Churning Current of Colors

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin is a much needed story of our time when people are still struggling for LGBTQ+ rights and freedom from family, society and state. Our understanding, acceptance, disregard, denial, disconcertion, disruption, emotions, resistance and all elements of our life concerning sexual orientation and personal freedom, like in everything else, are in a dynamic state – it is changing, evolving, and not so easily. 

    The novel centers on a caretaker mother who works in a nursing home for the elderly, and a lesbian daughter who has put up a fight/protest against a university for unfair treatment to homosexual professors. The daughter, who had left home to live on her own, have once again come back to live with her mother and this time with her partner. Mother, who doesn't want to accept, believe and welcome the sexuality of her daughter, has a world of her own in her thoughts – there is fear, hatred, sadness, love and desolation. Told from the perspective of the mother, this story takes a benefit of portraying universal mother-daughter relation, the trouble of living, aging and dying, sharp take on hard truths of our generation, an animation of thoughts, beliefs and difficulties. A daughter who cannot support herself a shelter, a mother who is finding hard to challenge her expectations, hopes and fear, an elderly woman at nursing home with dementia towards the edge of her life, and the unwavering commitment of the daughter's partner – these four women show us all colors of life.

In moments like this, I’m brought face to face with the ruthlessness of life. One hill after another after another. Climbing at first with hope and then gradually in resignation. But life never goes easy. A foe without mercy or magnanimity. A losing battle. A fight that ends only with defeat.

We find a mother who is not contented how her daughter is getting by and has different expectations from her. She cannot believe the private life and personal choices of her daughter but fears losing her – her only family left. Finding herself at the center of collapsing age, emotions and love, she is unsure how she should act, feels a social shame and thinks that her daughter has derailed from the regular course of life. Mother, who is also our narrator, is aware of her vulnerability and crisis of being left alone, aging and unhappy. She is mostly keeping to herself – her realizations, her hesitations, and her dissatisfactions, but cannot stop herself bursting at times, when it becomes unbearable – the burden of her inner thoughts. She is in a constant fear of death, aging and loneliness – always reminding herself that her death is imminent.

Why do I need a husband and children to have family? Ma, Lane is my family. She’s not a friend. We have been family to each other for the last seven years. What is a family? Family is people who support you and are always there for you. Why is that family and not this? That’s all those people asked. That’s all they said in class. And the school showed them the door. They shooed them off like flies without a word of explanation!

Ma, look at this. Look. These words here – that’s me. Sexual minority. Homosexual. Lesbian. This is what I am. That’s just how it is. That’s what people call me, and stop me from having a family, career, everything. Is that my fault? Tell me, is that my fault?

Caring Jen, the elderly at the nursing home, her dwelling on death, its suddenness, sullenness, sadness and horror surrounding it, have left her sensitive as if living in a life of peril. The futility of what and how Jen lived for, living her alone in the old age, the mother cannot stop seeing herself and her daughter turning into someone with a fate like Jen. Therefore, her passionate care for Jen, is a projection of her own hopes from her life and her daughter – someone to remember, someone to love, and someone to get love from towards the twilight of life. She feels guilty for her daughter's way of life and cannot express herself enough. She tries to comfort herself, be protected from emotional pain afflicted by her daughter but she cannot ignore her motherly love. We find ourselves in the shoes of our narrator, and feel her discomfort, displeasure and difficulties. At the heart, it is her love and fear for her life and her daughter's but she tries to feign ignorance, as her inner world is unruly and unsettled. She is lonely and desperate with a world of judgments and beliefs and she cannot express it enough; she cannot escape it.

The daughter and her partner living together in her mother's home, bring their world close to her mother's isolated world. We immediately find the conflict brewing up, the compromise of necessities and disjunction of private worlds. The mother cannot accept their relation as it is, cannot believe they can be happy – she can't believe families can be made in such ways; a happy life can be spent in such means. She tries to interact as little as possible, ignore them, and at times ask them to get out of her life, so that she can shield her feelings, aspirations and expectations from her daughter. We see two different world seen from the eyes of the mother and the daughter. The story reflects a stark picture of Korean society – aging population and struggle for homosexual rights from the state (there have been good progresses). As I was reading the novel, I couldn't help myself from getting the updates on LGBTQ+ rights in my own country (Nepal) as well, and was happy to know the recent Supreme Court's interim order to recognize and register same sex marriage. The novel is at the same time universal and contemporary, and can represent as a stand-alone novel in the bibliography of LGBTQ+ study in literature.

Maybe I am a frightened person. A person who doesn’t want to hear anything. Doesn’t want to get involved. Doesn’t want to get entangled. Doesn’t want to get dirt on my clothes and my body. I stand on the sideline. I say pleasant things, make pleasant faces, and slowly back away when no one’s looking. Do I still want to be a good person? But what can I do to be a good person to my daughter at this point?

Told as if a monologue with elements of stream of consciousness, this novel takes no shortcuts, has no hidden messages, and doesn't indulge in the rituals of sentimental treatment – it'll hit you with a bright light, and yet not dazzle you but clear your thoughts. There is a meeting of two worlds, new and old; meeting of two generations, two thoughts, two extremes of age, and the dilemma, drama, power of will, reservations and conflict between two women keep the flame alive until the end of the story. If I could suggest the author, perhaps little more detailing of the physical world would have made the narrative more engaging, and the Tipat's part of the story could have been presented in some other forms. Obviously there are no misalignments, but only a need of a tickle.

Sitting across from me, the girls eat with their heads bowed. So close I could reach out and touch them. I didn’t know just how far away they were, how they were, or even where they stood with their feet planted in the ground. Everything is becoming clear now. They stand right in the middle of life. They are standing with their feet planted on firm ground, not in fantasies or daydreams. Like me. Like everyone else. They exist in the thick of life, terrifying, relentless. What they see from where they stand, what they are trying to see, what they will see, I cannot even imagine.

Coming towards the end of the novel, we find that the mother's reservations, her conflicting thoughts are showing some signs of rest. As she sees the life of her daughter from close - trying to perfect it, solve it even before understanding it – she finds herself challenged by the truth of her daughter's commitment, will and way of life and happiness – a daughter who can go to all extremes to ask for rights, to fight for it. This is a revelatory story of motherhood, mother-daughter relation, aging, identity, fear of devoid of memory and love. The story doesn't end in the novel, it again starts at the end and begins with you to understand the world around you with patience, sympathy and love, and understand your own complexity and question your beliefs, resistance and inheritance of thoughts.

Author: Kim Hye-jin
Original Text: Korean
Translator: Jamie Chang
English Publisher: Restless Books https://restlessbooks.org/bookstore/concerning-my-daughter
Korean Publisher: Minumsa Publishing Group http://minumsa.minumsa.com/book/11755/

Source: Personal Copy

A Poem of Death

One of the greatest Russian poets Osip Mandelstam died at the age of 47, cold and emaciated. Mandelstam is one of the poets who died because of his poetry; a defiance turning into death. The Last days of Mandelstam is a harrowing account of Mandelstam's final days, filled with horror of suppression and destitution, hallucination and hunger. Vénus Khoury-Ghata's terse and acute prose profile a poet living by the death-clock hanging over his head, and a fall of a man, a husband and a poet, designed by the dictator.

 

At the height of his power and ascension, Stalin was skimming the country, purging his enemies, scheming even against his old comrades: fated for the show trial and execution. At such times of state terror, Mandelstam voiced the forbidden and recited Stalin Epigram (part of which has become a leitmotif throughout the book) – the poetry that opened an abyss of downfall and death for him – among his few friends. He was betrayed by someone he thought was his closest, gave away his poetry, and it led to animosity of the regime. His poetry became the spark that made him a personal enemy of Stalin, who didn't kill Mandelstam in the first hand, thanks to the appeal of poets and littérateur, but poisoned his life with deprivation, hunger and exile.

All we hear is the kremlin mountaineer,

The murderer and peasant-slayer

Exiled from Moscow, Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda settled in Voronezh. The couple did not have work permit and M. was not allowed to publish poetry. At the mercy of few fellow close poets, penury and hunger made the couple's life miserable. M. wrote his poetry in his mind, recited them to his wife at night, who mostly remembered them by heart in her memory-vault – the only way to make sure it is not confiscated – and would then transcribe them, and entrust them to few trustable. M. was already weak by this time, and had an ailing heart.

In this biographical, almost poetic, prose we see Mandelstam and his wife – who happily shared the fate of the poet – were the victims of state made impoverishment, and of Stalinism and its persecution. Imaginary dialogues and confrontation with Stalin throbs with terror Mandelstam felt throughout the rest of his years. As a dissident turned into an outlaw, Mandelstam attempted suicide, rejected his hunger, though he was aware of life and death, and even aware of the limbo. At the last days in a transit camp - where people only spoke the language of hunger – near Vladivostok, Mandelstam lived in paranoia, was decimated due to hunger and bad health. Fated for 5 years forced labor camp in Siberia, the poet couldn't last that long and return once again to his wife. This time, the poet had no strength left to survive.

The people in the street look like ghosts. They sleep to forget their hunger… Grass scorched by a horrible hot summer, there was a lack of hay. Starving cows gave scant milk. Mules had trouble pulling carts. A common sight, horses collapsed on the road, their masters whipping them to make them stand up.

A different sound made by the body dragged on the wet ground after a rain and for the one tossed into a grave. They learned to differentiate them, learnt to distinguish the sick man who still had one or two days of life in him from the one who has only a few hours.

In The Last Days of Mandelstam, we find ourselves in the ruminations of the poet on his past, poetry and exile. Poetry pieces used in the text show the distinctiveness of M., his realization, his dissatisfaction, his quips, his voice and his death. We have read so many stories about Gulag, but this is a tapestry of death, a montage of the poet's sad end, a gnawing existence where poetry confronts the power. Throughout the book, we find a restlessness but also an urgency to live, a life interspersed with poetry, and also a life intercepted due to poetry. The complex drama sprouted during the reign of terror grips Mandelstam. His life becomes a loop, a vortex and churning – life going out of him, hope coming back to him. Every sentence is like an episode of the sad end, a snippet of struggle for existence, a poetic flame fighting with a storm. In a typhus infested camp, where dead left the place for the dying, Mandelstam died as if in a hallucinatory pit of extinction and like a cold demise of a flame. This short book has played the strings of a dying poet's thoughts and soul, rendering a painful account of the poet's final days.

To eat: the final thought of the Soviet citizen tied to the execution pole, thinks the poet under his blanket who refuses to eat, and without hesitation allows himself to perish.

A strange era, spoken words rarely connected to thoughts. Denunciations were common currency in cities, the countryside, even in Voronezh where everyone knew everyone else. People of good faith spoke of misunderstandings.

The book feels like as if reading a great Russian novel from the canon, only that here the major characters are real, cannot choose for their life any longer, and that is how everything is set and ends. Hunger-stricken harsh individual realities of Mandelstam and his wife are like the final act of a tragedy. Resistance, denunciation, animosity, antipathy, persecution, destitution, hunger, hope, love, rejection, exile, death – Mandelstam's life thread unfurls in these. The poet was attacked on the most vulnerable spots – basic needs of human survival and well-being. Nadezhda, poet's wife had at least made sure that the poet lived – otherwise killing the art would have killed an artist, killing the poems would have killed the poet. Separated from his wife by a trickery and fated for a labor camp, regime hit the one final blow, put the poet in a death track, and this time the poet reached his end. 27 December 1938 – this date will never be forgotten. Mandelstam couldn't live longer then. But, Nadezhda survived it. We now know Mandelstam was never dead, Mandelstam can never die!

 Author: Vénus Khoury-Ghata
Original Text: French
Translator: Teresa Lavender Fagan
Publisher: Seagull Books https://www.seagullbooks.org

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher

 

A Slithering World

Who says you need a boundary? Damn the structures and comfort realities! Rajkamal's narrative branch out wonderfully to surprises and reels you in so gently, you want to chuckle at his wit or might even hold your head in discomfort from the brightness. The subtext, luminescence, bleakness and naked truths of individuals of Rajkamal's world was way ahead of his time. Upon finishing this collection, or every story, you feel like coming out of a long tunnel and be light-stricken.

In just mere age of 37, he had written hundreds of stories and poems, ten novels, essays, criticism, etc. and they are collected in Rachnawali by Rajkamal Chaudhary (Set of 8 Volumes). His eclectic view of the world are seen in the stories of the collection. And it surely must have created a displeasure among his contemporaries and critics. He was experimenting with wild ideas, stigmas, narrative and structure, disrupting understanding in its wake. The portrayal of sexuality and the reaction to it have never been easy in South Asia, even if they are used in literature. You'll know, Rajkamal's portrayal of it is not vulgar, but rather an artful disclosure and meaningful. Reading the collection, we gather that, above all, Rajkamal must have been a great thinker misunderstood by his time or not revered enough.

In the 12 stories of the collection, we find wild and bizarre imagination breaking the waves of cultural stigma, composition of discomforting veracities, oddities of characters and persona of modernity.

In the first story, Still Life, realities blur and transcend into one another. Mirrors and still images are emulsified in the dreamy awakening of a sick man and there is his girlfriend trying to help him. We find ourselves in the midst of a hallucinatory living. Like suggested in the intro by the translator, the narrator's contemplation on life, death, suicide yields to nothingness. It is like being inside a surreal mind of an artist, who is ready to damn the world. In Some People in a Burning House, the narrator, a salesman is sent to a brothel by his friend to spend the night. Police raid happens and brothel women and their clients end up hiding in a damp, dark and dingy basement. The scenes and the setting is vivid and palpable and yet the author do not attempt to overdo the details. The dark makes the instincts and senses sharp, and the result is, you'll sense the story. You'll find as if you are there among the characters too, living their life; being them. An old man bleeds in the middle of the dark room and another saves matchsticks for his cigarettes. The momentary details: blood, scream, fear of death, stench of dead rats, sex, and nakedness, all of this explode, or even can be said, implode into a giant realization of emptiness, futility, damnation of morality and love for life even if it is disfigured or in disarray.

Elementary Knowledge of Geography is a story of sexual encounters of a teenage boy and his inner world of confusions and personal ways of getting out of the disquiet and fear. The narrator, a teenage boy, shows us his world around and his experience and witness of sexuality, homosexuality and the complex world and people abutting them. Rajkamal is not afraid to drop taboos in his text, or establish some dramatic comedy with dialogues and scenes. The playful narrative style and shifts in the story at once makes it lively, brings contrast and also breaks the monotony, though we rarely find one. In A Champa Bud: A Venomous Snake, a husband and wife plot to marry off their daughter to a 62 year old man.

In An Angry Man, three friends meet at a port restaurant, their usual rendezvous, near Ganges River and wait for a woman coming on a steamer. Who is this woman? Among the three friends, Kamlesh is irritable and now his thoughts are troubled, angered and perplexed by his possessive maid; Ramnath still hasn't been able to come out of his unsuccessful love affair and episodes that met an unexpected end, and Mehtab companies his two friends. This story has a cinematic appeal to it and the narrative expositions makes it more intense. The world of these characters is surrounded with the influences of contemporary world – movies, celebrities, news. and is therefore also sets a transporting experience for the readers of our generation. Sometimes, Rajkamal's stories represent his zeitgeist while at other times, he even beats today's contemporaries in style and dissension. In An Angry Man too, Rajkamal's ploy lies in his strength to make personal dilemmas as the commonality of the age, while also being able to give a comic or witty charm to it – if these were turned into plays, they would come out as tragedy of the century versus the comedy of the existence. We also feel, the learnedness of the author who could encompass everything global to his use – visual arts or literature. We may also be tempted to believe that the banal are the most exciting things of the world; at least I did. An Angry Man can be read for many things – psychological drama of the individuals, the urgency of coming out of horror of loneliness – but what grasps us the most is the style, especially the shuffling of episode from the past, the personal realms of the characters and present burning with crisis as if in a coal. How inner world exhibits itself in the external relationship has been one of the themes of Rajkamal's stories.

In Warriors Don't Worry About the Right Time, the narrator visits his maternal home where his widowed uncle has delusions of apparition of his deceased wife appearing at night. There is also narrator's widowed aunt who haven't left her village after becoming a child widow. Snakes of Silent Valleys – This story will give you a deep pain and leave a furrow. The intricacy of the relationship between the narrator and his aunt's daughter, and the narrative voice is so piercing, that I personally consider it the best story of the collection. The story bulges like a surface of water; everywhere there is a tension; everything is sensitive to touch. And the mindfulness of the story is simply brilliant! Sometimes it becomes like a raw skin; you will be afraid to touch it. As if told in a stream of consciousness, you have no escape other than to hear Khagen's voice word by word. There is existentialism, lurking sexuality, reclusive and hindered love and pervasive crisis of relationship. Here, I am going to leave this as a mystery for you. I want you to find the sensibilities of the story, enjoy it, become its victim, become its witness and come out alive from the grip of snakes of the valleys. In Sisters-in-Law, we find two widowed sister-in-laws making their living by selling their bodies. And one day a strange incident afflicts one of them with horror.

Like Tennessee Williams' Mrs Stone, you donot know what to think and what to forget. You just want to escape. You are afflicted by the fear of the conclusions of your thoughts. You are unable to ask who is with me if I am not alone. It is raining outside and I don't want to get wet.

No, I do not want to die. I only want to kill the flame burning in my stomach. A wrong Jesus Christ is growing in my womb, I do not want to raise the child. And now the world doesn't even need Jesus Christ, it needs atom and hydrogen bombs! – You want to say it but you don't have the courage.

Set in a tribal land, the story of Veni Sanhar starts with hallucinatory images of a sickly woman who sees her surrounding engulfed in flames. She is a mother of an infant and is not in her right mind. Her husband has given up on her treatment. A black cat, considered a bad omen in Hindu culture, appears from the wild. The encounter between the sickly woman and the cat turns into a violent episode and leads to even more disturbing consequences. Like a Wall of Glass is a story of an artist who dreams of painting a woman, and ends in a disappointment and disgust. In Pyramid, a married man brings a woman into his house, particularly to show the charm of his drawing room, a self-comforting upper class display among the ruins, while his maid and wife remain restless until the woman leaves the house. In the title story, Traces of Boots on Tongue, a man goes out to a hotel to freshen up his mood and encounters mysterious women who are sticking out their tongue to him for bizarre reasons. And one thing to note is that, snakes are the repeated symbols used in these stories. As if people have mimicked the presence of venom, fangs, the threat display, its slither, and constriction, and are lurking behind others, waiting for the bite. I think Rajkamal was fascinated with snakes as symbols, and I am curious whether his other stories have snakes in them too.

A person's life is divided into pieces. There is no one person. There are people inside one person. Many contradictory situations. Nymphs from Kalidasa's heaven. Constantly warring gods and demons. Times future, past, present. Life is not at one place, which can be presented by tethering it to a mirror, a painting or a poem. Life is everywhere. In every moment, in every piece, in everything there is life. And it solely depends on the one who lives the life whether a moment is accepted under a certain circumstance and accepted until when.

She doesn't possess a maddening beauty or hypnotic gestures, because she is a wife, an Indian wife, who can cook, fan and massage tired feet but cannot say that she loves me a lot, with an amorous expression on her face, with warm breadth, flared nostrils, widened shoulders and ruffled saree.

Rajkamal has used different techniques in his stories like repeating the sentences, images and names creating a vertigo, and also to remind us what possess the characters' eternal doom. He carefully places his characters as if in a painting or play and decides their movement, sorrows of characters and therefore of being. Poetic pieces too have entered the stories in one or other way to leverage the intensity of narrative. He knows every fiber of his characters and how easily they can break. It is a restless world filled with doubts, disbelieves and compromise. You'll find terse dialogues and their interplay in the text: their entry and exit is sublimely done. We see man made from the past thrown into the world for personal struggle and face his/her fate, and dilemma of the artists which Rajkamal himself might have felt at his time. The realization of his era is vibrant, and so are his references built upon the religious texts, modern science, contemporary art and literature. We find ourselves in a profound feeling of empathy, as if at the bottom of deep well looking for the heart and sorrow of the characters' gloom, confusion and existence with a torch in the murky water. And at several instances it seems as if he is speaking with us, asking us questions and involving us in the narrative. Rajkamal's stories are not in the easy world despite being rooted inside it – it is composed of the feigning, the bearing and the reverberations, the bleakness of personal world and horror, the desolation of absence and unspoken personal experiences and tragedies.

We would like to express our deepest thanks to Saudamini Deo for this translation work. You have lit the candle!

Author: Rajkamal Chaudhary
Original Text: Hindi
Translator: Saudamini Deo
Publisher: Seagull Books https://www.seagullbooks.org

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher