MA as fantasy

Julia Kristeva has written of consecrated motherhood as a fantasy of lost territory that is nurtured by all adults. In the religious sphere, we see it in the form of a Mother Goddess or as Mother Mary, while in culture, we see it as the ordinary-seeming Ma who holds her son’s heart in her fist. In politics too, it emerges as the motherland, although politicians also tap into the power of consecrated motherhood when they bring their flesh-and-blood mothers into political discourse. We saw this most recently when Kamala Harris described her mother as an immigrant in the US – “a brown woman with an accent” who was tough, courageous, and yet, never lost her cool.

What Harris doesn’t quite say is that her mother, being human, is fallible. Instead, she sticks with the fantasy Ma – an unfailing, temperate presence who compensates for other lacking, including an absent or distant father...

Interestingly, the Hindi screen Ma looms larger if she is widowed, divorced or has been abandoned by the father. In this form, she is nearer to the primal Mother – the unrivalled creator and provider whose primacy cannot be challenged. In this way, she becomes an article of faith rather than a flesh and blood woman. The tricky part, of course, is that articles of faith never have any longings of their own. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich writes that it is only as mothers that women’s bodies are seen as “beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing”. In order to be deemed worthy, a woman must be seen as maternal, or at least potentially maternal, and these ideas still play out in public discourse.

Read the full article here: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/kamala-harris-salim-javed-mother-9539227/

Of love as fodder for fiction and a self-concious formal experiment

Is a novel a beautiful thing? What of a novel that is presented as an “outline” for the first draft of a novel that the narrator intends to write? Should the reader approach it as a finished aesthetic product or should it be taken for what it claims to be: a loose skein of ideas and character notes? Rahman Abbas’ On the Other Side is a tricky novel to read partly because it poses these questions even as it sidesteps genre conventions through the device of a narrator who claims to be working on a “bulky novel” based on the diaries of his deceased protagonist, the novelist-teacher Abdus-Salam.

Abdus-Salam is not necessarily a likeable or an admirable character, and the unnamed narrator does not tell us why he (or she) cares about him or his legacy. In many respects, Abdus-Salam is a fairly ordinary man. He chews a spiced-up tobacco mix and teaches at a suburban school while harbouring creative ambitions. While he has complex and conflicting thoughts about religion, in this, too, he is not very different from most people. He veers between opting in occasionally (going to the mosque once in a while, if only out of long-standing habit), to claiming that “God is everyone’s shield”, to doubting god privately even as he fears divine retribution in moments of crisis, such as illness. His amorous adventures, however, do make him an exceptional protagonist, if only because of how long the list of his paramours is, and how he uses them as fodder for fiction.

Read the full review in Frontline magazine: https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/rahman-abbas-on-the-other-side-indian-translated-fiction-experimental-writing-review/article68553415.ece

Against the Death of Dream (in Wasafiri, 40th anniversary issue, Autumn 2024)

I've written my first essay for the lastest issue of Wasafiri, themed Futurisms. Here's a very short extract from my essay, Against the Death of Dream: 

One of the most dangerous things, Pash warned, is the clock that moves on your wrist but not in your eyes. For years I wondered at this image of a stopped clock in the reader’s eye, and the way the poet juxtaposes frozen time against water frozen inside eyes. (Sabse khatarnaak vo aankh hoti hai/jo sab dekhti hui bhi jami barf hoti hai). If to dream is to have a vision for the future, then the death of dream is to accept that the present moment is all of time, and that we must lose all hope for a safer, more loving, more leisurely time. Read in this light, I would argue that the danger is not restricted only to the loss of hopeful dreams; it is just as dangerous to lose our nightmares.

In Radical Hope, philosopher-psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes that anxiety can be a realistic response to the world, which suggests that anxiety-induced dreams serve to alert us to individual and collective threats. If we know how to ‘read’ our nightmares, we may find that they serve as timely warnings. In my own experience, I find nightmares to be a useful aid in reconnecting with my instinctive ‘self’. Last year, I had woken up from a miserable dream...

Please read the rest of the essay in the lastest issue of Wasafiri (119, 40th anniversary issue, Autumn 2024).

Annie Zaidi