The Classical Novel/Film Panel, Video, Iowa City Public Library, October 8, 2010 |
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The Classical Novel/Film Panel, Video, Iowa City Public Library, October 8, 2010
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| Title | The classical novel/film panel, Iowa City Public Library, October 8, 2010 |
| Creator |
Samar, Edgar Calabia Choudhury, Chandrahas Kahora, Billy Siahpour, Farangis |
| Creator - Nationality |
Filipino Indian Kenyan Iranian |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2010-10-08 |
| Description | Edgar Calabia Samar of the Philippines begins the panel with a discussion of the power of lists on readership. He states that the danger that lists of canonical books is the fact they ignore potentially significant works and may further limit readership of these already largely ignored texts. Ultimately, however, he concludes by reflecting that such lists are important in that they make us reflect on our own “silences.” Next, Chandrahas Choudhury, a novelist from India, reads a short narrative about being unprepared to speak at the panel he is speaking in. Within his narrative, Choudhury reflects on the strengths of the classical realist novel. In the end, Choudhury realizes that the only way to capture his feelings about the novel is to tell his story. Kenyan author Billy Kahora relates the story of a woman he knew growing up and his attempts to incorporate her into a novel about Kenya. He discusses that this woman (named Mrs. Karoki for his story) contracted malaria and went insane. He explains that in his attempts to authentically write madness have been illuminated when contextualized within the madness of the world. Finally, Iranian author, Farangis Siahpoor discusses cross-media storytelling that takes place in contemporary filmmaking. He explains that with the advent of the internet that filmmakers and audience members are able to co-create the world of a film. He closes by stating that it is as yet what exactly is gained and lost with this new type of co-creation. |
| Venue | Iowa City Public Library |
| Topical Subject (LCTGM) |
Authors Writing |
| Personal Name Subject | Samar, Edgar Calabia; Choudhury, Chandrahas; Kahora, Billy; Siahpour, Farangis |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2010-2020 |
| Transcription | Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Edgar Calabia Samar Lists and Silence Reading a novel requires an extended amount of silence. Finding this silence becomes a challenge today in the face of sometimes intrusive forms of mass media such as the radio, TV, and the internet. Some people learn to cope by listening to their own selection of music in their portable music players in order to shut off other noise while reading. I am not one of these lucky people; I need my silence when I read if I really want to experience the book I’m reading. But I can’t always have what I need. I read novels while in a crowded fast food restaurant or in a bus on the way home to San Pablo, with chattering strangers around me. While the experience of noise and silence conditions novel-reading for many, another kind of silence places many works at risk of not being read at all, if not consigns them outright to oblivion: list-making. The paradox of list-making as a kind of silencing is the danger and delight of the canon, from the Bible to the Great Books, to every anthology and syllabus for any survey of literature class. What is never mentioned gets pushed farther away from our attention and memory, until we can’t decide whether a book is neglected because it has lost its significance or because it never was deemed worth reading by a few to begin with. In recognizing some texts, a list ignores many others, its descriptions and prescriptions inscribed with the list-maker’s biases. Jorge Luis Borges wrote his own list in “The Library of Babel” that included three of his own works and one collaboration with Adolfo Bioy-Casares, along with twenty-nine other titles. Donald Barthelme’s “Syllabus,” supposedly handed out to his students and published in The Believer, includes eighty-one titles; his only instruction was to “just read them” with no regard to any order of reading. The list was partial to fiction but in-cludes none of his own works. Virgilio S. Almario’s Walong Dekada ng Makabagong Tulang Pilipino [trans. Eight Decades of Modern Pilipino Poetry], released in 1981, which happened to be the year of my birth, and the year when almost a decade of Martial Law in the Philippines was lifted, not only included Almario’s own poems but also included only one female poet in a roster of exclusively Tagalog poets. He released an updated Sansiglong Mahigit na Makabagong Tula sa Pilipinas [trans. More Than a Century of Modern Poetry in the Philippines] in 2006, three years after he was honored National Artist of the Philippines, and in an attempt at recuperation included works originally written in Bikol, Hiligaynon, Iluko, Kapampangan, English, and Span-ish. Any list, therefore, has the potential to be repressive and oppressive. Even novels themselves, from Don Quixote to Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, may encourage and problematize list-making and promote their own lists of other works, though since they are novels, we often expect them to do so in a way that is less ex-plicit, that works harmoniously with their narrative. In an early chapter of Don Quixote, for ex-ample, the curate and the barber go over to the library of its eponymous hero in order to decide which books should be “burned and banished from the face of the earth.” Cervantes, being a true comic and self-mocking critic, denied his own earlier work, Galatea, a full pardon. In this case, a list is a criticism, is an act of censorship, and its only saving grace is its tentative nature. Among other books considered for the pyre in that chapter of Don Quixote are the four volumes of Amadis de Gaul, poems by Ludovico Ariosto, Bernardo del Carpio, and works of Homer-all of them temporarily saved from burning by the conflicting tastes of the barber and the curate. 1 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Perhaps our special attraction to lists is contiguous with humankind’s discovery of numbers, conceptual tools that provide us with a sense of certainty and order. A list presents itself with a claim to authority or consciousness of the popular, from the Ten Commandments to Billboard’s Top 100 to Facebook memes. In the chaos of the mass production of everything and anything, a list gives an illusion of movement away from disarray and confusion, even if it falls into the trap of arbitrariness, the numbers themselves seeming quite random in their certainty-why ten? Why one hundred? In trying to avoid this trap, contemporary lists allow room for revision. Even the classics undergo constant re-evaluation while writers continue to champion them. Nonetheless: the selections may vary, but the list persists. In March 2010, the third edition of Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die was released, a book that seems to attempt to popularize academic tastes. It focuses on the history of the novel despite having the word “books” in the title. A few titles appear in the list that not many would consider novels, however. If it allows for the inclusion of Ovid’s Metamor-phoses, a narrative poem, and Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths, a collection of short fiction, some might wonder why not Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey or Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Other Stories? There are many reasons why a title should be included in a list that invokes necessity (these are books you must read) and mortality (before you die): its unique exploration of the hu-man predicament and existence, its contribution to our understanding of the form, and its expan-sion of our sense of aesthetics that considers supposed generational and multicultural differences. Boxall’s source is a contentious list of experts who are mostly English writers and literature pro-fessors who insist, for example, on eight books by Ian McEwan across the three editions and ne-glect even one by, say, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. A reading plan that will take Boxall’s latest list seriously will have me begin-if I were to take the historical route-with The Thousand and One Nights and end with A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book. A plan based on authors’ last names alphabetically arranged would require me to begin with Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and finish with Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story. But I don’t think anyone could actually live with any of these two reading plans, that is, if someone would consider reading all 1001 titles before dying-as if death could actually be postponed un-til we’re done with the list. But I suppose that many people actually dream of reading these books, as I myself do. Sometimes I just wish I could at least afford to buy these books. Assuming e-book prices will significantly drop-which is not really the trend based on recent reports-and that I can finally afford and settle for them with a Kindle, the premise of the Boxall book still seems absurd yet enticing-or enticing precisely because it seems absurd. If I were to begin to-day (assuming I had read none of the books on the list) and read at a rate of four books a month (quite doable if we’re talking only of books as thick as Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John and not Marcel Proust’s multivolume Remembrance of Things Past that is counted as one book in the list), I’ll be finished after 26 years. And that doesn’t mean, of course, that I’d be ready to die by then. The first edition of 1001 Books came out in 2006, and the use of the number 1,001 had to do with its relation to both death and infinity, thanks to the allusion to Scheherazade’s stories-as if each book is a story we tell Death himself in order for us to live for another story, for anoth-er book. When the second edition came out two years later in 2008, 282 titles from the earlier 2 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu edition did not make the cut in order to provide for a more “international” selection. Case in point: five of Charles Dickens’ books were among those that got dropped in order to accommo date major eastern classics such as The Tale of Genji and what are considered the four great clas-sical novels in Chinese literature-The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and A Dream of Red Mansions-the omission of which was a severe oversight in the first edition. The selections remained predominantly Western despite these inclusions, though, and so I was very excited when a new edition was announced earlier this year. I was curious about what “corrective” action they would take this time. But instead, it was a huge disappointment: only 11 titles, all of them published in the previous decade, replaced titles that all came from the same decade. Do they really mean that the books published up to 1999 in the second edition were al-ready somewhat “stable” in their place on the list? It is this kind of stability that frightens. Yes, I knew that even if 1,001 was certainly a large number, the list could not possibly contain everyone’s favorites, and anyone would still have reasons to complain. Boxall, of course, knew and even hoped that the books that made and didn’t make the list would generate fresh de-bate about canonicity. Sadly not much debate has resulted, only disgruntled comments here and there, because, well, it was just a list and in the age of Twitter and iPad, anyone could make their own list, and none of it would really matter. No list could ever really satisfy, and consequently no list is really of any consequence. When The Guardian made its own “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read,” it immediately followed up with “The Ones that Got Away.” Many readers re-mained unhappy, expectedly, and life continued. I was tempted to make my own list, one that aims to focus heavily on Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, the region largely neglected in Boxall’s. I decided against it, at least for now, recognizing that it would only reveal how equally limited my vision is. Let me merely state the obvious instead. My major disappointment comes from the fact that no Filipino made it to the list-not even Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, which I was really hoping would make it into the 2010 edition. Call it false nationalistic pride, but not every country has a novelist for a national hero, and I will not deny this bias that conditions my own reading pleasures and distaste. I believed it was about time for the novel generally acknowledged to have “inspired the first Asian revolution against Western imperialism” to be recognized. When Penguin Classics released an international edition in 2005, more than a century since it was first published in 1886, it raised my hopes. But the book didn’t make the cut. If Rizal could not make it to that list, how could other Filipino novels, whose own greatness look up to Rizal’s, ever make it? I adore Paul Auster’s metaphysi-cal detective novels and do not have any quarrel over his The New York Trilogy being there, but seriously, his Timbuktu over, say, Eric Gamalinda’s My Sad Republic? The Asian “representations” were the usual suspects-winners of awards that were given by the West such as the Nobel Prize (Kenzaburo Ōe, Yasunari Kawabata) and the Booker Prize (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy), or those with already high western readership (Haruki Mura-kami, Banana Yoshimoto). The West’s imagination of the East is often largely limited to China, Japan, and India, as this list reveals, besides West Asian Turkey, thanks to Orhan Pamuk, who is also, well, a Nobel laureate, and-I just found out recently-also an alumnus of the IWP. The original language of the text and its availability in translation is also a major consideration. So if I could die guilt-free without having known Jessica Hagedorn, F. Sionil Jose, and NVM Gonza-lez, all of whom wrote in English and were represented by international publishing houses based in the US at some point in their careers, why would I be bothered if I-and the world-never 3 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu knew Lazaro Francisco, Constante C. Casabar, and Jun Cruz Reyes, whose works were never translated into English until now? Now do we really even have to recognize this 1001 Books if it has proven to be deficient for our own specific desires and interests? I recognize that the power of any list over us lies pre-cisely in its potential to silence us, even as we manage to forget that some of our own texts have arguably made and kept us alive throughout,--and in spite of-- our history. Being a novelist who began as--and continues to be--an avid reader of novels, I obviously have something at stake with this kind of list for the novel, this long narrative form that contin-ues to thrive despite predictions of its demise because of our contemporary inability to pay atten-tion long enough to finish a book or to linger on a text in silence. I admire Milan Kundera’s es-says on the art of the novel-even if I do not always agree with his assumptions-especially for the way he situates Franz Kafka, Witold Gombrowicz, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil in the history of the European novel. I also appreciate the way Carlos Fuentes pays homage to his con-temporaries in Myself & Others, regardless of nationality. In the Philippines the major contempo-rary critics of the novel do not necessarily write the form: Resil Mojares, Soledad Reyes, and Virgilio Almario. Jose Dalisay Jr. and Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, both published novelists, have written occasional essays on the novel, but their focus on Filipino works in English leaves me wanting more. I hope to read books that act as a counter-silence to lists like 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I myself would like to write essays on the novel, besides writing my own novels, and let my own silences reverberate in my writing the way the Boxall list is silent on Chart Korbjitti, Duong Thu Huong, or Edgardo M. Reyes. This is to say then that despite, or precisely because of, its limitations of vision, 1001 Books becomes worthwhile, even necessary, reading: it allows us to recognize our own silences. And to see that we ceaselessly read and write, and-on occasions like this-speak, in order to put those silences to test. Perhaps what I am trying to say is that we read critics, especially list- & canon-making critics, not just for what they say but for what they fail to mention or choose not to say. That we listen to them for whatever we believe is sadly missed. 4 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Chandrahas Choudhury The Classical Novel, On A Fall Morning In Iowa City The IWP writer Chandrahas Choudhury was in a state of great distress as he walked with long strides from the Iowa House Hotel up towards the Old Capitol Building on the morning of Friday, the 9th of October 2010. He did not see - or if he saw, he did not register - the red and yellow leaves of fall that now rustled beneath his feet, and that only lately had been green leaves above him; nor, mired in his inner discontents, did he respond to the overtures of all the attractive girls winking at him from behind their sunglasses. The only two things in his sights were his destination - the Iowa City Public Library, where he was due to speak in a few minutes - and his dismay. Because it was private and unspoken, his distress and the reasons for it could be picked up by nothing but fiction, which has a way of looking inside human minds that human beings themselves can never achieve, and this is its value in the world. To keep it short: Choudhury was distressed because he was unprepared. Or rather, he had prepared a lecture, but he had prepared wrongly, and so to the world it would seem that he had been slacking off and had not prepared at all. Only fiction (which excels at sympathy) would understand that he actually had prepared, only he had prepared wrongly. What was his error? Choudhury had unfortunately long been misconstruing the nature of his invitation to speak at the panel. Instead of applying himself to the subject of the persistence of the classical novel in modern times, he had instead for weeks now, with the habitual carelessness and the susceptibility to exotic suggestion that was at the root of his nature, been writing up his thoughts on the abiding relevance of the classical navel. This was less absurd than it might seem. For thousands of years it has been believed in Indian yogic thought that the navel is the centre of the consciousness, and it is therefore central to any Indian poetics of fiction. Choudhury had imagined that the presiding powers of the IWP, with their usual exquisite delicacy and their characteristic attention to the local contexts of writers from different parts of the world, had been wanting illumination from his proudly Indian self on this hitherto obscure subject of the navel and its relation to fictional realisations of consciousness, but he’d been wrong. It was the novel they wanted to hear about, and he’d only realised this two hours ago. In a panic, Choudhury had gone to all his friends at the IWP, hoping they might be of some help to him. This was because, on principle, he never wrote more than a thousand words a day, and now, with so much tension in the air, he couldn’t possibly manage more than four hundred words - an introductory paragraph, perhaps, and a swift conclusion. But if his friends (all smart people) would be so good as to contribute to his project a paragraph each off the top of their heads, each one taking the argument of the previous one a step further, then he might have something. However, his friends, in the usual manner of life, disappointed him deeply. The Israeli writer Touche Gafla offered no help other than playing Kate Bush’s “Babooshka” for Choudhury as a way of unlocking his creative energies; the answer to all the problems presented to Touche lay in some rock song or another. The Mauritian Farhad Khoyratty, a university professor by profession, said that, after a decade of dealing with truant students, he had no sympathy for ludicrous excuses about navels (which, with his characteristic cross-cultural agility, he said were also a kind of orange with their origins in Brazil). The Pakistani writer Husain Naqvi was unable to help, because this was not the slender window of lucid time when he was both not asleep and not at a bar (it strikes the narrator that there are three negatives in this particular sentence, while there are four in the opening sentence of that latest and much-lauded take on the classical realist novel, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and that if 5 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu only one other “not” could be found from somewhere, this would be a sentence not unworthy of America’s greatest living writer of classical prose). And Choudhury found himself quite unable to approach the Icelander Solvi Sigurdsson, because it had been Solvi’s birthday the day before and he hadn’t given him a present. As for Pola Oloixarac...well, ever since Pola had started attending those belly-dancing classes with the other IWP girls, she wasn’t the same person. If at all there was a subject on which she might now conceivably be of some help, it was that of the (now unwanted) navel. So there was Choudhury, on his own, walking to the Iowa Public Library without a lecture in the bank, feeling like a character from one of his own stories, typically a person who is in deep trouble, and is feeling the pressure of time on his pulse. Indeed, the same pressures that proved so satisfying in fiction, and gave him the greatest pleasure to construct, proved now, when transferred to real life, to be agonizing beyond belief. He resolved to be kinder to his characters from this point on, but then saw instantly that he was making one of those terrible conceptual fallacies that are always being pointed out by theorists of fiction: that of confusing characters in a novel with real people. He also saw, though, that if there was any stream of literature - and we’re talking here of fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and various avant-garde movements that have still to work out their identities - if there was any stream of literature that allowed for this kind of envisioning of a character as a living, breathing individual, as real and as present as one’s family or girlfriend or cat, then it was the realist novel. It was also the realist novel that, for the first time in the history of literature, dared to imagine, at extraordinary length and in vivid detail, a protagonist who was typical and not exceptional, and yet highly individualized, presented in his or her everydayness. In other words, the distinction of the classical novel form was precisely that it allowed the reader, through the magic of the extended and elaborate illusion that it was able to spin from mere words and narrative sleight of hand and a wealth of sensory detail, to imagine that he or she was watching a life (or even living an alternate one) and not reading a book. The persistence of the form and its many conventions as a perennial template for fiction was connected to the fact that here, finally, was a form that allowed you to forget the very question of form. The sprawl of the classical novel was like a kind of comfortable armchair, or pint of AmberBock beer, that broke down the self-conciousness - the awareness that this was a book - that both writers and readers had previously brought with them, like a second skin, to the experience of literature. Indeed, it seemed to Choudhury (as he nimbly avoided a US Bank frisbee that sailed out at him from somewhere) that one of the greatest and most durable satisfactions of the classical novel was the way in which it dramatised the passing of time. How the novel loved to play with time! Whole years could be made to pass with a single precise sentence, or the events of a single day could be made to fill up an entire book. Hundreds of things could be done with tense structures, cuts, and flashbacks, and at particularly delicious or fulfilling moments the reader, too, could stop time by closing the book for a few minutes. The realist novel gave both writer and reader the power to control time, which was denied to them by life. Choudhury was by now consumed by realist-novel-love: it seemed to him that Dickens was walking alongside him, that it was Willa Cather just ahead, withdrawing some cash from the ATM, that Naguib Mahfouz was smoking a cigarette on the patio of the restaurant he was passing, and it was Irene Nemirovsky who gave him a brief nod, from behind her sunglasses, as she passed. It seemed to him - oh, if only he had some paper at hand, to record these zinging thoughts that were now raining upon him like Iowan autumn leaves! - that the most characteristic experience of human consciousness was that of the 6 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu workings of memory. The realist novel, through the deployment of repetition, echoes, leitmotifs, and contrast, allowed the reader to powerfully experience memory within the field of the literary work, suggesting a connection between an incident on page twenty to another on page two hundred, and thereby stoking, without a pressuring hand, emotions just as strong as those from one��s own life. In its attention to inwardness, to the patient tracking of the leaps and bends and flows in the thoughts of characters (thought Choudhury, lost in himself at a traffic signal), the realist novel schooled the reader in life. It taught him or her that that which is the most silent may yet be the most dramatic, and created in him or her a yearning for a greater engagement with the back-story of the world - or, if the world proved disappointing and somehow unnovelistic, then once again with novels. And further: although the realist novel strove to be a comprehensive representation of life, in the most capable hands it somehow proved to be an even stronger and more potent presence than the reality from which it mined its details, because, for one, it could eliminate the inessential, which life couldn’t, and two, it could be inflected with the storyteller’s personality and tone, and become not just the world but a way of looking at the world. After reading a good novel, the reader was always looking - for a little while at least, while he or she remained within the force field of the work -to heighten his or her own life to the same level of significance and meaning. The realist novel both bowed to life, and raised its music up a couple of notches. Choudhury stopped for a moment outside the Public Library, and contemplated turning the other way into Bread Garden Supermarket instead, where he could hide himself amidst all the shelves of soup and the rows of microwave meals, the racks of vegetables and the salad bar (and also perhaps get himself some lunch). He felt the sun warm upon his face, and looked up at a blue sky in which he could see precisely one cloud. He saw that his deeply dire situation was once again something that only the novel could adequately record: a state of contingency, of being alive at a particular moment in time, and feeling a particular set of pressures and sensations. The realist novel was both chronicle and snapshot, coiling its nimble fingers equally ably both around an era and upon a moment. But what of it? All these thoughts were useless, useless. He saw that if only he had half an hour to sit down and write up the reflections of just the last five minutes (how silverquick was thought!), he would have, even at such short notice, made a success of his lecture. (Choudhury was given too often to thinking a little too well of himself.) But alas, there was no time. He was done for. Choudhury was innocent of the fact that, all this time (and as you and I know), a story was hanging above him like a small cloud (the first requirement of characters in fiction, of course, is that they never realise they are characters in fiction). And the story was recording his thoughts anyway, in all their rambles and tangles, occasionally editing a word or eliminating a redundancy, because it wanted to be a better story than Choudhury was a thinker. And Choudhury didn’t know that, in the digital age, the story could take care of itself, and reproduce itself, and circulate itself - it needed no mailman, no agent, no publisher. Even as he walked into the hall where he believed he would soon be undone, the story was writing itself out rapidly on the blank pages of a handout, and when Choudhury glumly picked up the sheets to look at what the others had prepared, he was astonished to find that - astonished to find that - really astonished to find that - despite having done no writing at all, he was a presence in them and not an absence. Really amazed. Blinking in confusion, and eating two kinds of pizza one slice above the other to save time, Choudhury took a few moments to register the amazing good luck of this day and, indeed, of his life. He had, once again, been saved by a story. 7 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Billy Karanja Kahora The Persistence of Form in Capturing Mrs. Karoki and Putting Her to Bed (Figuratively): Billy Kahora’s Experience of Writing The Applications, a Novel in Progress. “The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates… the actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” (Philip Roth; Writing American Fiction). I came across the above statement four years ago as I was doing an MFA and telling myself that I was working on my novel - at least as far as sitting down at my desk to write words on a page about a reality/ies that had happened in my immediate past and trying to shape that into a story. In truth I was replaying the same event in my head and had been doing that for a few years. I had taken a single instance or maybe a series of instances and molded/imagined/remembered it/them into some kind of story/narrative/sociology/drunken reverie that was ongoing and felt to me at the time just as it does now would go on and on for awhile. These part imaginings, memories, projections revolved around a woman that I will now call Mrs. Karoki after the main character of the novel that I am working on, who ―cracked‖ during my late teens. Mrs. Karoki was a woman my family knew very well; I had played with her kids, her husband was more than a passing acquaintance to my Dad. And before her ‗crack‘ she was very good friends with my mum. We lived in what had started off as a middle class ―estate‖ (that‘s what we call our suburbs in Kenya) that had slowly degenerated into a lower class neighborhood that would ultimately threaten to become a slum. This was a reflection of Kenya‘s fortunes in the world. Starting in the mid-1990s, the country was going through a serious economic downturn; the middle-class was in general decline just as their houses were in this particular space, white mansionettes with orange brick rooftops graying and browning. On the national scene, corruption had become rife and the winners in an emerging dystopia were small-time crooks, white-collar thieves, crooked policemen and politicians. The bribe became the foremost currency of transaction in contemporary life. Many middle-class families poured their values down the drain and joined the orgy, and if they could, they found a space from which they could help plunder the country‘s coffers. Of course, many families could not get onto the program; the fathers seemed to age and retire early, defeated. Their wives took up ―business,‖ retailing clothes, starting makeshift catering businesses, setting up hair dressing shacks and even selling vegetables, things they had once turned their noses at. Their kids, who they couldn‘t afford to send to college, hung around the streets and got drunk. Those who could left for the West and South Africa. Shiny-faced nuclear families became matriarchal depression zones, with the long-suffering, hard-working pious mother as the new family head, taking care of a drunkard no-good husband wallowing in self-pity with kids in all the throes of all sorts of 8 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu chemical abuse. Material success became disassociated with education and hard work. College professors became night-operating car importers, taking advantage of the duty free perks given to them. Application of self became meaningless. The Karoki family was better off than most and could have easily afforded to move to a ‗leafier‘ suburb-Mr. Karoki had some strong ethnic connections and an animal intelligence that was suited to the time. He and his family could have fled. Mrs. Karoki, we would later find out, had been struck by cerebral malaria, but by the time it was discovered it had already eaten into her brain and was manifesting itself in many strange ways. So, within a few years this once immaculately dressed woman, quiet and beautiful, had become a harridan who walked the estate pavements day and night talking to herself. She had become hostile and abusive if approached, and only some of her children could calm her. It was a sad sight to see her become what is described as paranoid and delusional. She developed conspiracy theories that her husband wanted to kill her. But then something happened and it seemed that with the everyday pressures, there were more and more Mrs. Karokis, each speaking their language, some even singing their own songs and dancing their own dances. On T.V, radio-the things my uncles and aunts told me became one wild Karokian episode. And soon Mrs. Karoki did not even seem to be as mad as she had started out to be because the place had itself become completely mad - which means normal in its own madness. I never really got to know what really happened to her or the immediate space because I escaped, at least physically, to South Africa. Mentally, she and that Buru Buru of my childhood never left my consciousness. I had continued reading and looking at Kenya from South Africa and by the time I‘d completed my journalism undergraduate degree I had decided to become a writer. I followed all the political and socio-economic fortunes of Kenya from a safe distance and in 2003, just as I was struggling with a graduate media studies program in South Africa, Kenya declared itself a new place and got rid of its madnesses and its 24 year-old despotic regime. I wrote a short story called ―The Applications‖ to declare my own sense of the end of Karokiness and sent it to a new magazine called Kwani that loved and published it. But it was never quite enough. Mrs. Karoki, who I re-imagined as having gone ‗insane‘ to survive, had stopped applying herself in a place she could not stand. She had gone sane because the world had gone raving mad. She had chosen to apply herself differently in what she saw as a new world of non-application or rather dysfunctional application. Even before I created Mrs. Karoki, I had been reading the novel in one form or the other all my life. First in an escapist, sweaty-palms gripping way that teleported me from my world, Mrs. Karoki‘s world, but later in what I would describe readings that were discerning, to help me think, analyze and evaluate my world, Mrs. Karoki‘s world. Some novels helped, the so-called realistic and social ones, especially. Many put me into a dizzying Po-Mo stupor and by the time I reached my undergraduate Lit studies, I could hold forth on political oppression, madness, economic failure in both abstract and Karokian ways, and these had become obsessions. At Edinburgh University, I signed up for an esoteric course called Insanity and Literature. Secondary texts for the course included R.D Laing. I only managed to read 9 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Doris Lessing‘s Brief Descent Into Hell - I could not finish The Golden Notebook, which was on the primary reading list of this course that would help me get a handle on how to frame madness within a literary space, essential to the novel I was now working on. I did, however, make a few breakthroughs. I inadvertently picked up The Corrections and this was a book that had something in it that made me understand how the Karoki family could somehow come to life on the page through a certain suburban prism. I also saw the movie The Hours and understood that an existential stillness posed by what one does with their ―hours‖ is more powerful than the most carefully recorded rantings of an insane woman. Of course, this is a kind of cherry picking and over-determinism of the frames that I could pick from these two examples. I use these examples to illustrate a point to an American audience as there are many other non-American books that I also read and films that I also watched that fed and inspired what I was writing then and now, and which continue to add to the ‗frame‘ in which I could paint the plight of Mrs. Karoki and Kenya. And so I realized that I not only needed to summon all the elements that are required of a novel that posits a social realistic stance, but I needed to also frame these within several lenses. I forced myself to understand three different but intertwined elemental forms of the novel: social realism, madness and the family saga. These became my forms. I was on my way and I eventually started sitting down to write words. It was and is not easy. Whenever I harken back to my Karoki world it is still full of that damn new Kenyan language, Sheng, an interface between English and Swahili; the realities of the Kenyan world have to be captured in this new language‘s glory. Irritatingly, high school rugby keeps on coming up - Mrs. Karoki‘s son is obsessed with it and I have constantly had to re-imagine how to narrate a rugby match in full flight. There are whole drunken lives that live in inebriated realities that need to be captured and retold. And there is the most difficult one of all - Mrs. Karoki‘s continuous cerebral malarial babble-register. So, how to combine these stupefying realities into the pages of a book? I now see all these things as the contents that fill in the forms that I have mentioned. Realism in the novels I have read and liked dwells on heavy and detailed description, alternative points of view. Family sagas I like run into detailed histories, arcs that trundle along, blow up, enter middling stretches - and Hours pass by. Insanity is paled against normative contexts and reliefs in the Great Novels of Madness. These are just some of the forms that persist to coax Mrs. Karoki‘s world onto the page for me as a writer. And when this happens, when these forms that I have appropriated from many places persist to ‗capture‘ Mrs. Karoki, the novel will end. And so will Mrs. Karoki in my head. But the forms are shape-shifters and when I think I have made them do my bidding they release Mrs. Karoki out again … and so on it goes … 10 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Farangis Siahpoor Alternate Reality Imagine if, when the movie Some Like It Hot opened in cinemas in 1939, the truth about the characters Josephine and Geraldine was revealed right after they joined the band. Or if the audience of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at London theatre in the 16th century was first given published papers that recounted the history of King Macbeth, and the background of the other characters. This is how modern-day cinema works, as trans-media storytelling. We are storytellers who are able to work across media because of technology. How does one develop a story and characters that can reach audiences in every part of the world? For example, if you live in an underdeveloped region, how do you successfully reach your audience? In order to do this, we as storytellers have to get a better sense of the people that make up our audience - who they are, what they want and what they can afford. The truth is that much of our audience cannot afford the basic necessities of life. At least 80% of the population lives on less than $10 a day and thus they cannot go to the cinema or buy a DVD. But almost everyone seems to have access to satellite TV; almost everyone seems to have a cell phone. As such, the great pleasure of classic cinema is an individual pleasure, as this media-and free media more generally-has become the new culture. If a new generation of filmmakers is trying to reach as many people as possible, then it needs to provide content for those who will only engage with one media platform and for those who don’t have much time. An important responsibility for anyone who works across different media is to understand how to offer a range of engagement options, as well as content that targets different skill levels and different time availabilities. Cross-media and interactive/immersive storytelling describe how to build story worlds that span across multiple platforms, engage audiences in powerful new ways and travel across settings. While conventional cinema cannot be adapted for these transitory viewing forms, internet cinema and video has the potential to do so, which opens up a vast potential market. Today's young people are growing up in a connected world with technology that seems completely natural to them, and this digital natives’ audience is engaging with media across multiple platforms and moving from a passive viewing experience to active collaboration. This how the art of cinema has changed. One other medium that has allowed for this shift is the web itself, and the idea of living in a multimedia environment. Where media contents flows fluently between platforms, it opens up the new possibilities for storytelling to speak. This is the essence of what we call web cinema. The other aspect of this movement is that the web technology allows us to talk about a concept of cross media where filmmakers are creating content and story-worlds instead of just one film experience. How does this new medium of cinema preserve the pleasure for audience? Cross media aims to increase the enjoyment and the challenge of understanding technology-based media in films and to emphasize their improvement to the cultural, social and economic life of people. The artist’s role is to explore, but at the same time, to question, challenge and transform the technologies that they utilize. The great pleasure of today’s cinema is in an active 11 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 8, 2010: Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines), Chandrahas Choudhury (India), Billy Karanja Kahora (Kenya), Farangis Siahpoor (Iran) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu collaboration - voting, sharing, commenting, discussing, tweeting and so on. Collaboration is adding to cinema today: be it through fan fiction, creating videos or illustrations. It is providing new content that you as author are free to embrace or reject. It can be created with the idea of negative space to lead the movie to re-dramatize the dramatic moments. To build a metaphysical state and to experience the unique particularity of contemplative cinema. These empty spaces with profuse hidden signs give more content and more power of interpretation to the audience. Spectators enjoy the greatest freedom not in the way that they manipulate films but in the ways that they can interpret them. For instance, Shirin is a film by Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami. What Shirin shows us-and indeed, all it shows us-is an audience of more than 100 women who are deeply absorbed in watching a film we never get to see. Based on the powerful 12th Century Persian poem by Nazami, the film-within-the-film is a story of star-crossed lovers and female self-sacrifice that is as well known in Iran as Romeo and Juliet is in the West. The movie explores the potential of cinema, stimulating and challenging the viewer's imagination to an extraordinary degree. We are free to imagine what we wish to be so. The main goal of today’s cinema is to show that there is no difference between the filmmaker and the audience. We all share the collective effect of our audio-visual media society. The key to this newborn cinema is in culture. The components of meaning in cross media articulation are inseparable from various social, intellectual and cultural developments. This cinema is dedicated to the emphasis of audience interactivity in order to shape meaningful experiences, to allow the audience to be a creator. This is how the new generation of filmmakers is trying to move away from the current situation, in which it is extremely difficult to pay for filmmaking tools that they themselves don’t even own, and that their audience is not able to afford. This is how they share the process of creation with their spectators. And it is the way the artistic economy and the financial economy work together. The question is, what are we getting out of this experience, and what are we not getting that the classic audience in Hamlet’s Shakespeare did get? Until our web culture is fully realized, it may yet be too soon to tell. Nonetheless, even though the traditional storytelling platform may no longer exist, at the end of the day, we all still want to hear a story. 12 |
| Type (AAT) | Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Duration | 01:20:19 |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection | International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
| Contact Information | Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/ |
Description
| Title | The Classical Novel/Film Panel, Video, Iowa City Public Library, October 8, 2010 |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (IMT) | mp4 |
| Date Digital | 2010-10-08 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_10-8-10.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_10-8-10.mpg |
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