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Sunday
Dan Clendenin’s indispensable blog Journey to Jesus alerted me to this Laura Kelly Fanucci poem. In response to those describing Donald Trump’s victory in apocalyptic terms, Clendenin says the poem—which he calls a prayer—can help us regain our bearings.
“When This Is Over” provides timely reminders including, most importantly, our potential “to become better for each other because of the worst.”
When This is Over By Laura Kelly Fanucci
When this is over, may we never again take for granted A handshake with a stranger Full shelves at the store Conversations with neighbors A crowded theater Friday night out The taste of communion A routine checkup The school rush each morning Coffee with a friend The stadium roaring Each deep breath A boring Tuesday Life itself.
When this ends may we find that we have become more like the people we wanted to be we were called to be we hoped to be and may we stay that way — better for each other because of the worst.
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Friday
In my last Postcolonial Literature class at the University of Ljubljana—Julia and I return to the United States tomorrow—I introduced the students to Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time. The novel made a good bookend to the six weeks I have spent with the students.
We began the course by examining how authors like H. Ryder Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad exoticized, orientalized, demonized, and demeaned other cultures. Two groundbreaking theoretical works, Edward Said’s Orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, showed us how (1) the colonizers framed the Other for their own benefit while (2) often getting the colonized to look down on their own culture and even their own bodies. What is needed, Fanon declared, is a “literature of combat” that helps form a new national consciousness.
From there we moved on to works by the colonized. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus exposed the colonialists’ project while pushing towards a new consciousness, as did, to a lesser extent, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Thing and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Then there are writers who have found ways to hybridize clashing cultures to form a third option that draws on the strengths of each. Leslie Marmon Silko in Ceremony explores how to preserve the integrity of the Laguna Pueblo nation within White America while pointing out ways that America desperately needs the Pueblo vision for its own health. Going back in time, I also looked at the 14th century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through a postcolonial lens, examining how a Christian culture that had turned against the body in the wake of the Black Plague needed to reconnect with the Green Man, a pagan fertility god that Christianity had never been able to expel, if it was to regain a fruitful relationship with nature.
Some of the authors we read, such as Adichie and Rushdie, don’t only criticize the colonial project but also look at problems that have arisen in postcolonial society. Roy, meanwhile, observes that India has had problems, especially its caste system, that predate colonialism by centuries.
And then there is Zadie Smith, who shows how the colonized, in returning to the motherland, are upsetting traditional distinctions. The new national consciousness here does not involve the former colonies but England itself.
A very funny chapter in Swing Time captures this new reality. In it, the narrator describes working in a crappy pizza parlor after graduating from college. The restaurant is run by an Iranian named Bahran and staffed by immigrants from all over the world, including Republic of the Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia. Narrator Fern, like Smith herself, is Anglo-Afro-Jamaican.
Bahran is one of those immigrants whose longing to belong to the privileged Anglo demographic is so transparent that he is a figure of self-parody. When he claims that polo is his favorite sport, his staff explodes into laughter. Fern observes
a flamboyant, comic rage that expressed itself in a constant obscene teasing of everyone around him—racial, sexual, political, religious teasing—and which almost every day resulted in a lost customer or employee or friend, and so came to seem to me not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating.
Thinking at first that Fern is Persian because of her nose, Bahran is solicitous and complimentary. When he discovers her mother is from Jamaica, however, he turns on her, telling her that her people “don’t pay, or they fight, or they drug dealers. Don’t give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth.”
Because she needs the money, however, Fern tells us she “couldn’t afford to be offended.”
Tensions are turned up a notch when the restaurant television begins showing Wimbledon matches involving Ben Shelton, a mixed-race American tennis player. Fern reports,
As it happened, I hadn’t been following Shelton had never heard of him really before [Somalian] Anwar pointed him out, but now I did follow him, along with Anwar I became his number-one fan. I brought little American flags to work on the days of his games…Together we cheered Shelton, danced around the place at each successful point, and as he won one match and then another, we began to feel like we, with our dancing and whooping, were the ones propelling him forward, and that without us he’d be done for. At times Bahram behaved as if he believed this, too, as if we were performing some ancient African voodoo rite. Yes, somehow we put a spell on Bahram just as much as Shelton, and as the days of the tournament passed and Shelton still refused to be knocked out I saw Bahram’s many other pressing worries…all slip away until his sole preoccupation was ensuring we did not cheer for Bryan Shelton, and that Shelton himself did not get to the Wimbledon final.
It all comes to a head when Shelton, in the third round, comes up Karim Alami, an Arab player from Morocco. The atmosphere in the pizza parlor becomes electric:
Their match was to start at two. Bahram arrived at one There was a great feeling of anxiety and anticipation in the place, delivery boys who were not meant to come till five came early, and the Congolese cleaner began working through the back of the kitchen at unprecedented speed in the hope she would reach front-of-house—and therefore the television—by the time the game began.
Through the match, Bahram chain-smokes Gauloises cigarettes and offers a running commentary that “had as much to do with eugenics as backhands and lobs and double faults.” This includes delineating the differences between Arabs and those from Sub-Saharan Africa:
The black man, he informed us, he is instinct, he is moving body, he is strong, and he is music, yes, of course, and he is rhythm, everybody know this, and he is speed, and this is beautiful, maybe, yes, but let me tell you tennis is game of the mind—the mind! The black man can be good strength, good muscle, he can hit ball hard, but Karim he is like me: he think one, two step in front. He have Arab mind. Arab mind is complicated machine, delicate. We invent mathematics. We invent astronomy. Subtle people. Two steps ahead. Your Bryan now he is lost.
“But,” Fern reports,
he was not lost: he took the set seven-five and Anwar took the broom away from the Congolese cleaner—whose name I did not know, whose name no one ever thought to ask—and made her dance with him, to some highlife he had going on the transiter radio he carried everywhere.
The euphoria does not last, however, as Shelton loses the next set 6-1, leading to a Bahran attack on Black Africans in general. “Wherever you go in world,” he tells Anwar, “you people at bottom! Sometimes at top White man, Jew, Arab, Chinese, Japan—depends. But your people aways lose.”
Meanwhile, with the score 2-1 sets in favor of Shelton, the game goes into a fourth set, at which point
we had stopped pretending to be a pizza place. The phone rang and no one answered, the oven was empty, and everybody was crammed into the small space at the front. I sat on the counter with Anwar, our nervous legs kicking the cheap MDF panels until they rattled. We watched these two players—in truth almost perfectly matched—battling towards an elongated, excruciating tiebreak that Shelton then lost, five-seven. Anwar burst into bitter tears.
And then, in a passage that my Slovenians and one Macedonian appreciated as it features a former countryman from the Yugoslav days,
“But Anwar, little friend: he have one more set,” explained the kindly Bosnian chef, and Anwar was as grateful as the man sitting in an electric chair who’s just spotted the governor through the Plexiglas, running down the hall.
When Shelton wins the fifth and deciding set, the reaction is electric:
Anwar turned his radio up full blast and every kind of dance burst forth from me, winding, stomping, shuffling—I even did the shim-sham. Bahram accused us all of having sex with our mothers and stormed out.
He then, however, figures out a way to salvage some self-respect. Recall that, up to this point, he has been unloading on Shelton and his employees for their African heritage. Now he plays the one card he has left. Showing Fern a photo of Shelton as she is taking phone orders, he says,
“Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.” “I’m working.” “Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.” I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled. “Half-winner,” he said. I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.
Shelton, in other words, is Black until it serves a racist agenda to categorize him as White.
I share these extended passages because they get at the heart of Smith’s vision, which is that citizens from the former colonies are transforming the motherland, turning it into a vibrant but bewildering new entity in which traditional distinctions are overwhelmed and new alliances are formed.
Of course, this is also leading to the rise of rightwing nationalism in many nations, along with immigrants who dream of joining those in power. In the United States, over the decades, we have seen various groups seeking to join the upper echelons of our caste system and become “White,” including the Irish, the Scots, the southern Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, and so on. In our recent election, it appears that certain Mexican Americans, in spite of Donald Trump depicting them as “rapists and murders,” were willing to vote for him. Trump also drew more support than expected from South and East Asians. How many Bahrams do we have, one wonders–which is to say, how many are willing to denigrate the descendants of Black Africa in order to become acceptable to White America? What are they willing to sell out to achieve acceptance?
For their part, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, despite being mixed race, did not choose to become Black, despite Trump’s claims. America’s caste system is such that they were inevitably “cast” into that identity. To their credit, they embraced it and became inspirational figures. But race continues to be a major force—maybe the major force—in American political life.
Which is why courses on Postcolonial Literature are so vital. The entire world is experiencing cultural explosions such as those described by Smith, and writers everywhere are exploring them. Teaching this class, which was made up of straight-up Slovenians, hyphenated Slovenians (Serbian-Slovenian, Sudanian-Slovenian), and Erasmus students from Germany, Belgium, Macedonia, and Turkey, made this clearer than ever to me.
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Thursday
Julia and I are just back from a wondrous visit with artist friends in Assisi. Alan Feltus and Lani Irwin, accomplished painters whom we first met when we all lived in southern Maryland, relocated to Italy in 1987 and never returned, raising their two sons as bilingual citizens of the world. I report on the visit here because their immersion in the world of the visual arts has given me perspective on my own immersion in the world of literature.
Fascinated by how people use art in their daily lives, Alan and Lani are constantly combing flea markets for items that people have decorated in their longing for beauty. Often these are humble household objects, farm implements, photographs with homemade frames, and tiny shrines to saints.
Along with these are dolls and old toys, fossilized shells, Italian tiles, stuffed animals, religious icons, woven baskets, clocks, hand-painted pottery, parts of musical instruments (which will never play but which Alan loves for the visuals), Pinocchios of all sizes and shapes, animal skulls and bones, antique photos, carpentry tools, tiny human figures, folded paper cranes, mannequin hands, wooden balls, parts of games, and many, many metallic owls. Sometimes the objects on the walls and in the cabinets show up in Alan and Lani’s paintings.
These anonymous artists have applied their talents in ways that few will ever see, bringing to mind the passage from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,”
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor.
Alani and Lani marvel at all the different ways that people speak beauty into the world. To borrow from Gray, they do not allow these flowers to “blush unseen”:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Along with the items are paintings and photographs, some by Alan and Lani, some by their sons, some by friends. There are also old photographs of anonymous persons, many with fascinating expressions. Rescued from flea market shoeboxes, they get a second life on the walls of the Irwin-Feltus house.
Along with the house, Julia and I benefited from the Feltuses’ artistic immersion when we went out walking. Sometimes we were in holy places with gorgeous paintings and frescoes, such as the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. But Alan also pointed out interesting iron work on railings and the stonework on wall facings where windows or doors had once been. His curious and creative eyes took in everything.
I realized that I use literature in a similar way. Although I don’t make art, I constantly apply the poems and stories that have moved me to the surrounding world. As a result, it’s as though the world is filled with resonance and infused with meaning. Both the visual and the written arts enhance reality and reveal its luminescence.
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Wednesday
Donald Trump’s recent victory has given me new insights into Midnight’s Children, which I taught last week in my Ljubljana Post-Colonialist Literature class. Salman Rushdie’s novel about a dictatorial leader bringing to an end India’s dream of a multicultural democracy seems all too applicable.
Yet curiously I have found some solace in the work, especially in the narrator’s faith in the next generation. The children of Midnight’s Children, he says, won’t be led astray by naïve dreaming, he says as he accuses himself of a sentimental idealism that couldn’t withstand the blows of power politics. More on that in a moment.
First, however, a word on our own sentimental idealists. I’m struck by a Jonathan Last article in the Bulwark that Biden could either have been a ruthless politician or a consensus builder and he chose the latter. As Last puts it,
Joe Biden was given the choice of betting liberal democracy on structures and the levers of power, or on the innate goodness of the American people. He put his entire chip stack on the American people and lost.
I made a similar argument several years ago about Obama, who got rolled by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s scorched earth opposition to his presidency, even when Obama was willing to compromise on Republican initiatives. McConnell broke with tradition by stonewalling most of Obama’s judicial appointments, including his Supreme Court replacement, and then he blocked Obama’s attempt to do something about Russian election interference. At the time I compared Obama with a gullible Othello who thinks that, because he himself has risen within the system, that race is not an issue.
Saleem makes a similar miscalculation when he realizes that the extraordinary children born between midnight and 1 on India’s liberation day can be instrumental in achieving a unified nation. As the child who has the telepathic power to bring them all together, he commits himself to a “loose federation of equals, all points of view given free expression.”
And at first, the nation appears to support Saleem’s view of things. Talking of the letter that his family gets from the prime minister, he reports,
Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: ‘Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.’
From the first, however, there is the problem of violence. While Saleem, having been born on the stroke of midnight, is the presumed leader of Midnight’s Children, the thuggish Shiva, born only seconds later, makes his own impact. Rushdie, by showing that Saleem and Shiva’s lives are inextricably intertwined (a midwife switches the two of them at birth), makes the point that nation building and violence are never altogether separate. When Saleem mentions the prospect of consensual democracy to Shiva, he gets in response “something resembling a violent snort”:
“That, man, that’s only rubbish. What we ever goin’ to do with a gang like that? Gangs gotta have gang bosses. You take me-“ (the puff of pride again) “I been running a gang up here in Matunga for two years now. Since I was eight. Older kids and all. What d’you think of that?’ And I, without meaning to, “What’s it do, your gang-does it have rules and all?” Shiva-laughter in my ears… “Yah, little rich boy: one rule. Everybody does what I say or I squeeze the shit outa them with my knees!”
And in truth, consensual democracy is difficult, as Saleem discovers as he tries to organize the 538 children:
We were as motley, as raucous, as undisciplined as any bunch of five hundred and eighty-one ten-year-olds; and on top of our natural exuberance, there was the excitement of our discovery of each other. After one hour of top-volume yelling jabbering arguing giggling, I would fall exhausted into a sleep too deep for nightmares, and still wake up with a headache; but I didn’t mind.
In his struggle with Shiva for ascendancy, for a while Saleem is like the traditional politicians who used to run the GOP: while they used to own the party, Saleem is the one with the telepathic power to connect the Midnight Children. At one point he has the following interchange with his alter ego:
‘You can’t run the Conference; without me, they won’t even be able to listen to you!’
And he, confirming the declaration of war: ‘Rich kid, they’ll want to know about me; you just try and stop me!”
‘Yes,’ I told him, I’ll try.’
In the end, Shiva prevails. Named after the Indian god of destruction, he evolves from street thug to military hero to government enforcer. In this last position, his violence receives official sanction as “the Widow,” based on Indira Gandhi, declares the same kind of state of emergency that Trump wanted to unleash on Black Lives Matter protesters. The Widow uses these new powers to clamp down on her opposition and to institute a system of mandatory sterilization. As her target is India’s multicultural democracy, she regards the Midnight Children as a threat and sends out Shiva, who is one of their number, to root them out.
Shiva tracks down Saleem, who reveals names and addresses under threat of torture. All the children are subsequently castrated, which strips them of their special powers, and without their carnivalesque diversity, India becomes the monochrome nation that fascists dream of.
I know this is all terribly grim so here’s the comfort I promised you. Saleem is married to Parvati-the-Witch, whose name is taken from the archetypal mother goddess in Hindu mythology. Like the goddess, Parvati gives birth to a large-eared child, named Aadam Sinai in the book but clearly meant to evoke Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god of intellectual thought and new beginnings. Aadam Sinai, Saleem hopes, will succeed where he himself has failed.
To be sure, young Aadam—born at Midnight on the night of the Widow’s emergency declaration— is not Saleem’s biological child but Shiva’s, the macho war hero who has gone through India impregnating women. That’s how it is in Hindu mythology as well, with Shiva, the god of creation as well as destruction, being the father of Ganesh. But rather than regarding this as a bad sign, Saleem figures it will make the next generation tougher:
We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams.
These dreams, recall, are those of a unified India. Because he has both Saleem and Shiva within him, Adam will be more practical as he goes fulfilling the dream that both of his fathers were born into:
I understood once again that Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the eyes of the child who was simultaneously not-my-son and also more my heir than any child of my flesh could have been, I found in his empty, limpid pupils a second mirror of humility, which showed me that, from now on, mine would be as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster…I wondered if all over the country the bastard sons of Shiva were exerting similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisaged for the second time that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything.
I hesitate to automatically ascribe hope to the next generation since people are always doing that, with mixed results. But I do see where both my boomer generation and my sons’ millennial generation grew up believing that the long arc of history was finally bending toward justice. Now my five grandchildren, whose ages range from twelve to six, will grow up with rights being taken away, climate change accelerating, and an authoritarian lording it over them. Like Aadam Sinai, they may not be as complacent as their parents.
It’s not only the faith that Saleem has in the next generation that consoles me. There’s something powerful in Rushdie’s concluding message that fighting the good fight never ends. To be sure, at first it looks grim as we see Saleem, like India, cracking apart as he is swallowed by a large crowd. (What this cracking looks like he never makes clear—it seems more metaphorical than biological.) In this mass of humanity made up both of dreamers and destroyers, he sees the novel’s version of Donald Trump:
[F]rom another direction… I see a mythological apparition approaching, the Black Angel, except that as it nears me its face is green its eyes are black, a center-parting in its hair, on the left green and on the right black, its eyes the eyes of Widows; Shiva and the Angel are closing closing…
But even as the end closes in, we learn that the dreamers will continue on. Though they lose time and again, their resistance will not end:
Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, all in good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.
Even if the upcoming years reduce untold numbers to voiceless dust, there is something heartening in the idea that the dreamers won’t give up. To be sure, such dreaming does not allow us to live or die in peace. The children of the Declaration of Independence and Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” will always be restless in the face of authoritarian rule. That restlessness, however, is their soul salvation.
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Tuesday
I’ve been traveling today and just have time to share this recent poem about hope, which John Stoehr of the Substack blog Editorial Board alerted me to. I suspect that the author had Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is that thing with feathers” in mind when she wrote it. I hope you find it as bolstering as I did.
The Courage to Find Hope Within By Nicolee Grant
I keep thinking About these words:
‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
I saw them somewhere.
I am transfixed by one word. “Hope.”
It plays over and over In my mind.
I see glares. I see hatred. I see fear. I see abuse. I see cruelty. I see indifference In light of suffering.
Yet still I hope.
I don’t want to abandon hope. It is all I have. It is what tells me Today will be better And if not, Then maybe tomorrow.
So, despite the glares, I stare straight Forward and smile.
Despite fear and hatred, I will pray for the Courage to love.
Despite abuse, I will be a conqueror.
Despite cruelty, I will welcome And wilfully surround Myself with kindness.
Despite indifference, I will hold hope Close to my bosom
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Monday – Veterans Day
When Siegfried Sassoon talks about soldiers as dreamers, he knows what he’s talking about since he experienced trench warfare in the first World War. Today we honor all those who have encountered humankind at its worst.
Dreamers By Siegfried Sassooon
Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land, Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows. In the great hour of destiny they stand, Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows. Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives. Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats, And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain, Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats, And mocked by hopeless longing to regain Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats, And going to the office in the train.
Readers may think, as they begin the poem, that the soldiers are dreaming of great deeds in battle. In “Dulce in Decorum Est,” fellow World War I soldier Wilfred Owen writes of “children ardent for some desperate glory.” But Owen calls out the lie behind such dreaming while Sassoon, in his quieter poem, shows us what soldiers really want.
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Sunday
Of the many things that Christians for Trump must answer for, one is their support for policies that exacerbate wealth inequality while slashing support for indigent families. There’s no question where Jesus stood on the issue. In today’s Gospel reading he lambasts those who claim godliness while soaking the poor:
As Jesus taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
Many celebrate the widow who gave her two mites—”everything she had”—to the church box. It’s altogether possible, however, Jesus focus was less on her and more on the wealthy church people who had bamboozled her into thinking it’s a good idea to allow her house to be devoured:
He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
We have many obscenely rich megachurch leaders, a fair number of them vocal Trump supporters, who are persuading their parishioners and followers that funding their lavish lifestyles is what God wants from them.
Seventeenth-century poet Richard Crashaw is clear what he thinks of such hypocrites. His four-line tribute to the widow is all the more powerful for being short:
Two mites, two drops, yet all her house and land, Fall from a steady heart, though trembling hand : The other’s wanton wealth foams high, and brave ; The other cast away, she only gave.
While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigned to raise the minimum wage, expand the Child Tax Credit, bring down the cost of insulin and other prescription drugs, construct affordable housing, and support daycare and senior living, eight out of ten white evangelicals voted for Trump. Televangelist Kenneth Copeland, whose net worth has been estimated to be $300 million, has claimed that Trump is “led by the Spirit of God.” Meanwhile Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas, who has a net worth of between $10-$20 million, called Trump’s win “a great victory.”
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Friday
It’s been unsettling to teach Midnight’s Children following Donald Trump’s presidential victory. That’s because Salman Rushdie’s novel, which begins with high hopes for post-colonial India and ends with the election of an authoritarian leader, parallels our own story a little too closely. Throughout the novel, we see the increasing fragmentation and polarization of the Indian state, which is sometimes torn apart by religious infighting, sometimes by language wars, sometimes by foreign wars, and sometimes (when “the Widow,” Indira Gandhi, comes to power) by the imposition of forced sterilization and other authoritarian measures.
What I want to focus on today, however, is Rushdie’s account of amnesia in a victimized population. That’s because I think America’s own amnesia played a role in Trump’s victory. Just as America forgot about Trump’s abysmal handling of the pandemic and his orchestrating of the coup attempt, so narrator Saleem Sinai discovers that people have forgotten the bulldozing of the “Magician’s Ghetto” which contains a wonderful cast of characters:
The conjurers and other artistes marched beside the troops, entertaining the crowds; there were acrobats forming human pyramids on moving carts drawn by white bullocks; there were extraordinary female contortionists who could swallow their legs up to their knees; there were jugglers who operated outside the laws of gravity, so that they could draw oohs and aahs from the delighted crowd as they juggled with toy grenades, keeping four hundred and twenty in the air at a time; there were card-tricksters who could pull the queen of chiriyas (the monarch of birds, the empress of clubs) out of women’s ears; there was the great dancer Anarkali, whose name meant ‘pomegranate-bud’, doing leaps twists pirouettes on a donkey-cart while a giant piece of silver nose-jewellery jingled on her right nostril…
Rushdie uses such characters to capture the color and magic of India, and it is to the imagination wonderland that Saleem escapes from India’s traumatizing war with Pakistan. There he marries the wonderful Parvati-the-Witch, who like him possessed special powers from having been born between midnight and 1 a.m. on the day India gained its independence from England (August 15, 1947). There they marry and have a child.
Because the son of “the Widow” thinks that the Magician’s Ghetto is an eyesore, however (Donald Trump, Jr.?), he has it bulldozed, during which catastrophe Parvati dies. Their son, fortunately, is rescued and represents a hope for the future that I’ll explore in a future post. But what occurs first is that, following the destruction of their home, the dispersed magicians forget about this idyllic home—just as much of the world (not only Americans) has forgotten about the pandemic:
[W]hen I returned to find Picture Singh beaming in the shadow of a railway bridge, it rapidly became clear that the magicians, too, were losing their memories. Somewhere in the many moves of the peripatetic slum, they had mislaid their powers of retention, so that now they had become incapable of judgment, having forgotten everything to which they could compare anything that happened. Even the Emergency was rapidly being consigned to the oblivion of the past, and the magicians concentrated upon the present with the monomania of snails. Nor did they notice that they had changed; they had forgotten that they had ever been otherwise, Communism had seeped out of them and been gulped down by the thirsty, lizard-quick earth; they were beginning to forget their skills in the confusion of hunger, disease, thirst and police harassment which constituted (as usual) the present. To me, however, this change in my old companions seemed nothing short of obscene… I, who could remember every hair on the heads of jailers and surgeons, was deeply shocked by the magicians’ unwillingness to look behind them. ‘People are like cats,’ I told my son, ‘you can’t teach them anything.’
Sadly, when people forget catastrophes, they sometimes blame the subsequent problems on those in power taxed with cleaning up the mess. That’s not the entire reason why the Democrats lost to Trump, but since incumbents have been losing elections all over the world, it’s part of the explanation.
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Thursday
I know that W.H. Auden’s poem “Stop All the Clocks” is about the death of a loved one, but watching the dream of a multicultural democracy take a severe beating from a fascist is like witnessing the death of someone precious to us. So here’s the poem, which captures our agony as we watched our fellow citizens choose a rapist, felon, and insurrectionist over a classy woman who wanted to serve the people. At moments like this, a despairing lyric like this one can provide a modicum of relief.
While I know that, in the days to come, we will need to rally our forces and fight the good fight, for the moment it feels as if, indeed, “nothing now can ever come to any good.”
Stop All the Clocks By W. H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.
And for good measure, here’s a bonus poem–by the sublime Emily Dickinson–which ends on a slightly more hopeful note. But only because it reminds us that there is a future.
For a day after experiencing the great pain, it felt indeed like we were just going through the motions. Mechanical? Leaden? In a stupor? Frozen? Our nerves sitting like tombs? Check, check, check, check, and check.
“He that bore” could be Christ or it could be a soldier killed while bearing a backpack (the poem was written during the Civil War). In either case, there’s intense grieving. But the poet also holds out the possibility that we mourners can outlive this and achieve the final stage of grief, which is letting go.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round – A Wooden way Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
