Marigolds
Chetram has lived for years in what Jean-Paul Sartre famously called ‘bad faith’. He has let himself epitomize the “Being-for-others”, succumbing to the lure of false serenity. However, his predicament is not just personal but also historical. In the “island”, distanced from the “imaginary homeland”, he is still haunted by the ‘residual’ elements of his cultural past. Inertia and paralysis of life have ossified his subjectivity, providing him with escape routes only in dreams and fantasies. He lives on the blurred borderline between the real and the imagined, and his trial to effect an ontological shift from the Being-for-others to the Being-for-Itself – or, in other words, to live in “good faith”- only culminates in a projection of “pathetic freedom”. The unnegotiated shadows in his dreams are neither exorcized nor granted a liberating role. Inhabiting a spatio-temporal limbo, he is denied both a horizon of togetherness and a self-sustaining solitude. Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, celebrates the “plateau” that is always in the middle, never at the beginning or the end. However, one may argue that, for Chetram, the “plateau” of history is consternating, not liberating. While his wife has settled herself in the circularity between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or to use Homi Bhabha’s metaphor, the time of scattering and the time of gathering, Chetram is locked in the wound of a primordial, almost mythic moment of cultural displacement- for him, there is no passage from this blackhole of wounded subjectivity to the solar circle of completion represented by the marigolds. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History , he can only helplessly watch his wings troubled by an alien storm, while under his feet the wilderness of fractured histories continues to cherish the silence of barrenness.
Blossom
Blossom’s narrative upholds the cathartic power of what Ashis Nandy, in Time Warps, calls the “unhistoricised pasts”, for a people uprooted from not only their place of origin, but also the cultural milieu where their own cosmology operated conveniently. At the same time, the liberation of Blossom’s female subjectivity through the possession of Oya , the goddess of turbulent natural forces, signifies the peculiar kind of emancipatory potential that Charlene Spretnak claims “goddess spirituality” to have for the female subject. The story also challenges the Enlightenment discourse of rationality and the concepts of “secular history” . Expelled by Western History which, as Michel de Certeau points out, always “objectifies” the past , the narratives of Blossom and the black women like her can be redeemed only in a different temporal modality that acknowledges the past in the present, a mythic time where moments of psychic purgation are salvaged from the emancipatory storm of Oya’s dance and constellated around the wound of Blossom’s (black) female subjectivity. It is interesting to notice that unlike the storm of “progress” sent from the heaven that does not let Benjamin’s Angel of History gather the fragments from the debris of the past, Oya’s storm is redemptive, it is this almost chthonic storm, rather than the “secular” sanity of a surreptitiously racist West that helps Blossom in picking up the fragments of selfhood and arranging them into an ontological stability. Dionne Brand, in her own unique way, challenges what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the “everyday subalternity of non-Western histories”, drawing our attention to “other constructions of self and community” that the metanarratives of Western history seeks to peripheralize as myth, or- “stories”.
Canadian Experience
“The son of a Barbadian plantation owner”, the protagonist of the story comes to Canada only to be disillusioned. Everyone can’t channel roots into the “unaccustomed earth”, especially when that earth is obstinately hostile to the newcomer. The actress is also frustrated, as far as her artistic ambitions are concerned, but she still manages to get a job, while the Barbadian immigrant can only be sucked into a nihilistic despair. He is actually a failed immigrant. It’s not that he lacks adjusting capacity, but the demands of the host society are too heavy for him. Stuart Hall has focussed on the New World myth’s mysterious presence in the Caribbean, which engages the Caribbean people in perpetual cycles of migration. A persona non grata in an apparently accommodative host country whose racism works silently and secretly, the immigrant’s “journey to an expectation”( to use Lamming’s words in The Pleasures of Exile) ends in disaster. A lack of formal education coupled with impractical ambitions subjects him to an inevitable failure in job-hunting , and he, now, can’t help but regret for having ignored his father’s advice, though he seems anxious to hide this regret from himself. His fate emblematizes the unsettling supplement to the glorious narratives of immigration, the cases of failure, for whom there is no possibility of either assimilation into the “new” land or ‘return to a native land’, that Cesaire himself , in Discourse on Colonialism, recognized to be impossible. The immigrant’s inglorious life story falls into the “crater of silence”(a la Amitav Ghosh), remaining “untranslated” by the host society like that of the Turkish worker in John Berger’s A Seventh Man.At least for him the “third space” is not productive, but rather an apocalypse of meaning.
Anway Mukhopadhyay
PG II
Chetram has lived for years in what Jean-Paul Sartre famously called ‘bad faith’. He has let himself epitomize the “Being-for-others”, succumbing to the lure of false serenity. However, his predicament is not just personal but also historical. In the “island”, distanced from the “imaginary homeland”, he is still haunted by the ‘residual’ elements of his cultural past. Inertia and paralysis of life have ossified his subjectivity, providing him with escape routes only in dreams and fantasies. He lives on the blurred borderline between the real and the imagined, and his trial to effect an ontological shift from the Being-for-others to the Being-for-Itself – or, in other words, to live in “good faith”- only culminates in a projection of “pathetic freedom”. The unnegotiated shadows in his dreams are neither exorcized nor granted a liberating role. Inhabiting a spatio-temporal limbo, he is denied both a horizon of togetherness and a self-sustaining solitude. Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, celebrates the “plateau” that is always in the middle, never at the beginning or the end. However, one may argue that, for Chetram, the “plateau” of history is consternating, not liberating. While his wife has settled herself in the circularity between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or to use Homi Bhabha’s metaphor, the time of scattering and the time of gathering, Chetram is locked in the wound of a primordial, almost mythic moment of cultural displacement- for him, there is no passage from this blackhole of wounded subjectivity to the solar circle of completion represented by the marigolds. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History , he can only helplessly watch his wings troubled by an alien storm, while under his feet the wilderness of fractured histories continues to cherish the silence of barrenness.
Blossom
Blossom’s narrative upholds the cathartic power of what Ashis Nandy, in Time Warps, calls the “unhistoricised pasts”, for a people uprooted from not only their place of origin, but also the cultural milieu where their own cosmology operated conveniently. At the same time, the liberation of Blossom’s female subjectivity through the possession of Oya , the goddess of turbulent natural forces, signifies the peculiar kind of emancipatory potential that Charlene Spretnak claims “goddess spirituality” to have for the female subject. The story also challenges the Enlightenment discourse of rationality and the concepts of “secular history” . Expelled by Western History which, as Michel de Certeau points out, always “objectifies” the past , the narratives of Blossom and the black women like her can be redeemed only in a different temporal modality that acknowledges the past in the present, a mythic time where moments of psychic purgation are salvaged from the emancipatory storm of Oya’s dance and constellated around the wound of Blossom’s (black) female subjectivity. It is interesting to notice that unlike the storm of “progress” sent from the heaven that does not let Benjamin’s Angel of History gather the fragments from the debris of the past, Oya’s storm is redemptive, it is this almost chthonic storm, rather than the “secular” sanity of a surreptitiously racist West that helps Blossom in picking up the fragments of selfhood and arranging them into an ontological stability. Dionne Brand, in her own unique way, challenges what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the “everyday subalternity of non-Western histories”, drawing our attention to “other constructions of self and community” that the metanarratives of Western history seeks to peripheralize as myth, or- “stories”.
Canadian Experience
“The son of a Barbadian plantation owner”, the protagonist of the story comes to Canada only to be disillusioned. Everyone can’t channel roots into the “unaccustomed earth”, especially when that earth is obstinately hostile to the newcomer. The actress is also frustrated, as far as her artistic ambitions are concerned, but she still manages to get a job, while the Barbadian immigrant can only be sucked into a nihilistic despair. He is actually a failed immigrant. It’s not that he lacks adjusting capacity, but the demands of the host society are too heavy for him. Stuart Hall has focussed on the New World myth’s mysterious presence in the Caribbean, which engages the Caribbean people in perpetual cycles of migration. A persona non grata in an apparently accommodative host country whose racism works silently and secretly, the immigrant’s “journey to an expectation”( to use Lamming’s words in The Pleasures of Exile) ends in disaster. A lack of formal education coupled with impractical ambitions subjects him to an inevitable failure in job-hunting , and he, now, can’t help but regret for having ignored his father’s advice, though he seems anxious to hide this regret from himself. His fate emblematizes the unsettling supplement to the glorious narratives of immigration, the cases of failure, for whom there is no possibility of either assimilation into the “new” land or ‘return to a native land’, that Cesaire himself , in Discourse on Colonialism, recognized to be impossible. The immigrant’s inglorious life story falls into the “crater of silence”(a la Amitav Ghosh), remaining “untranslated” by the host society like that of the Turkish worker in John Berger’s A Seventh Man.At least for him the “third space” is not productive, but rather an apocalypse of meaning.
Anway Mukhopadhyay
PG II
❤❤❤
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