The moon

On the roof of
My high-rise block,
I caught the solitary moon,
In the cup of my trembling veined hands
But it soon
Dissolved.
In the slanting
Silvery rays
That lit my shaking adult hands,
The way it
Illuminates,
The many
lands forlorn,
On the lonely and cold
Wintry nights.

It filled up
My heart
With
White hopes again,
As it did some
Fifty-five years ago,
Through the cracked windows
Of a poor peasant’s cottage,
At the edge of a lost village,
And it still does,
I am pretty sure.

The
Moon I remember
Of yore,
Always
Looked down from its heavenly perch,
Always smiling
And talking to an orphan
In gentle tones.

The big-eared rabbit
Standing on its legs,
The only resident allowed there,
Waved at me,
From the moon
And then
Came down to my room.

I would chat
And complain a lot,
The rabbit/ moon
Will listen to a
Ten year’s heart,
And invariably
Make the crying motherless
Kid sleep with
Its white wand.

For many years,
I forgot,
As struggle I have to do a lot,
About a caring and wandering

Moon.

Once I fell gravely ill,
In my little flat in the city,
Remembering my village,
My dead Pa and Ma,
My living brothers and sisters,
Who hardly cared
Whether I lived or died,
As I cried, as an abandoned baby,
I again found the moon
In my drawing room,
It had stealthily slipped in,
As it always did then,
Via the open windows
Of my tiny flat,
It flooded both my heart and hearth,
With its milky bright light
And gently touched
My tear-stained face,
With its
Ice-cool
White fingers,
The way my poor Mama
Did only once,
Before
She permanently
Died.
Everybody then said,
She is happy and sleeping at last.
I tried to wake her up,

Saying desperately,
Mama, Mama,
Please wake up
For your Chandu,
But she did not.
Then they took her away,
On a bare cot.
I searched her everywhere
In the village and home
But in vain.

In the cruel city,
I daily lived and died,
Fighting many battles
And about
The shining moon
I just forgot.
In fact,
Hardly could I see it
Above the worsening smog
Or
Through the seat windows of a
Crowded local or a noisy smoky bar.

To-night, however,
As there is no light,
I climb up to the roof,
After many long years,
And finally
See the moon

As always,
Smiling at me.
As
I gather its silvery rays
In my cupped excited hands,
And
Feel very light in spirit and body
And break into a rare
Smile
At my friend,
The big-eared rabbit,
Who stops
And grins,
Thus
Lighting up again,
In white light,
All my opaque insides.

---Sunil Sharma

To: A real friendly Dane Kasper Andersen
It is—
Kasper, Kasper, all the way,
The superman—
Perpetually,
Moving around home-hunters,
Locals and foreigners,,
He, this democratic youth, takes them—
Folks and their little baggage,
Driving them to new
Shrinking sublets;
The friendly, gentle Dane—
A true brother for the valiant but
Lonely internationals, most of them,
Already low on income and their spirits;
Kasper helps them shift up/down
The cold Aarhus;
And sets them off in new quiet
Neighborhoods,
Where icy rains and wind dances,
His warm smile lighting up—
Their small universes!
A reasonable-n- real mover-n-shaker,
He facilitates re/ re-locations,
And enables the floating ones,
Realize their human- n- just dreams,
Poor frightened young learners,
Overseas and locals,
Stepping off a Dickensian novel,
In and around academic Aarhus,
Where officials, as usual,
Do not care for these Others!

The Hauntings

The Hauntings

---Sunil Sharma

I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, (Emphasis added)

There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son's weak mind. (Emphasis added)

(A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens)

 Uncanny!

The moment I stepped out of the shower, I felt it.

The room was no longer the same.

Something had changed; it was in the air--- a slight disturbance, a subtle alteration somewhere? Some bad vibes?  

 I stood still and then saw.

It was a book, placed vertically, the cover facing me directly, on the side table, half-open in the middle, very obvious as a reading invitation.

A Christmas Carol.

The famous book was not there earlier.

Somebody, it seems, sneaked in and placed the novel strategically. A craggy visage looks hard, eyes penetrating; a malevolent presence.

Scrooge.

An apparition swirling up from the mists of 1843. The cadaver- figure suggesting emptiness, decay and sterility. The chilly glare, across the gulf of time, is still a turn-off. I feel the misanthropic hostility radiating from that leathery face, despite knowing well that it is just a painted face, a mere artistic representation. But the representation becomes real. I involuntarily shiver and avoid the unrelenting gaze. I feel Antarctic winds sweeping down my being.

Who placed this book?

 An hour ago, I had checked into the Swan Hotel in Staffordshire and come face-to-face with history. It is a place where past and present are conjoined. Footfalls echoed from the hoary past: The coach- wheels stopping at the former coaching inn, the din of the streets and tired passengers, the neighing of the horses, the bustling halls and stables, the hiss of the wind sweeping the desolate backyard on wintry nights. It is a different era. I am in the remote 1840s.

 Bivalved time can be felt in certain contexts. I witness the un- spooling. There are echoes from the past rising up like bubbles on the surface. Staffordshire. The ills of industrialization were seen here in ample by one sensitive and early acute observer---Charles Dickens.

I was in search of this man, Dickens.

He was a father-figure to me, an unsuccessful Indian writer and man. Two quick divorces, a fiery temperament, treating others as garbage, inability to hold any job for a day, excessive smoking indicated a paralysis that was frightening. I was shrinking fast. I wanted deliverance from a system that ensures atrophy of soul. When a caring friend in his early 30s died of a massive cardiac arrest in a New Delhi super-specialty hospital within hours of admission, leaving behind a sobbing wife and two pretty daughters asking their dad on the stretcher to wake up and play with them on the terrace and everybody was crying openly at this tragic sight, I, the only dry-eyed, could feel nothing. No pain or sense of loss. No fellow-feelings. No bereavement for a young life snuffed out cruelly. I felt nothing, only a gaping, widening void inside. A tall wall got erected inside. I felt like becoming concrete and very solid and hard inside. And when the dead body was finally being carried to the burning ghats, followed by loud and terrific commotion, pitiful wailing and crying around, and, amid this universal loud weeping and violent beating of chests, I could feel nothing but stasis of the frigid inner icebergs, I got real scared. In fact, I real panicked. What is happening to me? I do not feel anything. No cold, hot or loss sensation---nothing. Only a developing desert inside. It was frightening!

I was turning into early Scrooge, the selfish Scrooge before his final redemption through the ghosts. I needed ghosts to cleanse my toxic soul. I was searching for identical salvation and moral re-generation. A complete transformation.

Only one man could deliver---Charles Dickens. My relation to the writer runs deep. I read him in my college days and found him captivating. A great narrator with whom I had felt an instant Karmic connection. In my present crisis, he offered hope. Re-reading Dickens was therapeutic and an anti-dote to my fast decay and degeneration. In March, I booked my ticket and flew to England---on a long pilgrimage. The great Victorian was calling me. I wanted to meet him in 2012---his bi-centennial year of birth. Staffordshire and the Swan were good choices of this historic tryst. Dickens had visited the town and stayed in the hotel, then a coaching inn in 1852. I was sure to meet him there.

My intuition was proving correct.

The versatile Master had placed A Christmas Carol as the first beckoning sign; he was ready to speak with a seeking fan…finally.

 Let me share with you another sign, an interesting coincidence, my dear reader, that it was the same room where Dickens had slept in 1852 after a visit to Copeland factory in the Potteries, in the Black Country.

I just could not believe my luck. I was staying in the same room. Another positive sign. I was elated. Those who have visited Stratford- upon- Avon, told me of adult tourists coming from four corners of the globe---and there are three million of them annually--- crying in his birthplace or other consecrated venues. I can understand their state. If it was a fulfilling pilgrimage for me, then this room was my ultimate shrine.

It was sacred space.

Post-dinner stroll, I retired to bed with the book.

And my journey began.

The first message from the Master: There is a Marley to every Scrooge, and, a Scrooge for every parched soul that does not listen.

As I opened the book, I got pulled in by a magnetic force beyond frail me. My fingers, it seems, had activated the static landscape between the covers of the iconic book with a rare afterlife. The black marks on white pages became alive and dancing and the Victorian Age started becoming real before my startled eyes with lightening speed. And I became a part of that dismal landscape, Unseen by the Scrooge and party but they, seen by me.

And then, I saw DICKENS---the father-figure, creating and immersed in his created world.

His spectral presence floated up from the dim mists of time and overwhelmed me completely. I started crying like a child who gets united with a lost father after years of abuse and social neglect. Although Dickens said nothing, I could feel his compassion for crying me. It was a land of non-verbal communication. You sensed messages being transmitted by that kind-hearted gentleman. I could see materializing all the characters from his writing table---full-bodied round characters, utterly believable, some eccentric, some roguish, some loveable, some hated instantly, making you laugh and cry. It was unbelievable---the phantoms, these fictional creatures, taking an autonomous life and becoming uber-real and cool than their biological counterparts that served models for the observant writer.

Only Dickens could do that---with his master strokes on a very wide canvas.

Real is fiction; Fiction, real. Second message.

Then there is the whirlwind: Dickens sticking the labels in boyhood due to the incarceration of his father in the debtors’ prison; financial upheavals, law clerk; journalist, and, finally the writer. Nothing unusual. There were and are hundreds of thousands of such less-fortunate and ordinary people but only one towering Dickens.

There are more circulating images around me in the space.

The answer comes fast: Dickens’s empathy and haunting memory of those early dark days spent in the labeling factory, turning him into a life-long ally of the Undead of the industrialized England. At the cusp of a historical change and called upon as a true and reliable witness by Life, a sensitive and caring Dickens uplifts above ordinary circumstance by reading the present correctly, giving a correct diagnosis of the malaise afflicting his own robust age and giving a cautionary moral tale for the cynical succeeding ages as well. The clairvoyant writer is seen wandering among the poor quarters of London, visiting factories and prisons, talking to the overworked workers, taking up their causes with the real conviction and passion of a current journalist. And highlighting these social issues through his writings.

His involvement in the community, his immersion in the lives of the underdogs, his questioning the whole narrative of material progress at the cost of human soul---in brief the inversion of the Renaissance ideals by the 1840s and onwards---lays bare the naked motives of capitalist England---sheer wealth-accumulation minus a heart and soul.

After lifting the veil off the face of reality, the residual moral core is art that shows the ugly face beneath the painted one. It shows the wrinkles and warts of the age but also gestures towards the upcoming ages with the same message: Material gains sans any matching morality is like early Scrooge. An empty house.

Then another buried image pops up from the deep abyss: Dickens, successful writer and cult figure, making reading tours in England and America. He is still connected with his reading public, a celeb status notwithstanding.

Any writer divorced from his reading public or host community is unredeemed soul walking the ramparts of the fort in Elsinore.

Finally, Dickens confronts me. He looks directly at me. As shown in some of his pictures. He points to the beginning of the Carol book. I re-read it and get my final answer: There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

So, it is a story; about hauntings, that have a literary precedent in the haunting of the perplexed Hamlet, the prince, located within the Gothic tradition that Dickens inverts.

Hauntings are important visitations from the other side in ages defunct and will keep on recurring in future also to make us confront the self-manufactured ghosts from the past, and, unless they are laid to rest, we mortals will function as the walking ghosts of our own ideal selves from an earlier age.

Any book that fails to affect a deeper moral transformation of characters due for that cleansing process and a concomitant and parallel purifying process in readers will remain a hoax, a sham, a counterfeit, a minor and largely forgotten product…

As I furiously type out these words on PC, I feel I am being dictated by the spirit of Dickens. It is a desperate struggle to catch the ghostly words of a receding spectral Dickens before he exits completely at the crowing of a crow and start of a fresh dawn…

As I was leaving the Swan Hotel, completely cured of my insomnia and apathy, I asked the porter, “Who placed A Christmas Carol in my room?” He smiled and said, “It was left by a previous guest whose name incidentally was Charles Dickens. It was there. You might have failed to notice it upon your arrival.”

I did not have any answer to this.

The Finale: It is meta-story. Dickens made me write it. I never visited Swan. You can believe it or leave it as another yarn.

 (Courtesy: The Delightful Dickens)

The Chinese Opera, Ionesco, the Chairs, the Indian English theater and a mask

---Sunil Sharma

I was watching the Chinese opera last evening in an open-air auditorium in the suburban Mumbai. The February weather was mild. A cool wind was blowing off from the nearby river that flows into the Thane creek, creating a pleasant ambiance  The 90-minute performance by the visiting troupe left the audience stunned by transporting us into a different region. It also showed that good theater can transcend linguistic and geographical barriers easily. We did not know the Chinese; they did not know Hindi but the performance spoke directly to us. Pantomime, Kung Fu, song and dance were all part of this old Cantonese drama put by 27 artistes wearing dainty costumes and minimal make up on a bare proscenium in an Indian urban location. The music--- largely flutes and cymbals and drums---was haunting. There were no props. Not even scenery. Just a flood-lit stage dominated by the slim and pretty artistes gliding in the air in perfect sync with each other. Acrobatic and dramatic skills were highly evolved of these young artistes.
They were able to transform this corporate event into high performance art by their mobile facial expressions, body language and nimble footwork. An ordinary landscape was turned into a fairy land; an ordinary evening into a sublime experience through their stylized acting, singing and dancing.

We were taken back into the past and a China not found elsewhere in newspapers and books.
We were travelling autonomous art realms defying all logic of time and space. Past and present collided into each other, forming a continnum.
The imaginary never looked so real. That is the power of true art. It can make the unreal look real for the audiences everywhere.
That is public theatre--- a grand spectacle, involving music, acrobatic and acting skills, dance and powerful dialogues. Basically, it is oral communication and designed to be seen and heard. In other words, it lends itself more quickly for dramatization than any other genre; it is more liable to be staged successfully rather than other cultural forms like a short story or novel that demands to be read in solitude.
So theater is public; fiction is private. Theater is older; fiction in its developed form and finesse is newer. The early Greeks knew that plays were to be staged for the public. So did early Indians. Theater was mass. So is the cinema---thereat improved version for an industrial/ post-industrial, high-tech society. But fiction is historically meant to be consumed in private. To read your Tolstoy or Marquez, you need a quiet room; to see Seneca or Shakespeare, you need to sit in a big auditorium along with others, willing to participate in the common viewing of a common act. The requirements for both the genres are different. One is communal experience; another individual. But the person who likes Tolstoy and Shakespeare both can, given the different contexts, become a communal spectator or a private reader equally fast. Both public and private compete for his/her attention and the reader can effortlessly exchange the solitude for a public participation as a spectator in a cultural event that, as a staged performance of a team in a hired place designated as auditorium, can obtain full closure only with the participation of the citizens as willing viewers. In fact, the production is successful only when people turn up in large numbers to see the performance by paying for tickets in a special area famously called Broadway. In some cases, entry can be free. But the point is, free or paid, larger participation makes theatre a true theater and relevant also.
Sadly, the theater in the West and in India lost this original function and insight. Now, they are losing their audiences as well. Any theater that becomes the private property of few hundred clients in a closed space tends to lose its vitality and then, slowly, its appeal.
Let us take up the Indian folk theater like the Yakshagana. When I watched its open-air public performance for the first time---few years back, in another Mumbai suburb, on a street, late night---I was mesmerized by this spectacle put up by travelling amateur actors. There were a thousand people present for this performance on a makeshift stage. Again, the language was different---Kannada---but I could get the main drift of the action. The whole thing was sponsored by an Udupi hotel. There was no ticket. Everybody was welcome. And the diversified audience maintained discipline and decorum in that long performance that relied on elaborate make-up, gaudy costumes, fake mustaches and jewellery, and, loud dialogue delivery. A later identical performance in an upscale Mumbai auditorium failed to impress due to the congruity of the folk theater and its urban stage with sophisticated lighting and pit orchestra---an appropriate setting for more metro themes.
The world as open-air stage vs. enclosed space binary also plays a crucial distinction in the production and reception of plays.
 A similar 10-day, open-air production of the epic Ramayana also highlighted this factor vis-à-vis the effect of the popular theater  There was a large crowd of spectators. Some were sitting on the ground, some standing near the VIP enclosure. It was a kind of the Elizabethan stage where the commoners and the nobility met in the democratic and liberating theatrical space. Only difference was that this time the designated space was sacred as compared with the secular Elizabethan theatrical space. The story was well-known to everyone. It is in our cultural DNA. But the entire action was being lapped up hungrily by the quiet audience. There was lot of slapstick comedy and crude humor thrown in as comic relief by the cast of travelling amateur actors. Loud acting, costumes and music were a common staple. Dialogues in verses were for the actors playing the gods and prose, for minor characters. Ramayana and Mahabharata are the two epics that lend themselves easily to stage adaptations in every language of India and other languages of the world, including English. They contain all the elements that define and appeal to the folk psyche.
These are the master narratives that contain the entire civilizations in them. Their enduring beauty is that they still speak directly to us positioned in a completely different era.
As the folk theater  the production of such narratives becomes more flexible, open and supple. Artistes are free to innovate. The carnival nature of such village productions even to-day enables the critique of the official culture---entrenched feudalism in developing India in all its patriarchal and ugly manifestations---of power abuse at every level of society: educational, religious, political, panchayati, state, police by the troupes of wandering or resident artistes. Through humour, official order gets inverted. The power structures get lampooned and relief is provided in a grim social situation. Satire, burlesque and farce are other related developments of this flexible form.
It is a powerful medium of communication for a society---the public theatre where entire community or village participates either as spectators or actors and relevant meanings are socially produced, appreciated and dispersed collectively. The stage belongs to all. There are no hierarchies, no barriers. It is employed to question, educate and entertain the masses. The common public is both the creator and consumer of these public texts circulating in the rural areas: the ownership is common, so is its consumption. The role of public is important---as it was in the Athenian drama.
Modern theatre is private. And very pale vis-à-vis the more robust public theatre. The trend started in the eighteenth century Europe and climaxed in the twentieth. The royal patronage was gradually replaced by the individual, with the ascendancy of the middle-classes everywhere. Patrons, as individuals and a collective, became the deciding arbiters and end-users of a system designed to bring profits from theater as a commodity. In India, Anglicized upper-middle-class, in order to show the superiority of taste and their cultural exclusivity, came to patronize English theater in the 80s and 90s of the last century. The disconnect with the general mood was complete. English theater became elite. It reflected the aspirations, tastes, concerns and values of the power elites insulated from the problems and struggles of both middle-class and the toiling masses.
Theater had become artificial, effete and extremely private, out of bounds for the general public.
With further competition from TV and commercial cinema as sources of mass entertainment, the theater was rendered redundant and became finally extinct---or, almost. It lost its roots in the public place and vitality. Right from the Athenians down to our age, theater as a public form---street theater, for example, in our age---interacted with a live public and shaped up responses to major issues affecting entire communities. But privatization of this form and its patronage by the elites as cultural trophy suffocated this ancient form of communal communication, a kind of pluralistic artistic endeavor at producing, receiving and dispersing meanings and values, within the public art space---very much like the epics. The privatized theater produced tortured private visions in a dark Europe of the 40s and 50s and radical 60s. The English theater in metro India echoes Eugene Ionesco…and his famous play, the Chairs. By the second decade of the 21-century, English drama had exhausted its original creative spirit, its spark and got lost in the desert of puerile plots and inane dialogues that appealed to nobody in particular. The plot was lost completely. It was like the accumulating chairs on an empty stage, in an unidentified setting, where audience is expected anytime and chances of communication are difficult. Finally, when the audience arrives, it is not visible and the person called to deliver message is deaf-n-dumb! The old man and woman commit suicide from the tower by jumping into the sea. The effect, writes Ionesco, is to produce a sense of emptiness. Theater makes a rapid descent into bleak and cynical absurdity from its glorious heights achieved by Shakespeare and Ibsen. And nobody remembers their remote ancestors Sophocles or Euripides.
Everything marvellous becomes banal. The joint ownership of the form---between dramatist and live public audience--- becomes obsolete. The joint ties are sundered. Atrophy, ennui, despair, passivity step in and status quo continues with fractured visions. The Hamletian distressed cry of time is out of joint is completely drowned out in the cacophony of commerce.
English theater in England weakened; its distant colonial offspring wilted in an Internet age where amnesia is promoted and pizza and burger joints dominate the public discourses rather than Beckett or Pinter. English drama in India’s short renaissance is also over. The English novel in India is proving a tough competitor. It is an age not suitable to drama itself. A three-hour performance, highly-priced, is watched largely by wannabe actors, critics and writers. The general public is missing from these lavishly-mounted shows.
Any literary form loses its charm, once its historical age of production is lapsed. It gets overtaken by another developing form. Epic and its innocent age once over can never be replicated in the next age. Even if it does get replicated by a genius of Joycean stature, it fails to re-create the freshness and the original charm of the Homeric tales that still talk to us, like our own myths and epics. Theater --first as folk or public form, then as private form of expression of fractured artistic visions---is in critical stage. It has retreated into pricey auditoriums accessible to few rich clients. Broadway and Off-Broadway, street theater are some valiant steps to continue the tradition of dialogue, oral one, with the public, now passive spectators. Brecht did attempt some resuscitation of this passive consumer but after him, the consumer relapsed into a passive state. Theater is the voice of the people as famous Gaddar from Andhra Pradesh in India declares. Unless it returns to its roots and interacts directly with public, theater stands the danger of becoming a museum piece---whatever the coteries of critics, dons, writers, directors and actors might say. 
We need another rejuvenating spring for drama---and that includes the Indian English drama as well. India awaits its own Brecht in Indian English. The regional theater has been more vital, complex, real, meaningful and productive. People connect with the themes and productions. Drama needs a big jolt.  It is like wearing the theatrical mask of an Athenian or Classical or Noh or Yoruba drama on the stage and start seeing the world differently. A vision from that involved position, from that quick alteration---the rapid transition from person to actor to that character--- can be very uplifting and that frenzied state, that heightened perspective can ensure a revival and renewal of this crossover drama form here in India. Unless it is not done consciously by the stakeholders or its practitioners, English drama in India will remain a metro oddity---very much like listening to the American Jazz in a five-star hotel in Mumbai or New Delhi, along with the Page Three regulars, while rest of the city is in a hurry to catch the overcrowded evening bus or train to a distant home.

(Courtesy: Illuminati, 2012)

On : Language, Writing, Community and Ngugi

---Sunil Sharma

Ngugi  wa Thiong’o belongs to an illustrious tradition of story-telling that, for me at least, has got high summits like Cervantes, Shakespeare, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, among others. They all share common traits: concern for community and culture without being parochial or jingoistic; writing in and a preference for the vernacular language; a full life as an explorer of ideas, forms and cultures and an overall global artistic vision that encompasses all the classes of their native countries. Although topical in many aspects, these high-value and extremely gifted writers transcend spatial/temporal barriers and speak to us as contemporaries, despite the materiality of our rootedness in different geographical locations, literary tastes, linguistic contexts, cultures and eras. They are Immortals who have defied time, and, space just cannot restrict them. Serious writing is always like that, otherwise Homer would have been dead a long ago---with physical Homer. Ngugi is an inheritor of a long tradition of writing---in other words, story-telling; of un-stale, youthful master narratives that leave us rejuvenated, post-reading. The great bilingual Kenyan writer is what other post-colonial writers are not: He is local, yet global in his impact and reach. His later works, although composed in his first language for his community, still stir powerful feelings of empathy, affinity and identification; shock of understanding and appreciation; in other words, a host of fellow feelings among us---the forced residents of a globalised society where MNCs with USA bases largely dictate and decide what we have to see, read and eat, think and express, wear and drive and work, in this totalitarian cultural set-up. Big Mac is no longer theirs; it is ours now---a global icon that celebrates a way of eating, living and thinking. Country contexts do not matter in this relentless conquest of mind---the thinking mind converted into a consumer’s mind that gets their orgasmic peak by shopping in a Wal-Mart franchisee in Khartoum or Dhaka. In fact, in a post-colonial but neo-colonial world, Ngugi sets up a contrasting example for other writers desirous of an USA visa or assignment in Ivy-league universities there: Go local. Discover the joys of writing in your language. Return to your beliefs. Explore the folklores and folktales that embody the aspirations and the experiences of an entire community and by becoming one with this world-view, get the right feel of your location, your history---your situatedness in a timeline that has got a past, present and future. This return to your roots, this journey back to your own language and through this language, to your community’s overarching value frameworks, can be very redemptive, fruitful and productive. It is like walking through a dense fog in the jungle and suddenly running into a glittering civilization, out in the open that was there before us but invisible due to opaqueness of vision. For the skeptics, Ngugi shows the way in this reverse migration. He is the typical expert guide in the quest for indigenous cultures and helps facilitate in the recovery of the receding voices and documenting of the things about to be eclipsed by forces of post-modernization and post-colonialism on the rampage in most of the third-world countries. For every bi/tri-lingual middle-class writer/academic dreaming of a home in America, Ngugi leaves a choice: Homeland and native language Vs. English, its enormous fringe benefits and a Western recognition. They call it the debate between Achebe and Ngugi. Critics might say he is good master but poor role-model. He himself is settled in USA, finally. But these are the strong contradictions in every powerful writer’s personality: The paradox of living in a volatile world where ideas and oppressive politics clash and produce unstable social conditions for intellectuals that often degenerate into open hostilities, prison terms and even complete annihilation of the dissidents. Ngugi is many things to many folks but one virtue remains constant: His love for Kenya and Kenyan people. This sincerity of conviction makes him a stand-out figure. And, for me, a colossal among writers from Africa who prefer English to denigrate their own countries of birth. Ngugi is a nomad---like the earlier predecessors. He is bold and courageous. And he is one with the community. The latter is his inspiration and bedrock. He is epic in his sweep and presentation; others from Africa are not. The latter’s vision is fragmentary and micro. Ngugi is macro, comprehensive and majestic. Like Kilimanjaro, he towers above them all.

Besides, he is an activist. The one that makes engagement with politics a must for his life. A writer of commitment. No, it is not a dirty word for him. The year 2011 shows that commitment is new global mantra. De-radicalized age is receding behind---if not a myth, it will become so soon when the disinherited and disillusioned join the swelling ranks of protesters. The Tahrir moment is proving universal and a nightmare for every corrupt ruler. Arab Spring is invading every closed or open political system where 1% is allowed to rule over 99% of the people. In such an unstable scenario, Ngugi shows the moral value of dissident, of serious writing that challenges the status-quo everywhere. The writer as subversive. The writing as authentic. As not an individual search for hybrid and hyphenated identities but as the genuine, well-articulated communal resistance against debasement, oppression and exploitation.

His lineage is grand. The colonial world brings literary treasures to the colonized and transmits the finest values of revolutionary bourgeoisie through its literature.  Despite the dangers of casting the rest of the world in their image of superior civilization by manipulating such writings, the fact remains that the colonized become alert to the existence a better, democratic, liberal world and possibility of a completely humane world. Ngugi’s literary ancestors---and ours also---question the political system that promotes the welfare of the elite at the cost of the majority and talk of a sense of history that restlessly demolishes all the totalitarian social structures in its evolution and growth as a world force. In his long career, Ngugi, as a professor of English and indigenous writer, resists the temptations of English and its global domination---from the position of an insider---and ably demonstrates that as a post-colonial subject, still embedded in Anglo-American grid, he can, through his writings in Gikuyu, can resist the transmission of the hegemonic cultural values of an evangelical and imperialistic West and in this long and painful process of sheer evolution, undermine the monochromatic western vision, especially UK and USA, as leading power brokers and power elites of a USA-centered world teetering perilously on an economic collapse caused by the recession and sub-prime crisis and huge bail-outs. It liberates him from the shackles of imperialistic ideology and sets him back on a return journey to original Africa, largely unseen to Western tourists and writers so far.

In a way, Ngugi resists colonial languages for their purely political and commercial manipulations by the elites in the spread of the consumerist, cultural and hegemonic values and their capacity for colonizing mindscapes of post-independent nations in Africa and elsewhere through the literary and media routes, by extension. His return to his own language by abandoning the use of English for creating his version of Kenyan society is remarkable, honest and sincere. It has enabled him to capture the dreams of his community in their first language; their cadence, vitality and idiom, most authentically, realistically and poetically. In English, it was not possible. The daily struggles, hopes, existentialist despair, angst and frustration in living in a society ruled by corrupt new black or brown masters are vividly painted by him in Gikuyu rather than in English. This strategy has paid him off well. His reputation and integrity as a writer has globally increased and stature uplifted, and, writing in a medium understood not by many outside Kenyan borders and within has not diminished his position as a writer of eminence. He has achieved what other writers preferring to write in English in Africa or elsewhere have failed to achieve: Authenticity of local flavour and an immediate connect with his own people. His work resonates with them. It is like catching their dreams for them in full details.  

You catch your dreams in your first, your own language, not in the language of your colonial oppressors and greedy masters, for whom your grandpa was a dark-skinned coolie and your nation as a looting ground. The souls of these heathens were to be saved from rotting in hell and the dark place was to be saved from utter damnation and anarchy. Order, enlightenment and progress were to be brought onto such dark folks and a dark continent by the marching missionaries and merchants and their ruthless armies.

Writing in your first language brings a certain proximity denied to writers who write in English outside the West. It is gaining access to the collective dreams of your peers and compatriots. It is like portraying your own community and nation through a language spoken by a majority and thus recovering a healthy sense of historical moment via it. It is communicating with your people in their language, not in an alien language. It is dealing with contemporary realities through the prism of a common medium of perception and communication. Great writers have done this only. They have gone to the so-called vernacular rather than Latin or courtly French in the past for identifying the national sense and mood.

Cervantes, Shakespeare, Turgenev and Dostoevsky did that only---elevating the languages spoken by their compatriots and peers alike in their respective countries and time. Cervantes wrote in vernacular Spanish; Shakespeare in English in complete contrast to the prevalent style of the University wits, Turgenev wrote in Russian, despite his love for French and Dostoevsky was steeped in Russian language only.

Then, there are other affinities as well; uniting them across the temporal-spatial divides. Their nomadic nature; quest for national spirit; championing of the underdog and the subversive nature.

Take the wandering Cervantes first. He served in the army, got wounded fatally, lost his left arm, was captured as a slave by the pirates on the high seas and got ransomed and finally released; got jailed for fraud and later on settled down to write his vision of Spain in transit. Don is a living vital literary document---as alive and kicking to-day, as it was in the 17^th century. Its vitality is never diminished. He drew a complete picture of manners and mores, in a language spoken by the common people. Democracy had arrived in a big way. The vast canvas and the epic scale of Don are just staggering. You cannot have such broad and in-depth vision today. He talks of a society in transit. Aristocracy dying; the revolutionary bourgeoisie arriving in Spain, and, Cervantes caught at the intersecting junction.

Shakespeare, escaping from Stratford-upon-Avon---found sanctuary in London. He created unforgetful dramas for the Elizabethans in their lingo. His theater is live and inclusive. All classes meet here. History, robust and on the go, is witnessed in the mix of classes. A complete society emerges in his rich plays, a society in transit.

Turgenev, escaping from his past as a landed gentry and oppressive nature of such an unequal Russia of serfs and lords, roamed the countryside and came up with his famous Hunter’s Sketches, a sensitive, almost poetic evocation of Russian countryside and the domination of the serfs by the cruel landowning gentry. Again a society in transition. Anticipating broadly the revolution of the 20^th century Russia in its unrest and turmoil that such unequal social conditions are bound to crate sooner or later. Turgenev creates a claustrophobic Russia where future generation were to be active in order to breathe freely.

Dostoevsky was involved with radical causes, got death sentence that was commuted at the last minute and his religious conversion that helped him deal with the crises of such a violent world. All these writers were actively involved in the social life of their time and came to develop an epic world-vision by their identification with the historical moment in all its flaws and beauty. They condemned the brutalities and championed the cause of the poor. You might like their solutions or not but they are very sincere in their commitment towards their craft and society at large, elevating them above the ordinary.

Writing is a means of protest, of resistance, of change---in short, activism on behalf of the voiceless.

Ngugi inherits the same illustrious tradition of writing as a challenge to the ruling elite/s and dominant ideologies, if not consciously, but as a subconscious influence through a western education and exposure. His return to his first language and folktales---the repository of collective beliefs----signals his commitment to a social cause: Of radicalizing the consciousness of the recipient reader/viewer through serious writing and using literary forms as empowering sites of protest, resistance, awakening and change. His theatre does that for his people what Brechtian theatre did for the Germans and later on, to all of us.

It awakened us from our slumber.

Ngugi family suffered a lot during the early Mau Mau revolution. He came back to teach in Kenya, got arrested for his questioning attitude, suffered a lot, his home there got burgled; he moved to America by accepting a dual teaching assignment and was racially abused recently in a hotel---showing things have not improved much for him either in homeland or his adopted country. Issues like poverty, exploitation of the poor and political oppression in free African nations and racialism in advanced nations still preoccupy his artistic attention. The dream of a free and fully democratic and liberal society still eludes him---and rest of us, located in different historical moments and contexts world-wide. His nation is still in transition. Most societies are dynamic and in constant flux. From being an organic intellectual to a dissident, Ngugui has become a global beacon for the successive generations of the post-colonial writers and readers. He shows the way to us: Either follow the dictates of the Western academia and publishing MNCs and write about Africa/India the way they like you to be or abandon the language of the former masters, resist the colonization of mind and go back to your own roots by celebrating that lifestyle in your own language. Most of the post-colonial writings in Africa or Asia are either mildly critical or supportive of the colonial experience. Most of the time, it is organic to the project of colonialism. They treat the former white masters as benevolent ones and criticize the administration in mild terms. The writers still pander to certain myths and stereotypes in English or French or Spanish to please their new masters. A certain India or Africa---mostly caricatured, chaotic, unruly and despotic---is allowed to emerge in these carefully-calibrated and dispersed writings by writers writing in London, Paris or New York. Ngugi, through his radical views on writing, language and its politics, the experience of post-colonial societies, has demonstrated that for a full recovery of selfhood, racial memory and historical sense of location and situatedness, of community feeling, a writer, a true writer, has to abandon the language of former colonial masters and write in his nation’s language. The rest is as real as the fake roses in the dentist’s clinic---to cheer you up before your appointment in the reclining chair for that painful dental procedure called root-canaling. 

Tendai Tagarira interviewd by Sunil Sharma

Interview text of Tendai Tagarira: A Denmark-based versatile young author, poet, blogger, political exile

Q: What does it mean to be an exiled writer in a globalized world?
Exile is not easy. Speaking up is not easy. In my case, the price I have to pay for free speech is exile. As for globalization, that notion is a confusing one because it implies some things I don't quite fully agree with. The way I see it, I am one of the many voices that are persecuted for exercising their freedom of opinion by a government bend on suppressing its peoples freedoms, in Zimbabwe. Living in Denmark allows me to write or speak my opinions without a petrol bomb being thrown into my apartment. That is why I put up with the cold Danish winter, because I must exercise my free speech in order to speak for my generation in Zimbabwe.

Q: What role does memory play in the writing of the exiled?
In Africa, we have a storytelling tradition that involves metaphors, usually of animals representing the human social condition. This method has proved an indispensable way to keep ancient knowledge and history through the art of African story telling. It is easy to remember a good metaphor. For example, in the West, many remember Gorge Orwel's Animal farm. So, before I talk about memory, I must talk about metaphor, as it is good for method to keep an important lesson engrained in the readers memory. In most of my writings I use metaphors and irony, but sometimes I am too impatient and I write as if holding the barrel of a smoking gun. When that happens, it is as if my memory is a Tsunami wave. The end result is that I can write volumes of work everyday.

Q: can we re-produce a Proustean memory? Careful recall of certain lapsed moments and their artistic presentation?
Yes. I think the human mind is a powerful tool and even the latest sciences are only uncovering the secrets of the mind. I believe artists and writers are gifted in different ways and there is no one particular method that works. There are several methods, depending with one's experiences and background. Some authors make better use of their proustean memory, others don't.

Q: What is the role of the land exited? Does she call you back---a silent mother---on lonely, snow-covered, moon-lit nights?
Yes, and much more.

Q: What is the identity of an exiled writer? Hyphenated? Pull of the land receding behind; pull of the new welcoming shores? Are you capable of reconciling these competing pressures?
Identity of the exiled writer is one the writer chooses, but in most cases one cant help but feel rootless. Yet some embrace their new exile cultures, others hang on to the past, and some dangle between these two aspects. In my case, Identity is not cast in stone, but is always evolving. But I choose to be me and that is the essence of my identity. I have no one specific culture, but I can dabble with many cultures and therefore my identity is a diverse one.

Q; Is it all about new beginnings? Or, old appeals and sundering of emotional ties?
New beginnings are always a both scary and amazing time, depending how one looks at it. In my view its a question of looking at the glass as half empty or as half full. As for old emotional ties, I use that to fuel my writing. It is fuel and very good fuel.

Q: How can an exiled writer straddle these two worlds and remain relevant and appealing to both?
For me, its about taking one day at a time and keeping busy. I have a passion to collaborate with a vast number of artists from across the world. I also dabble in different artistic expressions. Last year I won the Nice Film Festival in France, for a film co-produced with Vitor Lopes(Portugal). The film is based on an old poem I wrote in 2010 and then I transformed it into a script and it took us one year to make 8 mins of animation film. So I keep busy and I hardly spend time straddling these two worlds. I live in the moment, just like a heartbeat.

Q: Is it not difficult to resurrect disappearing home landscapes in a new socio-cultural settings? You feel, initially, alien in both places---for your beliefs and values?
Hahaha. I am an Alien. At least that's what my Danish government issued travel passport said. In many ways, i am different from many people. No matter where I am, even back home,or while traveling, I am always a little different. Its my lifestyle and I love and embrace it. I am not afraid of being different so I embrace being called or feeling Alien.

Q: Has not political exile a programme of moving to West by some writers as a self-promoting exercise? You get asylum, better opportunities and recognition---for denouncing your country and its regime?
Trust me, not at all. One still has to work hard and network. One must still shake the coconut tree to get the coconut. And African literature has some kind of glass cieling in the West. That is why I am puting my literature in different art mediums like Animation, Comics and hopefully in the future, video games. In these new artistic expressions, its a level playing field. Where one comes from does not influence the marketing and promotion of the works. Today, with the internet, one's work can be in many places at the same time. So one can be in the West and not know how to network, and one could be in Africa and use the internet and achieve many positive results.

Q: Why not be an embedded writer in your own culture, stand up for your values and offer resistance and get caught? So-called dissidents in China, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, are doing this as an act of honesty and bravery.
Culture to me is dynamic, well at least mine is and all the time. So maybe this is where the aspect of globalization should come in. In my work, it can be very traditional, contemporary or even futuristic. I choose to swing from one cultural branch to another in the vast jungle of artistic expression.

Q: poetry as a political weapon. Can it bring required/desired changes? How? Dictators do not read poetry these days.
In Africa, poetry is mostly used in songs and if you look at singer/poets like Miriam Makeba, Fela Kuti, Thomas Mapfumo, Oliver Mtukudzi, Lucky Dube, you will see that they used poetry as the most potent weapon against the oppressors and many people heard the message. When Mandela was in Robin Island, many poems went out to the world. Even Mandela is a bit of a poet himself and his writings are a treasure chest for Africa's development.

Q: The role of writer in an age of micro-narratives?
I dont believe in Ages. The age that is, is the one chooses for him/herself.
I am in an Age of SELF Discovery and business is good.

Q: The politics of awards? Is there a life for the Non-Booker writers?
Yes of course. I have an award from a prestigious Film Award for my animation film, “A Can of Worms” A week I received this award, I was attending the Frankfurt Book Fair and giving a lecture at an event on stage. I told the audience that the term African writer is often misunderstood and used as a giant glass ceiling. Some Western editors decide for the rest of the world what is good African literature. In my opinion, this decision is best left to Africans just like the West decides upon its own literature. The big publishing firms are controlled by a cabal of people who sometimes don't do enough to promote African and so called Third World Literature. So for many African or third world authors, awards are a great way to leverage the economy of reputation.

Q: Role of community in writing is crucial. How exiled in their writing can capture that sense of involvement, while living abroad?
I think if one is to enjoy exile, one has to participate in the local community as well. I am a hyperactive person and so I can do as many as ten projects at the same time, one day at a time. So for me the community is a way to make friends and also networks and collaborate e.g my latest Children's book in Danish, which was illustrated by Lone Hadegaard. I have also developed a fan base in the community I live by starting a popular cultural blog.

Q: The role of English/ any other language in dealing with your ancestral realities, national paradoxes and ironies?
Most of Southern Africa was colonised by the British. So the English language was forced down my throat from an early age. I had no choice in the matter. That is why I can express myself so well in english. In any case, the British Empire has declined from its “glory” days and today english is a world language. So it enables me to reach mass audiences. But sometimes, I also write in my mother tounge but the readership is only in Zimbabwe and I am currently banned and exiled, including my work.

Q: Can an exile live by their literature alone?
Well one has to be a jack of a few trades in order to live from writing along. In my case, I have a vast set of skills that I use to leverage the economic situation. Mostly I enjoy starting innovative enterprises along the lines of art and culture.

Q: How is publishing scene abroad?
I already told you. Not easy.

Q: Any message?

I wish writers in India, Africa, Brasil and Latin America could join forces.