The second panel ‘Blood and Ink: On the Written Word’, of the third day of the conference was moderated by Prof. Merin Simi Raj. The first paper titled ‘Nuyorican Poets and the Promise of Poetry’ was presented by Manu Joshi from Delhi University. The paper was based around the tense citizenship and political membership that trouble the people of Puerto Rico, a U.S. protectorate since 1916. Puerto Rico has recently been in the news regarding its apathetic treatment and botched relief measures implemented by the federal government of the U.S. in the wake of the devastating hurricane Maria. Even as political and militaristic resistance was stamped out or lost popular support, literature has remained a promising avenue of political protest and also for articulating a divided sense of identity. The speaker then outlined his paper to be the reading of poetic works of the Nuyorican poets Martin Espada and Pedro Lopez Adorno.
The first poem was ‘Liquid Matter’ by Pedro Lopez Adorno. The primary act in the poem, he said, was retrospective reminiscence. The poem seemed to echo a renaissance reference to Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, to the beauty of Helen of Troy and to the very core of western literary tradition. The poem closes in on the coming together of the opposite tendencies of love and domination, of the intimate and the political and the personal and the global. He concludes by saying that the poem portrays the powerful, emotional, complex contemplation of loss and yearning as one experiences it, through one’s reflection of the past that compresses a variety of past experiences and memory onto the predominant and indelible sense with which they leave us.
The second poem was ‘Talking to the Waves’ also by Pedro Lopez Adorno. Manu spoke of how the poem illustrates the profound dilemma of the colonised whose culture is irreversibly hybrid. The biblical ethos imparts a degree of righteousness to the poet’s cause. It seemed to be at the very limit of the poetic and the linguistic. It seemed to even exceed it, spilled over beyond the capacity of language in order to convey the foliage, the wordless description of the perfect sunsets, yet paradoxically, it is this very ability that reaches the extra lingual, that is conveyed in language in poetry.
The instrumental rationality and European education in the poem bring to mind the split inherent between the body and intellect, one that the poet has rejected earlier as he attempts to blur the distinction between language and reality and problematizes merely the presentational function of language.
Yet portrayed through the masters’ language, the main role is of the homeland, at least articulating a sense of it through the language is lost, either because dual legacy suggests complicity with the colonizer or makes it inconceivable to return to the pre-modern world. The ultimate failure of language is that despite this avenue of self-expression and resistance, it fails to usher in the age of freedom. But, he says, perhaps the poem does succeed, given the way it manages to condense the complete emotions and the complexes of affection and experiences.
The third poem was ‘Coca-Cola in Coco Fríyo’ by Martin Espada. The poem shows the childhood wonder of the boy as he explores, because his connection to his Puerto Rican heritage was largely cultivated through tales and was yet to experience it firsthand. His movement symbolises discovery of exotic land. The speaker mentions that it is only after discovering the unique taste of coconut that the child realizes how distinct Puerto Rico is from Brooklyn and how he himself is, given his heritage. He speaks about a sense of loss, awareness of one’s own heritage and duties, the moving image of people oblivious, lost in wonder of cultural tropes that are experientially different for them, that the poem manages to convey.
Though occasioned by remembrances of his childhood, the poem’s primary force is aimed at rousing the people to come alive and engage with social and political realities. This is an invocation of the poet for the people, forever renewed through language and awareness of responsibility towards things that conference grace on human existence. The poem employs the most incidental of entities- coconuts, now a cliché in our imagination of the tropics, yet he manages to shape it into a reminder that draws you in because of the visceral nature of the child’s enjoyment along with his sense of wonder. The poet then works to subtly move towards the larger implication of our everyday choices and attitudes. He concluded by saying that he has attempted to capture the sense event of poetic performance as one opens up and responds to it.
The distinctive character of poetry as a literary entity is in its use of language that estranges it from its more instrumental usage, to harness its power towards pressing and complex understandings of what it means to be human. The speaker wrapped up by mentioning he has chosen poems that stand out for the particular manner in which they stage memory and remembrance in order to articulate upon questions of identity and at the same time, formats in literature that demands our response.
The second paper was presented by Arya V.M. from Pondicherry University. It was titled “Shades of Racism: Identity and Citizenship in Americanah”. The focus of the paper was on the experiences of an immigrant person of color in a foreign land, the claims of identity and citizenship they bear. Immigrants of color often struggle to fit into the socio-political frameworks of the land of their residence. The transnationality and translocality of their experiences notwithstanding, immigrants draw on their identities in different manners to settle in foreign lands. The liminality of experience and isolation they experience is high. The paper sought to understand this through a close reading of the themes explored in the novel Americanah by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Americanah was published in 2013 and details the experiences of a young Nigerian woman by the name of Ifemelu who travels to the United States to attend university. The novel also takes the reader through the lives of the people surrounding Ifemelu and how color and culture weigh in these relations, especially with the men in her lives. The United States is considered to be a dreamland for people in impoverished nations all over the world. The ubiquitous “American Dream”, where hardwork is seemingly the only currency for prosperity is still sought by many. The character of a Nigerian woman set in the United States is important, not just to contrast the nature of life in both nations, but to also display the depth of complexity that identity assumes for an immigrant of color. There are several factors that determine the experiences of a colored person, like race, gender and class. In the United States, there is an implicit hierarchy of races that determines the trajectory of life for a citizen. White people are at the top of this hierarchy, with African Americans below. But further below in this hierarchy is a spot occupied by African immigrants. The very subtle degree of racism between African Americans and Africans is expertly portrayed in the interactions of Ifemelu. The interaction of nationality and race results in a very curious experience for colored immigrants. Despite the differences in their experiences, immigrants lose their individuality and are subsumed by the label of color. Their native divisions are erased. The different phases of the aspirational immigrant experience are shown, along with the immanent challenges of freedom of employment, citizenship and racism. The novel succeeds in capturing the ubiquity of these experiences amongst the immigrant populace and also the feelings they undergo when they return to their country of birth. Despite the prevalence of technology today that helps reinforce the transnationality of an immigrant’s identity and their connection to the heartland, they still continue to struggle in foreign lands.
Following the paper presentations, there was a Q&A session.
Article 19 