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American Dan Hoyle lived in Nigeria for ten months in 2005/2006. During that time he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Port Harcourt, in Nigeria’s restive delta region, the source of most of country’s wealth – and turmoil. He attributes the decision to come to Nigeria to a Professor at the Northwestern University, who, aware of his desire to study globalization (a 2002 grant was spent researching the activities of American companies in developing countries), stabbed at a map of the world and said: “If you want to study globalization, just go right here!” “Here” turned out to be Escravos, a region in the west of the Niger delta.

Hoyles obeyed, and his Nigerian sojourn in Nigeria inspired him to write TINGS DEY HAPPEN, an award-winning one-man performance piece set in the delta and exploring the complicated set-up that is the Nigerian oil industry. Nigerian ‘Poilitics’ if you will.

TINGS DEY HAPPEN is in Pidgin English. When I heard Hoyle was going to be performing in Nigeria, at the invitation of the State Department, I decided I had to see the show. More than anything, I was curious to see what Hoyle’s idea of pidgin amounted to. There is so much contrived stuff that passes for Pidgin English in popular culture, that I really didn’t have any significant expectations.
By the end of the 75 minute performance, which took place at the heavily guarded American Guest Quarters on the Ikoyi waterfront in Lagos, I was more than impressed. Hoyle’s pidgin is impressive, and as 'authentic' (I hesitate to use that word) as it gets.

Much has been written about the Niger delta. It is my guess that an entire publishing industry – academic papers, seminars, lectures financed by Universities and think-tanks mostly in Europe and America – is built on the workings – misworkings more like – of Nigerian oil.

This is not to mention the fact that the bulk of the news about Nigeria in the international media streams forth undistilled from the dark, polluted mangroves of the delta. The 18 – 24 November 1995 edition of the Economist bears as its headline: NIGERIA FOAMING WITH BLOOD. The accompanying image is of an oil rig from which blood is spewing forth, clearly at high pressure. The Financial Times journalist, Michael Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars: Paramilitaries and Pipelines at Nigeria’s Oil Frontier, was shortlisted for the Guardian UK’s first book Award in 2009. And then there is a growing genre of ‘Niger delta literature’, inspired by the cataclysmic events of the last decade and half (one of the landmark ones being the 1995 extra-judicial murder by the Abacha government of activist and writer Ken Saro Wiwa, arguably the most prominent environmental activists to emerge from the delta). Books like Kaine Agary’s novel, Yellow Yellow, and Ahmed Yerima’s play, Hard Ground (both winners of the Nigeria Prize for Literature) are set in the delta. A novel forthcoming from Helon Habila, (tentatively titled “Oil on Water”) is set against a background of violence and kidnapping in the delta.

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Justin E. H. Smith

The last time I went to a poetry reading, I was made to sit patiently as a preening, college-age jack-ass indignantly declaimed, in verse that could only be called 'free', his strong disapproval of Dick Cheney. A serious issue, to be sure, but certainly not serious in a way that gets my poetic imagination going. If I confess a sympathy for what Stefan George called 'pure aestheticism' in poetry, this is not because I believe myself to be above politics, but because I believe that poetry is above current events, and by 'current' I mean whatever social world human beings have managed to throw together for themselves, for now, until it comes apart. Leave engagement with that to prose, which is to say to the vastly greater part of what language does in this, what Walter Benjamin rightly called our 'prosaic age'. Prose is the (more or less) formally unrestricted use of natural language for the telling of captivating things about the world. The formal restrictions of poetry, by contrast, bring it about that whatever poetry says about the world, it is always also saying something about language. This means, among other things, that translating poetry is at least something quite close to writing poetry (unless we take Nabokov's hyper-literalist translation of Evgenii Onegin, which was meant precisely to illustrate that a true translation of one language's poetry into another can only come out as prose). Someone who has translated a novel, by contrast, certainly could not be said eo ipso to have written a novel.

What language is poetry about? Generally, it is about the language it is in. In translation, in turn, poetry is about the limitations of the fit of one language with another. These two facts together mean that, in writing poetry, in contrast with prose (more or less), it matters what language one is writing in. I have become convinced, in fact, that good poetry, the best poetry, is the poetry that seeks to lay bare the essence of the language that serves as its medium. Now I understand that from a historical-linguistic point of view languages do not have essences, but are ever-evolving accretions of borrowings, local adaptations, creolizations and mishearings, but that does not change the fact that, in terms of expressive power, 'life', 'earth', and 'kin' sound closer to the soul of English than, say, 'vitality', 'terrestrial', or 'family'. I have thus also come to appreciate the extent to which the essence of English is Anglo-Saxon and Germanic, and to think that no one understood his task as a poet better than Seamus Heaney, when he undertook to translate Beowulf into modern English, in part, as he explained, to come to better know not just the source language, but also the target language.

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By Usha Alexander

When I visited India the summer I turned 9, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler to select pendants to bring back to the US. My brother and sister chose the gold-tipped tiger claws, still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s. But I found the tiger claws too “gee whiz”; I wanted something that was meaningfully Indian. So the jeweler trotted out his line of large, bright silver pendants shaped either as Om or swastika. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetics of the swastika designs, with their symmetry and regularity of line; the Om was alright, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I had a difficult time deciding to bring home the swastika, waffling on the matter until it grew late and even the jeweler was losing patience with me. In the end, I came away with the Om, which languished never-worn in my dresser drawer for years until I simply lost track of it. Something about the entire episode never sat quite right with me, but as a child I couldn’t puzzle out why.

I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide.

The word swastika can be translated as wellbeing (from the Sanskrit su, meaning good, and asti, meaning to be, plus the diminutive suffix, ka) and in most of the world the identical symbol (by whatever name) has long been associated with wellbeing and good luck. In South Asia, the swastika is found on artifacts dating back 4,500 years to the time of the Harappan Civilization, where it frequently occurs as a character in their symbol system. Even as Harappan culture faded into obscurity, the swastika was carried forward, becoming strongly associated with Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist religious traditions, an association that persists to this day throughout Asia. Especially in India, the swastika is the most ubiquitous of religious symbols.

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Jesse Thorn is the host and producer of Public Radio International's The Sound of Young America, a cultural interview program he grew from humble beginnings at KZSC, the radio station of his alma mater, UC Santa Cruz. He's also the proprietor of Maximumfun.org, which hosts such other audio ventures as Jordan, Jesse, Go!, Coyle and Sharpe: The Impostors and The Kaspar Hauser Comedy Podcast. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

We've got to do some awareness-raising. What makes The Sound different from other public radio interview shows one might hear across the dial?

More awesome.

How much more?

The premise of the show is, “a public radio show about things that are awesome.” That translates to, essentially, a public radio show from my editorial perspective. We focus on things that are fun and funny, which means you get — for lack of a less annoying word — a “hipper” public radio show, but you also get a lot more comedy, a lot more indie rock and hip-hop and books about things that are fascinating.

Is this sort of thing totally absent from the public radio airwaves other than on your show? I feel like I haven't heard many comedians anywhere but on your show.

Comedians are almost totally absent from anywhere in serious public discourse, unfortunately. The kind of stuff I cover on my show occasionally pops up on other public radio outlets, and there have been public radio attempts to hew to this formula in a more system-wide or “big money” type of way that have thus far failed.

Usually, if you hear someone who's been on my show on another show, whether a good one or a bad one — and it could be on Fresh Air, which is one of my favorite shows in the world — when you hear that person, it's like they're a visitor. They're not native to those other programs. They're a curiosity, or a novelty, or they focus on some aspect of their story which doesn't have a lot to do with their work. Maybe it has more to do with the kind of narrative theme that somebody picks out for a newspaper feature story. You know, “So-and-So Happened to Be Raised By Dogs”? On my show, I like to think they're a little more at home.
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by Aditya Dev Sood

I know the grip, more or less, but nothing else about how to swing a club. I hold the club away from me, shuffle into a likely stance, and settle its head down, behind the ball, already resting on the tee. Hold your right foot steady as you swing back, Abhinav says, and your eye on the ball. My brother is a natural coach, but I am an awkward athlete. Yet there is a determination in me to show physical and kinesthetic ability now, in full adulthood, that I never felt in my youth. I see the ball staring back at me, daring me to hit it.

My cousin Rohit has been on my mind a lot, lately, and perhaps that's why I'm here at the driving range. He was the one who first showed me how to hold a golf stick and sink balls into the little holes marked with numbered, red, rusting markers. The putting green was right next to the club house, from where a roar of social chatter rose up, among many uncles boasting and guffawing over multiple beers, each of which progressively drowned out more sound. That nineteenth hole was where my cousin really shined, winning people over with his smile, his one chipped tooth that could kick-start any number of increasingly incredible bar tales.

Rohit was born with the kind of charisma that made his odd looks irresistible. He was tall and dark, with the small sharp jaw that runs through our family like a birthmark, soodon da thappa. His thick, thatchy-wavy hair was already graying by his mid-twenties, and now and again he sported a slight paunch, which he also wore with style. Rohit attended boarding school in Darjeeling, and grew up between the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, the Saturday Club, and Tolleygunge. It was his allegiance to these clubs, it once struck me, that kept him from ever moving to New Delhi, no matter how difficult things became for him in Calcutta.

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Maniza Naqvi: You have spent a lifetime leading political, anti war and socialist activism through demonstrations, protest marches; political articles, books, lectures, interviews, and speeches . You have spoken out in all sorts of forums ranging from university settings to the streets during anti war demonstrations. You are noted as the leader of the Left in Europe. You’ve been a hero and example for many of us. So, in all of this, where does writing novels fit in? You have now written five novels, two of which I absolutely loved reading: The Book of Saladin and Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree.

Tariq Ali: I started writing fiction in 1990. Why? I don't know. I felt like it but recently on a trip to Pakistan I came across a letter I'd written my mother in 1966 or '67, soon after leaving Oxford. I was quite surprised because I'd written that I was thinking about writing a novel. I have no memory of what I might have been thinking of…then 1968 happened and swept our generation away into the utopian wilds. It was the end of that period that started me thinking of fiction again. I had written plays and film scripts in the 80's and early 90s. So a full-scale novel was not such a huge leap forward. 



Maniza Naqvi: What draws you to fiction? Can you place the role of fiction writing in your life?

Tariq Ali: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree was begun in 1991 after the first Gulf War. I wanted to excavate the history of European Islam and went, naturally, to Spain. Here I saw the Great Mosque in Cordoba, went to Granada, wandered round Seville and imagined the ruins whispering to me…stories of their past and those who had built them. So I imbibed the atmosphere and wrote the first novel of the Quintet. Edward Said read it and liked it and said: 'Don't stop now. Tell the whole bloody story.' He meant the whole bloody story of the clash between Western Christendom and Islamic Arab civilization. So I did and it was Edward who first started referring to it as the Islam Quartet, which soon became a Quintet. Writing these historical novels became the centre of my intellectual life till 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reality dragged me back to non-fiction which I had more or less given up. Now I do both, but to write fiction I have to cut myself off completely from everyday life which isn't easy. Had the US agreed to the bombing of Iran I might not have been able to finish the Quintet.

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This article is, in part, a retelling of 'The Heroic Age of Hysteria,' a section from chapter 1, 'A Forgotten History,' in the 1997 book, “Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror,” by Judith Herman, M.D. It was published by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, New York. I highly recommend this book to all interested in the subject.

In part, this article relies on the work of Harold Bloom, principally, his 1998 book, “Shakespeare: The invention of the human,” and a few of his interviews related to Sigmund Freud. The book was published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., New York.

At the time Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) began his research into Hysteria, it was understood as a malady peculiar to women (according to 25 centuries of medical thinking) and accounted for any disease whose symptoms could not be found to have an organic cause. It was manifest in symptoms like partial paralysis, hallucinations, sensory losses, convulsions, and amnesias. Lumped into these symptoms was anything found (by men) to be mysterious or incomprehensible in women. The source of the problem, it was believed, resided in the uterus, and thus the medical term, Hysteria.

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