Go from me, please.

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore--
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself. Not whom I want you to be, but to who you are." Antoine de Saint Exupery

I scored a hardcover collection of Ted Hughes' poetry cheap cheap last night. While bonding with the pages I came across this:

To be a Girl's Diary

Crumblings, glanced into
By strange smiles, in a saleroom,
Where the dust is of eyes and hearts, in proportion,
As well as of old shoes, meteors, and dung ...

To be an heirloom spoon, blackening
Among roots in a thorn-hedge, forgetful
Of flavours as of tongues,
Fleeting towards heavenly dispersal,
Walked by spiders...

Nightfall collects the stars
Only in a manner of speaking.

Everything is inheriting everything.

Indeed.

In a Second-Hand Bookshop by Christopher Morley

What waits me on the shelves? I cannot guess,

But feel the sure foreboding; there will cry

A voice of human laughter and distress.

A voice no one needs as much as I.

For always where old books are sold and bought

there comes that twinge of dreadful subtlety-

These were actual, and they were thought

By someone who was once alive, like me.

Daughter of Eve I am

When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry- and often find it too- whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonise with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical...

Anne Brontë in Agnes Grey

All the warm effusiveness with which the dawn of the month was greeted has faded against a reality of the inner struggle. The novelty has worn off, the promises made to self and the Divine asking that bit more to be seen through. Ramadan is a scenic detour from the humdrum of conventionality. In itself it is sublime, unchanged through the years, the first ten days of mercy, the second ten of forgiveness and the last of freedom of hell, asking the same, offering the same, the potential for inner peace the same. The difference in experience is within us. I'm trying to cut down on the quotation habit but I find Mandela's words so relevant here, 'There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.'

Despite the sombre note in the overture above, I'm not particularly sorrowful or anxious. I'm just pensive. So in a prolonged moment of mental yoga I went digging though my archives for some conciliatory whispers from Christina Rossetti:

Daughter of Eve

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:--
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

Christina Rossetti

On losing a prince of narrative and entering a stream of consciousness

When Al Jazeera English was first founded, the champion of novelty that I am, eagerly signed up as a correspondent on the Riz Khan Show. In those early days, when Al Jazeera had yet to feature in the DSTV bouquet, I received an email almost daily from the Riz Khan team in DC, detailing future shows and asking my pithy contribution. I stayed glued to Arabsat just as often, waiting to see if my two-cents worth had made it to the screen. Sometimes I was rewarded, 'Ha there's mine! There! Mum come quick Look! Oh darn it it's gone now.' Most times, I just watched, and had lengthy interactions with the show's guests all the same. A labour of love, if ever there was.

I don't watch Riz Khan as much as I'd like anymore (I blame it on blogging) but I do still receive emails from the Riz Khan team, entreating me to give blogging a break and interact with them instead. Today's email shook me: 'With the loss of Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish who do you think will speak the Palestinian narrative?' Yes, Darwish, the great poet had passed on, I knew, but suddenly I felt a dearth in the world that is for us to fill.

Darwish was a poet and a fine one at that. Just a few days ago I discussed with bint battuta the merits of Al Khansaa's poetry, and how, even in translation it holds up well, belying the French who say, 'Translating a great poem is like kissing another man's bride through a veil.' Reading and listening to Darwish in Arabic is a profound experience and listening to him today has left me aggrieved. But his words do live on, haunting those left behind. Here he is, in English:

Psalm Three

On the day when my words

were earth...

I was a friend to stalks of wheat.

***

On the day when my words

were wrath

I was a friend to chains.

***

On the day when my words

were stones

I was a friend to streams.

***

On the day when my words

were a rebellion

I was a friend to earthquakes.

***

On the day when my words

were bitter apples

I was a friend to the optimist.

***

But when my words became

honey...

flies covered

my lips!...

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye commenting on Darwish's work,

"Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging..."

I have suddenly developed the urge to write fiction. I thought I was adverse to it. But I have this great idea running through my head. It's so poignantly me and now. I have to write. I'm starting to think I can write. I blame it on blogging.

Reading the world

'The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.' Jean Paul

We are privileged to have learned to read, not just the signs that constitute written language but the world too, is a text, a complex system of signs, which should be read. The world is open to interpretation, we construct meaning out of just about anything, the frivolous, the mundane, the essential, they all take turns to boldly shout, 'It's a sign!' But for better or for worse, our readings of the world are not fixed. As we grow older and become more proficient at reading the world, the people, images, ideas and places that constitute our individual worlds constantly invite 'second' readings. Our world-views then, are constantly in flux. Would it not be tragic if we looked at the world everyday with the same eyes, refusing to make sense of it? As Alvin Toffler said, 'The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.'

"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

South Africa--My huisie by die see

Language, the code behind which we rally to forge out an identity. Language, the code, against which we rally,its derision of that identity. No more so than in the multi-cultural, multilingual hodgepodge that South Africa is language a more a sensitive issue. June 16th, a national holiday in South Africa, Youth Day. We commemorate the heroism of the Soweto youth in 1976, who protested against the compulsion of an Afrikaans-medium curriculum. To a generation not born at the time, not quite fully understanding the impact of what has become an Apocalypse of history, we are haunted by the spectre of Hecter Peterson and indeed, others like him.



I found myself in the curious position of having to tutor Afrikaans today, Youth day, to the daughter of Paskistani immigrants. The irony has afforded a somewhat less affable understanding of the present. June 16, 2008, South Africa is now the unwitting home of an ever-growing immigrant population, a population who we have denied the very freedoms Hecter Peterson died for.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said writes,

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of discussions-about influence, about blame and judgement, about present actualities and future priorities.

(Said, 1994: 1)

We fail to realise that history is not neat. It is not a neat procession of events tucked away in a textbook. We are the products of history. This, the present circumstances, sullied and imperfect, it may well be, is the product of our history. We may look back to lay the blame for the imperfection on the colonialists and Aphartheid, or we may look back to learn, and take a step forward.

As I explained to my incredulous student, who has the name Benazir to live up to by the way, I am quite taken by the following poem. It may well be in Afrikaans, a language that will for a long time be tainted for being the tongue of Apartheid, but Afrikaans itself is uniquely African. While others continue to look at Africa as the other, the Dark Continent that affords no hope to its peoples and still others have rushed to point South Africa as no less mismanaged as any other state in Africa in the aftermath of the xenophobic riots. But surely the very presence of these immigrants indicate that South Africa is something of a beacon of hope in Africa. Indeed we have not acquited ourselves well these past weeks but as this poem describes a little house by the sea, being ravaged by the darkness of night, the unrelenting anger of the ocean against the rocks it is built upon and the merciless wind that is like a lost soul that finds no rest, I see South Africa, there, a little house by the sea. Battered and bruised, indeed, but deep inside, a fire roars, warming the heart, and a little candle (no thanks to Eskom :p) gives its light.

Ek het 'n huisie by die see
H.A. Fagan

Ek het 'n huisie by die see. Dis nag.
Ek hoor aaneen, aaneen die golwe slaan
teenaan die rots waarop my huisie staan
met al die oseaan se woeste krag.

Ek hoor die winde huil-'n kreun, 'n klag,
soos van verlore siele in hul nood
al dwalend, klagend, wat in graf en dood
geen rus kan vind nie, maar nog soek en smag.
My vuurtjie brand, my kersie gee sy lig.
Ek hoor dan meer hoe loei die storm daar buite,
ek hoor hoe ruk die winde aan my ruite.
Hier binne is dit veilig, warm en dig.

Kom nag, kom weer en wind, kom oseaan-
Dit is 'n rots waarop my huisie staan.

As Serote wrote for his friend Don, for my friend Don--

For Don M. – Banned
Mongane Wally Serote

it is a dry white season
dark leaves don’t last, their brief lives dry out
and with a broken heart they dive down gently headed for the earth,
not even bleeding.
it is a dry white season brother,
only the trees know the pain as they still stand erect
dry like steel, their branches dry like wire
indeed it is a dry white season
but seasons come to pass.

--------------

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

Emily Dickenson