June 19, 2013

Bulletpoints: Man of Steel

(Spoilers, obviously)

Look, I’m a reasonable person. Ideally I’d like movies to be thoughtful and deep and beautiful and surprising and interesting, but on a summer afternoon with my friends I will settle for pretty people + stuff blowing up. Man of Steel is by a director whose previous work I haven’t liked, but it still promised to feature planetloads of explosions and Henry Cavill’s face. In the event, there was even more destruction than I’d anticipated and I’d forgotten just how impressive Cavill’s face was. I ought to have been satisfied, but I spent most of the movie either bored or actively unhappy.

  • I have no investment in Superman. I’ve never had a particular fondness for the character, I haven’t read that many of the comics, I don’t really care that he kills someone in this film. Or I do care, because if you’re going to make a movie about a particular character you might as well get the details right, but this is not an angry comics fan rant because I’m not really a comics fan.
  • The early scenes of MoS take place on Krypton, whose technology and interior design appear to have been designed by H.R. Giger (with added tentacles to draw in a modern, cephalopod-loving audience). I thoroughly approved of this. The design stuff is gorgeous, and there are weird flying beasties and underwater baby farms and important Kryptonians appear to be wearing headgear stolen from Immortals and so far things are going well.
  • Apparently Krypton has seen no natural births in centuries, which must be their excuse for not having contrived less painful ways for women to give birth. So the first thing we see of this movie is a Hollywood birth scene with the writhing and the pain, and the fortunately being over quite soon with no complications. Already I’m rolling my eyes. And trying to work out backstory that would excuse this situation–perhaps Superman’s mother didn’t know (since it’s been so long since anyone did this) how much it would hurt. Perhaps the people of Krypton did contrive a less painful way for women to give birth and the underwater babygardens were it. But the way the movie had chosen to fall back on unthinking cliche already set the tone for pretty much everything else.
  • A few minutes later Jor-El/Russell Crowe jumped off a building and fell a few floors before being picked up by his flying beastie. And it was … nothing, there was no sense of danger; the audience had seen this scene a million times before and the film knew it. Going through the motions. It was almost genius in that it not only managed to depress me about this movie, it managed to make every other summer blockbuster in which I’d seen that scene feel less meaningful (which is hard, considering summer blockbusters) as well.
  • To be fair, there’s not much variation in how you can depict a planet collapsing in on itself, but the end of Krypton looked a lot like the end of Vulcan in 2009′s Star Trek (a film which also had an annoying birth scene). After this we started seeing echoes to other big blockbustery movies everywhere. Lois falling backwards with blue light crackling behind her? The Avengers. Smallville fight scene? Thor. The leaping and crashing before Superman learns to fly? John Carter. I think there was a moment in there that looked like Looper. And collapsing buildings that looked like what feels like every big Hollywood movie of the last few years because everything must be about 9/11 forever.
  • I’m sure if I was more well-disposed towards this film I could say something here about the universality of the superhero story (and Superman is in so many ways the first superhero) but I’m not, so it just felt derivative and dull.
  • Flash forward to adult Clark Kent on Earth, shirtlessly saving people on a burning oil rig, flames all around him flickering on his lovely torso. Did I mention that he was shirtless? And has a lovely scruffy beard? And lovely chest hair which somehow (like his hair and beard) is not singed by the fire raging around him?
  • He then falls backwards, arms flung out, to look like Jesus. The Superman = Jesus imagery is not subtle. There is a scene with Clark in a church, with a stained glass representation of Jesus behind him. Not subtle. Lots of people have objected to this imagery–it’s not cleverly done, it’s not original, and as Chris Sims points out here, it’s particularly ineffective if your Jesus figure ends up taking out an entire city and then killing a guy.
  • But if there’s one thing this movie does well, it’s the gorgeous, stylised tableaux. Superman in Jesus pose, Superman against stained glass, Superman closing his eyes and turning his face to the sun in a moment that is straight out of classic comic book art. Superman in a ballpit of skulls when we discover that the inside of his head looks like a Beksiński painting.
  • These lovely tableaux all put together make the most dysfunctional, whiplash-causing flipbook imaginable.
  • What if Man of Steel had abandoned any pretense of being a mainstream summer superhero movie and had gone with some sort of daring, beautiful, religious film? Okay, it would probably still have been pretty bad.
  • Michael Shannon is pretty good. Amy Adams is pretty good and her Lois is more active and competent than I’d feared (Neither Nolan nor Snyder have impressed me with their ability to depict women in the past). Henry Cavill looks beautiful and would possibly have been good if given anything to do.
  • I feel like most of the second half of this film could have been dispensed with. This is probably true of most of the first half.
  • There’s one gorgeous minute in space where the camera manages to suspend gravity (and not in a showy, look at the 3D way) that I really liked.
  • At one point the scientist character says “Oh My God. They’re terraforming” and one of the military people who is hanging around says “what’s that?”
  • The movie manages to resist the emotional beat of letting the dog die.
  • I guess everyone on Krypton is white? And most people on Earth? There’s a bit where Superman has to fly to the other end of the planet and there’s a fisherman throwing a net and he’s probably brown but he’s in silhouette.
  • Everyone has already talked about the sheer, senseless violence of it. The last half-hour or so (was it longer? it felt longer) of the film has an extended fight sequence in which people fly in and out of buildings punching one another. There are no people, and at no point are we faced with the horrible idea that all this stuff going boom can in any way be affecting the people caught up in these battles. That people might die, lose things or people that are important to them.
  • The sheer consequenceless of the action is something other people have written about: see here, for example. I don’t know if there’s a conscious attempt to make films more palatable; I think we’re all just drifting into seeing violence as pure spectacle and that is terrifying.
  • Also this.
  • Having said which, I wasn’t awed at the spectacle at all. I was prepared to switch my brain off and embrace the adrenaline rush of the explosions but it never came. It felt like even here the film was going through the motions. I longed for Michael Bay, who at least blows things up with conviction.
  • China Mieville’s Embassytown has aliens called the Ariekei, who cannot understand language unless, as the words are being spoken, the consciousness behind them means them as well. I felt like one of the Ariekei. Or like someone not fluent in English was ve-ry-sl-o-w-ly-re-a-ding-or-sp-elling-out-a-sen-ten-ce.
  • The last time I was this unhappy watching a movie I was in a plane and the only movie they had was Bride Wars.

Posted in comics, movies | Leave a Comment »

June 18, 2013

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, “The Whispering Trees”

(Terribly late with this one, sorry!)

The third of this year’s Caine Prize shortlistees. “The Whispering Trees” can be found here.

Context means a lot when you’re reading an author you don’t know. If you’re reading a slush pile you expect most submissions to be mediocre and you tend to only really notice the ones that stand out. If you’re reading an awards shortlist you expect most stories to be brilliant and if they’re not obviously so are willing to make the extra effort to hunt through them for what makes them good.”The Whispering Trees” has the most promising (lucid, deceptively simple) beginning and the most disappointing closing lines of any of the Caine prize finalists I’ve read so far, and I’m not sure what to think.

The story is about Salim, a young man who loses his eyesight in an accident, a month before he was to graduate from medical school and marry Faulata, the woman he loves. Having lost his mother, his career, and (he assumes) his fiancee all at once, he deals with his new situation first badly then well. Faulata stays and helps in a saintly fashion until she is no longer needed, then marries someone else. In recovering from this second great loss Salim discovers in himself the ability to see people’s souls though he can no longer see their faces; losing sight, he has gained insight.

A few here. Firstly, I suspect that if I was blind I’d be pissed off to learn that the magical power to see souls was an improvement I should be grateful for–but I guess that’s implicit in that whole blind prophet tradition, so perhaps it’s unfair to feel it more here than elsewhere.

Secondly, I’m not sure what the prose here is doing. Keguro Macharia’s post on the story is  very well worth reading, in this regard in particular.

Thirdly, those opening lines made me think for a moment that this story was in part fantasy or horror. I have a horrible habit of trying to read things that aren’t ‘really’ (whatever that means) SFF as belonging to the genre and I’m trying to resist the temptation to do so here. Because if it’s not a post-death story, it does have ghosts and supernatural powers. But the whispering trees that give the story its name and the possibly interesting dead childhood friend don’t feel to me like the focus here. What is the centre of the story then? Salim’s reconciling himself to his loss of eyesight, I suppose, and his difficulty with his faith in the wake of the tragedy.

On twitter a few days ago, Ben asked (half-jokingly? I guess? I don’t see why not?) if anyone was going to do a reading of “The Whispering Trees” as a sort of prequel to Tope Folarin’s “Miracles”. I’m not, but I think the juxtaposition of those two stories can be interesting. Because “Miracles” also touches on questions of faith, of personal (mis)fortune in the context of religion. Except that the religion of “Miracles” is something social; it’s something that acts within communities and it’s this quality that has our protagonist come out of the story uneasy. “The Whispering Trees” focuses almost entirely on the personal, and has its main character coming out of it obedient, contented, and with faith intact.

Saints are rarely fun to read about and I don’t like being preached to. I’ve been trying since I read it to come up with alternative narratives (none of them, I think, the story “The Whispering Trees” thinks it’s telling) that are more satisfactory to me. So the ghost story. The story where this story simultaneously debunks (he’s not possessed, he’s depressed; there isn’t a malevolent spirit haunting the trees) and affirms (the attempted exorcism does seem to help; there is a ghost haunting the trees) spiritual belief. The story where those opening lines are the truth; Salim is dead and the rest is all some sort of afterlife analogy.

None of them quite seems to stick. I keep thinking that all this story really comes down to is that weak last line: “I realise that happiness lies, not in getting what you want, but in wanting what you have.” I really don’t want that to be the case.

 

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As ever, other people’s thoughts on the story are here:

Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva
Jeffrey Zuckerman
Veronica Nkwocha
Kate Maxwell
Scott Ross
Kola Tubosun
Keguro
Aaron
Ben Laden

 

Posted in Caine Prize | Leave a Comment »

June 14, 2013

Adi, Tantra

One of the things I’ve been waiting to see, with the current explosion of popular Indian literature, is popular genre fiction. What started out with Chetan Bhagat and the 100-rupee campus novel has grown into something bigger– Amish Tripathi’s Shiva trilogy was massively successful; Srishti (publishers of about two-thirds of the awful campus novels out there) have just published Arka Chakrabarti’s The Secrets of the Dark, featuring a Mysterious Hooded Figure on the cover, and there exists something called Thundergod: The Ascendance of Indra by Rajiv S. Menon. My attempt a couple of months ago to read The Immortals of Meluha went horribly wrong, and yet I’m glad that series exists. Because very few of the Indian authors I know are genre snobs; most of them will happily read across genres and are fans of some major SFF authors that I like, and many will include speculative elements in their work. Samit Basu’s written some genuinely good epic fantasy, Anil Menon has written good SF, Nilanjana Roy even ventures into genre’s beloved talking cat territory. But it’s taken this, a series of books by (from the bits I’ve read) a not-very-good writer to really get popular genre fiction started, and now that this is a thing, it’s possible that some better writers may emerge.

In the meantime, there’s Tantra, by a writer known only as “Adi”. Tantra is an urban fantasy, set in Delhi, and is about a “guardian”/ vampire slayer named Anu Aggarwal who has come to Delhi to track down the murderer of her American boyfriend Brian. As Anu stumbles on a bigger mystery involving the disappearance of slum children in Delhi, she has to deal with other problems–like the loving aunt she’s staying with who insists on trying to arranged-marry her off. Anu has told her parents she’s gay to avoid marriage-related pressure from them, but in Delhi, it seems, coming out would be at least as scandalous as admitting to being a professional killer of vampires. (Indian queer people, like vampires, must be fictional).

I didn’t have particularly high hopes for Tantra, but this is still a set-up that is full of comic potential. Unfortunately the writing makes some of the comedy rather less intentional than I suspect it was intended to be.

So on the first page we have Anu terribly dressed for the local climate and culture. “She’d worn her signature pleather pants, midriff-baring halter top, and cashmere-lined leather jacket for the occasion”. This is already awful, and it’s only slightly mitigated by the fact that the book clearly sees the humour in anyone walking around Delhi dressed like this. Her partner Amit ridicules her, and

“The toughest battle she’d fought was with an elderly couple convinced she was an upscale prostitute who needed saving. After an hour of explaining that leather was not the temptress guise of a lost soul and that she had in fact read the Ramayana, she’d nearly staked them”.

Because I am a lazy person, here are some of the quotes I ended up saving as I read this.

On Anu’s Guardian-angst: “She tried to remember what it had been like when she was more intimate with the smell of uttapams than the smell of blood.”

A character introducing himself: “the quintessential scotch-drinking Indian hypocrite male.”

A character explaining why Indian men don’t hit on women in clubs: “The Indian gentleman is always discreet to a fault.” (you can all stop laughing now)

Anu, lamenting the difficulty of conversations with the man you have a crush on: “It was hard to talk to Gaurav, who continually and wittily flirted with her on the phone.”

A battle: “The vampire preferred to use his hands rather than a weapon, and Anu’s knives kept finding stray limbs to cut.”

Anu’s don’t-call-me-guru guru, lending her his strength: “A gush of crimson threads from his hand invaded her body.”

Some sexy talk:

After Anu grabs the testicles of a man who attempted to chat her up:

(Drink every time Anu punches one of her male companions in the shoulder)

Anu herself is (of course) superlatively fair-skinned (enough that she was pale by American standards) and beautiful enough that every young male in the book, be he dead ex boyfriend, colleague, potential husband, potential husband’s brother, or chief vampire, has a crush. She’s also superpowered beyond the abilities of most Guardians. I think this is as much a problem of this genre as it is of this particular book, but it still caused me to roll my eyes.

For all its various badnesses, though, Tantra makes me realise how starved I am of genre fiction set in worlds I know. A few months ago I read a really good Zen Cho story in which a character is wearing white Bata shoes to school and I remember those shoes, and that they cost rs 80 when I was ten years old and somehow this really mattered. Tantra is set in my city; Anu’s aunt lives about ten minutes away from me and the plot mostly moves between south and central Delhi. And so I did genuinely laugh when Nina aunty was safe from the vampires invading her house because she’d shifted to a more vaastu-compliant bedroom, and I was very pleased when the violet line of the Delhi metro made a cameo (accompanied by an India-Shining-esque bit about how much better it is than New York’s subway). There’s a rather unbelievable bit where the characters manage to do a complete circle of Ring Road in 15 minutes in a Honda City, and a mention of there being “hundreds of white Maruti cars” which would make me wonder, were it not for the Metro reference, if the author had been in Delhi since the mid-90s at all.

There’s a genuine attempt to combine vampire lore with Hinduism and without falling into a Hinduism Is The One Truth trap– though conveniently, pretty much every character (except poor Karim, who is a noneity) is at least nominally Hindu.

There’s a scene in which a disgraced vampire is strung up in public with a sign attached to his belt that reads “Cock-a-doodle-doo, behnchotes”. I almost want this book to be made into a movie purely so that this can be its tagline.

In short, it’s terrible and I will probably still read the sequel.

Posted in (sic), delhi | 2 Comments »

June 13, 2013

Lucy Boston, The Children of Green Knowe

This is not a Rasa of Yearniness post, or not really, Kip.

From this week’s column.

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The haunted house is such a classic (and effective) trope in literature because we believe that places matter. Ghosts wherever they are, mean history; that a place is supposed to be haunted is a constant reminder that it has had a past. Things have happened here. Quite apart from the inherent uncanniness of spirits that can move things around, the idea of ghosts is a reminder that we cannot entirely control our surroundings. We will never be the first to experience a place.

One house that can lay claim to a long history is The Manor, in Cambridgeshire, England. It is supposed to be one of the oldest continually-habited houses in the country, having been built almost a thousand years ago. The Manor was also home for many years to the author Lucy Boston, who used it as the setting for the six books in her “Green Knowe” series.

I don’t know if there are any stories of ghosts that haunt The Manor, but its fictional counterpart certainly has them in abundance. The first book, The Children of Green Knowe, has seven year old Toseland (“Tolly” for short) arriving for the first time at his great-grandmother’s ancestral home. Almost immediately he begins to sense the presence of other children, though he cannot yet see them.  Green Knowe continues to be the home of three children who lived during the 1600s; Anthony, Linnet and Toby (another Toseland). As Tolly learns to see these distant relatives in more definite ways than out of the corner of his eye, he also learns more about the history of this house and of his own family.

Some of my favourite books, particularly children’s books, have as their background a feeling of quiet yearning. It’s in invoking this feeling that Boston’s great achievement lies. Not much actually happens in The Children of Green Knowe, but something about this book is pure, distilled childhood. It’s in Tolly’s immediate acceptance of the very strange world he has come to live in, in the elusiveness of companions who cannot always be directly looked at, the equal parts of fear and longing. Death exists in this world, and so do curses, and sadness and fear are inevitable even for adults. But above and around them exists a sense of safety, of being in the right place.  To read The Children of Green Knowe is to remember that “nostalgia” is from the Greek for homecoming—Tolly comes home to family, history, even to his own name. For this alone it might just be the perfect children’s book.

There’s also something rather special happening with time. Play that involves companions who might disappear at any moment may seem transient; and read from my (now) adult perspective so may this whole business of childhood itself. But on a larger scale things stay remarkably unchanged in this little world. Children’s play appears to have stayed constant across centuries so that Tolly is able to communicate immediately with these distant relatives. The house is unchanged. Even the faithful retainer is the descendant of his predecessor in the position—apparently the Boggis family have been content to be loyal servants for centuries. (One wonders if the Boggis children get to have similarly nostalgic adventures). Green Knowe is also known as “Green Noah”; the house is surrounded by a moat and we first see it during a flood. It’s tempting to see Green Knowe as a sort of time-ark, carrying within it the past, and preserving it into the future. Is it even really a haunted house when the past, present and future exist together in this protected space? I’m not sure.

As a child I was terrified of ghosts—to the point that a single nightmare could have me in tears regularly for months after. But as a child I had not yet read The Children of Green Knowe, and I wonder if that could have changed things.

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Posted in children's literature, Left of Cool | Leave a Comment »

June 11, 2013

Bulletpoints: Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani

I blame Suba for my continuing to do these bulletpoint things, and this anonymous friend for this particular one. Anyway:

  • I watched two Hindi films in theatres in May. Both featured main characters called Bunny. The other one was better.
  • Is Bollywood still in the middle of its meta-, pay-tribute-to-other-bollywood phase? I’m not complaining, because I find all the self-referentiality charming, but still. So naturally, in a movie that talks about the superiority of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge over Phantom of the Opera (an entirely reasonable point of view) we have the sheltered, bookish heroine going off on holiday with the irresponsible young man, and then falling in love with him. Complete with visual references to certain iconic train scenes (sadly no mustard fields).
  • Another of the movie’s charmingly retro features is the idea that Deepika Padukone with glasses on is somehow bookish and unnoticeable. Fair enough, Bollywood- (or Hollywood-) pretty isn’t the same as regular person pretty. But one of the many excellent things that has happened since the eighties is that we have fashionable glasses, and entire subsets of the population who think people are more attractive with glasses than without. Even the movie is unable to commit more than half-heartedly to the idea that Padukone’s character is magically prettier after she takes her glasses off. Which she does, from the end of the first half. Presumably in the eight years between the first and second halves of the movie she gets contact lenses.
  • What with this, Gippi (which I haven’t seen yet) and Student of the Year, that’s three movies Karan Johar has been involved in that have featured a major character who is lonely and unpopular at school as a plot point.
  • This is interesting, I think, because one of the things the first half of the movie does well is Padukone’s character Naina. Naina is all bottled up and awkward, has very little idea how to connect with these new people yet feels terrible about being left out. This almost makes her feel like a real person– until a few days in the mountains with new people turn her into a new person. Suddenly she is no longer wearing glasses, initiating songs, and apparently forgetting that she’s religious. We will never see this awkward, likeable person again.
  • Everyone in this movie is a child. Grown men keep getting into fights until the women around them force them to say sorry to one another (at one point Ranbir Kapoor’s character Bunny accepts an apology but refuses to offer one in return, whereupon Aditya Roy Kapur’s character (Avi) whines at Kalki Koechlin’s character until she makes him). Padukone’s character throws a hissy fit because Evelyn Sharma’s dance at a wedding is good and she wanted hers to be the best (remember when this woman was all awkward and shy about being around people?). (This situation leads to this song, and how anyone permitted Kapoor to wear those shoes is beyond my understanding) Men order other men away from the women they are attracted to, because we’re all toddlers here and not afraid to show it.
  • And yet. Occasionally the film takes the trope and undoes it. Bunny sees Aditi (Koechlin) and her husband arguing and assumes that Taran is jealous of his wife’s close friendships with other men. No, it turns out, he’s telling her not to be so hard on a (close, male) friend with a gambling problem. Aditi was in love with Avi in school; but this isn’t Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and normal people don’t stay hung up on their school crushes for decades after. And so she’s stopped, and they’re best friends, and it’s fine. At one point I almost wondered if these characters were going to be mature enough to admit that their goals and worldviews were incompatible and part (or have lots of sex then break up) regretfully, but sensibly.
  • LOL no. Because this may not be Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (though the movie begins, like I think all films from this stable do, with some of the KKHH music) but it’s still a tribute to DDLJ and all its genre. Aditi may not spend her life pining after the guy she had a crush on years ago, but Naina, being the heroine, must get the guy, even if it’s years after and she could do better.
  • Before the interval, the movie switches between Naina and Bunny’s perspectives, though it mostly stays on Naina’s. At the end of the first half this changes–so we know that Bunny goes to college, becomes a photographer, eats exciting food in French restaurants, dates attractive women. We presume that Naina becomes a doctor, but we know nothing about her life in this eight year interval. There’s nothing to suggest that she’s done anything at all -had career highs and lows, men, women, heartbreak- other than keep herself unmarried and unattached enough that Bunny can come and claim her without too much difficulty.
  • And I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that the film sees her character arc as having ended in the first half itself. Naina’s “problem” is that she’s not bright and friendly and outgoing, her trip with her newfound friends fixes that, problem solved. Bunny doesn’t really have problems in the first half, so the movie kills his dad (poor Farooq Sheikh!) because Daddy Issues are the most reliable problem there is. Bunny’s problems are solved by his coming home, realising that he’s willing to give up his big, see-everything dream if it means he can have the woman he wants, and resolving his guilt over his father’s death.
  • And I find myself uncomfortable with both of these arcs. The first, because it suggests that awkward, bespectacled Naina is broken and outgoing, wanting to be the centre of attention at weddings Naina is fixed. I’m an awkward bespectacled person who is bad at connecting with people, and it frequently sucks, and I’m sure the world would be much easier if I were none of those things (if I danced at weddings, or indeed at all). And I can’t demand that Naina (were she a real person, which she’s not) not want to be the sort of person for whom the world (and particularly the world of Bollywood) is easier; yet I don’t like the implication that there’s something wrong with those of us who don’t fit that particular pattern.
  • As for Bunny’s arc. There’s a moment towards the end of the film where Bunny finally goes home and speaks to his stepmother, she assuages his guilt and tells him that his father was always proud of him for uncompromisingly following his dream–even if it was a dream that meant being constantly uprooted. Of course, Bunny’s dreams as they stand are incompatible with the happy heterosexual couple ending that the movie needs, so they must “change”. The movie ends with the happy couple having just gotten together so we don’t see the years ahead of them; the toll Naina’s constant extrovert face (or the horror of calling her lover “Bunny” in the throes of passion) might take upon her, or Bunny’s thwarted need to be moving. But it feels like a betrayal of both characters–and surely love shouldn’t be that.

Posted in gauchegirlcanon, movies | 6 Comments »

June 9, 2013

Pede Hollist, “Foreign Aid”

In Pede Hollist’s “Foreign Aid“, a young man named Balogun moves to America, reinvents himself as “Logan” and returns many years later to his family in Sierra Leone for a short visit.

When you title a story something as blatant as “Foreign Aid”, you’re already signalling something about what it’s likely to be, what it’s likely to mean, in this case what Ben refers to here as the “relationship between the individual/humanistic and the systemic”. And so Logan’s interactions with his family and other countrymen (and I’m using that word here only to deny it later) are framed as if to be read as some sort of analogy for the relationships between nations, and a reader ends up looking for what the story has to say about that. When the answer is “not much”, it’s too easy to entirely write it off as a disappointment.

Reading this story as an Indian reader is interesting because we (like most other postcolonial countries, I assume) have our own narrative of the NRI (Non-Resident Indian). I’ve never actually met someone who has changed the name Krishna to Chris; if I’m sure these people exist it’s because I’ve read countless books and seen countless movies in which they are either comic (look at the entitled idiot from abroad who doesn’t know how things work!) or tragic (look at this poor person caught between cultures!) figures. It’s a stereotype to me, and I suspect to anyone reading from a similar context.

And possibly to Balogun/Logan himself. Frequently in the story I got the impression that Logan was playing a part, that of the magnanimous visitor from abroad:

“Get us some drinks, Bro.” Logan dipped his hand into the fanny pack. Eyes trained on him and a hush descended on the gathering.

“Ohmos, Sa?”
“Two dozen beer and two dozen sodas.”
“Soda wata, Sa?”
“Naa, meh. Soda is what we call soft drinks back in the States.”
“Why, Sa?”
“Er … er … we do things differently in America, dude.” And with a flourish, Logan whipped out different-colored bills, fumbled with them for a bit—feigned exasperation when one dropped to the ground—and finally slapped a fistful of notes into Tunde’s waiting hand. The boy and his friends bounded off.

(Emphasis mine)
That’s a very tiny moment, and I don’t know if it needs to mean anything beyond the fact that obviously Logan is enjoying showing off how much money he has in the role of rich relative from abroad. The role that he thinks he’s playing and the role the reader thinks he’s playing need not necessarily be the same. But there’s a need to have his part acknowledged constantly- “I’m from the States, bro?”. Most of his setbacks seem to come from the fact that other people (perhaps they’ve been watching the wrong movies) don’t seem to recognise their parts in the story: his parents should have needed a little less money, his sister been a little more excited at the prospect of a trip to America, her friend Tima a little more willing to sleep with the exciting America-returned cosmopolitan. Ali Sayyar is the worst of all–not only does he not have the courtesy even to be properly foreign so that Logan can despise him on that count, but he’s also fulfilling his responsibilities towards Ayo and doing more to help Logan’s family than Logan could indignantly demand. And it’s funny, and it’s a tiny victory every time Logan’s vision of Sierra Leone is disrupted–when people argue with him instead of being grateful, when his suitcases are returned.

Read from this perspective, this becomes a story about thwarting the narratives placed upon it–by Logan, by the title, by its readers. And if I’m not sure it entirely works that could be because some of those narratives (like that title, again) are things it brings upon itself. Or because I’m completely wrong, of course.

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Other people’s thoughts:

Kola Tubosun
Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva
Veronica Nkwocha
Aaron Bady
Kate Maxwell
Scott Ross
Ben Laden

Posted in Caine Prize | 9 Comments »

June 6, 2013

May Reading

It’s been a slow reading month. Then again, it’s been 42-47 degrees in Delhi this month, so I count my mere survival as a resounding success.

 

Antonia Forest, The Thuggery Affair: Wrote about this at length, and with pictures of wildlife, here.

Sheela Chari, Vanished: A proper post on this soon–it’s a children’s book about a missing veena, set in America and India, and I quite enjoyed it.

Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria: I think I have an essay about this book (and why it doesn’t work and why, somehow, that means it does) brewing. I say that all the time and somehow these essays never get written, so I’m hoping someone will hold me to this one.

Rumer Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire and Breakfast with the Nikolides: I’m working on a longer piece about some of Godden’s India novels, of which these are two. There’s much that’s objectionable about their politics; even as a relatively pro-India and pro-Indians (for her time) white British woman, Godden has some very fixed notions about the temperament of the Indian (a biological species, much like the slow loris). And yet the characters, the descriptive prose, the sheer life in the text blew me away. The introduction to these lovely new Vintage reissues says of one of the books that it “thrums with sex”; I snorted when I read this, but it’s all true.

Carl Wilson, Lets Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste: Written about in the column, here.

Uday Prakash, The Walls of Delhi: Written about in the column, here.

Frederic Tuten, Tintin in the New World: Written about in the column, here.

Jaishree Mishra (ed), Of Mothers and Others: Written about in the column, here.

Matt Fraction, David Aja, Javier Pulido, etc, Hawkeye 1-10: I very rarely read comics. I know a bit about comics (by the standards of someone who barely reads them), but this is because I’m surrounded by people who are real, informed fans. I know enough to pass, mostly. I think I may be a Fake Geek Girl.

But everyone I know has been gushing about Hawkeye for a few months now, and now that I’m finally reading it I see why. I share this concern about the disconnect between its Hawkeye-as-everyman (empathetic, understanding what people’s lives mean to them) and Hawkeye-spreading-destruction (because things have to go boom and ordinary people end up being collateral damage) narratives, and I’d like to see future issues do more to address that. But on the whole it’s gorgeous– it’s stylish and funny, I love the art, the people look and act like people. And there’s Kate Bishop, whom the series has so far managed to resist slotting into potential girlfriend or smitten protegee roles, to the extent that the friend who nagged me into reading the series insists that she is its hero.

(I can live with this)

Plus there’s naked (Clint Barton) Hawkeye. And a really cute dog.

 

 

Posted in Books read in 2013, comics | Leave a Comment »

June 5, 2013

Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

I think I first heard of this book in an interview with Mark O’Connell, author of Epic Fail. Which makes sense because they’re both very personal meditations on how we interact with particular forms of art; almost interactive themselves in the way the reader (for values of The Reader equalling me) is implicated and forced to reexamine her own position. I really enjoyed it, anyway.

From this week’s column:

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Among the most chilling final lines in English literature are those of George Orwell’s 1984. “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” It’s the ultimate negation of both free will and the self—the power (that of the state, in this case) to not just make people bend to one’s will, which only needs force, but to control what they love or hate.

In Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Carl Wilson attempts a similar, sinister thought experiment—upon himself. Can he think himself into a position where he can love the music of Celine Dion? Dion is the sort of singer who shows up on “most annoying song” lists all the time; when an elevator full of strangers begins to play “My Heart Will Go On” we silently bond in our disgust. And yet this highly successful pop star must have fans; so who are they?

Wilson examines the context from which Dion’s music emerges and interviews fans for a fuller understanding of what there is in her music that draws them to it. But more importantly he asks questions about his own dislike of her music, the factors that form his aesthetic judgements, goes as far as re-examining the whole of the aesthetic framework within which he judges things. As a result Lets Talk About Love becomes a meditation on taste, and one that is both incisive and deeply personal.

Because these are personal questions, particularly to those of us who make artistic judgements for a living. We’ve (mostly) as a culture outgrown the notion that our aesthetic standards are completely objective and universal, that there exists some platonic ideal of good art. Yet we continue to write reviews and columns (like this one) that rely for their very existence upon the idea that such a thing as critical judgement can exist and can have meaning—that some things are ‘better’ art than other things.

But the personal nature of our tastes isn’t confined to professional critics. Our tastes are more malleable than many of us are comfortable admitting; they depend in large part on things like class, exposure, our peers. A column in this paper last week discussed the new Daft Punk album and the critical to-ing and fro-ing with which it had been greeted as people waited to work out what opinions they could be seen to have. This is a particularly visible example, but we live in a time when a new album is immediately available to us along with the hype leading up to it and the reviews that follow it. If our tastes, in music, movies, art, are one of the ways in which we signal who we are and what identities we wish to construct for ourselves, I don’t know if it’s possible in the twenty-first century to divorce personal taste from social dynamics. I don’t know if it ever was. Wilson’s discussion of taste here moves from Kant to Bourdieu to the trend of reclaiming and finding value in music that was dismissed by critics when it was first released.

Perhaps the sentimentality of “schmaltz”, as Wilson categorises Dion’s oeuvre, is its biggest strength and its critics’ biggest weakness: “isn’t it equally plausible that people uncomfortable with representations of vulnerability and tenderness have emotional problems?” Wilson is able to squeeze out a few tears during a Dion concert, but the most emotionally powerful moment in the book concerns the use of “My Heart Will Go On” in an episode of Gilmore Girls. It’s when Wilson is twice removed from the song (analysing its use in a programme that also comments on its use) and the reader thrice removed (we’re reading Wilson’s commentary on the show that also comments on the song) that for the twenty-first century writer and reader it has most meaning. And perhaps we finally love Celine Dion.

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Posted in Left of Cool, music | 2 Comments »

June 3, 2013

Tope Folarin, “Miracles”

I’m supposed to be blogging the Caine Prize along with a number of people, links to whose (considerably more worthwhile) thoughts can be found at the end of this post.We start this year with Tope Folarin’s “Miracles”, which can be read here. Unfortunately I’ve been rather out of it this week, so consider this post (which is late, anyway) a placeholder, with some unconnected thoughts that do not do anything like form a coherent thesis.

As pretty much everyone else has said, the pronouns are important here. “Miracles” is set among a congregation Nigerian Christians, gathered to see a “prophet”.  The first third (or so) of the story is full of “we”: “our heads move simultaneously”, “we echo his defiance”. These are not just shared actions, but there’s a sense of shared thought. That the narrator, whoever he is, is somehow tuned in to exactly what everyone else is thinking.

We have come from all over North Texas to see him. Some of us have come from Oklahoma, some of us from Arkansas, a few of us from Louisiana and a couple from New Mexico. We own his books, his tapes, his holy water, his anointing oil. We know that he is an instrument of God’s will, and we have come because we need miracles.
We need jobs. We need good grades. We need green cards. We need American passports. We need our parents to understand that we are Americans. We need our children to understand they are Nigerians. We need new kidneys, new lungs, new limbs, new hearts. We need to forget the harsh rigidity of our lives, to remember why we believe, to be beloved, and to hope.
We need miracles.

 

And then the “we” turns into “I” as the prophet singles out our narrator; young, bespectacled and asthmatic (he seems more concerned about the asthma). A miracle is promised, and it might be delivered.

 

He shoves my head back until I fall, and the attendant behind me eases me to the floor. I finally understand. I remain on the floor while his attendants cover me with a white sheet. Above, I hear the prophet clapping his hands, and I know that he’s praying. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling are shining so brightly that the light seems to be huddling in the sheet with me. I hug the embodied light close.

 

It is not, or at least in any direct way. Our hero chooses to pretend it is, though, and the story explains that “a community is made up of truths and lies. Both must be cultivated in order for the community to survive”. This seems rather ham-handed and obvious for a story that has, until this point, been composed of really lovely (if not very subtle) prose. But why is our narrator willing to go along with it?

 

I think part of this has, again, to do with pronouns. I think the narrative shows a visible, deliberate discomfort from the minute it goes from the “we” to the “I”. In addition, there’s the extent to which our narrator is doubled with the prophet. They both have sight-related problems (and there’s the whole tradition of the blind prophet who nonetheless has insight that is being drawn upon here), breathing problems. And since if anyone here can be sure of the extent to which the miracles work (or don’t) it’s the prophet, both prophet and narrator are tied together in their shared deception. Because apparently they know what communities need and communities sometimes need lies, and that’s just how things are.

 

But there was that moment of disorientation, when our narrator was singled out:

 

We remain standing because we don’t know to whom he is referring.
“YOU! You! You! YOU! Come up here!”
We begin to walk forward, shyly, slowly. I turn around suddenly, and I realize I’m no longer a part of the whole. I notice, then, that the lights are too bright, and the muggy air in the room settles, fog-like, on my face. Now I am in the aisle, and I see the blind old man pointing at me.

 

That first “we remain standing because”, like the “we”s that came before it, presumes shared thoughts and understanding. But with “we begin to walk forward, shyly, slowly”, we’re immediately proved wrong. Our narrator’s wrong about what’s going on in the heads of the people around him; this is what makes the glib “truth” about communities palatable.

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Other people’s thoughts on this story:

Posted in Caine Prize | 1 Comment »

May 29, 2013

Jaishree Misra (ed), Of Mothers and Others

An anthology whose proceeds go to Save the Children. Am I cheating if I include this as a South Asian Women Writers book? There is only one man (Jai Arjun Singh) in it.

I quite enjoyed this collection, which I wrote about for this week’s column. The quality of the individual pieces was sometimes uneven, but those I liked, I liked very much. Nisha Susan’s “Missed Call” is excellent, as is Anita Roy’s “Eating Baby”. Urvashi Butalia’s lovely, nuanced piece on not having children can also be read here. Jai Arjun Singh’s piece contains the line “yeh machli meri ma hai” along with other great moments in Bollywood Ma-dom.

 

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I forget Mother’s Day every year until my social media timelines explode first with platitudes about how wonderful people’s mothers (most of whom don’t use the internet very much) are, then with people pointing out that the first set of people should be telling this to their mothers, rather than the world. (My mother, luckily, forgets Mother’s Day until I remind her).

The symbol of the mother is something to which we as a culture ascribe considerable value. Mothers are regularly presented to us in cinema and literature as devoted, self-effacing, angelic. Celebrities claim in interviews that their mothers are their best friends or heroes. Advertising depicts them constantly worried about whether they’re raising their children—are they buying the best toothpaste/detergent/malt-based drink to help their children get ahead in life? Our veneration of motherhood makes “ma” (or “yo’ mama”) an intrinsic part of our rich vocabulary of swear-words and curses, across a variety of languages. Motherhood means so many things that there’s often very little room left for the actual human beings who fill that position.

In Of Mothers and Others, a collection of short stories, essays and poems edited by Jaishree Misra, over and over we see women who defy, struggle with, or otherwise find limiting this image of motherhood. Prabha Walker’s “The Slap Flies Off My Hand” features a mother whose unhappy married life resolves itself in physical abuse of her child. Nisha Susan’s short story “Missed Call” has a mother whose difficult relationship with her daughter is rooted in genuine dislike. In “Determination” Smriti Lamech describes the reaction of a woman hoping for a daughter to the revelation that her child might not be all that she imagines. Sometimes motherhood drives women to do awful things, as is the case in Sarita Mandanna’s “The Gardener’s Daughter” and Kishwar Desai’s “The Devi Makers”. The “business” of motherhood is explored in “’Shake her, She Is Like The Tree That Grows Money!’” by Sarojini N. and Vrinda Marwah, an essay exploring surrogacy in India. Shalini Sinha writes movingly of her relationships both with her child and her own mother.

The “others” of the title are represented as well. Shalini Sinha’s “Amma And Her Beta” and Bulbul Sharma’s slightly saccharine “A Grandmother at Large” both explore the relationship between grandparent and grandchild. Urvashi Butalia discusses her own choice not to have children in an essay that affirms the many forms that motherhood (and childlessness) can take.

Of Mothers and Others often tries to unravel some of our glibly shallow portrayals of motherhood by displaying the darker sides it can have. Children who have died or disappeared, as in Manju Kapur’s  “Name: Amba Dalmia” and Humra Quraishi’s “The State Can’t Snatch Away Our Children”; children suffering through poverty or illness (Shabana Azmi’s introduction to the book discusses the shocking state of healthcare for mothers and children, a death toll she describes as the equivalent of 400 plane crashes per year). Children adopted or born to surrogate mothers. There is a whole range of families here, and none of them are as blandly immune to unhappiness as the two-parent, two-child unit who appear in televised ads.

But there are also moments of joy. Such as the very funny “Eating Baby”, in which Anita Roy describes the process by which feeding her young son began to take over her life.  Jai Arjun Singh’s “Milky Ways” discusses the figure of the mother in such classic Hindi films as Ajooba (in which Amitabh Bachchan is nurtured by a dolphin) and Disco Dancer.

“There are all kinds of mothers”, says Shashi Deshpande in her essay here; “loving mothers as well as unfeeling ones, kind mothers as well as cruel ones, protective mothers as well as possessive ones. The final truth is that we bring ourselves into all our relationships”. Of Mothers and Others’ great achievement is in its constant insistence that we first see its mothers (and its others) as themselves.

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Posted in Left of Cool, SAWWC | 4 Comments »

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