The death of José Saramago (1922-2010) doesn’t escape its sombre irony. It is a final punctuation mark in the life of a writer who wrote unpunctuated, seamless sentences. The man who designated the writer as an apprentice and his characters as masters, was ultimately forced to quit his training at the ripe age of eighty-seven. Nevertheless, in tune with his working class roots, Saramago kept his tryst with productivity as diligently as his respiratory illness worked against him.
In his meditative, 1998 Nobel Prize speech, Saramago began by paying tribute to his illiterate grandfather, Jerónimo Meirinho, calling him the wisest man he ever knew. Why was the grandfather so wise? Because he could tell stories endlessly, recounting, what Saramago called, “an untiring rumour of memories”.
This early exposure to oral storytelling helped Saramago incorporate its skills in his writing. He urged the reader to “hear” his novels by reading them aloud, rather than silently. His prose demanded the recognition of the oral as much as the written techniques of language. Saramago himself used the term “written orality” to signify the language he deployed. It opens up an interesting horizon in our understanding of writing’s aural character, apart from the visual. It also grants a twofold meaning to the narrator: as a voice and as a signature.
This must have immediate repercussions on Roland Barthes’ contentions regarding the death of the author.
Unlike what Barthes pointed out, in Saramago’s writing, the “hand” is not “cut off from any voice”. Saramago makes hand and voice work together, where the voice feeds the hand, the way hearing precedes (hence, dictates) writing. The author (in) Saramago thus exists between two disparate credentials, that of the writer and of the oral narrator. The dissemination of language occurs through this process of reciprocal translation between voice and hand, body and mind, memory and invention.
The other contention of Barthes, about the difference between reader and writer, gets blurred as Saramago’s writing itself emerges as a kind of reading. Saramago is infamous for committing mischief with religious and historical narratives. A task he owes to both, a reading and a counter-reading of canonical texts to produce new, critical versions by a reader. The author (in) Saramago is a reader beyond recognition.
For example, in The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Saramago reads between the lines of history and legend, to produce a counter tale. Raimundo Silva, a proofreader, tampers with a vital fact about the Christian re-conquest of Lisbon, by making the Crusaders refuse to help the Portuguese king, hence by default siding with the Moors. Such a move mocks and disturbs Portugal’s nationalist imaginary.
Saramago also spoke of inviting the reader (speculatively, including himself) to “accept a pact”, where he would transform an “absurd idea” into a “logical” stream of thought. He called this “the possibility of the impossible”.
This is particularly evident in novels like Blindness, Seeing and Death with Interruptions, where improbable events take place in a believable language. The events serve as an allegorical device by Saramago to bring to focus his deepest concerns about the human world. The language is believable because Saramago’s plots exaggerate on the oldest anxieties of human beings. He reworks old questions in the light of contemporary concerns, where the bizarre clashes against the everyday. This rupture between the bizarre and the everyday is the key secret of Saramago’s power to both enthral and disturb his audience. Whenever Saramago delves into the theme of political decadence, as he does in Seeing, he traps the reader at the psychological level, but keeps him marvelling at the ingenuity of the plot. The question of plot in Saramago works in an insidious manner: to highlight a particular crisis in the world which the writer finds to be going out of hand, and therefore in need of a radical sub-version of vision. It is a critical subversion of reality, where uncanny events emerge from the heart of the mundane. There is a constant tendency in Saramago to fuse the surreal with the pragmatic. Born to landless peasants, and brought up in a working class neighbourhood, the writer was vigilant about the contradictions of life.
Saramago spent his formative years under Salazar’s fascist dictatorship. This had a deep impact on his working class sensibilities. Saramago became a card carrying member of the Communist Party of Portugal from 1969, when the party was illegal. His relationship with the movement was, however, always critical.
In the 1980s, Saramago sided with the reformist rebellion within the party. Except him, everyone else was expelled. Fidel Castro was a friend who invited him many times to Cuba. Yet in 2003, despite and because of his love for Cuba, Saramago disowned Castro by saying, he “has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams”. In 2004, during his visit to Columbia, Saramago designated the two rebel guerrilla groups in that country as “armed gangs”.
There have been polemical attacks by communist intellectuals against Saramago on these issues. It includes sociologist James Petras’ open letter to Saramago regarding the comments on the Columbian guerrilla in the American newsletter Counterpunch, where he accused the writer of “bizarre historical amnesia”.
What is, however, missing in these attacks is the old question post-Stalinist, communist politics needs to ask itself: How does the movement and the party understand the relationship between writers and politics?
For Saramago, like Garcia Marquez, being a writer and being part of politics sometimes uncomfortably came to mean torn loyalties. This rupture of loyalty however doesn’t take place under any relativistic prism. It is not a rupture with the political but rather a rupture within the political. It works as an event which always reaffirms the presence of ethics in politics. Am alert writer, free from the burdens of bourgeois/religious morality, may not fail to distinguish and question the difference between politics as such, and what happens in the name of politics. In other words, the writer would question the representative form of politics and probe the justifications of its excesses. Such an intervention, in cases like Saramago’s, steers clear from any individualised conception of both society and politics.
Despite the de-individualised form of such a writer’s identity, involved in the larger dream of historical transformation, clashes can occur with the vagaries of political expediency and its justificatory, ideological logic. Saramago called himself a “hormonal communist” and yet added, he wouldn’t “make excuses for what communist regimes have done”.
This is a post-Sartrean distinction where a writer refuses to follow any diktat which seeks to undermine criticism in the name of ideological commitment. The angst of good faith is privileged over the paranoia of bad faith. To the disgrace of political regimes, such writers have been violently punished by disciplining bosses in the shadow of ideological excuses. Saramago was fortunate to escape, unlike others, in this regard.
Both literary temperament and politics work within certain constraints. The rationalist logic of politics cannot forcibly restrain the intense logic of literary imagination. Imagination is political, but on its own grounds. This issue not only begs a re-reading of the Frankfurt School and other intellectuals, but more importantly a re-reading of the (auto)biographies of poets and writers who were convicted under communist regimes.
What Saramago owed to communist ideas is best exemplified in his novels. A modern fabulist, he set the mythical vis-à-vis the historical, and the moral vis-à-vis the political. The materiality of Saramago’s imagination never failed to assert its concern of how class divisions work in historical contexts.
In Balthazar and Blimunda, Saramago used the baroque style to capture the violent contrasts between the royalty and the Church on the one hand and the common people on the other. His description of elaborate grandeur surrounding royal and religious formalities gets constantly tampered by his sense of bitter irony and irreverence. The story pays homage to the courage of marginal but talented heroes and heretics who don’t give up the audacity to dream and love in the midst of an impending auto-da-fé.
In novels like The History and All the Names, Saramago also showed his keenness towards certain minor figures like the proofreader and the clerk. These figures, alluding to Saramago’s own journey through these crafts and positions, gain extraordinary prominence due to their idiosyncratic insights into history and society.
Once when asked to specify his identity, Saramago said: “First of all I’m Portuguese, then Iberian, and then, if I feel like it, I’m European.” To prefer linguistic and geographical specificities about oneself over an occidental frame of reference shows how Saramago understood political contexts without taking the rhetoric of grand, cultural narratives too seriously. His understanding of communist politics can also be read through this register.
In 2002, Saramago enraged Jews by comparing Israel’s barbarities with the Holocaust. Saramago’s interest in the Middle East and his siding with the Palestinians is an illuminating shift from a writer who was whimsical about his European identity.
In his last published book of essays, The Notebook, Saramago severely criticised the new global economic order. He called George Bush “the high priest of all liars” and severely took the United States to task.
In a world besieged by neo-liberal fascism, the populist decadence of democracy and the calculated murdering of the poor and the other, Saramago’s voice is a warning from the future. It is very different from the way Hollywood imagines the future in the form of re-colonising, scientific fantasies. Saramago tried to persistently tell us, the future is disappearing before our eyes.
The writer is a poet and a political theorist, living in New Delhi. This article is a slightly improved version of the one by the same title as it appeared in the Literary Review section of The Hindu, 4th July, 2010.
Here we link an important essay that explores Marcuse’s engagement with Surrealism. It was written by a prominent American left activist and scholar, co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group, Franklin Rosemont, who died last April (12 April, 2009). The essay also contains letters between Rosemont and Marcuse.
During the last twenty-five years of his life, Herbert Marcuse repeatedly affirmed a lively and sympathetic interest in surrealism. His many references to the subject, in Eros and Civilization and in nearly all his subsequent books, as well as in scattered articles and interviews, reveal that this interest was continually expanding and deepening. At least from May ’68 on, as his commentators have conceded, surrealism was central to his vision of revolutionary social transformation.
Marcuse’s letters to the Chicago surrealist in the early 1970s – published here for the first time – constitute his only sustained discussion of the aims and principles, theory and practice, past and future of surrealism. Adding appreciably to our knowledge of the great critical theorist’s mature thought, these letters should also help stimulate a broader discussion not only of surrealism as such, but of the whole complex interplay of poetry, imagination, revolt and revolution – today and tomorrow.
From one of Marcuse’s letters included in the essay:
“The gap which separates art and the people could be reduced to the degree to which the people cease to be “the people” (=those who are ruled) and become freely associated individuals. The real socialist revolution of the 20th and 21st centuries would be catastrophic transformation not only of the material and cultural institutions but also of the sensibility, imagination and reason of the men and women engaged in this transformation. In this transformation, the esthetic qualities would play a decisive part – not as decoration, ritual, and surface but as the expression of the vital needs of the individuals.”
No change in sight for women’s rights
No expropriation of privileged mights
Militarists prescribe global peace lies
Working class interests fail to unionize
Organic farming for corporate profits
Healthcare granted for the insured elites
Homeless poor in the glitzy American nights
Hundred twenty-two die in daily medical plights
Twenty-five hundred families each day bankrupt
Subjects of Superpower profoundly distraught
Feed into Afghan, Iran, and warmongering distractions
Collectively throttle international socialist aspirations
The Wars are going to end, say the War Presidents
Monopolist bankers at G-20 make economic precedents
Plutocratic nobility yield from ethical charity claims
Priests abuse children, forgive selves, avoid prison chains
Anticommunist Herta Müller wins Nobel literature
Postmodern Rands follow individualistic scripture
Private properties grow sacred with economic recessions
Consumerism thrives on year around discount seasons
Environmental concerns lip-served by business interests
Mountains ravaged, peoples displaced, plundered forests
Insidious attempts at defining freedom, political liberties
Minorities oppressed amidst democratic Colacracies
Marriages outlawed for all sexual orientations
Intending immigrants still illegal alien notions
Middle strata suffers from pangs of alienation
Trickled money from the rich their sole aspiration
Poor’s crimes are poverty and unemployment
Stealing of breads still law & order assessment
World capitalism is absolved of systemic failures
Of unequal laws, old boys networks, racist cultures
Two Thousand and Ten promises to be more of the same
Let’s not celebrate this arrival of an age old game
Where monopolists continue to be magazine covers
Instead come what be the day, let’s join the class struggles
Revolutions won’t be scheduled for any auspicious occasions
Oligarchs cannot be rescued by their Gods or divine interventions
“Enough already!”, cry Zapatas in Chiapas and Orissa’s Maoists
Poor and wretched shall rise, and the rich ruling classes perish!
In the early days of the current economic crisis, the Treasury Department demanded from the U.S. Congress a 700 billion-dollar bailout to buy up the “bad paper,” a term for all the junk assets owned by the banks and mortgage companies. Bad paper – the phrase was an evocative one, and the next time I found myself walking past a Barnes & Noble Bookseller, looking through the broad front windows at the stacks of unsold “bestsellers” on the display tables, I couldn’t help but imagine the CEOs of the Big Six publishing corporations scurrying to Washington D.C. to demand their own big slice of bailout pie. After all, who could have more bad paper to unload than Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, the Penguin Group, and Macmillan?
Bhopal, Jun 8 (PTI) Noted playwright and theatre director Habib Tanvir died at a hospital here today after a brief illness. He was 85.
The theatre legend was admitted to the National Hospital here three weeks back after he complained of breathing problems and was put on a ventilator, family sources said.
His daughter Nageen was at his bedside when the end came.
Born on September 1, 1923 at Raipur, Habib began his career as a journalist and went on to become a highly renowned playwright.
Known for his plays like Agra Bazar and Charandas Chor, Tanvir founded the Naya theatre company here in 1959. He also scripted many films and acted in a few of them.
He was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1969 and Padma Shri in 1983. (Courtesy: PTI)
Kisi aur des ki or ko, suna hai Faraz chala gaya.
sabhi dukh samet ke she’hr ke, sabhi qarz utaar ke she’hr ka.
(They say that Faraz has left for some other land,
Taking with him all the sorrows of the city, paying away all its debt.)
The long history of political turbulence in Pakistan produced a long list of writers, poets and artists who raised their voice against oppressive regimes. In exchange, they suffered regular threats, imprisonment, torture and exile. Prominent writers and artists like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Habib Jalib, Ahmed Faraz and Ustad Daman were hunted and haunted by the establishment. Finding the political milieu unbearable, these writers had to go on self-exile as mark of protest. Through their poetry and other writings, Faiz, Jalib, Faraz and others exposed the exploitative and suppressive nature of the Pakistani state, plight of the ordinary citizen, helplessness of writers and artists, imperialist interference and their agencies, and the environment of political suffocation borne out of pruned civil rights, truncated laws and gagging of public opinion.
However, as one may be proud of this legacy of protest and defiance, it is sad to note that there have been writers and poets who accepted positions and power as rewards for keeping silence or lending support to the rulers. But then, this is not a phenomenon unique to Pakistan. Hegemony will always find courtesans and court-poets for legitimacy.
Most of the Urdu poets and writers from Pakistan have always been politically responsive, unlike their counterparts in India who chose to remain apolitical/neutral, especially after independence. This was perhaps because of linguistic-communal introversion that Urdu-speakers suffered in India. On the other hand, the Pakistani writers and artists had to express themselves in a long-term civil war-type situation characterised by a continuous political instability, lack of social reform, a continuing grip of landed oligarchies and tremendous neo-colonial pressure on the Pakistani political economy. Therefore, we see a galaxy of radical writers/poets associated with the Progressive Movement, which included poets like Faiz, Jalib and Faraz. With them the Progressive Movement flourished in Pakistan, while in India we saw a decline with leading poets like Ali Sardar Jafri reciting poem in praise of Lotus (while accepting Gnanpith award) and applauding Atal Bihari Vajpayee as a great poet.
To trace the legacy of anti-hegemonic resistance we see that Faiz was jailed for a year after being implicated in the notorious Rawalpindi conspiracy case. Habib Jalib was imprisoned several times. To silence him, other tactics were also tried, e.g., his name was selected for Adamji Award, the highest literary award of Pakistan. Habib Jalib refused to accept it, saying that he wrote for people, not for Adamji. Ahmed Faraz, best known Progressive poet after Faiz and Jalib, was first jailed in June 1977 during the Zulfiqaar Bhutto government for reciting his poem Peshawar Qatilon (Professional Killers!) in Islamabad in which he challenged the military rulers, saying: Peshawar qatilon tum sipahi nahin (Soldiers you are not, you professional assassins).
As he always found himself at the left of the establishment (right from the Ayub regime, to Yahya’s, Bhutto’s and down to Musharraf’s), Faraz was always viewed by the establishment as a rebel. In 1978 he was exiled from Sindh (by the Zia regime), receiving orders for his exile in a Mushaira where he had just recited his famous poem Muhaasira (The Siege). He felt so greatly dejected and heartbroken that he left the country and did not return for six years. Asked once, when Zia was still in power, why he had left Pakistan, he replied that he was in Karachi when the order expelling him from the province of Sindh was served. ‘I said to myself, ‘What have we come to when a man is exiled from his own land! Today, it is Karachi, tomorrow it will be Peshawar, the day after, Lahore. That is when I decided to leave.’ Faraz also returned the Hilal-i-Imtiaz conferred on him for his literary achievements in 2004. He returned the award in 2006 after becoming disenchanted with the government and its policies. He said in a statement, “My conscience will not forgive me if I remained a silent spectator of the sad happenings around us. The least I can do is to let the dictatorship know where it stands in the eyes of the concerned citizens whose fundamental rights have been usurped. I am doing this by returning the Hilal-e-Imtiaz (civil) forthwith and refuse to associate myself in any way with the regime…”
No one could match the wit of Faraz. When asked why he had kept the Hilal-e Imtiaz for two years, he replied jokingly, “Do you think it laid eggs in those two years?”
He could actually outwit his opponents without losing his sense of humour. An anecdote gained much popularity. One day Faraz heard loud banging at his door. He rose hurriedly to open it, only to see four or five bearded men in white skullcaps. “Can you recite the Kalima?” one of them asked. “Why, has it changed?” Faraz inquired.
These are just a few examples of how he could give a humorous turn to a grave situation or outwit his opponents. Kishwar Naheed, writing a letter to ailing Faraz (in The Hindu, New Delhi on 24 August 2008, just a day earlier when Faraz died), narrates several such incidents. Once at a mushaira held on the occasion of International Women’s Day to honour protesting women. Faraz was the chief guest. When he started reciting his poetry, a fiery Tahira Abdullah objected, saying, ‘we want poetry on women.’ Faraz abruptly replied, “But all my poetry is about women.”
With the passing away of Faraz (August 25, 2008) in Islamabad, a true inheritor of Faiz’s mantle has died. As noted Pakistani journalist Khalid Hasan puts: ‘Like Faiz, he suffered prison and lived in exile during the dark days of military rule in the 1980s. Like Faiz, he is very popular, especially among the youth, and nobody wrote with more intensity about love than Faraz. He gained fame as a young man…. Few poets have had more of their work set to music and performed by the great singers of the age than Faraz.’
Faraz is considered one of the best poets of Pakistan. He was born in Nowshera on January 14, 1931. His real name was Syed Ahmad Shah. The Pashto-speaking Faraz learned and studied Persian and Urdu at the Peshawar University, where he also taught later. He headed the Islamabad-based National Book Foundation for several years. In 1976, he became the founding Director General (Later Chairman) of Pakistan Academy of Letters. He wrote 13 books and all put together came as Shehr-e Sukhan aarasta hai (A City of Poetry is Adorned), his latest publication so far.
Arjumand Ara is a lecturer in the Department of Urdu, Delhi University.
