589. V is for Visibility

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

A thing becomes visible not only when it is in sight, but also when it is seen. Or conversely, something is invisible either because it is hidden or because it is not looked at. Let me elaborate.

In the summer of 1996 I happened to be in England with my husband and our son, then eleven, during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia (U.S.A.). It was there that I was first struck by the difference between the British and the U.S. coverage of the Games. Britain certainly covered the relatively few events in which one of its athletes had a chance of winning a medal (I refuse to use the horrible verb “medaling”), but it also covered plenty of other events of interest to its viewers. By contrast, the U.S. coverage of the Olympics is obsessed with the U.S. winning the maximum number of medals and with besting its competitors, particularly those in the political arena. If there is a sport in which another country, however small, is pre-eminent, the U.S. is determined to beat it, despite the fact that it already takes home the most medals by far of any other country.

In an interesting study, Framing the Olympic Games (2008), authors Caroline Walters and Sheila Murphy investigated this very subject—the way that the U.S. television coverage of the Games presents them in an ultra-competitive and nationalistic frame. They write: “While media outlets from all countries are guilty of reporting on the Olympics (as well as other international events) from their own perspective, the American media have been routinely criticized for their overly nationalistic coverage (78). Given this skewed coverage, which the authors amply demonstrate, they asked whether and how it had an impact on the way American viewers see the Games.

Could the American media’s nationalistic portrayal of the Olympic Games ultimately undercut the very purpose of the event? . . .[W]e examined whether—far from promoting world peace—adopting a competitive and nationalistically-centered frame for Olympic coverage actually serves to reinforce international rivalry and undercuts the intended objectives of the IOC.” (84)

Walters and Murphy’s results suggested that “nationalistically framed Olympic broadcasts may encourage viewers to be less engaged and open to cooperation with other countries” (99). They concluded:

This research exposes a contradiction between how the modern Olympics Games are currently being presented to the American public and the official mission of the IOC. Our results reveal important and potentially alarming consequences of the use of highly nationalistic framing with respect to the Olympic Games, and perhaps international events more generally. These findings make a strong argument for the need to reframe or at least soften American television coverage of the Olympic Games. (100)

If the U.S. media’s framing of the Olympic Games may predispose American viewers to see their relationship with the rest of the world as one of competition rather than cooperation, what about the visibility of the rest of world in U.S. news coverage?

In its story, The world, according to the U.S. news, 1 Point 21 Interactive, a company that creates web content to increase awareness of particular brands or social issues, analyzes 94,000 U.S. news headlines from three news outlets, the New York Times, USA Today, and Fox News, between January 2019 and May 2023 to see which countries were mentioned the most and the least, and in what regard, and then they mapped the data visually.

The piece began with the simple statement, “Our understanding of the word is shaped by the information we encounter – and the information we don’t.” It found that the countries that were mentioned the most were those that were most important to U.S. foreign policy and that “just 10 countries, including the U.S., accounted for 80% of all headlines that name a country”, with China, Russia, Iran, and Mexico in the top ten every year. Of the countries that were rarely mentioned, they found that they tended to make the headlines only if they had a war, a political crisis, or a natural disaster. Even so, if the country was small, or if it was in Sub-Saharan Africa, it was unlikely to get a mention.

It find it sad that U.S. news media rarely cover news from the rest of the world and even then, only in terms of how that news affects the United States. As a result, Americans are presented with a skewed and incomplete picture of the world. Funnily enough, it may be the people in the smaller, less powerful nations who have a more accurate view of the world. They certainly have to know much more about the United States than it knows about them.

These two examples of what the U.S. news media covers and on what basis demonstrate that we see what we are shown, what is made visible. The fact that so much is rendered invisible requires us to do more work to uncover and reveal it (Williams).

What about the case in which the news item is there, but we don’t see it, either because we have been given to understand that it is not important, or because our attention is directed elsewhere? How many times have you become interested in a subject—prisons, for example—and suddenly started seeing articles about it everywhere? It was there all along, hidden in plain sight, only you didn’t have the eyes to see it. Or perhaps society’s messaging about prisons and prisoners had taught you to avert your eyes when faced with the subject.

                  (ABC News)

These reflections have been sparked in part by the Catch and Kill phenomenon brought to light by former president Donald Trump’s latest trial, in which his campaign paid the National Enquirer to buy a story about him (David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer called in “checkbook journalism”) and then to kill it—to withhold publication. Of course this is an extreme case of visibility—or rather, invisibility. Although the story is true, it will not see the light of day.

  postcard, Bread and Puppet Theater

What does this question of visibility have to do with the world? Well, what we see depends on where we stand, what we want to see, and how much digging we are prepared to do. There is much that is obscured, hidden between the lines and beneath the surface. Why should we want to see the world whole, and not blinkered by our nation’s perceived strategic interests? Well, that’s a question akin to “Why would we want to seek enlightenment?”

Perhaps it is enough to go back to the Olympic Games and the International Olympic Committee’s concept of the Olympic Truce, “which encourages all participating countries to lay down their weapons during the Games in an effort to create a window for dialogue, reconciliation, and diplomatic conflict resolution” (Walters & Murphy 77). 

Making the effort to create a window lets in light and opens up new possibilities where there was once a wall.

Let’s take off our blinkers and see the world whole. Our very survival may depend on it.

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575. Global Literacy

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

With the advent of social media in the first decade of the 21st century, schools and colleges designed and began to offer media literacy and digital literacy courses, in which students were taught how to engage safely and critically with digital media. In the 2010s, as it became apparent that students would need greater global awareness and skills in cross-cultural communication in order to function effectively in an increasingly interconnected world, courses in global literacy began to be offered in both schools and universities. In developing and teaching a global literacy course as a first-year seminar I found students to be very receptive to the material, especially when they realized that it introduced them to skills and perspectives that were likely to benefit them in their working lives. However, I think many of them were also pleasantly surprised to find that it opened up a wider world to them, one that was not frightening, but full of promise.

When I first started teaching in this small state college in Central Massachusetts, many of my students had never been to New York City, only 200 miles away, and some of them had never even been to the big bad city of Boston, less than 50 miles away. And unless they or their parents were immigrants or they had a family member in the military, most of them knew very little about the world beyond the borders of the United States.

Test your geography knowledge—World Countries (Lizard Point)

As an assignment to do at home after the first class meeting was to take a self-administered geography quiz. I let them choose their continent and they weren’t required to turn in or even to report back on the results, because I didn’t want them to start the semester by feeling humiliated. For it is well-known that students in the U.S. don’t know much about geography. More importantly, I didn’t want to give too much importance to merely locating countries on a map.

I introduced the course to them as follows: 


Along with Digital Literacy and Media Literacy, Global Literacy involves developing the skills and perspectives you will need to thrive in the 21st century, in a rapidly globalizing world. Broadly speaking, this means acquiring competencies that enable you to recognize different perspectives (others’ and your own), communicate ideas effectively across diverse audiences, and thereby understand and act on complex, interdisciplinary issues of global significance.

These competencies were divided into three main areas: intellectual skills and knowledge, social/cultural competencies, and ethical dispositions (Nair et al.).

In my half-century of living in the United States, other parts of the world have only seemed to come into view when the U.S. has been at war with them or they are seen to be important to U.S. interests. So it wasn’t second nature for the students to take an interest in a country for its own sake. However, they did find it easy to recognize that the large, intractable problems that faced their generation, such as climate change, were shared responsibilities that could only be solved by cooperation at the global level. It wasn’t a big step from there for them to accept that skills such as intercultural communication would be increasingly important. Still, although I continually stressed the importance of cultivating a global perspective, rather than merely a U.S.-centered one, it was also one of the hardest things to explain to my students.

Every year I have to buy a batch of global first-class stamps to put on the Christmas and New Year cards I send to relatives in England and India. One particular year’s stamp infuriated me, and I ranted about it to anyone who would listen—mostly to my long-suffering husband. It struck me that showing it to the students might make them see something that I had had difficulty explaining to them in words.

I projected an image of the stamp on the screen and asked them what they noticed about it. Well, they said, it was postage for letters going abroad, so it made sense that it had a photo of a globe on it. Beyond that, they were at a loss. 

What else? I asked. They shrugged their shoulders. Well, what do you see on the globe? —Oceans and some land. What is that land? —A continent. Which continent? –North America. So, what’s wrong with that? 

Finally someone got it—the penny dropped. And I was gratified to read, in one student’s end-of-semester reflections, that that little exercise had been a turning point for her:

An “aha” moment I first experienced this semester was when we as a class discussed the global postage stamp. If it is a “global” stamp how come only North America and part of South America are shown on the stamp, what about the rest of the world?

The last set of readings/videos were on global citizenship. At first students found it an alien concept, even faintly unpatriotic. But many of them ended the semester writing about how they had taken, or at least begun to take the idea on board along with their local and national identities. They felt better equipped to go out into the big bad world with some global competencies under their belts, and knowing that they shared more with people across the world than they had previously thought—a common humanity.

Here’s Sam Cooke’s What a Wonderful World—enjoy!

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567. Oppenheimer: Sins of Omission

The mushroom cloud of the Trinity nuclear test rises over the New Mexico desert (National Security Research Center)

On March 14th, 2024, Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA) produced a webinar entitled “Oppenheimer—Sins of Omission: Nuclear Industry Fallout and Indigenous and Chicana/o Resistance in the Southwest.” Organized by members of MAPA’s Indigenous Solidarity and Nuclear Disarmament groups, it was scheduled for the aftermath of the Academy Awards ceremony, where Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster was widely predicted to win big.

On March 10th, as Oppenheimer duly swept the Academy Awards, many of us waited expectantly for one of the seven Oscar winners to acknowledge the ongoing fallout from the nuclear bomb. We waited in vain, with the exception of Best Actor awardee Cillian Murphy who, in closing, did dedicate his Oscar to “the peacemakers everywhere.” 


Whatever you think about the film artistically, you ought to be aware of some of its glaring omissions.

A hibakusha of Hiroshima with nuclear burns (Wikipedia)

—In its first-person perspective of one brilliant, troubled, not very self-aware man who was given a blank check by the U.S. military during WWII to build and test an atomic bomb, the film did not depict the horrible deaths of the more than 200,000 Japanese civilians in two targeted nuclear strikes just weeks after the first nuclear device was test-exploded.

View of the Pajarito Plateau from Nambe Tuesday. Los Alamos is in the upper left side of the photo. (Photo: Terrance Haanen)

—In its choice to describe the siting of the top-secret project “in the middle of nowhere,” it erased the history of the Pajarito Plateau and the indigenous and Chicana/o peoples who lived there, focusing instead on the scientists and military personnel who were gathered at what came to be named Los Alamos National Laboratories. 


Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium protests at the Trinity site, 10/21/23. (Danielle Prokop / Source NM)

—In its focus on the anxious anticipation of that first nuclear test at the Trinity site in New Mexico, and the chance, however tiny, of setting off a nuclear chain reaction that could destroy the world, it failed to mention the slow but deadly chain reaction that it did set off, one whose fallout continues to kill people in the area nearly 80 years later. Here is the trailer of Lois Lipman’s documentary, First We Bombed New Mexico, currently making the rounds of film festivals. In it, Tina Cordova, representing the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, pushes tirelessly for compensation under the Radioactive Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) for the four generations of people killed and sickened by radioactive fallout from the Trinity test.

Claim 28: abandoned uranium mine in Tachee/Blue Gap, AZ on the Navajo Nation (Credit: Caylee Scott)

—Despite the fact that uranium and plutonium were essential to building the bomb, Oppenheimer made no mention of the uranium mines and mills, many on tribal lands, that operated for decades with an almost total lack of safety precautions for workers and residents alike. Today, hundreds of abandoned and still-functioning mines continue to contaminate the air, soil, water, and people.

—In all of the above omissions, the people most directly affected were Asian or indigenous peoples.

There’s a telling scene in Oppenheimer, when Robert is beating himself up over the suicide of his lover and his wife Kitty says, “You don’t get to commit the sin and then have us all feel sorry for you that it had consequences.” Spot-on. All too often, the perpetrators of violence are somehow made out to be victims, who deserve our empathy. The Oppenheimers of the world are the ones who are placed front and center, fully humanized, presented as complex characters, while the people in the affected communities are nowhere to be seen.

Stan Shikuma of the Japanese American Citizens League, quoted in an article entitled, Oppenheimer draws debate over the absence of Japanese bombing victims in the film, noted that “to truly challenge the audience to contend with the horrors of the bombings, …narratives need to shift toward those who were impacted [the] most.” In her article entitled, The People the Oppenheimer Film Erased, author Chantelle Murphy wrote, “If the film depicted the native New Mexicans and Indigenous people who did housework in the homes of the scientists and performed janitorial services at the lab, then maybe filmgoers could relate more to the sacrifice that these Americans endured to make this weapon a reality.”


As it turned out, despite repeated efforts to reach out to the filmmakers, none of the affected communities were acknowledged in the film. On the morning after the Oscars, Sen. Ben Ray Luhan of New Mexico, campaigning on behalf of victims of nuclear fallout, said, “Those artists deserve the wins, but what about those people whose stories were not included in that film? Who are dying, who are willing to use all their energy to educate others. I certainly hope that everyone who was a part of Oppenheimer doesn’t forget these folks, across the country.”


Our webinar, “Oppenheimer: Sins of Omission”, focused on the people and places in the American Southwest who were not included in the film, people who are having to live—and die—with the legacy of the bomb. We were graciously joined by speakers engaged in the struggle for their lives and lands every day, on the ground, and who are willing to use their precious time and energy to educate us and engage us all in this critical task as well. 

You can watch a videorecording of the webinar here, and link to a resource list here, with contacts to the organizations, campaigns, and action items represented and discussed in it.

Tewa Women United

See TWU’s Excellent Resource:
Oppenheimer—and the Other Side of the Story


Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium


Haul No!


Union of Concerned Scientists
 

 The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA)

☢️ What you can do to extend and expand it ☢️

On March 7th, 2024, the U.S. Senate voted to re-authorize and expand RECA. Now it must be approved by the House before it expires in June.
Please use the above link to call Congress today!

 

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557. Revisiting Barbara after Barbie (the movie)

I’m sharing a link to an old post here and below, Dolls I Have Loved and Lost, about the dolls and teddy bears in my girlhood, including Barbara, the doll I was allowed instead of a Barbie.

The Barbie movie craze is leaving me totally cold and feeling alienated, even betrayed. At best I think it’s silly. All these grown women swooning over the film and taking selfies in pink–come on! I never had a Barbie. I wasn’t much of a doll person, but I did use dolls and bears to comfort myself and to act out with. I certainly never fantasized about being a Barbie; there was nothing about her or her brand that I could identify with. In my teens the women’s movement only strengthened my negative feelings about the phenomenon, with its sexism and its flagrant commercialism.

Barbie started as a German sex toy and turned into a sexy American doll aimed at children. Was it progress for girls no longer to play at being mothers but instead to play at being fashion models? Was it progress to create black and brown Barbies and to start selling doctor-Barbies, with all the expensive accessories to go with them? I’m glad my mother refused to get me one.

I expect that I’ll be called a party pooper and worse, but honestly, this movie was sponsored by Mattel to revive its flagging brand. It has been spectacularly successful. Director Greta Gerwig is certainly brilliant, but she’s having it both ways, using her clever “subversion” to make Barbie and all its (I refuse to call it “her”) accessories even bigger.

And I don’t like pink, never have.

https://josna.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/dolls-i-have-loved-and-lost/

 

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555. On ‘Giddy Innocence’

Last weekend, while family from India were staying over, we watched the 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, on the big screen, AKA the living-room wall. The first time I had seen it was in February 1970, more than half a century before, on my flight over to the U.S. as a teenager with my mother and sister. This morning, as I was waiting for the kettle to boil for my morning tea, I opened the weekly Bookmarks email from The Guardian (U.K.) which included a piece by the young novelist Maddie Mortimer on the diaries left by her mother, who died when Mortimer was a young teen. 

In the article, ‘I became obsessed’, the author talks about the changing, but always central, role that her mother’s diaries have played in her life over the past decade or so as she herself has mourned her loss, gone through parallel struggles, and come into her own voice as a writer. I read it with interest since, I too have sought comfort, support, and self-knowledge in the diary entries, letters, and personal essays left by my mother, who has been gone these past five years. As a woman considerably older than Mortimer— even older than her mother was—I cannot help but read the article from the point of view of the mother as well as the daughter. Who am I addressing when I write about my life, and why? Will my loved ones read and take solace in it?

Back to the film. For decades, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was wholly indecipherable to me, as confounding as Americans and America itself. Forty years later, not long after finally taking the plunge into American citizenship, I attempted to decode it in a post entitled, Con Men, Card Sharks, and Playing a Different Game. Still, the film’s starring duo, Paul Newman and Robert Redford, remained opaque to me. Watching it last weekend, the bicycle scene with Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and Etta Place (Katharine Ross) stood out as luminous. Of course it featured the song that went on to become a pop hit, topping the Billboard charts as I immigrated to the U.S., but always meaningless and, to be honest, intensely irritating to me. Funnily enough, Maddie Mortimer references the bicycle scene in her article, likening its “giddy innocence” to a description of a golden afternoon with a cameraman in her film-producer mother’s diary. Apparently, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was one of the first films she and her mother ever watched together.

What a coincidence, I thought, as I sipped my first cup of Sunday morning tea. Until one short week ago, before I watched the film properly for the first time, I would have completely passed over that reference in Mortimer’s article. I knew the song—how could anyone who lived in the US in the early 1970s have avoided it?—but had completely forgotten the scene. Now I looked back at its “giddy innocence” with new eyes. Giddy, certainly, but innocent? Perhaps only in the sense of the innocence that allows Americans to be blissfully ignorant of the violence they—we—wreak in the world in the pursuit of power, the blindness to the consequences of their actions, their effects on others. The outlaws Butch Cassidy and his partner-in-crime are American icons, legendary outlaws that represent the amoral, every-man-for-himself ethos of the Wild West. In the film, Etta Place was married to the Sundance Kid but equally in love with Butch Cassidy. When the Sundance Kid pushed her away, she could take flight on the handlebars of Butch Cassidy’s careening bicycle—for a time, at least.

    Source: Movie Photo Stills

As the woman who sheltered and darned the socks of both outlaws, Etta Place went on the lam with them, an extended joyride funded by their armed robberies, then on the run as they were tracked by the law and eventually, out of the country to South America, where they continued their life of crime with impunity. This contemporary viewer winced at the crude representation of Bolivia and Bolivians in this half-century-old film but, truth be told, attitudes have hardly changed since then. Back to the bicycle scene, though: Etta had the good sense to jump off the careening bicycle of her lovers’ lives before they met their inevitable, violent, end. For her, that exhilarating ride with Butch Cassidy was a temporary escape; but for the two men, their whole lives were an escape.

The above reflections rippled out further when I read a devastating article by Sarah Topol in the New York Times Magazine over my second cup of morning tea: The America that Americans Forget, on the U.S. colonialist relationship with Guam. The enormous and expanding U.S. footprint on the island makes it a direct target of China and South Korea as the U.S. ramps up its dominance in the Pacific, while most Americans remain blissfully unaware of what is being done to the people of that U.S. territory in their name. This sanctioned ignorance allows people out of sight to bear the burden of the “forever wars” of the U.S. so that Americans can continue to live lives of giddy innocence. Sanctioned ignorance, postcolonial critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term, refers to colonialist ways of thinking that have become so ingrained for those in power that they are invisible—not to those who are the targets or the collateral damage of their imperialist designs, but to its beneficiaries and those who pay their taxes to support it.

Coincidences or wake-up calls? I was reminded yet again that what my country does in my name is my responsibility to know about and further, to call out. According to Professor David Vine, the United States has more than 750 military bases in 80 countries; the Washington drumbeat to war with China should be a matter of concern for us all. Personally, I was reminded why I write and what my mother’s writing means to me. Perhaps the urgency of these messages explains in part why I seem to be being jolted awake early these summer mornings, unable to go back to sleep. There is no more time for giddy innocence.

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548. W is for Waqt

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual April Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

   Waqt Se Din Aur Raat (title song)

In the last few days of our eight-week stay in India we curled up on the couch with my cousin for two consecutive evenings and watched the 1965 epic Hindi film Waqt, which translates as Time. As a film buff and music-lover, he was able to answer all my questions and comment on the actors and the songs along the way. I was transfixed throughout, all disbelief suspended as I found myself identifying with almost every character in turn, and sometimes all of them at the same time. My lifelong habit, especially annoying to those around me, of continually asking questions and reacting agitatedly to events in a movie as they unfold, did not seem to be a problem in my cousins’ home. If anything, they indulged me with mild amusement.

It was almost unimaginable that I could have reached my late sixties without having seen Waqt even once. It had been so popular that even I had at least heard of it, and it was now considered to be a timeless classic. Directed by Yash Chopra and starring Balraj Sahni, Achala Sachdev, Raaj Kumar, Sunil Dutt, Shashi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, and Sadhana. Waqt was nominated for best film and Sadhana for best actress, and had gone on to win Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Raaj Kumar), Best Story, Best Dialogue, and Best Cinematography in the 13th Filmfare Awards (Waqt (1965 film), Wikipedia). And the film’s songs, one can’t forget the songs.

the three separated brothers in the court scene (S. Verma, rediff.com)

As soon as the closing credits started to roll, I wanted to go back and watch it all over again, and in fact have started to do so this evening. Although it is full of the highly improbable coincidences that mark classic Hindi films, they seemed absolutely right to this viewer, as if the story could only have unfolded in exactly the way it did.

(1965) Shashi Kapoor & Sharmila Tagore at the Ashoka Hotel in Delhi during the shoot of ‘Waqt’.

              Sadhana with Sharmila Tagore in Waqt

I loved the film’s setting in the Sixties, when my own family was still in India, because the era and the atmosphere were familiar to me. Of course, I was growing up in a small university town far from the glitz and glamour of Bombay, so the fashions were far more daring and avant-garde than anything I had known, especially the outfits worn by the irrepressible Renu, played brilliantly by Sharmila Tagore, then barely 21 years old. Shashi Kapoor, who played opposite her as the youngest of the three brothers, was only 27 at the time. I could go on about each of the stars and how they inhabited their roles, but that is not my purpose here. If you don’t mind spoilers you can read this review; but better still, you can watch the whole film here, with English subtitles.

Balraj Sahni, Achala Sachdev, Sunil Dutt, Sadhana, Raaj Kumar, Sharmila Tagore, Shashi Kapoor, Sumati Gupte, Surendra, Leela Chitnis, Manmohan Krishna (l to r)

The main reasons I found Waqt so riveting were its panoramic scope, carrying us through the dramatically shifting fortunes of one family across a broad span of time, and its theme of Time itself. Not knowing all the nuances of the Urdu word waqt, I can only speculate about the layers of meaning it carries within it. But the online Urdu dictionary Rekhta lists a number of different senses in which the word is used, and many longer terms and idioms that include it. Here are just the first few definitions:

Time; term; fixed time (for); season; hour;—duration; juncture;—opportunity;—(met.) adversity, distress:—waqt ānā or ā-pahuṅćnā, or waql barābar ā-jānā (-kā), The days (of a person), to be numbered:—waqt-ba-waqt, adv. From time to time;—now and again:—waqt-ě-be-mauqa, s.m. An inopportune moment; unseasonable juncture:—waqt-be-waqt, adv. In season and out of season, at all times, constantly, perpetually;—a time that admits not of delay;

Time is the present moment in which one is wholly absorbed  (as expressed in aage bhi jaane na tu, one of the film’s iconic songs); Time includes the vicissitudes of life, all its ups and downs; and it refers to the limited possibilities available to a person at a given time, depending on the times. Time comes and goes in an instant, never returning, or it loops back on itself and revisits us when we least expect it. We can never, never take it for granted, for we are all subject to and subjects of Time (as the title song, waqt se din aur raat, puts it so well). Waqt certainly runs us through Time’s wringer, leaving us drained but overawed and, paradoxically, reawakened.

It was the end of my short stay in India, and Time was very much on my mind. So much time—nearly a decade— had elapsed since my last visit. It had been even longer, a whole generation, since Andrew and I had last come to India together, as young parents and eight years before that, as newlyweds. Time spooled out before our eyes as we witnessed places and people in the here and now superimposed on our memories of them ten, twenty, thirty, nearly forty years before. And the cycle of time made itself very clear to us as we met our cousins’ children, now young parents of the age we had been back then, their children now the same age that they themselves had been. Again, we saw whole lifetimes sweep by before our eyes, and how quickly our own times had arced across the sky like shooting stars.

Now I am back in the U.S., our family’s “new” home for more than half a century—itself a very long time. After a trip like this, it seems only yesterday that I left India as a schoolgirl of fourteen. The persons I have felt myself to be at every stage of my life now come into view, each one emerging from or superimposed upon the one before. All of them are still me, all of them at the same time. And my far-flung and fractured family, with all the living generations and so many now gone to join the ancestors, seems to me to be a Milky Way, a web that I must keep reconnecting and repairing, gathering and re-membering; and finally, when I can hold it no longer, casting it wide upon the sea.

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544. S is for SPARROW

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual April Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

     The Nest

About ten days into our trip, Andrew and I booked an auto rickshaw and rode to Dahisar in Mumbai, to the Nest, home of SPARROW, Sound and Picture ARchives for Research on Women. I visit SPARROW every time I go to India, sometimes staying on to work with them for a few days to a week. This time it had been nearly nine years, and the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, so I went with some trepidation. I need not have, since the SPARROW staff are small, but nothing if not intrepid.

SPARROW is a Mumbai-based women’s archives directed by Dr. C.S. Lakshmi, who co-founded it in 1988 with fellow women’s studies scholars Dr. Neera Desai and Dr. Maithreyi Krishna Raj. To quote from the profile page on their website, “The idea was not to set up a Women’s Archives as just a collection centre but to create an archives which would be more vibrant and more communicative. The women’s archives was conceived as an organisation which would bring people together; an archive which would be an agent of change.” It operated in several temporary spaces until 2008, when SPARROW was finally able to build its own nest with a major grant and donations from friends and supporters.

This small band of women have been able to build a substantial collection over SPARROW’s nearly 35 years of operation and, surviving on crumbs, they have been able to carry out their mission of being agents of change. In addition to its publishing program and maintaining its physical and digital archives, SPARROW has half a dozen major projects: its oral history recording program, its digital video recording projects, photography project, media watch project, multilingual collection project, and NGO documentation. All this is carries out with a staff that has had to scale down from nearly 25 to just a dozen. Andrew and I toured the collection, learned how they had weathered the pandemic, and sat down in their customary circle on the floor to share our packed lunches, spreading a coverlet in the floor and passing the dabbas around from person to person.

In addition to her scholarly publications, SPARROW’s director C.S. Lakshmi is also the renowned Tamil writer who writes under the penname Ambai. She has published several collections of short stories, and won the 2021 Sahitya Akademi Award for her short-story collection, Sivappu Kazhutthudan Oru Patchaiparavai, which has been translated into English as A Red-necked Green Bird (2021).

In my teaching I have used some of SPARROW’s booklets on pioneering women in different fields of endeavor, from literature, dance, and film to science and sculpture in stone. These publications have exemplified SPARROW’s commitment to creating a dynamic, interactive archive. The process of creating them involved inviting the subjects to a workshop with college students, who conducted oral interviews and produced the booklet. These workshops inspired some of my students to conduct their own oral histories and to carry out research into similar archival projects in the United States.

Through the booklet on the eminent Dalit writer Urmila Pawar, I came to know and teach her stories, and learned that she had been born and raised in Ratnagiri, also my father’s hometown. On one of my first visits to SPARROW I learned that their collection of oral interviews contained an interview with my atya Kumud Rege, who had lived and worked in Ratnagiri and its vicinity all her life as a Gandhian social worker, and that the interview had been conducted by none other than Urmil Pawar herself. Since the interview was in Marathi, I undertook to get it translated into English, and my youngest atya has now completed that task, all the while caring for her elder sister who passed away just before the pandemic.

My visit to SPARROW this time was necessarily brief, but I cannot describe the sense of relief and respect I felt when meeting the staff and their fearless leader again after such a long time. With children to care for and the lockdown to contend with they had managed to maintain the archives and continue the work, albeit scaled down, throughout the pandemic, returning to the Nest halfway through and then having to retreat to their individual homes during the second surge.

If you wish to learn more about SPARROW you can visit their website here. And please click on this link if you wish to donate to their work.

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541. Pronunciation: Indian English

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual April Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

I mentioned in a earlier post that most of my Indian family and friends speak excellent English, far better than I could ever hope to speak any of the Indian languages I have studied. Their grammar is impeccable, their vocabulary vast, and their pronunciation amazingly accomplished, given the quirkiness of English pronunciation.

As any non-native speaker of English can tell you, English is notoriously hard to pronounce because is it so inconsistent. If you don’t already know the “correct” or received pronunciation (RP), then learning it is a nightmare. Oh sure, there are rules, but every rule has a number of exceptions, thereby requiring speakers to simply memorize everything. In contrast, a language like Hindi is entirely phonetic, which means that it is pronounced exactly as it is spelled—and conversely, spelled exactly as it is pronounced. This makes it possible for even a novice to pronounce words correctly, as long as s/he has learned to sound out all the letters of the alphabet.

The anarchic nature of English pronunciation makes it all the more infuriating that non-native English speakers from different parts of the world are mocked and marginalized for their “incorrect” pronunciation, when many British English speakers seem to make a virtue of mispronouncing non-English words; or alternatively, Anglicizing them out of all recognition. That is why it is so heartening to see the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) roll out its new feature, Pronunciations for World Englishes, including Indian English. They have developed a general model of and a key to Indian English pronunciation. Further, for each of the words of Indian origin in the OED, they have included an audio version (or versions) of the Indian English pronunciation of that word as well as its pronunciation in British and American English. Here is an 18-minute video of a talk about the project, produced by Oxford University Press; and here is an excerpt from a news article on the project:

Pronunciation transcriptions and audio for over 800 entries particularly associated with Indian English, including desh (a person’s or a people’s native country or place of origin), diya (a small cup-shaped oil lamp, typically made of baked clay, often used on religious occasions such as the Diwali festival), bachcha (a child; also a young animal), almirah (a free-standing cupboard, wardrobe, or other storage unit), and bindaas (bold; independent; admired; fashionable), are now available in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

I hope that initiatives like these will begin to put an end to the idea that only the English speak English properly, and that everyone else is a figure of fun. For all the articles and videos on the English words that Indians commonly mispronounce (here’s a benign one, but just do a quick search and find many, many more), there are very few on the many words from Indian languages that non-native speakers of those languages mispronounce.

      from Smoothtalk

At last it seems to be being recognized that there are many World Englishes, each with its own conventions of pronunciation, rather than there being only British and American English, with all the English speakers from elsewhere doomed to playing an never-ending game of catch-up. Perhaps the whole idea of mispronunciation will shift from asking whether a word is pronounced correctly or incorrectly to whether or not it is intelligible.

On my recent trip, as Indian pronunciations became naturalized all around me, American pronunciation began to sound excessively—well—American, almost a caricature of itself. Back in the States, I enjoy listening to the speaking voice on my iPhone that I have changed to Indian English (male); “he” enunciates all the words so clearly.

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513. Blank Slate

I suppose I had thought that a person accumulated her experiences over the years and then, when retirement afforded her the leisure to go through her diaries, miscellaneous writings, and correspondence, she would have all that she needed to write her memoirs. I, that is, not she. All those boxes of papers I haven’t organized going back to the year dot, they could all wait until I had the time to go through them. Once I had the time, I had supposed, the floodgates of memory would simply open, and all the flotsam and jetsam of life would more-or-less fall into place. I realize now that I was counting on it. But as it turns out, events are conspiring to present a wholly different picture. 

For one thing, my mind seems to have gone completely blank. After all, over twelve-plus years Tell Me Another has accumulated more than 500 stories in its archives. That’s more than seven stories for every year of my life. What more can there be possibly left to tell? The more I wrack my brains, the more I come up empty. Perhaps there are no more ’nothers. Likelihood is that I’ve wrung myself dry. 

It’s not only my own memory banks that are failing to deliver, but also those of my trusty MacBook Pro, which has secreted in its ill-organized layers of files and folders my entire life since I first started using a computer—since graduate school in the late 1980s. After years of service, it seems to have chosen this moment of my impending retirement to completely die on me—locking all my data away with it. Even the man at the so-called Genius Bar at the Apple Store had nothing to offer me except for the business card of a data retrieval service that he assured me would withhold charges if it was unable to recover my materials. I was not reassured.

Coming at this time of transition in my life, this massive loss would be daunting enough, but there is more. For along with the data in the documents and photo library on my laptop, all the emails in my personal email account dating back to the mid-1990s—thousands of them–have disappeared as well, trapped in the dead computer and failing to transfer onto any other device. The loss of my emails is perhaps the biggest blow of all, since it means that decades of correspondence with my closest friends are simply gone. 

As a result, standing on the brink of retirement, looking into the abyss, I find myself a blank slate. It’s all over, and I have nothing to show for it. It strikes me that I might have been feeling this way even if I had not lost my data and emails; but now what was the expected angst accompanying a rite of passage has become literal. Everything I have is gone, and I cannot retrieve it. (Before you offer me technical advice on how to recover the emails and (rightly) admonish me for not having properly backed up my data—I do need that advice, but what I’m facing here is something different, something existential.)

I suppose the question now is, when you take away my words, the written proof that I was here, and there, and everywhere, that I wrote, and said, and did, thus and so, what else is left? Who am I and what does my life mean? Without the documentation, the details, what has my life been worth? And then there’s the terror—what if I wake up one morning and the memories themselves are gone, irretrievable? Without my words, will I still be me? 

Many people didn’t think so when my mother began losing her words. Without them, many of her highly verbal friends didn’t know if there was anyone left to engage with. As old friends began to look through her and to talk about her, even in her presence, Mum would cry out, “I’m here!” Here was the infuriating invisibility of the ageing woman raised to a factor of ten. It took me some time to realize that my mother was still very much with me and always would be. She might have lost her cognitive powers, but she never lost her emotional intelligence, or the way she carried herself in the world, or her love. She never lost herself. 

What would happen if I sat with and worked through the panic? If I imagined that the data are indeed irrecoverable? Accepted that I can’t provide hard evidence to support the facts of my existence; can’t call to mind any new stories to justify my existence by re-narrating it. What then? What if I faced the terror of being nothing but a blank slate, stepping forward with nothing but myself, no footnotes, no documentation? After all, I can’t take it all with me, can I? Am I really going to be spending the rest of my days sorting through the detritus of my working life? Or am I going to step forward into a new stage of my life unencumbered? 

As an immigrant, I suppose I’ve been a bit of a hoarder. My brave and peripatetic parents would give everything away each time they moved and start over. In contrast, I have saved every shred of evidence of my former lives, terrified of losing anything lest I lose an irreplaceable part of myself. What if I simply let it all go and decided to travel light for the first time in my adult life? 

Of course I still hope to recover my data and my old emails. But if I cannot do so, I might actually be liberated. Like a child who finds that they do not need their special blanket in order to get to sleep; like Ernie who finds that when he can put down the ducky he can finally get creative. It’s not something I must drag around with me for all eternity like Marley’s chain in A Christmas Carol. What I have really drawn from my experiences has become part of me, part of who I am. And whether or not I lose my cognitive powers, which I suppose we all must do sooner or later, I will never be a blank slate.

What am I afraid of? 

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487. Virtual RUSH II (post-election playlist)

Back in March, when the COVID-19 pandemic first struck and we were sheltering in place at home, our monthly meeting of Rise Up Singing in Harmony, or RUSH (described here in TMA #331, No Rush), was one of the first casualties. It was quickly discovered that group singing was a highly contagious activity, since it releases aerosolized droplets with tremendous force; and furthermore, many of us in the group were of a particularly vulnerable age. That month I consoled myself by compiling and circulating a list of songs for A Virtual RUSH, never imagining that eight months later, there would still be no end in sight. Since the November 3^rd presidential election I have found myself missing RUSH like anything, and wondering what people would choose to sing to mark the occasion if we were going to be meeting as usual this month. Here, then, is Virtual RUSH II.

The songs below are organized by book and page number, since we use two songbooks (both compiled by Annie Patterson and Peter Blood), Rise Up Singing and Rise Again. (For those of you who don’t have copies of either of the books, you can order them here, find indexes here, and learn the songs here.) Clicking on the titles will take you to renditions of the song on Youtube. Of course the choices here are all mine, when the great pleasure of RUSH is going round the circle in turn and singing the song that each person chooses. Please do share what your choice would be for a post-election song.

 

 

From Rise Up Singing (the old blue book):
America the Beautiful (p.1)
Ray Charles leads here with one of its lesser-known verses of this song, which is arguably sung more than the official national anthem:
O beautiful for heroes proved, in liberating strife 
Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life 
America, America, May God thy gold refine 
Till all success be nobleness, and every gain divine.

This Land is Your Land (p. 5)
In January, 2009, Pete Seeger led the singing of this Woody Guthrie favorite at President Obama’s inauguration. If I had my druthers it would be the national anthem.

How Can I Keep from Singing? (p. 43)
Singing has always sustained people in times of great hardship and oppression. This song is no exception, and Enya gives a haunting rendition here. It started out as a hymn, but Doris Plenn added the following verse in 1950.  
When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,
And hear their death-knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near,
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile,
Our thoughts to them go winging;
When friends by shame are undefiled,
How can I keep from singing?

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize (Hold On) (p. 60)
This anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, sung here by Sweet Honey in the Rock, never gets old.

Lean on Me (p. 66)
This song, released back in 1972, has always been deeply comforting. Its writer, Bill Withers, passed away in March 2020, right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he left us this song, among many others. Here it is again, in a global performance by Playing for Change.

Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms (p. 149)
A simple love song (sung here by Doc and Merle Watson) in which nothing else matters:
Ain’t gonna work on the railroad
Ain’t gonna work on the farm
Gonna lay round the shack till the mail train comes back
And roll in my sweet baby’s arms.

Paradise (p. 149)
An elegy to the destruction wreaked by coal stripmining, this song was on the first album by John Prine, whom we lost to COVID-19 in April 2020.

Banks of Marble (p. 180)
A union favorite, sung here by Pete Seeger.

By the Rivers of Babylon (p. 193)
This song was written and recorded by The Melodians in 1970, and was made world-famous on the soundtrack of The Harder They Come.

 

 

From Rise Again (the new brown book):
Redemption Song (p. 80)
On the last album Bob Marley released before he died.
Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
‘Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs

Siyahamba (We Are Marching) (p. 80)
This song, performed here by the Mwamba Children’s Choir,  originated in South Africa and was sung around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, as part of the global solidarity movement against the hateful Apartheid regime. I learned it, along with other South African freedom songs, from Jim Levinson, who directed our a cappella group The Noonday Singers back in the late 1980s, while Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned on Robben Island.

Dear Abby (p. 90)
Another song from John Prine’s first album, reminding us to pull ourselves together: “stop wishing for bad luck and knocking on wood.” (And yes, it’s a repeat from my first Virtual RUSH playlist).

Many Rivers to Cross (p. 136)
Jimmy Cliff sings this song in the movie The Harder They Come, when the hero is between a rock and a hard place. (Another repeat from my first virtual playlist! But then, RUSH members are noted for requesting their favorites month after month, and their favorites become our own.)

Shelter from the Storm (p. 138)
This song, released by Bob Dylan in 1975, was one of my mother’s favorites.
Come in, she said, I’ll give ya
Shelter from the storm.

I Can See Clearly Now (p. 193)
Johnny Nash, who released this song in 1972, is another of the artists we lost this year, October 2020. I’ve always been intrigued by these words:
I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
He celebrates not having cleared the obstacles in his way, but having cleared his mind so that he can see them for what they are.

Monster Mash (p. 233)
This was always a favorite in our RUSH group, and I hope it will continue to be a favorite when it is safe to sing together in person again. Sung by Bobby “Boris” Pickett with The Crypt-Kickers.

Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key (p. 255)
The lyrics of this song are by Woody Guthrie, the tune by Billy Bragg, who sings it here with the band Wilco.

Route 66 (p.280)
Oh, for a long road trip! This song was written by Bobby Troup, and famously covered by Nat King Cole, but my favorite version is this one by the Rolling Stones.

Pressure Drop
Toots Hibbert, of Toots and the Maytals, was another beloved artist whom we lost to COVID-19 this year, in September 2020. They first recorded this song in 1969, and it has been covered by many different artists since then. (Pressure Drop is not in either of the Rise Up books, but if we had been meeting in September I might have brought copies of the lyrics with me and taught it to the group.)

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