tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2 2009-10-13T16:51:35Z Movable Type Pro 4.3-en tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.196 2009-09-19T02:26:17Z 2009-10-13T16:51:35Z

He has a peasant's face, built by everything the earth has thrown up and the sky sent down. He sits in his thatch-roofed hut and watches. His mouth is open, his teeth are rotting. He sits on the edge...

Sharmistha But our civilisations have existed for much longer. Our pasts consist of several thousand years of time, space, language and everyday practice---much richer than the history and culture of nation states. There is a nation-state of the novel, the English language novel. We always meet in America or Europe, never directly, never. What actually rises and falls--a conversation. To make space, enough so that question and answer do not have to be related. The young man who records is truly a recorder. Nothing breaks his vigilant silence. The interpreter is exactly his opposite. Every word passes through her.MYPAGEBREAK It seems difficult to have a conversation as writers or even to know what that means. So we talk in the language of social theory. Only when the writer's loneliness came up did I feel a spark of something. Trying to move near what is originary in a civilisation, what rises, like hands or wings or mountains. There were mountains and rivers, paper and ink, brushstrokes. There were caves with painted narratives. There are offices of glass, innumerable highways, the metro moving silently on its tracks. In between, an enormous ravine that our bodies cross at will, back and forth. In the ravine, no river, no stream, nothing moving. The fish that rest on the bottom are carved from blackened silver. The lightness of red sandstone in ruins and tombs. Its heaviness in poems that emerge from them. Poetry is dying. It's on its way to death. Our imaginations are getting more and more pale. Something problematic must have happened to our poetry. In a way poets in different nations form a weird imaginary community--in the sense that they share the same commonality, of our imaginations having become more and more pale.MYPAGEBREAK There is a disjunction in this conversation. On the one hand we are talking about social realities, on the other hand Indian writers have been concerned with infinity. This has brought me to a difficult moment, as to in what context our conversations are to take place. Infinity or contemporary reality? Our pasts unending but not unchanging. What will be new? Not that which is not old. On the blackened iron scales in the marketplace, a thousand years equals today. We are more nation state than Europe. I think this is pathetic. We should define how to build the nation state of the future. These are civilisations that have lasted four thousand years. But we think we are senile and decrepit, that Europe and North America are youthful and vibrant. Trying to understand one another. Trying to understand our understanding of one another. Is there too much past, or too little?MYPAGEBREAK Following the ridge of regrets, fate, thoughts that came too late, a future appears, even of the past. From Japan to Iran boundaries between religions have never been very important. The discourse of modernity and revolution have gotten entangled with each other. The discourse of colonialism and modernity are intertwined. Untamed, animate, time becomes many, and landscapes continue to be formed, not naming themselves yet, not conscious of being a continent. When my mother died her eyes were open. We didn't realise that sight leaves the eyes little by little. I haven't expressed this memory in twenty-seven years. But in last evening's Chinese poems this memory returned. I grew up in a small Bengal town, near a river called Churni. In winter, a moon advanced over the river, the cold grew, as did the fog. I myself became fog. With his words, he touches the silence of my memories, no history needed, no philosophy. ]]> tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.195 2009-09-06T04:47:53Z 2009-10-13T03:26:17Z

Read ">Twenty One Poems from Magadh by Shrikant Verma. Shrikant Verma (1931-86) was a central figure in the "Nai Kavita" movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, he did his Masters in Hindi from...

Ashwini Twenty One Poems from Magadh by Shrikant Verma. Shrikant Verma (1931-86) was a central figure in the "Nai Kavita" movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, he did his Masters in Hindi from Nagpur University in 1956, then moved to New Delhi, where he worked in journalism and politics. Verma served as special correspondent for "Dinman", a major Hindi periodical, from 1966 to 1977. In 1976, he was elected a member of the Rajya Sabha on a Congress (I) ticket, and served as an official and spokesman of the party through the late 1970s to the early 80s. He published two collections of short fiction, a novel, a travelogue, literary interviews, essays and five collections of poetry, of which the most important are "Jalasaghar" (1973) and "Magadh" (1984). The latter, a groundbreaking work that remains one of the best-known books in contemporary Hindi poetry. Verma was a visitor at the Iowa International Writing Program twice (1970-71 and 1978), and won the Tulsi Puraskar (1976), the Kumaran Asan Award, and the Sahitya Akademi Award (posthumously, for "Magadh", in 1987). Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator of no fixed address. Founder and co-editor of Pratilipi. Chief editor at Writer's Side. Translating Geetanjali Shree's novel "Tirohit" for Harper Collins India, and Dharamvir Bharati's "Suraj ka Saatvan Ghoda". Other works in progress include a documentary and a novel.
Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue ]]> tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.194 2009-09-06T03:38:50Z 2009-10-04T03:06:52Z

Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940. He was a student of Architecture in London between 1957 and 1958. He read English Language and Literature at Oxford and taught at a language school in London before returning to Bombay...

Ashwini Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940. He was a student of Architecture in London between 1957 and 1958. He read English Language and Literature at Oxford and taught at a language school in London before returning to Bombay in 1970. His published works include two books of poems, Land's End (1962) and Missing Person (1976). Jussawalla is the editor of the anthology, New Writing in India, Penguin, 1974. Ashis Nandy is one of India's most significant thinkers and public intellectuals. His work spans the fields of political psychology, sociology, nationalism, public conscience and culture. He is the author of many books, some of them seminal in Indian thought, such as The Intimate Enemy, and The Savage Freud. For many years he was a Fellow and a Director of the Centre for Developing Societies in New Delhi. He was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007. Bei Dao was born in 1949. He spent eleven years working as a construction labourer. He is one of China's most significant poets, and has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His work has been widely translated into English. His books in translation include The August Sleepwalker (1990), Old Snow (1991), Forms of Distance (1994), Landscape Over Zero (1996), and Unlock (2000). He is one of the founder editors of the literature journal Jintian, begun in 1978. Jintian published a new literature which expressed the importance of the imagination and of individual perception, long suppressed in the Chinese context. It was banned in 1980, and was later revived by Bei Dao in exile, and he continues to edit it today. He currently lives in Hong Kong. Bhanu Kapil was born in England in 1968, to Punjabi parents. Her mother now lives in India. Bhanu lives in Colorado, in the United States, where she is an Assistant Professor at Naropa University, a liberal arts college founded by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche thirty years ago. She teaches poetry, prose and cross-genre writing within Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which was started (a kind of fire) by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. Bhanu also teaches writing in the graduate school of Goddard College, in Vermont. She has given readings throughout the United States, and is the author of three full-length collections which, for some readers, function as prose, and for others as poetry: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works), and Humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press). Forthcoming is a cross-genre project, Schizophrene, a lyrical research document of the intersection of mental health, racism and domestic violence in Indian diasporic communities in north-west London, with the proviso that such enclaves have already mutated twelve or seventeen times. Ge Fei is one of China's most important fiction writers. His novels include Flag of Desire, Ren Mian Tao Hua, (winner of the Chinese Media Outstanding Novel and Dinglun Biennial Literature Award), and Shan He Ru Meng. He is also the author of the novellas, Encounter, Fool's Poetry, and Only Rubbish, and of many acclaimed short stories. His scholarly works include On Fiction Narration, Pendulum of Kafka, and Syren Songs. He is currently Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Born in 1939, Li Tuo spent twenty years as a construction worker. One of China's leading thinkers and critics, he is the author of numerous essays, many of them pioneering ones, on literature, cinema and painting. He is the editor of several literature anthologies, especially of experimental literature. He has also written fiction and scripts for films. Li Tuo has been executive editor for the literary journals Jintian, and Beijing Literature. He lives in Beijing. Mani Rao (b. 1965, India) is the author of seven books of poetry, including Mani Rao: 100 Poems (Selected Poems 1985-2005), and Echolocation (2003). Her essays and poems have featured in Tinfish, Wasafiri, West Coast Line, Iowa Review, 91st Meridian, Fulcrum, Meanjin, Zoland Poetry, and anthologies by WW Norton, BloodAxe and Penguin. Translations of her poems have been published in seven languages. She was a visiting fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program in 2005 and 2009, and won the University of Iowa International Programs writing fellowship in 2006. Mani worked in the advertising and television field in India and Hong Kong for twenty years. Since 2004, she has been writing and studying, and living in USA, India and Hong Kong. Mani is completing a translation of the Bhagavad Gita via 'postmodern' poetics. Ghostmasters is a manuscript of poems about the gone present, and After Ovid & Co. is a manuscript of poems drawn from Greek and Indian myths. More writing, links and multimedia work are on www.manirao.com Ouyang Jianghe was born in 1956. He is one of China's foremost poets. Jianghe is the author of several collections of poetry, including Through the Glass of Words (1997), Who Leave Who Stay (1997), Tears of Things (2008), as well as a book of reviews and essays, Standing on the Side of Fiction (2000). He lives in Beijing. Togara Muzanenhamo was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris. He became a journalist in Harare and worked for a film script production company. His work has appeared in magazines in Europe, South Africa and Zimbabwe. His debut collection, Spirit Brides, is published by Carcanet Press. Shrikant Verma (1931-86) was a central figure in the "Nai Kavita" movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, he did his Masters in Hindi from Nagpur University in 1956, then moved to New Delhi, where he worked in journalism and politics. Verma served as special correspondent for "Dinman", a major Hindi periodical, from 1966 to 1977. In 1976, he was elected a member of the Rajya Sabha on a Congress (I) ticket, and served as an official and spokesman of the party through the late 1970s to the early 80s. He published two collections of short fiction, a novel, a travelogue, literary interviews, essays and five collections of poetry, of which the most important are "Jalasaghar" (1973) and "Magadh" (1984). The latter, a groundbreaking work that remains one of the best-known books in contemporary Hindi poetry. Verma was a visitor at the Iowa International Writing Program twice (1970-71 and 1978), and won the Tulsi Puraskar (1976), the Kumaran Asan Award, and the Sahitya Akademi Award (posthumously, for "Magadh", in 1987). Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator of no fixed address. Founder and co-editor of Pratilipi. Chief editor at Writer's Side. Translating Geetanjali Shree's novel "Tirohit" for Harper Collins India, and Dharamvir Bharati's "Suraj ka Saatvan Ghoda". Other works in progress include a documentary and a novel. ]]> tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.193 2009-09-05T18:21:18Z 2009-10-04T03:08:10Z

Translated by Howard Goldblatt 1. Not until the two middle-aged policemen in white uniforms and their young skirt-clad female partner showed up did the villagers reluctantly recall Mr. Wu You. That bygone episode, like a maiden's lost chastity, stirred...

Ashwini Translated by Howard Goldblatt 1. Not until the two middle-aged policemen in white uniforms and their young skirt-clad female partner showed up did the villagers reluctantly recall Mr. Wu You. That bygone episode, like a maiden's lost chastity, stirred the people's emotions. And since their recollections were triggered by the introduction into their lives of the three outsiders, village elders were quick to tell youngsters eager to revisit the painful past, "Time erases all memories." Thanks to the three uniformed guests, the villagers learned of such things as handcuffs and, so they were told, alarm sirens. A sense of security accrued from the presence of the outsiders, even though they were not above putting on airs at times. One of their favourite pastimes was getting farmers to stop work, either out in the woods or in the shade of the high walls, to relate obscure details regarding Mr. Wu You. They failed to get the answers they sought, not because the people were so uninformed but because they were so blasé. Nothing excited the people of the village. I, on the other hand was eager to work with the outsiders. I still recalled how the condemned man was shot that morning.MYPAGEBREAK Mother reacted to the news that I was going to watch them shoot Mr. Wu You at a spot five miles from where we lived by slapping me across the face. "Killing a man is the same as killing a chicken," she said. So I went back out to watch my younger brother do just that. Old K, who was still little then, held the chicken by its neck in one tiny hand and a small penknife in the other. As I walked up to him, he asked me to help. "Killing a chicken is the same as killing a man," I said. "They're the same thing," Old K replied. Suddenly, the bird broke loose and flapped its way across a block of stone before soaring over the wall. Old K stood there holding his blood-streaked penknife, mesmerized by the sight of chicken feathers floating above us. I grabbed his hand and dragged him out the gate, telling him we were going to watch them actually kill a man. He was standing beside me when they shot Mr. Wu You. His mouth hung slack, and he was a different boy from the one who was trying to kill the chicken. On the way home, he muttered the only thing he would say for three whole days: "Killing a man is a lot easier than killing a chicken."MYPAGEBREAK I divulged this to the three outsiders, who wouldn't dignify it with a response, would not even jot it down. But when I told them I was a distant relative of Mr. Wu You's, they smiled and turned real friendly, urging me to go on with my story. My ears rang with official jargon in a singsong twang that made my skin crawl. I said Mr. Wu You was shot on the day of the dragon-boat festival. "That's perfect!" the skirt-clad young woman said. It really was the day of the dragon-boat festival. Women, some of whom had stayed up all night, went down to the stream to pick leaves, which they floated home on bamboo rafts, in sampans, even in washbasins as wrappings for their glutinous holiday treats. A gossamer mist hung in the early morning air like evanescent steam, heavy with the subtle fragrance of water reeds. Men were washing rice in large sieves. Children played behind their parents as they worked, splashing stream water with stripped willow switches. Just then one of the younger wives took off running from one end of the village to the other, shouting the whole way. And that is how people learned that Mr. Wu You was going to be shot later that day. Everyone watched her run, except for a smattering of young fellows who had no idea what was going on, since they were too busy staring at the fleshy mounds jiggling beneath her pink chemise to worry about what she was shouting. Much later, whenever they discussed the affairs of that morning, they admitted it was the first time they had ever seen a woman run like that, and for them all other living objects hung in a state of suspended animation.MYPAGEBREAK 2 As soon as they heard the clanking noise, the villagers knew that the police were out for a stroll: all manner of brass contraptions in all sizes hung from their uniform belts. Encountering a middle-aged woman out on the street, they decided to question her. One of them casually slipped a brass hoop off his belt and fitted it over the woman's head, telling her it was a high-frequency lie-detector ring, the most advanced of its kind in the world. It shrieks every time you tell a lie. So she clammed up while the hoop was in place. But as soon as it was removed, words gushed from her mouth. Their technology had met its match. Apparently feeling tension in the air for the first time since their arrival, the outsiders asked me to show them Mr. Wu You's living quarters, in an old, dilapidated, and boxy little ancestral hall. His room had been sealed on the day of his death, and no one had entered it since. Prying open the rusty latch was hard work. When we finally got the door open, we were greeted by a thick cloud of dust. It was stifling inside, a]]> tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.192 2009-08-27T16:01:47Z 2009-10-07T15:32:40Z

In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window....

Ashwini In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.191 2009-08-27T15:58:16Z 2009-10-13T05:22:11Z

In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. The poems in this selection are taken from Muzanenhamo's 2006 volume of poems, The Spirit...

Ashwini In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window.Carcanet Press ]]> tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.189 2009-08-27T15:56:47Z 2009-09-21T08:37:38Z

In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window....

Ashwini In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.188 2009-08-27T15:54:41Z 2009-10-13T06:11:35Z

In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. These are previously unpublished poems from Mani Rao's work in progress, Gods R Us. This...

Ashwini In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window.Gods R Us. This excerpt is an Almost Island exclusive. ]]> tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.187 2009-08-27T15:50:16Z 2009-10-13T06:12:20Z

In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. The poems in this selection are from Mani Rao's manuscript, Ghostmasters. "Worker" and "Airing at...

Ashwini In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window.Ghostmasters. "Worker" and "Airing at a Sniff" first appeared in Tinfish and XCP respectively. ]]> tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.186 2009-08-27T15:46:08Z 2009-10-04T03:09:28Z

In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window....

Ashwini In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.185 2009-08-27T15:37:54Z 2009-09-21T08:38:37Z

In order to represent the text in its exact form it has been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. This excerpt from Bhanu Kapil's hybrid novel, Humanimal (a Project for Future Children) was first...

Ashwini In order to represent the text in its exact form it has been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window.Kelsey Street Press (Berkeley, CA, 2009).]]> tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.184 2009-08-27T15:36:35Z 2009-10-13T06:12:59Z

In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. This excerpt is an Almost Island exclusive....

Ashwini In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.183 2009-08-27T15:29:24Z 2009-10-13T06:10:16Z

In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. This excerpt is an Almost Island exclusive....

Ashwini In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.182 2009-08-26T13:22:44Z 2009-09-21T08:52:23Z

Read Spirit Brides by Togara Muzanenhamo. Togara Muzanenhamo was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris. He became a journalist in...

Ashwini Spirit Brides by Togara Muzanenhamo. Togara Muzanenhamo was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris. He became a journalist in Harare and worked for a film script production company. His work has appeared in magazines in Europe, South Africa and Zimbabwe. His debut collection, Spirit Brides, is published by Carcanet Press.
Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue ]]> tag:work.meramare.net,2009:/almostisland//2.181 2009-08-26T13:20:12Z 2009-09-21T08:59:24Z

Read Gods R Us and Ghostmasters by Mani Rao . Mani Rao (b. 1965, India) is the author of seven books of poetry, including Mani Rao: 100 Poems (Selected Poems 1985-2005), and Echolocation (2003). Her essays and poems have featured...

Ashwini Gods R Us and Ghostmasters by Mani Rao . Mani Rao (b. 1965, India) is the author of seven books of poetry, including Mani Rao: 100 Poems (Selected Poems 1985-2005), and Echolocation (2003). Her essays and poems have featured in Tinfish, Wasafiri, West Coast Line, Iowa Review, 91st Meridian, Fulcrum, Meanjin, Zoland Poetry, and anthologies by WW Norton, BloodAxe and Penguin. Translations of her poems have been published in seven languages. She was a visiting fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program in 2005 and 2009, and won the University of Iowa International Programs writing fellowship in 2006. Mani worked in the advertising and television field in India and Hong Kong for twenty years. Since 2004, she has been writing and studying, and living in USA, India and Hong Kong. Mani is completing a translation of the Bhagavad Gītā via 'postmodern' poetics. Ghostmasters is a manuscript of poems about the gone present, and Gods R Us is a manuscript of poems drawn from Greek and Indian myths. More writing, links and multimedia work are on www.manirao.com
Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue ]]>