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American Writers in
Search of a Book Fair
By RUMA DASGUPTA
It could have been the winter of our discontent in West Bengal. On our
wanted list was the 33rd Kolkata Book Fair, with the United States as the
focus country. However, the Calcutta High Court ruled that this year's
chosen site, the greens of Park Circus, were too close to numerous
educational institutions and, above all, to a hospital. On the eve of the
inaugural day, the fair stood cancelled. Civic rights activists who moved
court had every reason to do so. A book fair that is the third largest in
the world would have thrown traffic out of gear and added to the existing
noise pollution. The lawns of Park Circus were already damaged by the
stalls and the playground was out of bounds for children. Still, the
sudden depression in the Bay of Bengal was just as unexpected as winter in
this part of the country without the traditional book fair celebrating the
literary heritage of Bengal and the world.
The American Center in Kolkata decided to console book lovers with what
American writer Paul Theroux called "a guerrilla book fair." It wasn't
underground, however. It was wide open to the public, with book readings,
lectures, seminars, a spelling bee and an inter-collegiate debate on the
question: "Does American Culture Have a Positive Influence on Indian
Youth?" There was even a sale on books, in a way. The American Library
offered a 50 percent discount on annual membership.
The Government of West Bengal and publishing houses also organized a
revived version of the Book Fair from March 1 to 10. Events planned at the
American pavilion included a launch of The Fiction of Alice Walker by
Seema Murugan; sessions on visa information and Fulbright fellowship
counseling; book and play readings; American music by the Calcutta School
of Music quartet; American folk and country songs by Pulak Das; and a
presentation on U.S. presidential elections by the American Center.
In 1816, Mark Twain was asked in Calcutta if he had ever met a Bengali.
"Not yet in flesh," he replied, "But in literature, can I ever forget
him?"
The bonding with books in Bengal goes back a long way. It's this emotional
connect that carried Kolkata through January 30 to February 7. Even
without the book fair, we interacted with Theroux, poets Joy Harjo and
Christopher Merrill and others in intimate environs to explore what lies
between the lines in contemporary American writing. It was a huge
disappointment for publishers and marketers, with thousands of books from
around the world on their way to India and 10,000 copies of The Mingling
of Waters-an anthology of the works of poets of Bengal and the United
States-landing up in a non-existent book fair. But for those who made it
to the Lincoln Room at the American Center, to Bangla Academy, Yapan
Chitra Gallery, Presidency College, Town Hall or to Oxford Bookstore, it
was a rewarding experience.
On the opening day at the substitute fair, Theroux, Harjo and Merrill
captivated the audience at the American Center when they spoke on
"Re-mapping Cultural Narratives in American Literature."
Douglas Kelly, director of the American Center, has admired all that
Theroux has written for over 40 years and it was because of his initiative
that the writer was once again in Kolkata. Theroux's first visit to the
subcontinent was in the mid-1970s, much of which is chronicled in the book
that shot him to fame-The Great Railway Bazaar. Theroux believes that a
return journey to any place should be made by retracing steps as far as
possible through surface travel, revisiting places and seeing the seen in
a new light.
"For instance," Theroux elaborated, "I went to the Kali temple in this
city…in Kalighat…yesterday and then again today. It was different today
from what it was yesterday. The crowd was different, the light was
different and even my mood was different." It was also his way of
negotiating a question from the press that caught him unawares and
challenged him to explain his first impression of Kolkata recorded in The
Great Railway Bazaar, which was a series of negative perceptions by an
outsider.
Just listening to his tales of travel across continents was a wonderful
reassurance that the world has not fully shrunk into a global village in
our postmodern age of package tours and virtual globetrotting.
"Have you seen any of those ice houses that used to be here?" he said,
referring to the British storehouses for ice brought from a lake in Canada
to chill the wines and cool the air in this capital of the British Empire
in India. Neither temples nor forts nor museums engage Theroux as much as
the human architecture of a place. It's that interest in human beings in
relation to their culture and their environment, their past and their
present, their body language and their idiosyncrasies that perhaps took
him a second time to Kalighat temple, teeming with devotees, hawkers and
shoppers, with a crematorium next to it and with one of the city's red
light areas encircling it, pimps and priests and householders sharing
space with the dusky goddess Kali.
Inspired and encouraged by Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, with whom he
shared a deep friendship for many decades, Theroux has written more than
50 travel articles, numerous essays, short stories and engaging novels
that have captured the formative cultural changes of our times.
"I will never write the great American novel," he says. "What I'd write
would reflect where I'd been and what I'd seen, what I know."
If Theroux believes in writing about the world as he sees it, Harjo writes
narrative poetry from the wealth of shared tribal memory of her people.
The past gets entwined with the present as she travels in time as opposed
to Theroux's grounded journeys.
Harjo's shiny black hair frames her face, etched with lines that tell as
many stories as her narrative poems. She delves into the myths and lore of
her Muskoke tribe, fighting to preserve its identity.
"I come from one of the 500 tribes and cultures in the United States who
are omitted on the official map," Harjo told us, and for a fleeting second
her eyes were on fire.
Harjo was born in May 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and hails from a family of
painters. At the University of New Mexico, she switched her major from art
to poetry, which probably explains her fusion of art and poetry, and music
and poetry. During her presentations, she sings her lyrics and punctuates
them with the strains of a saxophone. "In my tribe, we don't separate
poetry from storytelling, music or dance. Most poetry is outside the
covers of books. In our families, there is one who is designated to
collect stories and songs. We listen to stories when we are pregnant. The
stories go into our babies and are stored as memories," Harjo told the
audience before she read from In Mad Love and War and The Woman Who Fell
from the Sky.
In India, reeling under jet lag and getting used to the chaos, Harjo took
time opening up. Once she found her bearings she was eager to meet an
astrologer and a palmist, not as a typical tourist from the West, but from
a deeper interest in the grassroots of Indian society and its practices
that create its indigenous identity. Before she left for Santiniketan, she
had already established bonds with those of us who knew the moment we saw
her that she was like one of our own.
Quiet and understated, Merrill was a treasure trove Kolkata discovered.
Author of The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of
Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee,
Merrill urged us to critique the wisdom of those who control the world
from positions of power.
Merrill has been a reporter who recorded his experiences in war zones,
especially in Yugoslavia. He talked of his concern to get the story right
without taking sides, revealing a mind that is constantly in search of the
truth. In his most recent non-fiction work, Things of the Hidden God, he
came to terms with various kinds of love, from the spiritual to the
vocational. The book is an account of his journey to Mount Athos in
Greece, which has 20 monasteries and 2,000 monks.
A journalist, literary critic and teacher, he has published four
collections of poetry as well. He is also the director of the
International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
"The experience of reading and writing poetry is not unlike the experience
of prayer," Merrill says. Many of his poems are a search for the divine.
Merrill is a layered personality who listens to medieval chants and folk
music. He loves the works of unknown icon painters in the churches of
Mount Athos, as well as Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall. At the
American Center, he recited his poem on a soccer player juggling a ball on
the last day of summer on an empty field, which sounded like rap and
captured the rhythm of a game that Kolkatans thrive on.
Ruma Dasgupta is a Kolkata-based freelance writer and a
correspondent with Harmony magazine.
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