The special presence of paintings comes from their being at once untouchable and viscerally evocative of touch. (April 21, 2020)”. A piece of painting is never so important, that it will continue to invoke our presence for its self-fetishization.  Painting does not transcend life and humanity – it does not need to sit in a museum and make its own publicity look so arrogant and inhumane, waiting for its bidder, and its entry into the house of a collector.

4.

True human values lie in the honesty of the heart, even of it is not ‘artistic’ by the world’s standards. There may be true worth in the greatest of writings, but its appropriation by the industrial elite, has overshadowed its preciousness in a world of self-mesmerizing profanities. Creative writing should be undertaken in one’s own language, criticism should enrich one’s own culture and values. The unthinking study and glorification of Anglophone discourse, out of which we can scarcely escape, automatically aligns us to the media elite that tries to control the world’s markets. As long as we don’t shift our attention from the sufferings of our fellow humans we shall not render a disservice to people who speak the same language as ours, who reap the fruits, flowers and grain that sustain us. True beauty is tied to this simple life of communications.  The viral moment has now created a space of introspection. It lets us focus on the essential spark of life. Academic discussions have been alienating us for long time.  The best definition of creative process is to be creative, explore – each one, one’s true hope and dream. and to hope for expiation through a humble word. It would be time, in a world freed from the virus, to identify and negate the presence of all brands of elitism.

Poems by Subhankar Dutta

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Subhankar Dutta is a native of Mohanpur, West Bengal, and presently working as a Teaching Assistant and Research Scholar in HSS Department, IIT Bombay. Though he uses Bengali as a preferable creative medium, he also tries to express the same in English and Hindi as well. Apart from publishing his poems in college and university magazines, he also contributed to the several little magazines and journals namely, Aalokon (The Enlightening), Sebanjali, The LangLit, and others. Being a theatre enthusiast, he is also part of “Qissa Kothi”, a Mumbai based theatre group, and serves as a PG Convener of Fourthwall, the Dramatics Club of IIT Bombay. He has directed and written plays for the club as well as for IIT Bombay for ‘Justice’ (a non-profit organization). He can be reached at subhankardutta1996@gmail.com

Special Collection: Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020>>

I am never at Home

I’m never at Home!
My steps roamed around from Kashmir to Kanyakumari,
But they never met each other.
The smile, the face, the fence, the gate,
The sorry in the damasked eye,
Kisses the horizon too early.
My TV remote shuddering like a bullet gun
Thrushes the window fence and
I never came back.
Yes, they do promise of a promised land.
Yes, they promise of an easy walk!
Yes, they promise of a better life,
Yes, they promise like the birthmark!
Been there for years!

I beg, I cry, I try at each opened door,
For home, for domesticity, for belongingness!
But they pass an alien eye,
With half baked smile!
I roar, I fight, I protest at every street corner,
For shelter, for shade, for suggestions!
They cut my tongue, calling it too long to speak!

Now standing on the empty street
I look up, look down, and look left and right!
I look for faces where I belong,
I look for faces where I reside,
I look for places to rest!
I look for hope and to decide!

Yes, they promised a lot!
As if promises are hardly been kept!
Now, as the street are emptied of hope,
As the faces are getting blank,
As the tongue ceases to speak,
And the path ceases to end,
I will find my home at every coming bend!
My home will be on each unknown land!
I will find my home at every coming bend!

The old clock

The old clock tinkling like the evening dusk,
Half dark, half lightened, but still going.
It has witnessed the long past,
The Plague, the drought, the reddened sky,
The sobbing nights and drenching eye!
The tick tick tick at the deep dark night,
The housewife’s many unsaid plights!
The father who ceases to be broken,
Holding the last hope of the night, the last token!
It has heard the unfed belly crying aloud,
The uncertainty of dawn looming around!
It has witnessed the second-last,
It has witnessed a long past.

Published on May  25, 2020. © Author

 

Poems by Crystal Hurdle

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Crystal Hurdle teaches English and Creative Writing at Capilano University in North Vancouver, BC, Canada. In October 2007, she was Guest Poet at the International Sylvia Plath Symposium at the University of Oxford, reading from After Ted & Sylvia: Poems (2003). Her work, poetry and prose, has been published in many journals, including Canadian Literature, The Literary Review of Canada, Event, Bogg, Vallum, Ars Medica, The Dalhousie Review, and The Capilano Review, of which she was Fiction Editor in the late eighties, and on whose Board of Directors she sat for many years. Teacher’s Pets, a teen novel in verse, was published by Tightrope Books in 2014, and is part of the 2020 North Shore Authors’ Collection in the public library system. Sick Witch (poems) is forthcoming from Ronsdale Press.  Her website is crystalhurdle.ca

Special Collection: Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020>>

Distance

Picnic tables and remembrance benches cordoned off
wrapped in the yellow tape of crime scenes
gradually petering out
until the last bench sports what seems
like a yellow pendant
blowing in the April breeze
of a cancelled festive parade

New signage at Maplewood Mudflats and Bird Sanctuary
Socially distance six feet
your height
or an eagle’s full wingspan from tip to tip

Too many walkers on the trails
this brilliant blue and gold April day
even without the papier Mache floats and cherry blossom confetti
they don’t heed the signs
to walk in single file when you encounter
people coming in the other direction

the cat tails are also six feet tall
maybe I should wield one like a sabre
but the ducks chitter remonstrance when I reach
and you scold

You and I continue to walk
the imaginary eagle between us
a head like a revolving owl’s
it directs its severe gaze between one of us
and then the other
its cowl as golden as today’s unseasonable sun
its feathers intricate shiny spikes, small bones

an errant heron leaps on long legs
rips the sky like a pterodactyl
a murder of crows suddenly erupts
long black lines in the sky
where planes so recently flew
they caw and caw
social distance of no import as each crow flies
home to roost

startled, our eagle on his manlegs
lurches forward
and runs and runs over and above
the phalanx of oncoming walkers
extends his six-feet wings
glides and flies
against the river
against the tide
precipitously
Icarus or is it Daedalus
into his sun

and we don’t know how to measure
the distance supposed to be between us

we reach the last remembrance bench
with the Wordsworth plaque
“my heart leaps up when I behold
a rainbow in the sky”
gleaming with slanting sunlight
the yellow tape rustles and dances
above the birds sing

below earth-tethered
you clutch the non-sanitized guard rail
admire the faraway view
I read the sign on the bench
wonder what this person died of

the distance

Six feet
under

Ghost Flowers

Shivering snowdrops
poke through the crusty dead leaves
also mystery blooms from a frenzied planting
late last summer
Little tete a tete clutches of yellow
Phalanxes of narcissi, daffodils, and now tulips

how glad I am to have a garden in Vancouver
into which to escape the statistics
the slow walk
the slower talk
of the numbered dead
flowers are not statistics

While the flower farms in La Conner stay closed
its first daffodils rearing their heads
as the first care home victims bowed theirs
the tulip festival and parade cancelled
the tulip farms closed behind tall fences
so only drones or the birds can enjoy the sight

in Bollenstreek, people flock to the flower fields
looking for fresh air, signs of rebirth
tulip gardens such attractive nuisances
one must be cruel to be kind
help people to help themselves

cloaked government gardeners with scythes
lop off tulip heads by the hundreds, the thousands
a decapitation
floral genocide
the earth moans
is silenced
and it is too quiet

If a tree falls alone in the forest
can anyone hear it?
If a tulip erupts into blind brilliance
is it not still beautiful?
If a tulip shaft remains tall and green
can one imagine the shimmer of its parted petal bells
as they bend ghostlike toward the light?

Anaphylactic Shock

The No-Name peanut butter unwillingly substituted in my first on-line grocery order under quarantine is the exact shade of baby shit in an overfull diaper or the Depends on the old folks in so-called care homes one into which I went just before all the lock downs with my friend to visit her aunt who told her to go away but my friend stayed and cajoled and mollycoddled her because she didn’t want to make a waste of her unwanted visit though she had not been asked to come unlike all of the health care workers of whom there were not nearly enough even then even working in multiple nursing homes and I felt bad for the poor defenseless old lady who couldn’t even keep away people she didn’t want to see though maybe her dementia prevented her from remembering anything too untoward like bed sores and loneliness and deprivation and loss and the wrong visitor at the wrong time and how much worse with a virus too small to be detected by those incarcerated as in prisons but what criminal acts did the seniors commit other than growing frail not wishing to die becoming old?

Easter Triduum 2020

Maundy Thursday

The six-pack of pansies reluctant
to release from its
polyamine sheath
roots refuse to let go

the plants leap out as if
from an ice pop mould
out of season
darkest chocolate
so bitter your lips will pucker
on the unconsecrated host
you think is good for only baking
unleavened deepest chocolate
threaded with white
a lacey veil of mint striations or something like

what a find at the Superstore
freshly opened Garden Centre
we wait in line for the cashier
patiently socially distanced
spaced out in all senses
blitzed on the pollens and sunshine
non-medical masks instead of sunscreen

Scott with our massive cart of bagged soils
so many we could build another earth
slowly forward moving
on each interminably allowably distanced X
the marks for a low budget horror flick
no one wants to be a part of

I make the rounds up the aisles of flowers, seeds
smelly herbs in pots
for my garden in plots
I go for the splash of colour
very berry cherry delicious
unlikely to get chocolate eggs this year
for the wilder sounding names
calendula, mimosa, coral bells
not giving a damn about these prohibitions
for sun or for shade
for richer or for poorer
for alpine or for meadow
in sickness and in health

Scott’s fingers on the cart handrail
tap out a Morse code reckoning
of freshly tilled earth
of food security
of growing your own
He abhors Kale but it’s good for you
so I grab seven packs for luck

While I would usually hold out
for perennial or at least self-seeding
wanting my gardening dollar to s-t-r-e-t-c-h
beyond these labyrinthine lines of X to X with the hopscotch squares now too far apart
for this to be a fun game

I spring for one annual after another,
Annual, why not?

not as if we have a lot of time left

Good Friday

In heavily accented English
Quebec’s premier proclaims
the Easter bunny an essential worker
but he cautions the children
wriggly rabbit happy on their carpets at home
before the screen
This year he might not bring chocolate eggs
or effigies of himself
but date-sweetened oatmeal cookies or handwritten notes
the lettering suspiciously like a parent’s

I remember a long-ago Easter
My sister got a new chalkboard and on it
a message from the Bunny
to eat her greens and to listen to her mom and dad
not then socially distanced
That was to come
The separate rooms
The separate lives

Or maybe pancakes of bunny heads
with carefully poured long ears
my sister now a mother herself will create whiskers
with thin lines of syrup
a raisin for each nose and call it done

avoiding the dog poop overwintered
peanut M and M’s on their scorched earth front yard
my nieces will forage shrieking
with their bedraggled last-year baskets

Later, today’s children will measure other Easters
against this one
though they won’t turn up their noses
at chocolate marshmallow suckers
and Cadbury Crème eggs

“Remember when the bunny
brought those great chicken-shaped pancakes?”
“Remember when the bunny
brought GORP in cardboard egg cups
painted the colour of last year’s bathroom walls?”
“Remember when the Bunny
brought Dad’s baseball from when he was a boy?”

Fingers crossed that we will be around to remember

Holy Saturday

the abnormally clean yard
so clean you could eat off it!
gaps and gapes
in need of new plants
The shorn ferns more ragged than my self-trimmed bangs

As if in answer to my silent plea
tender fronds emerge from the earth this Easter Saturday
unfurl into the beckoning light
at the same time tendrils of hair frame my face
Oh so kindly
On this dateless clubless partyless
strangely secular though sacred night
of Netflix and death decluttering
in multiple separate rooms

Easter Sunday

Skunk cabbages both phallic and reverent
on this Easter Sunday morning

They are able to congregate
in groups larger than 50
than 100
than 250
Faith groups Zoom to parishioners
and priests sit in folding chairs at drive-by confessionals
like a drive-by shooting
but who is the accused?
what is risen?

Faster than a speeding bullet
That blood tendril unfurling in the brain
I have sinned
You are healed

Their Crayola yellow flames beam
goodwill
hope
that oft-told tale of resurrection while

(unnoticed)

elsewhere

a bat cave

tomb

slides o p e n

Neighbourhood Watch

I) Will you Be?

Tattle on the neighbours who
Build without permits
Water the grass 24 hours a day
Don’t heed the rules
to self-isolate when they return from away

Shamers social pariahs
Even easier to do from 6 feet away
Love thy neighbour
tell him what he’s doing wrong
isn’t that love?

Everyone at home
Potential crucible for violence
The neighbours leaf blow and power wash
The neighbours fire up their lawnmowers
The neighbours banish the children out of doors

Love thy neighbour until you are sick of him

Neighbour to neighbour
Will you be my neighbour?

Won’t you? Please don’t

II) TGIF

It’s a charming laneway party
the noise, oh, the noise
kids underfoot and then banished
unemployed or working from home
adult children back in the nest
the noise, oh, the noise
It’s a charming laneway party

brief respite from the every single room
now an office or a home
laptops proliferating cords
electrical wires as sullen as snakes
tripping your every move
the noise, oh, the noise
tonight each in a lawn chair
6 or 7 feet apart
each raising a glass to the celebrant
to the end of another new normal ordinary week
It’s a charming laneway party

And Tift raises a glass across the class chasm to Lapt
and Bodger blows kisses to Heldone’s wife
and Madjet talks isolation crafts to someone else’s daughter
and Xirsim and Pulette with Kanda
the noise, oh, the noise

the noise, oh, the no
every single room now a toilet or a boudoir
laptops Instagramming infidelities
electrical wires as taut as nooses
putting down the wine glass
to bang pots and pans at 7 o’clock
in harmony this disharmony
it’s a charming lane way party

until it isn’t

III) Free-range and Long-range

In the preternaturally early spring
Children run free range, far afield
We socially distance in laneway parties
On rooftop condo decks
Shivering in our overcoats as we
X to X
Raise a glass
Our own glass
(So we can use the good stuff not the watered
down no-name brand we usually give the neighbours)
to Stacey’s 40th birthday
to Liam’s promotion
even to T.G.I.F. Friday
in a week devoid of colour

Won’t you be my neighbour?

Noise carries
Isolation breeds

On the other side of the lane
A socially distanced long range rifle barrel clicks into place

Steady
Ready aim fire

X marks the spot

Mask with Blades

The former fashion designer
in the lower right hand corner of the screen
smaller than a postage stamp
you’d stick on mail currently going nowhere
–worse than post 9/11
New York currently besieged
worse than Anthrax formerly in those envelopes—
explains how to make the nonmedical masks
NY state is now clamouring for
after weeks of the mantra
that nobody need wear a mask
that masks are no good
don’t really protect
give a false sense of confidence

you glassy-eyed on the loveseat beside me

Now seamstresses on the front lines
viable options viable substitutes
a double layer of interfacing inside
Another YouTube crafter says like making a quilt but
without the batting
but with what?
What is the mythical middle layer?
I am frantic with the unknowing
air thick with old breath and flattened rage

This special from Good Housekeeping
the 2020 version of
the Second World War effort to
save our scraps—gather your metals–
and mettle
Now you need a twist tie or paper clip
to make the nose grip against the face
your distinguished roman nose
or roman a la clef
this is you or me dying
and a mask can cover up only so much

And the tinier woman on my tiny screen
like the girl in the Black Magic chocolate box ever receding
like the girl in the Borax canister ever Matrushka
Household cleaner so necessary now
alkaline mineral salt
is brandishing scissors and
apologizing
usually she’d use a
different set of scissors

to cut the paper pattern
paper

Rock paper scissors
there’s losing even in the winning
third time lucky?
Yesterday you’d brandished rock
hand balled as a fist
Anthrax not a mineral? Spores, so animal? Or is it a plant?
You knew Borax gets rid of chocolate and rust stains
How you crowed over your filled pie in Trivial Pursuit
We need a new Covid Quarantine edition
and special dispensations for o n l y t w o players

to cut from the fabric
fabric

and I think of my scissors
the pretty pearl-handled ones you gave me
on our thirtieth wedding anniversary
dulled from hacking at my incorrigible hair
and rust-bloodied from having stabbed you a day ago

they’ll have to do double duty
when in Rome
the smaller woman in the woman in the woman
I eat two chocolates, mine and yours
I replay the video
to learn how to

pandemic poem

this many days in quarantine and counting
still
counting…
still…

claustrophobic cross-country family road trip
we’re all in this together
novelty long worn off
plaintive and beseeching
amidst the torn Timmy’s wrappers
and A&W root beer cans
surfeited by salt, sugar
no treats left under Mom’s front seat
Dad’s white knuckles on the sanitized steering wheel
convert to cruise control

we’re all children in the back seat
are we there yet?
are we there yet?
still

Published on May  14, 2020. © Author

Reflection of Social Conflict of Kazakhstan of the 90s of the 20th Century by Visualizing Spatial Models in the Film Directed by Darezen Omirbaev

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276 views

Yembergenova Dinara1, Akhmedova Aizhan2 & Abikeeva Gulnara3

1Kazakh Leading Architectural and Civil Engineering Academy, Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan, dinarae@bk.ru, ORCID: 0000-0002-9133-1993

2Kazakh Leading Architectural and Civil Engineering Academy, Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan, aizhan.akhmedova@googlemail.com, ORCID: 0000-0003-3935-3957

3Turan University, Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan, gabikeyev@googlemail.com; ORCID: 0000-0001-8493-1547

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.19

Abstract

The article highlights the issue of social and cultural clashes of different segments of the population of Kazakhstan. Art is a way of communication;  so Darezen Omirbaev expressed his opinion about the current situation in independent Kazakhstan in 1991 through the film “Kairat”. According to the plot, the main character, Kairat, leaves his village and moves to a big city – Alma-Ata. These are two fundamentally different spaces, both architecturally and socioculturally. As the director demonstrated, – the city did not accept a resident of another class, a different type of thinking. Kairat, as a representative of the Kazakh-speaking culture of Kazakhstan, ineptly tries to integrate into the Russian-speaking urban environment. The frames are filled with archetypal images that allow a more in-depth look at the conflict between the film and society. The article provides data that demonstrate how the situation with the film industry and language policy in Kazakhstan has changed.

Keywords: Film, Director, Kazakh Cinema, Language Policy, Social Conflict, Space, Kairat, Darezhen Omirbaev.

Magical Realism: The Magic of Realism

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5.2K views

Ayyub Rajabi1, Majid Azizi2, Mehrdad Akbari3

1Ph.D. Student of Persian Language and Literature. Arak Islamic Azad University, Arak, Iran. Email: ayob.raiabi@gmail.com

2, 3Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University of Arak

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.18

Abstract

In Magical Realism the elements of reality and imagination are so elaborately interwoven that the reader simply accepts them, in such a way that all artificial and imaginary incidents in the storyline seems completely real and natural. Considering the concept of Realism, it can be realized that literature aims to surrender itself to the real world and, by the means of imagination and imagery, balances the truth. Furthermore, realism admits that it owes a repayment to the real world, the world that it indisputably surrenders itself to. The results of this study indicated that, this art and the magic of Realism and reality have transformed Magical Realism into the most appealing and real type of Realism in such a way that, despite its magical and marvelous appearance, it is mostly acceptable and believable for the reader. Additionally, this kind of literary genre is more consistent with the principles of the school of Realism than any other, and it presents the mission of the Real author and his/her commitment to the community well and beyond reality.

Keywords: Imagination; Realism; Magical Realism; Knowledge; Reality.

Teaching and Researching Reading in Indian Context

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308 views

Megala M1 & Anil Premraj J2

1Research Scholar,  2Assistant Professor, Department of English, School of Social Science and Languages,Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. Email: megalamanisharaj@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.17

Abstract

The importance placed on reading skill emerges from the necessity of performing well that starts from primary stage of learning to the workplace scenario. One of the first things children are pressurized to do at early schooling is ‘Learn to Read’ and of course that remarks their progressive transformation to become an expert in reading. Using descriptive method of research, the study traces the importance and efforts taken by second language teachers and students towards the development of reading skills from primary class to university education in Indian context. It also addresses the existing lag in English language education, necessity of infusing the requirement of specially designed curriculum, and to fulfil the need of learners especially who felt difficulty in reading. The study suggested skill-based instruction in detail at each level as a remedy for rectifying deficits in reading.

Keywords: ESL, Subskills instruction, Reading skill, NCERT.

Performative Subjects & the Irresistible Lack of Understanding in David Mamet’s Oleanna: a Butlerian Discourse Analysis

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294 views

Hojatolla Borzabadi Farahani1 & Mariam Beyad2

1Department of English language, Arak Branch, Islamic Azad University, Arak, Iran

2Associate Professor, University of Tehran. Email: n_bfarahani@yahoo.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.16

Abstract:

The present study tends to explore the constitution of power and its formative effects on David Mamet’s play, Oleanna, a very controversial work dealing with sexual harassment and political correctness. The analysis is going to be done applying views and results of Judith Butler’s notion of gender and identity trouble to the play first through explanation of related key concepts like difference, decentering, subject and language, and then utilizing them to analyze the roots of sudden, surprising transformations and role-reversals of the involved characters, John and Carol, through the three acts. Furthermore, it is tried to find out the causes of unavoidable violence within the contexts of the relations going between the characters.

Keywords: gender, identity, difference, decentering, performative, understanding, violence, discourses, language

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Features of Adolescent Deviant Discourse in Social Networks

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255 views

V. V. Gridina1, V. N. Antonova2, I. G. Malanchuk3, A. V. Kipchatova4, O. I. Katlishin5

1 Samara State Technical University, Samara, Russia. ORCID: 0000-0003-3183-0448. Email: samavera@mail.ru,

2 North-Eastern Federal University named after M.K. Ammosov, Yakutsk, Russia. Email:  antegor@mail.ru

3 Independent Non-Profit Organisation Expert Union KONTEXT, Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Email:  cora1@inbox.ru

4 Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University named after Viktor Astafyev, Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Email: allakipchatova@mail.ru

5 Perm State Agro-Technological University named after Academician D.N. Pryanishnikov, Perm, Russia, ORCID: 0000-0003-2869-2312. Email: katol81@yandex.ru

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.15

 

Abstract

The flip side of “networking” was the emergence of new types and ways of social interaction between individuals and social groups, characterized, among other things, by socially dangerous manifestations. These manifestations are expressed in the absence of a system of sanctions and control over the dissemination of any type of information on the Internet, difficulties in identifying ideologues and leaders of extremist and separatist associations that also conduct their activities using social networks and much more. The younger generation easily perceived the entire multilateral network world with its ambiguous consequences for the system of its own norms, values and behaviors. It is not necessary to mention once again that the informal, youthful groups of a criminal nature today have changed their internal structure, mission and functional features. It is enough to recall a number of mass protest actions regularly organized using the internet and other social networks, including offline. Recently, quite often mass actions of a destructive nature have occurred with the participation of adolescents of middle and senior school age, whose activities were coordinated through the global Internet and other modern means of communication. At the same time, the scientific and expert community does not yet have reliable data on the mechanisms of such interaction, its trends and patterns. The social network of a teenager with deviant behavior will be interpreted by us as a special type of connection between the social positions of adolescents, the closest social environment, including the school environment and close relatives, which are formed on the basis of social capital resources, goals of interaction between these actors interplay between their positions.

Keywords: adolescents, deviations, social networks, social interaction, communication, age psycholinguistics, discursive behavior.

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Artworks by Ansel Oommen

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155 views

Ansel Oommen, MLS (ASCP) is a Clinical Laboratory Technologist, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University Medical Center. His artworks and poem emerged out of his intense experience of the pandemic situation. He writes:

“As a medical technologist working in clinical microbiology in NYC, I have been caught in the epicenter of the American outbreak. Since mid March, I have been conducting SARS-CoV-2 PCR tests on hundreds of patient samples to aid in the diagnosis of COVID-19. As the first human being to see the results of those tests before releasing them out into the world, I was bound by an immense gravity. As an artist, I processed my losses by dissecting, excising, and reconstructing my grief into various collages. These collages were composed of bio-hazard labels, a familiar laboratory item, to convey how elements of politics, public health, mental health, and ecology overlap. The use of bio-hazard labels also alludes to my academic training in toxicology. By capitalizing on aposematic color codes, these pieces are visual warnings for viewers to stop and reflect on the various threats that plague our world.”

Special Collection: Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020>>

Autoimmunity

We are not immune as we once believed

We are not immune to business as usual
When business has always been busy
Prescribing profits over prudence
With false prophecies of golden years

We are not immune to the viral strains
Of rabid voices coughing up empty words
Ever mutating sense into missense
Each echo more feral than before

We are not immune to the dissemination of lies
Aerosolized and transmitted as truth
For even with repeat exposure
We still react to what was never foreign

We are not immune to the poisons of privilege
As we amputate left to save what is right
As we amputate right to save what is left
When instead, the diagnosis was truly systemic

We are not immune to being the greatest
When we fill our graveyards to be the least

As we reach the end stage of life as we know it
While we await a vaccine for all our ills
Let us remember:
The disease was always within ourselves

The pandemic was just a symptom.

Artworks

Pandemicon
Silent Spring

 

Published on May  04, 2020. © Artist

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