The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq – Hassan Blasim

 

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

 

The crack of dawn is just half an hour away. I’m neither interested in the passing night nor the approaching new day. Two fried eggs on a rye toast for breakfast. That is what I’m thinking. That is what I shall eat among the stench of blood, the sordid gore and a curious child fishing for a frog in a puddle of blood. The images don’t seem to leave me. The voices crowded my auditory senses. The book clutching in my palms as the heaviness akin to a corpse that now takes over my sensibilities ,words engulf me, maybe it’s the heavy silence of the passing night or my mental claustrophobia that has become the mythical Hydra. I knew it right then that this book will frequent my sanity for weeks to come.

 

Because every child born in this world is simply a possibility, either to be good or evil, according to the classification set by schools of religious education in this stupid world. But it’s a completely different matter to us. Every child that’s born is just an extra burden on the ship that is about to sink.

 

Are human corpses the wartime metric scale upon which a country’s heroics are measured? As the world unified in blindness revelling in the creativity of death, a trained assassin learned his first tutorial, the infliction of banal humanity beheaded on the pillar of cowardice. The bloody knife glistened to the tune of a sombre child’s lullaby inaugurating the corpse exhibition, taking a deep bow was the mortician, a truly great war-time artist working overtime with utmost gratitude and kindness, elegantly restoring mutilated corpses. Watch for fear in people’s eyes, he said. A lesson on ‘how to be a lion’ imparted from the palms of a delinquent. In the quest of being one’s own God, the killers and the compass stamped into the memory of physical and sexual brutalities. Is it really worth having trust in humans when the sanctity of human conscience is in exile? Why are graveyards the only real estate bought during the war? In absurdities of assassinations and power grabbing egotistical vanities where betrayal is as common as stepping into a bloody puddle, the green zone rabbit awaits to lay an egg. The web of psychological wiles nestled in a silenced revolver; a pensive youth embarks on an unspecified terrorist operation puzzled over the validity of an egg laying rabbit.

 

Life and death was a game of running, climbing and jumping, of watching, of secret dirty words of sleep and nightmares.

 

To the dead of the war writes an army newspaper, the words of poetry and prose shall honour the martyrs with sublime tales woven with love and destiny, honesty and valour, memoirs of humanity. Personal vanity and desperation hastily layers with the madness of the war. Greed, lies and deceit ravaged the spirit of an literary editor, the built-in incinerator a silent witness to coloured workbooks and inhumane folly. Horror and paranoia stumbled in the sea of coffins. War and peace became permanent riddles, down and across imprinted in a sinister crossword. The shrieks of a trapped soul deafening the darkness of a tormented life try to solve the life and death enigma.

 

Aren’t we humans, killing and looting mankind to ruination similar to devils and ‘jinni’, residing in our own holes of idiocies and hallucinating in our cannibalistic overtures? The language of mankind challenges the language of God in the depths of an underground hole. The purging of earth from devils is detailed in the bizarre rituals of a cannibalistic jinni. The war of religion and politics gets wrapped around the lives of the innocent; terror paralyzing the silence of peace. History and heritage of a land lost among the missile noises and military coup. Tales of Western agents and exotic blondes with guns misplaced among the disregarded words of the madman of Freedom Square. The baptized soul waited to view the fated empty chair, a prayer for his beloved mother led into a journey to the next world. The Iraqi Christ overwhelmed by a mysterious desire for salvation.

 

Spilled blood and superstition are the basis of the world. Man is not the only creature who kills for bread or love or power, because animals in the jungle do that in the various ways, but he is the only creature who kills because of faith.

 

A magical tale of a thousand and one knives portrays violence in the extremities of pain and torment. The mysteries of the magical knives remain unsolved as do the mystery of humans taking comfort and pleasure in crucifying their brethren. The bleating of goats recounted a grim memory of a septic tank, a pulsating cry in the murkiness of a prosaic tale. The chorus of the song of the goats blaring from the loudspeakers infiltrated the competitive troubled narratives, a prize in offing. The sanctimonious virtue of religion is marred by selfish desires, murderers and thieves thriving under religious cloaks. The emergence of false gods examining moral compasses of human obligation to schizophrenic religious dogmas. Is then life a burden or a blessing? The songs of a composer paying the price of patriotism muddled with militant insurgency. The pillars of religion, humanity and patriotism; in the chaos of flesh and fire which one outweighs the rest and which one crumbles? The fate of an inauspicious smile dangling between the curses of agony and joy, vaguely chants “the body must be protected, not the thoughts”.

 

Why are the trees so green and beautiful as though they’re washed with water every day? Why can’t we be peaceful like them? We live in houses like pigsties. While their houses are warm, safe and colourful. Why do they respect dogs as much as humans? Why do we masturbate twenty-four hours a day? How can we get a decent government here?

 

War and migration, the trials and tribulations of refuges in the aftermath is filled with humiliation and dreams of a dignified life. The question of securing asylum is solved by a constant dread of wavering stories of killers and heroes. The ordeal of a wounded man recounts seeking asylum in the reality and the record of an abstract truth. Dreams that never learnt the language of a new country, survival in an adopted homeland burdened with philosophies of pride and indignity. The ghosts of the pasts wear out the fate of a vulnerable being trying to find the meaning of life. The valuable existence of Salim Abdul Husain disseminating in the recurring nightmares of Carlos Fuentes.

 

Iraq, a country besieged by the cycle of war and death and its citizens trapped in the nihilistic trenches of insanity. Hassan Blasim’s anthology of challenging stories pierces right through the heart with glimpses of a land dwelling in visceral horror and repellent irrationalities. The history of Iraq spans from the horrific eight yearlong Iraq-Iran War (1980-88), American troops occupancy, dictatorship (Saddam Hussein), militant Kurdish insurgency, mushrooming terrorist organisations and an endless loop of civil war. Dubbed as the ‘Iraqi Kafka’, Blasim pens a memorable yet haunting ugly truth of menacing savagery and failure of human conscience without a glimmer of wisdom. The meaningless world of war prevails in hopelessness, bloodlust and bloodshed. The surrealistic nature of these metaphorical tales let out an honest cry of a dystopian homeland.

 

There is nothing beautiful about war. There is no triumph in it. Victories marred with the blood of the innocent. Are the dead happy over the victories of war? Do the dead agonize over their crimes or martyrdom? Are the sufferers ever liberated from the shadows of war? The dead become mere statistics until the next battle. The fragility of life measured with the next conquest. Is annihilating civilization seen as a laudation for bravery? Do the footsteps of peace have to march on the road strewn with bloodied corpses? In a world where allegiance to dogmas of faith outweighs the respect to mankind, the lines of real and unreal are blurred by hostilities and fanaticism, the sanity of humankind rotting in an abyss of mortal horror; there will be no escape from the chaos of war.

 

4/5****

The Taste of Apples – Huang Chun-ming

 

It has been months since I put my pen to paper. Words keep struggling against my emotions, the range of my imagination jammed up in literary reflections. As I sat with an open book in my lap, Huang Chun-ming’s characters gazing right back into my face, I pondered on the thought of how human survival becomes magnified when human condition thrives at the lowest rung of the societal ladder. Marginalised people, forgotten lives overlooked by the socioeconomic indicators, suffering at the hands of their affluent counterparts and their stories steeped in inherent universality, hesitant in finding an ardent voice to uncover the social process of basic human survival conflicted in a world of contradiction and confliction.

 

“ Ah-cang , the next time you come home, try to bring a fish back with you. It’s not easy getting a saltwater fish up here on the mountain. Bring a big one if you can.”

 

The cooked bonito wrapped in taro leaf swayed heartlessly into fragmented happy endings. The saltwater fish fairly symbolizes the temporary victories harboured by a child on a threshold of youth, only to mercilessly fade into a vague far-fetched desire bearing harsh realities of trust and resentment. Self-doubt, a sense of personal inadequacies creeps through the rickety windows of paranoia. A yearned escape from loneliness and fatigue seeks a satisfying reprieve in an infant’s smile. A loving father on a verge of a mental breakdown dons his “sandwich-man” costume for he has always been his son’s ‘big doll’ “Oh! I’m Ah-long’s big doll, his big doll!!”

 

Trepidations over birth control and poverty find a respite in the scaly outlines of ringworms patterned on infected bodies. Minor events captured in everyday subsistence become majorly momentous in these impoverished lives. The currency of luck shines in most dreadful ordeals. A looming tragedy compensating a family’s fortune, an unforeseen affluence now a commonplace in penurious existence is filled with a surge of anxiety and guilt over bewildering kismet. The sour taste of the apples devoured with a demure crunch was sweetened with every bite as the thought of a luxury unknown heightened with the chorus of noisy munching.

 

“Principles I’ve held on to tenaciously for many years and that have formed my unique personality and temperament – are they to be cast aside now? Then why have them in the first place? It wouldn’t seem like the real me without them. “

 

Caught up in an ambivalent world of mangled moralities, a mask of pleasantries worn to handle two onerous affairs makes a young office employee question the value of adhered ideologies and the inevitability of primary survival. The wounds of a tragic Japanese-Chinese history (1930s) conflicted with the provisional role of a “pimp” to entertain visiting Japanese businessmen , a quest to move from the bitter past resulting in artful linguistic diplomacy and friendly sayonora/zaijian greetings in a rapidly changing societal mores.

 

“Memories of the past are always fond ones and this was especially true for these men in their twilight years; only their past instilled a sense of pride.”

 

With the advent of modernisation and Pedi cabs, the aging men of a rural village, the gong-beaters of a quaint town, migrant workers and the unaltered rural landscapes, all caught between the old and new are propelled into a state of hopelessness, a feeling of invisibility blending into the inability to adapt to change. The present seem to be crumbling into prospects of an innovative future overshadowing humble heritages and traditionalistic customs. Amid the peals of laughter, the drowning of an old cat demarcated the irreversible modernisation and a tale of stubbornness of a man and his rebellion. A world of absurdities and turmoil is formed when two-sign painters get entangled in the web of technology and media in metropolitan culture. The beats of Han Qinzai’s gong succumbing to the monopoly of pedicabs, a desperate man holding onto the last crumbs of his fading fortune seeks salvage in ghost stories and a group of vagrants for a momentary boost of a dignified life. For, when fortune goes missing from one’s life, all a man has left are the remains of his reputation, a final refuge to belong somewhere in this societal structure. The concept of losses and gains and a lackadaisical attitude spun chronicles of two pressure cooker salesmen in a little coastal town. The thin line between faith and deception quivering between courage and cowardice hurls unforeseen folds of events wrecking illusions of perfection. The disfigurement of harsh reality lay bare underneath Xiaoqi’s cap signalling underlying societal metaphors.

 

..………. I figure that the hardest compromise to strike would be with myself, for if I put a side my principles, what would I have left?

 

Huang Chun-ming’s short stories penned in circa 1960-70s, exclusively focuses on the intricacies of the then thriving Taiwanese society; its rural folk being the crucial element. The so-called “ordinary folk”( a term I detest to use, for these very people exhibit extraordinary grit of survival), societal rejects who are witnesses to a hostile socio-economic milieu, coping with effects of illiteracy , debilitating poverty , migration to urban cities, adherence to conformist dogmas , muddled self-worth , modernisation and callousness of urban life. Human existence at its most detrimental stage. Nevertheless, what is remarkable about these engaging stories is the array of characters that come alive through the subtle yet sincere prose narrating their unique tales, their robust presence felt throughout numerous incidents spanning across their lives from the countryside to the metropolitan cities. Huang neither pities his characters nor want his readers to do the same. In the despair of an obsolete existence what is desperately searched is wisdom and dignity, a need to be acknowledged and cherished in a world where remorse overpowers elation, where the reservations of the past are carried in a shaky present, dreaming of an uncertain future and all a basic survival needs is a true sense of humanity.

 

 

4/5 ****

Wind and Stone – Masaaki Tachihara

 

 

“You are a stone”, said Kase, smoking a cigarette after they had made love.
“I think you are the stone”, replies Mizue without opening her eyes.
“No, I’m more like the wind. I could never be a stone.”

Rapt in wonder the stone deliberates the lightness of the wind. The subtle windy caress arouses a sense of vitality. The stone sewed up in permanence yearns for an escape from its prosaic settings, rousing at the existence of the wind. The imminent chaos blowing over the passage of the wind, gusts through the tranquil garden calling forth nature’s dualistic predicament – transience and permanence. What is it to feel ‘truly cleansed’? To feel alive – the very sentiment entranced by the proverbial elan vital, sprouts an iota of change in the dormant despair of mediocrity. The brevity of the nascent bud awakens the lush green foliage; the manifestation of change erupting a sense of vitality from the tree. The blossoming flower harmonizes the impression of liveliness in the perceptive observer trying to escape the mundane, its echoic gratification consoling the depths of desolation.

Gardens, they say, are the chief marker of time. The rhythmic seasonal cycles alter the landscapes replacing the new with the old. In the yearly cycle of change and continuity, the garden in some mysterious ways fleeting from its mediocrity, matches the rhythms of nature with the flow of time.

“For me”, he then said quietly, “building a garden is a struggle against mediocrity.”

Yusaku Kase’s meticulously crafted garden seeps in irony delineating the tranquil exterior and the internal chaos of both, its creator and its owners. The freedom of aesthetics colliding with burdens of morality forms a limitless extension of human emotions haunted by the kinks of change and consistency. The perpetual ‘struggle against mediocrity’ is the potential dilemma, prevalent in this Tachihara narration. The escape from the mundane animates an invisible force enabling the characters (of this book) to seek out their freedom hidden in a dark lonely place.

In every small, closed world, there is the same quality of complacency and exclusiveness.

Prolonged periods of peace often give rise to stagnation. Peace and Stagnation are not precisely opposites, but, one is desirable while the other is deplored. (The I Ching or Book of Changes ). The need to be loved, to feel desired, overrides the substance of ecstasy, the aspiration of self-indulgence stems from the psychological stagnation fixed in the fears of abandonment. The realization of inner desolation elevated the suffering within the defined portrayal of the four individuals tangled in perturbed relationships, each facing the obvious anxiety of being ‘detached from life’. The garden takes a life of its own demarcating each phase of turmoil and harmony of a man-made landscape scattered in a balanced histories and an imbalanced future of a heart’s non-conformists desires.

Again she had the fleeting feeling that the stones were Kase’s eyes watching her…………Still, Mizue could not help feeling they were composed of invisible colours and empty spaces. She did not know what to make of this feeling. What was this invisible colour?

Mizue , a daughter ,a wife, mother and a lover ; the life-roles confronted Mizue with the dilemma of moral conventions, abandonment and a ‘thirst for love’ ; seeking a sense of vitality to feel alive and “completely cleansed”. Similar to Kase, Mizue struggles against herself. Her significance in an evolving sphere called life. Tachihara puts forth a simmering question, whether we are detached from the universality of nature? The man-made garden meshing with the language of the wild, precisely marking metamorphosing milieu influencing the imbedded stones and yet the timelessness of the stone remain unchanged. An entity on its own, the ever transforming garden, becomes the pathway to ruination. In Tachihara’s subtle narrative symbolisms, Mizue resembles the immutable stone, wondering is a strong gust of wind could uproot her from the prosaic settings, and, Kase, the nomad wind pursuing for a sanctuary which could restrict its flow and purify the turmoil within.

Can ‘lust’ purify ‘lust’, if it takes one beyond the tussle of commonplace? Is ‘love’ an immutable factor among capricious lust or a mere matter of self-indulgence of inner thirst that needs to find self-fulfilment, a sense of wholesomeness? Change and consistency are not reciprocally absolute in the flow of time. Is then in the monochromatic array of transience and permanence, the struggle against mediocrity will seek the exact shade of the invisible colour, everlastingly? The hue that defines monotony.

 

4/5****

The Rose in My Garden – Arnold Lobel

 

The book I read
Grows like a seed,
Step by step it flows
Just as a seed grows,
Words dance to poetic tunes
Like flowers that slowly bloom,
Upon a rose in the garden
Sleeps a bee among the pollen,
Birds peck and butterflies flutter
Shelter the daisies, peonies in summer,
On a chase, a cat and a fieldmouse
Rattles the garden on shaky grounds,
With a single red rose it starts
Wisdom to the soul it imparts,
The beauty of a poem culminates
In miracles of nature it resonates.

 

5/5*****

Days with Frog and Toad (Frog and Toad, #4) – Arnold Lobel

 

 

In realm of silence, when thoughts corrode
Words fade, swept away by a mind sham,
A comfort searched within nostalgic shades,
With fresh pot of tea, stories sprang on a warm divan.

Jumped the rope one hundred times, an Old Dark frog,
Did it really happen?, was it true?, a thought to mock
Amid ghostly shivers, rise tales of quick wit and grit,
On a cold dark night, two trembling hearts warmly grin.

Swirling in the sky, on a bumpy ride, the kite encircle
To laughter it climbs, higher from its airy shackle,
To the march of the wind, perseverance and hope sparkle
In the shadows of the kite, the robins fly, without a squabble.

There waits for a sleepy head a glad tomorrow,
Under the covers, procrastination a happy phrase
A thought of another day, a despair in future foreseen
Tomorrow a clean slate, in present where the mess lays.

A birthday hat too big, a gift that seem unfit,
In biggest thoughts, highest mountains, tallest trees
A larger head for a hat, a loving heart for keeps
In white lies sees a caring friend, happiness pleasantly knit.

Wet sandwiches on a sunny day, a reason to be alone,
Two friends, sitting alone together, a home away from home.

Lessons learned, an empty teapot , a wide smile to boast
Spending time with a friends, what a wondrous magic
Adventures of an amphibian pair, an inspiring classic
A tale of friendship within the Days with Frog and Toad.

 

5/5*****

 

Replacement – Tor Ulven

 

The mid-afternoon breeze lingers over the traces of burnt up lavender oil. As the heady scent fans out the pleasing Camille Saint-Saëns symphony swirling on a loop nearby; my heart slowly awakens to the thought of an early spring , the currency of which now seems to be a piece of fiction amid this dreary winter. The flaky skin on my forehead smoothens with a dash of coldcream, the lonely curl tucked back in my bundled hair. The looking glass pondering of a time when the opulence of a soft skin , the raven-tint coiffure, render into becoming another pipe dream , the supple visage resigning to its eventual cascading fate. “Take an apple, for example, or any other fruit or vegetable that rots, that withers, shrivels, and wrinkles, as human bodies wither, shrivel, and wrinkle more and more as they age, so that rotting can be considered the lowest common multiple of all fruits (or vegetables), just as people too are only really revealed in decline…….”; the recurrent words of Ulven putting me in a trance. In the descent of a living soul, lay bare the gospel truth of years gone by, magnifying every infinitesimal detail of a quavering time stamp that seem to be hidden beneath the illusive youthful mirage, perpetually trickling down to a forgotten interlude that seem to have dissolved in the passage of life. The fading confines of fact and fiction searching for a glimmer of memory or a dream to legitimize the practicalities of the living shrouded amid surrealistic assimilations of a poignant reflection. The genuine face revealed in the midst of a stimulated sham.

 

…….an artist hanging a row of bananas from a rack along the wall, how all the bananas were painted white, so they all looked identical, and how they were all artificial, except for one, and how once the exhibition opened, one banana, the real one, of course, began to rot, thereby revealing its true face, while the others, the artificial ones, of course, stayed white and pristine.

 

The deceptive façade falling off exposing the tiniest irregular disparities, the forgotten interlude of time now manifests in the peculiar image that is no longer a familiar companion. The implicit fantasy set on the explicit world stage breaks down in a meaningless hiatus, the nagging feeling of misplaced opportunity, the process of self-realization that is not too late to hold onto the transience immediacy of time, the need to express the raw pain of this very thought as the precision of reality remains. Oceans slowly turning into sand, the foetus leisurely growing in the womb, youth being substituted by old age , the sense to see, to think , to imagine, the strategies of equal and opposites, the precision of the surroundings embracing the ambiguity of life. Replacement becomes a linguistic ode to placing the living at equilibrium with the existing milieu, the existence personified by everything real, everything unreal. The attempt to challenge stereotypes being the greatest stereotype of all.

 

….he imagines a blind man with a rattling box for a stomach, who constantly feeds himself coins just to buy himself a few more minutes of sight, though when the river of change dries up, he’s blind until he can fish up some new coin….

 

We are indebted to our cognitive skills. We indebted to our vision, our ability to speak, to hear, we are answerable to every act that our minds and hands commit. Ask a blind man what would he give to see a speck of crimson floating in the morning sky, ask those who are bed-ridden what would they give just to be able to sit at the dinner table. The trembling fingers who battle with every button that needs to be keyed in a shirt, the delirium that gradually erases the sweet nostalgia of your first kiss, the warmth of a lover’s naked body, the crumpled sheets that no longer carry the scent of your beloved, sobriety being taunted by a reclusive beer bottle, the forlorn heart that fraternize with a half-lit cigarette ,sounds of a chimney evaporating in vacuity along the waning years; emptiness builds sanctuaries , you get used to the burgeoning darkness and yet, darkness is never still. Ulven writes, “Whenever you want. Nothing is physically stopping you, nothing, that is, but the prohibition itself.” Reading Ulven’s celebrated words, make me ponder on how we humans take things for granted. How we in our luxuriate narcissism bring an illusion of invincibility to our mortality. The crimes we commit against each other, the ignorance that mushrooms in neglect, how we bloated with pride disregard the lives we throw in oblivion, the very lives who could one day save us from our own nullity.

 

Someone is standing motionless on the footbridge. As you get closer you see that it’s a middle-aged woman in a gray coat, and that she’s thrown something, it’s impossible to say what, over the rail, and that now she’s following it with her eyes. Afterward, she turns around and walks toward you. As you pass one another, you seem to see a secret smile of forbidden pleasure playing across her face. ………..

 

The phenomenon of death points the issue in permanence of physical departures and deliberations over the plausibility of an afterlife. Ulven fields an inquiry in the correlated subject matter of legitimacy of a soul. The rationalities of death and dying make an emphatic paradox debating the religious dogma of a heaven and hell. The contemplating abstractions of mortal v/s immortal soul characterised as the anecdotal sum and substance of biological continuity v/s spiritual reliance. Death is perceived either as a relief or consolation, the boundaries of consciousness disappearing in a deafening cry. Ulven’s outlook on how we don’t possess the exclusivity of joie de vivre, accentuated Ulven’s own personal turmoil. The candid dialogue on suicide… “you remember what the psychiatrist said, how when someone finally convinces themselves to do it, they get excited, cheerful, they seem happy, energetic, and everyone thinks they’re getting better, but in fact they’re not getting better, they’re just grimly, morbidly happy because they’ve finally decided to do it…”, comes to be a prophetic writing on the wall underlining Ulven’s own impending suicide couple years later. (Tor Ulven killed himself in 1995).

 

Replacement swarms with the quotidian of the lowest possible decimal of organic existence. Elementary trivialities are elevated on a visionary pedestal, entwining the reticence of beauty with the complex realism. With beauty comes suffering. Germination is chased by decay. Ulven’s amorphous metaphorical world may seem as clear as the mud, yet the celebrated verses flow into multifaceted passage that at times equate to serene banality of a pond; the silent waters a chimeric humeral veil to the chaotic world thriving beneath brimming with stones, aquatic fauna and flora, each embracing the frictions of splendour and degeneration. Akin to silhouettes meeting in secrecy , Ulven’s voices rise and fall throughout the solemn narrative fluently switching from the meditative musings of a nonagenarian protagonist to the assorted individual dispositions of multiple characters bracing the aesthetics of a life beyond and within the parameters of beauty and suffering. Steadily, as the reader immerses in these soul-stirring reflexions resonating in the queries of resounding silence, the flow of words animating the numerous articulations amalgamate into a single resonating conscious , the assumed mind trip eventually residing within you, the reader, the humble self locked up in the precariousness of time.

…..what you’ve got to understand is that meaning can be found in meaninglessness, and that these meaningless words hold all you need to know.

 

All is connected, all is replaced. Change is inevitable. You find yourself standing alone with your reflection, a tranquillity steadily sets in, you keep gazing into the identical likeliness until the image blurs your rationalities, the chill in the air no longer affecting your bare skin, the last whiff of the lavender fetching in the elusive epiphanies of the Ulvenesque aura that everything matters, every tiny bit of it creating intelligent and unintelligent life. Insignificant beads strung together transforming into pearls of wisdom, the interlacing circulatory sequence edifying with every drop of fluid sagacity. So, readers like myself who whine about facets of life getting in the way of my undertaken readings, need to take a step back pausing all the juvenile tantrums and appreciate the dealings of life in its entirety no matter how tough or easy things might seem, respect it much as you respect your beloved things , value it as much as you value the words you read in a book, maybe even more , for as every single letter is as precious as the word composed ,remarkably in some of the most meaningless things lies the profundity of a lifelong meaning.

 

5/5 ♥♥♥♥♥

Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers – Kang Sok-Kyong, Kim Chi-won, Oh Jung-hee

Women writers. Women penning the trials and tribulations of being a woman. The pen and ink bidding farewell to the prevailing apprehensions. The spoken language of an individual narrowed by gender hierarchy labouring in relative anonymity, women write, knocking down the heavily guarded patriarchal gates of a traditional society , the defining emergence diminishing the glaring divide of public from domestic life, where men reigned the former and women the latter. How does one designate the essence of being a woman? How does one quote a chapter and verse from the consequential book of womanhood? Women who have conventionally been beheld as someone’s daughter, someone’s wife and someone’s mother; their own individual identity lapsing into being a mere legal signature on few sheets of paper. How does one then define the constitution of Korean women? Or can you? Women who are as diverse as the land itself spanning through generations, cultural edifications and numerous personal and societal evolutions seeking an autonomy to their existence in an overwhelming patriarchal world. How does one ever answer the unwelcomed question of signifying the autonomy of womanhood? The patriarchal advocacy of literature, the very notion of belles- lettres being the prime avocation of cultural gentlemen, the adversities of gender discrepancies shadowing the laboured efforts of women writers derides the valid declaration of talent having no gender whatsoever. The contemporary Korean women writers (three of whom being mentioned in this book) bring forth an notable insight to the strenuous effort of their emergence from a society profoundly influenced by the Confucian precepts, finally breaking out from their obscurities. The undying spirit of their penned narrative, the meticulous characterization, accomplish a sophisticated sensory faculty of symbolism sketching the evolution of Korean women in a rapidly modernized world

“……to accept our own lives, and without such thoughts to make us feel good, how could we live? We women were facing up to life with our bodies as our only asset. We may now have smelled like roses, but we got to learn all about life and freedom in our way…..”

The picturesque forsythias blooming on a palace walls, the beauty of scenic spring stretching on a wall calendar in a clinic testing venereal diseases befits the stark revelation of a social world where days and dreams brim with the futility of a traumatic past and the aspirations of striving for a dignified existence. Kang Sŏk-kyŏng allegorizes the social status of prostitutes surviving on the U.S. military base in Korea, to a drifting isolated island, a temporary home destined to subsist in loneliness of abandonment. The slight flicker of hope within melancholia is the hallmark of their lives which struggle to find a haven of freedom and integrity. In the endless fight for human dignity, their bodies become the sole measure of self-defence, a path to their freedom however despicable. The marginal women thriving on the societal periphery seek comfort among their ilk, the labelling of “leftovers” a crude irony, in a world where men carry the burden and the badge of brutal enforcers. The rebellion and restraints to freedom, personal choices of women shackled by archaic ethos stretches afar from the Korean peninsula into the male-dominance of the Western world, applying universality factor to the predicament of women sexuality condemned to abhorrence. “But if two women see eye to eye, there’s no law that says they can’t live together,” said Toma.” So what if they’re lesbians? People live the way they want to. And so what if we’re whore? Except for worrying about money, it’s great living around the base. No husband to treat us rough, no kids to worry us, no one interfering with us.”

The controversial subject of a woman’s body becoming the weapon for her emancipation edges on the possibility of emotional vulnerabilities and inconspicuous rebellion. Kim Chi-wŏn dwells in to unchartered territories where the society as a whole becomes the source of shame for a woman. The collective chauvinism that safeguards the sanctimonious matrimonial institution rests upon the humiliation of women. The marital sacrosanctity ruthlessly abused under the assumed patriarchate prerogative. Kim Chi-wŏn is scrupulous in rendering the dual state of relationship between a man and a woman , raising a similar yet different issue concerning the life of a Korean woman immigrant in U.S. The quest for a resourceful independence gives Yun-ja a possibility of a certain beginning, a marriage based purely on monetary and legal convenience. The probability and improbability of a ‘real marriage’ immerses in reflections of a financial arrangement, age and divorce. The disconnect of a woman and the society is evident in the final libertine declaration.

“Longing for something to sustain and steady her, the woman nevertheless tended to to doubt the permanence of everything. Do flowers last more than ten day? And floods that look like they’ll sweep the world away are gone in a couple days, aren’t they? But her relief that the world was transitory was tempered by the painful realization that society expected marriage to be the most harmonious of human relationships.”

Transience becomes the most fitting lifeline to despondency. Kim Chi-wŏn is scrupulous in rendering the dual state of relationship between a man and a woman. The nightly mellow lullaby sung a mother is marred by domestic brutality, estrangement and resentment. A clandestine corner in the house tries the patience of a battered wife, the harmony of matrimony crumbling into ashes floating on the cold ghostly waters of a pond nearby. The central themes of hopelessness and self-restraint fade away, yet the predictability of self-reliance is still muddled in impermeable monocracy.

“Like a foolish girl you’re trying to find beyond the world. If you’d only given in a little, you wouldn’t have had to go around butting up against the world; you wouldn’t have had to spill your blood. You would have found that the springtime of life isn’t a chain; it’s a pair of wings.”

The self-restraint of rebellion originating from the conventional mores once again twirls the idea of freedom although being the sweet nectar in a claustrophobic milieu; it is the dawn of justice that brings the sweetest aroma in an acrid life. The fortunate franchise of youth caught amid Marxist ideas and democratic upheaval plunges into an abyss of alienation and confusion. The structural sanctity of filial piety bruised by blatant hypocrisy and customary subordination questions the cogency of an inherited male-dominated hierarchy. The pursuit for individuality resulting in either enforced submission or absolute abandonment; agony being the sole companion of nothingness. As a daughter, is trapped between familial obligations and self-exploration, the youthfulness of a sibling risking the madness of a powerless chaotic soul, the maze of confusion unable to find a sheltered room in the woods. Kang Sŏk-kyŏng once again underlines the crucial adherence factor of meritocracy that stamps its social legitimacy of becoming a societal shrine with its ignorance, narcissistic enforcements and submissive gender protocols.

Alienation is seen as one of the strongest denominator in lives of these female characters perpetually trapped in the polarities of modern and conformist worlds. O Chŏng-hŭi in her literary explorations reveals the torments of estrangement when engulfed with the bleakness of death and impermanence. The stories spun a convoluted web of conflict and acquiescence where choices are imaginary. An evening game is vacated for a pleasurable night with a young lover. The women preoccupied by the melodies of a young mother reminiscence her harried past detached from her present apathy. The daily father-daughter card game echoes the whispers of a mother losing her sanity over the loss of her child, a father waiting for his son and a possible infanticide. O Chŏng-hŭi adroitly frames a sequential persecution in an episodic narrative. The vagueness of death seeps into the comprehensibility of life. The grave stones symbolise the quandary of two women, the former seeking a grave plots for her and her husband and the latter contemplating the rationality of her husband’s dubious absence. The words of farewell scatter the memories of physical departure and vacuousness of physical existence.

Talent has no gender. Creativity does not go picking and choosing its master appropriated on the grammatical gender system dais. Literature has no single definition. The vexing question then arises as to why women are the only ones to be bestowed by such an endearing privilege of their entirety being abbreviated through the myopic primal gender regulations? Sarcasm or anxiety of the patriarchy? These stories of Korean women penned by three remarkable women writers encompassing multifaceted thematic nitty gritty of prostitution, youth, death, generational gap, bigotry, sexuality, love and much more, travel beyond the said geographical panorama depicting the notion of universality, broadening the thematic accessibilities of the female characters chronicling their own future detached from their status as someone’s mother, wife or daughter. In the current ongoing global scenario where women’s rights are easily bargained, a coming of an age story not cracking down on the deliberations of a quintessential teen male, but, a disquieting collage of a young girl matured beyond her naïve years, life impressions swirling around the nauseating chaos of sex, death and poverty in the war ravaged Seoul district bylanes of Chinatown ,call for a response of literary stimuli to view beyond the charcoal coated faces in the classic Bildungsroman ,an empathetic astute listener to the stories of women acutely ingrained in Korean culture ; the innocence of childhood stepping on the onset of womanhood culminating in the pragmatic…“My menstrual flow had begun.”

 

4/5 ♥♥♥♥

Quicksand – Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

 

What is to be a fool? What is to play the fool, bewitched into becoming a mere cat’s paw used to draw amorous carnality from the flames of passion? What is to feel powerless, ridiculed in love when appreciation veils subtle humiliation, to be a clay pigeon in the game of love? What is the sine qua non of love? Wherein, the human universals of shame and humiliation circumvent the existent perplexity of self-justification. Dubious emotions casting shadows creating a vivid portrait of a hypersensitive inner-world sheathed in the depths by humility of love and arrogance of lust. The immoralities of an imagination seducing the moralities of human nature. What is it to sense an illicit love that has yet to take a definite form, looming in the heart of sheer lust?

….And even of if it was wrong to be secretly in love with another man, what was so bad about being in love with a woman, someone of my own sex?”….

 

Tanizaki brings forth an enticing work of fiction steeped in delirious pathology of eroticism and psychological obscurities in the quest for an obsessive longing. The lesbian affair mutually affecting Mitsuko and more so Sonoko, prevails with the conquest of sexual pleasures; supple bodies become a constructive and destructive force of subliminal mind, insatiable for sensuous stimuli.

The torrid liaison sexually and emotionally manipulates Sonoko and Mitsuko invading along the lives of Watanuki and Kotaro, distressing and disrupting the very inadequacies of individualistic disposition. Tanizaki explores the ambiguities of love and marriage delineating the fervid mystification of the sinister bend ingrained in the core of human nature. The sensual arc centring eroticism tainted by hysteria bypasses the aspects of perversion sketching out human frailty encompassing the aesthetics of Mitsuko’s virtuous beauty. The need to ‘cling onto love’ culminates in mortification with the ‘pretence to love’, bona fide revelations still lingering in a rigid state of denial. Watanuki’s sexual impotency masked within his embolden physical dishonesty stands in contrast to Kotaro’s sexually potent yet impassioned libido curdling tangible neurotic regression of complex relationships changing the entire course of basic psychosomatic make-up of human physicality. Profoundly intertwined in the web of envy, violence, adultery, malice, animosity and other ensuing emotional incitements, the four keyed up protagonists ravenously cling onto the vanity of love; Mitsuko becoming the core link in the catastrophic game of love and eroticism , the two men and Sonoko mere pawns of manipulation. Love, an intoxicating blend of lust and devotion, serene yet unstable when disturbed by surplus stress equates to the quicksand phenomenon, a static human fallibility sinking in the deep well of chaotic pith.

So I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand, and although I said to myself I had to escape, by this time, I was helpless. I knew I was being used by Mitsuko and that all the while she was calling me her dear sister she was actually making a fool of me.

 

Tanizaki’s exploration of women thriving in naturalistic societal milieu, women whose lives are confined to the workings of their inner-self, is subtle yet provocative. Tanizaki perceives the external human equation as an artistic portrait wherein the bare truth lies buried in its shadowy depths, abstracted from the customary kaleidoscopic visible exterior. The female characters be it Sonoko or Mitsuko are sexual aggressors; the unrestrained sexual needs clashing with the emotional displacement are emphasized by jaded manipulative passions stimulated by forlorn hearts. The brattish demeanour fading in the virginal splendour of supple chaste body; sex being the prime tangible deriving force of commotion. Being a frequent Tanizaki reader, the literary configuration is structured with a definite beginning and an end; the journey in between either fascinating or mundane transforms imagination into impending authenticity; the enabled truth which is not ethical but psychological. The masked flaws of a virtuous beauty self-contained in a manipulative world fixated on force rein. The Japanese titular connotation “Manji” symbolizing the four pronged Buddhist Swastika, epitomize four harmonious lovers immersed in the whirling force of passion, fantasizing the certitude of love.

…..I kept pretending to be confident of her love…..

 

 

3/5 ♥♥♥

Radish: (China Penguin Special) – Mo Yan

 

The silken jute stalks sing, “Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”
The silken jute stalks sing, “Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”

The chorus of a bare back fills the barren land,
Dew laden leaves recite lore of a superhuman,
The blistered belly nestled near a dimly lit fire,
Bare-chested and barefooted, he was detached,
Crisp voice descending in silence, apathy his attire,
In waves of a lush reverie, a respite he seeks,
Nature’s feeble lullaby, in harshness of his life.

The auburn ducks snicker, “Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!
The auburn ducks snicker, “Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!

Witnesses the fertile soil, long miseries of a boy,
Bears the purple sweet potatoes, the pinch of hunger,
Crouched between tossed radishes, a fallen fingernail,
The guilt of theft, abandoned in the burning coals,
In tongues of fires, melancholic arias prevail,
The old blacksmith’s song pushing chords of joy,
Resting on the anvil, the golden radish, radiates,
Mysteries of life scattered in slivers of faith.

The vegetable patch whisper,” Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”
The vegetable patch whisper,” Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”

Agriculture without its irrigation, a motherless child,
A mother’s breast with no milk, a deadly fright,
Hundreds of labourers toil, chisels hastens,
The allegorical mother claiming loyal lives,
In the obscure womb lie the Commune’s whims,
Opened floodgates dragging the human plight,

The cold white stones hum, “Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”
The cold white stones hum, “Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”

In glory of socialism, the man eats,
In glory of socialism, the man marches,
In glory of socialism, the man barters,
Human virtue, an imperfect bastard child,
Immorality surges, in human sacrifices,
In glory of socialism, the graves reek,
In glory of socialism, mankind gets bartered.

Ardently Mo Yan pens, ” Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”
Ardently Mo Yan pens, ” Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”

A mason, a woman and a blacksmith,
Lust of love indebted to the fallen irises,
Hungered the red jacket, the scent of a crimson scarf
Youthful love, caressing kisses, hearts writhe,
In a meadowlark call, the secret alarms,
Bleeding love redeemed in a sunlit radish.

The two bloody gouges scream, “Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”
The two bloody gouges scream, “Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!”

Swan-like, he stretched his neck, standing,
The hem of his coat touching the wiry thighs,
Like a fat-headed catfish on feet, he strolled,
On the banks of the river, golden rainbow afloat,
Desires of a sunlit radish, sown in hazy sighs,
The falling rays of the autumn sun, verbalize,
A doleful tale of a fragile heart in a benumbed abode.

The golden radish chimes, “Hei-hai!! Hei-hai!!
The golden radish chimes, “Hei-hai !! Hei-hai!!

Only if,
He had the warmth of a mother’s breast
Love had not perished in the black earth,
Had not the radish lie hid in the river mists
Had not the hammer been his inheritance,
Had not humanity sprout callous tentacles,
Had humanity sheltered his naked fears,
Had childhood walked the a euphoric path,
The rustling leaves wiping the trickling tears

The silken jute stalks sing, “Hei-hai !! Hei-hai!!”
The silken jute stalks sing, “Hei-hai !! Hei-hai!!”

4/5 ****

The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa – Yasunari Kawabata

 

Beggars are people too……Crazy people are women too……” Fallen women” were once naïve young girls……Men who indulge in ‘flesh trade’ aren’t called “fallen men”……As I scribble these words, my pen comes to a grinding halt. The notebook laid there crammed with the vestiges of my thoughts. The flux of my words was at the mercy of an inaccessible sheet of paper. No matter where landing stage of the wordy compositions deviates, words always appear to be imperfect when expressing the inexpressible. The voyeur within me now precedes Kawabata’s voyeuristic world attempting to comprehend human incidents through an impartial lens, the accomplices to my silence aiding to unearth the truth veiled in the allusive reflection of the transient beauty. The unassuming moon silently floating on the water mirrors the unreal within the real; the reflections on the windows ceasing to exist upon a whiff of wind, the window opening into a bargained emptiness. A tiny drop of water is competent to epitomize the reflection of the moon and the window oblivious to its crystalline pictorial pushes forward committing perjury. Life is a mingled yarn of all things echoic and nonechoic , pure and impure, sincerity and deceit ; the vitality of a perishable life holding onto the wispy filaments of pure longing. The world of nothingness steadily awakens with the melodious sound of the bells of the Senso Temple, the rhythmic choreographed long legs tapping to the blues of the jazz, the murmur of the piano from the dimly lit geisha house, the chatter of the rickshaw pullers, the tranquility of the Sumida River colliding with the exhilaration of the Casino Foiles ; the fragrance of the camellia oil soothing the incoherence of the streets of Asakusa.

“Asakusa is Asakusa is for everyone. In Asakusa, everything is flung out in the raw. Desires dance naked. All races, all classes, all jumbled together forming a bottomless, endless current, flowing day and night, no beginning, no end. Asakusa is alive…….”(Azenbō Soeda)

Akin to the many and various algae proliferating on a summer’s day stretching put a lush emerald carpet over the stagnant waters of the Gourd Pond, Asakusa comes alive with the vibrant hustle and bustle on the streets. The lyrical verses of Soeda resonates the wonders of Asakusa. A home for the homeless, a love for the loveless, a source of food for the famished; a world of leftovers of leftovers. Asakusa, a melting pot to amalgamating all races and classes equating to any thriving city on the face of this earth and yet, Asakusa finds distinctiveness in the allure of its design. How or rather who creates the infrastructure of a city? How are places resurrected from their own ruins? People nurture the land and the land in turns fashions the prevailing communities. Among the elderly delinquents of time, Asakusa was a “young punk”. It exudes an energetic charm seeking the genuine vitality of life, positivity through the purity of wild. Asakusa was a lost piece found through its very own people.

Kawabata generates a fascinating dais for Asakusa as a “human market”, attracting all and sundry from hobos , prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, geishas, shop girls, flappers, vagabonds, artists and the entire artistic shenanigans rough plays where the ornate dressings rooms of the “ero-queens” are as amusing as the man feeding wheat crackers to the carp in the pool while munching on few of from the pack.“But essentially Asakusa is like a specimen in the Bug House …… something completely different from today’s world, like a remote island or some African village led by a chief , a whole net of time-honored codes over it”

Originally published as a miscellaneous series in news dailies, the Asakusa chronicles finds it titular derivations in the wanderings of the Scarlet Gang. The self-christened theatrical group – The Scarlet Troupe publicized their hope of performing something spectacular in the kitschy votive stickers plastered all over the vacant walls in the city. Over the years, embarrassed by this modernist work of his, Kawabata once had said, “All I did was walk. I never became acquainted with any of the young delinquents. I never addressed a word to the vagrants either….. but I took notes…”. A young man with a baggage of just a pen and a notebook wayfaring through the heart of Tokyo in the aftermath of the 1923 The Great Kanto Earthquake investigated lonesome demimonde lives existing on the societal periphery. Kawabata being a silent flâneur preserves a certain sense of objectivity and distancing in his reportage, and yet ironically the acute perceptions are cryptic evaluation in their abstractions. The trajectory of the narrative rocks back and forth amid three distinct articulations accompanied by multifaceted active and passive vocalizations. Kawabata takes the reader along with him through the alleys of Asakusa. Kawabata devotedly address ….”Dear Reader….just take a walk along the alleys…”…..”Dear Reader…..as you knows”……” …..” what would you do if you were in their place……”……. The subtle prod eventually turns the reader into a loyal companion to the narrator. The “I” of the reader dissolving in the “I” of the narrator.

With its evenly matched pictorial illustrations denoting the aspects of materialistically cultural grandeur capturing one of Tokyo’s fascinating socio-cultural era of history and social relationships; this book registers a certain ‘pop-fic’ ambience . Nevertheless, Kawabata the literary master that he is stays true to his art, astutely conveying the philosophical totality of mono no aware allying the quintessence of transience beauty with the subsequent sadness. The melodrama budding within the printed pages leaps through the loops of subtle humour, economic recession, resistance to convention and the idea of love mingled with eroticism and vengeful crudity encumbered with the emptiness of longing. The dregs of Asakusa. But as long as she can still run, she’s still a woman. Because most of the bums are no longer human enough to run………… The weathered folks no longer talk. They live amid the hustle and bustle of the commercial district without saying a word. The malleable “taste of the backstreets” was sexy and absurd. The impish labyrinth of Asakusa is an inconclusive world of nothingness, but it is not nihilistic.

“When I’m with a man, I’m always sizing myself up- weighing the part of me that wants to become a woman against the part of me that is afraid to. Then I fell miserable and even more lonely” The yen for fulfilling the ideals of womanly dwells within the fragile beauty of Yumiko and Oharu. Yumiko’s desire to be viewed as a man pulsates through the memories of her being the fateful “daughter of the earthquake”; the vengeance of the kittenish arsenic kiss sailing on the Sumida River. Umekichi’s confessions of love residing the idea of love on the lips of a middle-aged woman. The radiance of red and purple sashes blending in the fated hues of the “fallen women”. The transparency of Ochiyo’s lunacy contrasting the rouge of the Okin on the bank. The emptiness offalseness of the varied protagonists is forged ahead surviving the customs of their incompleteness.

 
Asakusa had perhaps been for him (Kawabata) as it was for me – a place that allowed anonymity, freedom, where life flowed on no matter what, where you could pick up pleasure, and where small rooms with paper flowers were rented by the hour. ( Donald Richie , Afterword)

Wading through an interminable picturesque lattice of memories and dewy-eyed faces ; the rawness of dreams drifting though an endless ebb and flow of desires and pleasures strewn with snippets and snapshots floating in a stoic air , this chronicled narrative resembles a fragmented puzzle. And, you find yourself plucking these coquettishly naïve and seductively sinister wanderings, assembling it piece by piece into a significant portrait, an art illuminated in its own abstraction by its own peculiarities. Richie’s accuracy in his noteworthy inferences about Asakusa being a pathway of anonymity to an uninterrupted freedom resonates in the sensory perceptions captured amongst the echoes of “dear reader”. The human flow aggressive in survival and passionate in expression pulsates throughout my cerebral silence bringing Asakusa alive within the spiritless walls of my room; an absurd persuasion enticing me to seize the floating moon amid the nimble watery ripples. The yearning to obtain the unobtainable. The need to discover the sincerity and beauty in the depths of nothingness. Luminescent in the aureate sun, the urge to grab the ephemeral beauty of a piece of glass before it being engulfed by the shadows of the passing day; is how Kawabata’s Asakusa chronicles captivates me. And, I certainly do not need a new notebook for my words as my thoughts are no longer at the mercy of neither the pen nor the paper.

4/5 ****