The songs we could sing in lifeboats when we are shipwrecked

Voltaire’s oft-quoted recommendation, ‘Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats,’ does offer hope for those who find themselves in hopeless situations, for those who have suffered a defeat or a series of setbacks, as individuals or collectives, but there’s something missing in the l

Good advice.

There’s something missing though. It’s as though it’s all some kind of divine plan, that god, let’s say, wanted all people, of all places, of all ages to experience shipwrecks and was and is taking notes: who in the lifeboats sing and who do not, and to hell with those who drowned.  

Maybe that’s all there is to it, if you are ‘a believer,’ that is. I am not. I don’t believe in divinity and therefore I don’t believe in divine plans. Ships get wrecked in storms and ships that are less seaworthy have less chance of weathering storms. Not everyone gets to escape in lifeboats and indeed sometimes there are no lifeboats at all. People drown.

Voltaire came to mind when I was looking for a poem by Nazim Hikmet and came across the ‘Reflections upon reading a letter from Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), which I wrote in July 2012. The following, in particular:

“Pablo Neruda describes in his ‘Memoirs’ Nazim’s account of how he was treated after being arrested in 1936. He had just published ‘The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin’, the last of his books to appear in Turkey in his lifetime and the Government was perturbed by the fact that military cadets were reading his poetry, especially ‘The Epic’. 

“Neruda relates: ‘He was stuck into a section of the latrines where the excrement rose half a meter above the floor.  My brother poet felt his strength failing him. The stench made him reel. He knew then that his tormentors wanted to see him suffer. So he sang, low at first, then louder and finally at the top of his lungs, all the songs he remembered, love songs, his poems, the ballads of peasants, the battle hymns of the people. And so he vanquished filth and torturer.’

“In 1961, writing his biography in East Berlin, Nazim wrote: ‘Even if today in Berlin, I’m croaking with grief, I can say I’ve lived like a human being and who knows how much longer I’ll live, what else will happen to me?’”

Nazim spent most of his life in prison or in exile. If his life was a shipwreck, what he’s described above is just a small element of the tragedy. It’s as though his life was one shipwreck after another, an angry ‘god’ punishing him over and over again for the sin of singing in the lifeboats he made for himself from wreckage he painstakingly mined.

Yes, he is not alone. Throughout history, there have been shipwrecks and shipwrecks, lifeboats and lifeboats, life-savers and self-liberators, people who were subjected to ‘trails’ similar to those Nazim faced. Or worse.  Voltaire was speaking in a different context of course, but not everyone who quotes Voltaire thinks of asking, ‘who made those damn ships so they cannot withstand a storm?’ They don’t ask, ‘who sent that storm our way, what kind of god does that?’ They don’t seem to be perplexed by the fact that ships get wrecked in calm waters that roll gently pushed by balmy breezes under cloudless skies.  

Voltaire prescribes singing but not songs. What are the songs that the shipwrecked sing or should sing? Should they sing the praises of gods in hope of divine intervention of a kinder, gentler kind? Could they, god forbid, sing about shipwrecks and ship-wreckers. Should the lyrics include a resolution to build better ships, so that people won’t have to sing consolation-songs in lifeboats but can sing upon the decks themselves?

Nazim sang. This is why we know of singing and shipwrecks of a different order, and why in East Berlin, even as he was choking with grief he was convinced that he had lived as a human being. And among his songs, there was one written in 1949 titled ‘Keep your heart’ [with a subtext I read as follows: keep your heart at all cost, in whichever prison you happen to be].


‘Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.
I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass
            ten or fifteen years inside
                                    and more –
            you can,
            as long as the jewel
            on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its lustre!’

Voltaire meant well. We must not forget to sing in the lifeboats if, indeed, we find ourselves shipwrecked. What’s important is that we choose to sing, what we choose to sing about and what we do while singing. And making sure that the jewels on the left side of our chests do not lose their lustre. 

 ['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

Other articles in this series:

Pure-Rathna, a class act

Jekhan Aruliah set a ball rolling in Jaffna

Awaiting arrivals unlike any other

Teachers and students sometimes reverse roles

Matters of honor and dignity

Yet another Mother's Day

A cockroach named 'Don't'

Colombo, Colombo, Colombo and so forth

The slowest road to Kumarigama, Ampara

Sweeping the clutter away

Some play music, others listen

Completing unfinished texts

Mind and hearts, loquacious and taciturn

I am at Jaga Food, where are you?

On separating the missing from the disappeared

Moments without tenses

And intangible republics will save the day (as they always have)

The world is made of waves

'Sentinelity'

The circuitous logic of Tony Muller

Rohana Kalyanaratne, an unforgettable 'Loku Aiya'

Mowgli, the Greatest Archaeologist

Figures and disfigurement, rocks and roses

Sujith Rathnayake and incarcerations imposed and embraced

Some stories are written on the covers themselves

A poetic enclave in the Republic of Literature

Landcapes of gone-time and going-time 

The best insurance against the loud and repeated lie

So what if the best flutes will not go to the best flautists?

There's dust and words awaiting us at crossroads and crosswords

The books of disquiet

A song of terraced paddy fields

Of ants, bridges and possibilities

From A through Aardvark to Zyzzyva 

World's End

Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse

Street corner stories

Who did not listen, who's not listening still?

The book of layering

If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain

The world is made for re-colouring

The gift and yoke of bastardy

The 'English Smile'

No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5

Visual cartographers and cartography

Ithaca from a long ago and right now

Lessons written in invisible ink

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness'

A tea-maker story seldom told

On academic activism

The interchangeability of light and darkness

Back to TRADITIONAL rice

Sisterhood: moments, just moments

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows

Sirith, like pirith, persist

Fragrances that will not be bottled 

Colours and textures of living heritage

Countries of the past, present and future

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains

The ways of the lotus

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville

Live and tell the tale as you will

Between struggle and cooperation

Of love and other intangibles

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions

The universe of smallness

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills

Serendipitous amber rules the world

Continents of the heart

  

The allegory of the slow road 

 

 

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Time is long Dear Rebel, really long

Nazim Hikmet

This is the twenty fifth in a series of articles on rebels and rebellion written for the FREE section of 'The Nation'. Scroll to the end for other articles in this series.  'FREE' is dedicated to youth and youthfulness.

‘Time’ is a term that plagues rebels.  You have to be on time.  You have to get the timing right.  You are always ‘running out of time’.  The ‘time window’ is narrow more of than not.  You can’t be too early, you can’t be too late.  There are a million things to do and there never seems to be enough time to do them all. 

Relax.  There are rebel-moments that are long.  Exceedingly long.  Not talking about hours as opposed to minutes and seconds, not talking about weeks or months.  Years.  For good or bad that’s a possible ‘part of the story’.  In the end it is up to the rebel to make best use of these long moments. 

Nazim Hikmet, the best known and most translated Turkish poet, spent less time as a free man in his native Turkey as he did in prison or exile.  He once made a pertinent observation on ‘time’:  

Since I was thrown inside

                The earth has gone around the sun ten times.

If you ask it:

                “That’s noting – a microscopic span.”

If you ask me:

                “Ten years of my life!”

I had a pencil

                The year I was thrown inside.

It lasted me a week.

If you ask it:

                “A whole lifetime!”

If you ask me:

                “what’s a week?”

During those long years, he could not agitate or attend demonstrations, he could not meet comrades or like-minded people, he could not discuss or debate, he could not raise voice against the many tyrannies he encountered and took on.  He raised his heart and mind, though.  He had strength to lift a pencil and move it across paper.  His words flew out of his heart and into the skies.  They turned into water.  The wind took them to the four corners of the world.  They fell, drop by drop into the thirsty hearts of rebels all over the world. 

There are writers who are incarcerated.  Then there are the incarcerated who turn their agitation and rebelliousness into poetry.  Sometimes they don’t get paper or pencil (or in these days laptops or mobile devices that make communication possible).   But rebels are resourceful people.  They have the will; they find a way.

I once knew a prisoner who had written a comprehensive critique on the dominant paradigm of development.  When he was arrested, the police confiscated all his papers.  I am sure they couldn’t make head or tail of that document, but he never got it back.   Three weeks later, he was released.  In that time he re-wrote that entire book. 

There are of course better known and much celebrated prisoner-writers.  Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist, is a good example.  The title of his best known book, ‘Prison Notebooks,’ explains context in just two words.  Contained therein are thoughts that have inspired and informed a lot of social theory over more than half a century. 

No one wants to go to prison.  Well, when blood is hot and stoutness of heart is overestimated there’s a righteous imp within every rebel that says ‘take me in, do your worst’.  It’s not fun.  But more importantly, imprisonment for the true rebel is less a possibility than a probability.  If you are in for the long haul, as they say, tell yourself now and then that bars don’t stop and indeed they can boost capacities and enhance productivity in ways unimagined. 

Time can be very long.  Count it as a blessing.  You might as well.  

Other articles in this series

Dear Rebel, please keep it short
Get ready for those setbacks
The rebel must calculate or perish
Are you ready to deceive?
Dear Rebel, 'P' is also for 'Proportion' 
Dear Rebel, have you got the e-factor out of the way?
Have you carefully considered the f-word?
It is so easy to name the enemy, right?
The p-word cuts both ways
Cards get reflected in eyes, did you know?
It's all about timing 
Heroes and heroism are great, but...
Recruiting for a rebellion
The R, L and H of 'Rebellion'
Pack in 'Humor' when you gather rebellion-essentials

When the enemy is your best friend

The MSM Principle of Engagement

Dear Rebel, get some creature-tips!

Dear Rebel, get through your universities first

Read the enemies Bibles

Poetry, love and revolution

Are you ready to shut down your petrol shed

The details, the details!

Know your comrades

Good to meditate on impermanence.

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Turning apples into oranges and anguish into smile

A couple of days ago I was discussing poetry with a Turkish friend.  She asked me if I had read a poem by Nazim Hikmet about painting happiness. I had not. She quickly translated the first few lines and emailed it to me. 

"Can you paint happiness Abidin

but without the easy way out

not the rosy cheeked mother breastfeeding her child

or the red apples on a white cloth

nor the jolly fish darting aquarium bubbles;

can you paint happiness

the kind without lies?”

The idea is old of course and speaks to the ancient debates about the purpose of art and the true calling of the artist which will remain unresolved.  No one, Hikmet included, can commission the artist to paint this or that. It is the artist’s decision.  And here, before I am misinterpreted, let me add that we are talking about people who take their art seriously and who are not influenced by ‘market realities’ and the play of demand and supply when it comes to choice of subject, material or style. 

Nazim’s concern is simply and elegantly put.  He wants the artist to depict for us those tender things that reside just below the surface called ‘appearance’ or that which is lost in the clutter of the everyday.  Perhaps.  I don’t know.  I assume.  Anyway, it made me recall the oft-quoted and ill-employed lines from John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, ‘Beauty is truth and truth beauty; that’s all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’.

How does one paint happiness, ‘the kind without lies’, I wondered.  On Sunday evening, I found out.

I went to watch a street theatre performance in Moratuwa.  It was organized to commemorate the birth anniversary of the late Gamini Haththotuwegama, widely recognized as the pioneer exponent of this form of theatre.  It was exactly one month after he passed away.  It was a trans-generational affair with members of the original troupe performing with the present lot, old favourites infused (as has always been the case) with present-day reference, slang, prop and cultural allusions. 

There was naturally a tinge of nostalgia that hovered over the players and the performance given the significance of the event.  That quality was enhanced by the vocal and physical presence of the master’s son Rajith.  Rajith would I know dismiss all this as unimportant as he should and he wouldn’t be wrong.  On the other hand, he alone possesses his father’s voice and in this sense it was ‘complete’.  The father was present in son, chosen genre and the excellence of performance.

Back to happiness.  People and human relations are not red apples (or mangoes) on a white table cloth; nor are they ‘aquariumed’ specimen swishing this way and that to be gazed on and painted by the random passerby.  They are not one-dimensional and are never made of either black or white but both as well as a multiplicity of other colours and shades.  The story of a single human being is an epic.  The story of social process is an untenable proposition in that it is never amenable to reference in the singular; there are millions of stories and millions of version, all cluttered by the grind of the diurnal and the paint of ideology and political prerogative. 

It is not easy to paint human being.  It is not easy to find the colours that do justice to the human condition in all its complexity.  Indeed it is hard to pick and slice and describe it without injuring that which was chosen for dissection. 

The performance, divested of nostalgia, to my mind was an expression of what Hikmet demanded of Abidin.  It was ‘happiness without lies’.  ‘Happiness’ not because that which was commented on through word, action and rhythm was about a world without blemish, a world warranting salutation and celebration. It was a ‘true’ depiction and it rang true because the colours were believable. 

Social comment suffers in delivery because it is often painted in harsh colours and is devoid of humour and wit, whereas people regardless of what kinds of drudgery they suffer are not humourless and not one-dimensional in response or being. 

The critical edge that I saw in the performance was the fact that the script while being ruthless in criticizing the status quo of a number of things still endowed the ‘sufferer’ with the power to laugh at the oppressor and oppression, injustice and its perpetrator, not in a revengeful way, but an almost paternalistic manner.  More than this, the ‘sufferer’ also laughs at himself.  This is one of the most endearing human qualities and I think this is what allows us to believe in and work towards a different social order. 

I do not know what Abidin said to Hikmet. I do not know the rest of the poem and what else Hikmet asked Abidin.  I have never seen Abidin’s paintings.  But I think, had Hikmet lived in Sri Lanka and had known ‘Hatha’, he would have written a different poem. Or perhaps added an extra verse to the ‘Abidin poem’. Something like this:

Come Abidin,

Let us to the pearl of the Indian Ocean

The tear of all tears

Blood soaked and benign.

There, I have heard

Lives a painter

Who turns apple into orange

Draws it out of table, table-cloth and frame

To feed revolution;

Who disguises scream as laughter

Anguish as resolve

And tickles himself to death

So he can live forever.

Malinda Seneviratne is the Editor-in-Chief of 'The Nation' and can be reached at msenevira@gmail.com.

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A kiss awaits you on page 223

People have up-days and down-days.  There are good times and bad times. Right places and wrong times, wrong times to be at the right place.  The world is made of mismatches, one might argue.  Anomalies.  Chasms that prohibit bridging, bridges that help your go from nowhere to nowhere. Saviours who are forced to wear devil-dress and of course the satanic that comes decked as messiah.  Liberators who deny freedom and tyrannies that build the solid foundation from which movements seeking freedoms of greater magnitude can be launched. 

The truth doesn’t come like sunlight or monsoon-ending rain. It does not in the manner of bee and butterfly flit from flower to flower engendering life and dream.  It is made also of scream and abandonment, choice-absence and wrong-pick, the safe-bet that tripped and the random shot in the dark that found its mark. 

There are times I really don’t know what is what, times when I wish that things retained their original names. And functions, I should add.  It is not that I don’t like ‘time’ to be defined in terms of the last sighting of the beloved, the distance to the last shared moment of bliss etc.  Metaphoring I’ve found has its down side.  When we think that road is journey and journey road, we sometimes end up thoroughly immobilized.  When we talk we stop seeing gap between letters and refuse to acknowledge the virtues of healthy conviviality between words, between sentences and among human beings.  

Cacophony drowns our hearts.  So we rely on the poorer logic of mind.  We cut and paste. Compare and contrast. Weigh and weigh.  We cost-benefit.   There are days of exhilaration of course, I do not doubt.  There are down-days too; days made of ‘impossible’ screaming ‘give in, give in’ or whispering with a sneer, ‘give up, give up!’ 

On such days we turn to what we believe are the wise words of wise people, we clasp hands in prayer. We put our baggage down, close our eyes to meditate (and find, when we open them, that someone has stolen all our suitcases.  We should laugh out loud at such times and proclaim to the world in soft conviction the good news of liberation, but we lament instead. Most times. 

I was not up or down, sideways or flat on my face.  Didn’t know where I was so the question of being in the right or wrong place did not arise.  Neither did the issue of right and wrong time come up because time had stopped. Just like that.  Was not looking at any of the many version of the truth-map given free with any purchase over 300 rupees in a used book store.  There were so many lies begging for embrace that I turned them all into a massive pile of dried leaves, jumped straight in and swam from end to end in the liquidity of colour and texture.  I came up colourless. 

I was not looking for anything in particular but I think something was looking for me.  So I opened a book. And the answer to the riddle of the universe kissed me on my forehead with all the love of a mother for a child and a lover for a lover at parting: 223.

Don’t stop what you are doing. Be.  A book will open before your eyes.  Trust me.  ‘Book’ as in a container of information and knowledge, insight and lie, buried in whose elusive dimensions is a kiss that delights and calms, ignites and humbles, embraces and leaves and leaves and leaves in an endless unending that brings you back to the irreducible semi-tones of your humanity.  Trust me.

Here’s the name of the kiss that floored me with a caress and lifted me with love: The Optimist.  No one knows where and when that kiss was born, but the love was witnessed and duly recorded on December 6, 1958 in Baku by Nazim Hikmet thus:

As a kid he didn’t pluck the wings off flies

tie tin cans to cats’ tails

lock beetles in matchboxes

or stomp anthills;

he grew up

and all those things were done to him.

I sat at his deathbed;

he said to read him a poem

about the sun and the sea

nuclear reactors and satellites

the greatness of humanity.

[This is from ‘Poems of Nazim Hikmet’ translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, Persia Books. Page 223.]

Open the book. It is there right in front of you.  It might be made of pages, have illustrations and diagrams. It might be an email from a stranger. The blemish on the surface of the table you left your glasses on, the particularities of the curl of pencil-shred that rolled out of sharpener, the loudness of the loudmouth next door, the word you wanted to hear but no one said. It doesn’t matter.  It is waiting to be opened.  To page 223. 

I was silenced.  That’s what kisses do to you by the way (among other things of course). 

msenevira@gmail.com

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