Last week, #Tata Literature Live 2015, I happen to attend this session ‘Fighting the Big C’. Choose your own approach. The panel consisted of Neelam Kumar, Amit Vaidya and Amrita Chaudhary.
The panel Neelam Kumar, Amrita Chaudhary and Amit Vaidya
Neelam Kumar spoke about how she had undergone treatment for her cancer which struck her two times. There were cancer groups she met during this time. She stated that you need to have positivity and inner strength during these times. Teachings of Buddha have helped her too on this journey. She says that you are alone on this journey where people won’t support you and you need to find your inner strength. Change the way you think. (Your approach).
Neelam Kumar introduced to us her book To Cancer, with Love: My Journey of Joy. She recounts her years of illness, betrayal, financial hardships, the breakdown of relationships and the death of loved ones besides the obvious emotional and physical trauma she underwent during this time.
I like to quote a few lines from her preface to this book –
Life is like water. Ever flowing. It has no beginning and no end.
Like a meandering river, it twists and turns into ever new topography. Sometimes it delights us with a patch of sunshine so intense that you wish you could run bare feet onto its banks and stay there forever. But just when you are preparing for this escapade, it winds without a warning into a terrain so grim, dark and foreboding that you wish you could run for cover. Except that there is none.
That is the adventure that makes life such a crazily, dizzy, thrilling journey. The only way out is to fall deeply, madly, irrevocably in love with it.
In the second section of the book, The Sea and Me is all about profound life lessons she has learned from the sea and the six strategies it can teach us to cope with the interval between birth and death. She quotes President Kennedy –
It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat and in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch, we are going back from whence we came’.
It is no wonder that the sea covers seventh-tenths of the terrestrial globe. We are the sea and sea is us. The sea is the greatest of all teachers.
Then in her third section of the book – Interactive section Life skills. Life throws at us myriad challenges and we do not know the answers. This section attempts to answer question’s whether it is a communication roadblock, confronting illness and death, handling adversity and obstacles, facing financial hardships and fears. How to overcome your fears?
Finally, a few teachings of Buddha from Daisaku Ikeda, Buddhist philosopher, peace builder, educator, author and poet. He is the third president of Soka Gakkai lay Buddhist organisation and the founding president of Soka Gakkai International (SGI), which is the largest and the most diverse of Buddhist organisations, promoting a philosophy of character development and social engagement for peace. I shall end with his quote
Even if things don’t unfold the way you expected, don’t be disheartened or give up. One who continues to advance will win in the end.
Her book is simple to read and one could relate to it. If you are a non-fiction reader, then to do read this one.
PS: Check more posts on this literature festival here
The ornate detail of this monument is second to none. It’s beauty is marvelous. Like a most delicately carved jewelry box, this architecture built to honor Shah Jahan’s favorite wife, attracts visitors from all over the world.
In a tour, it was mentioned how the process of carving the white marble and inlaying semi-precious stones was accomplished.
The ornate white marble coaster embellished with marcasite, lapis lazuli, coral, and other semi-precious stones is one of the most treasured souvenirs.
India is a land of mystery and awe.
*/This post was inspired by Weekly Photo Challenge Ornate /*
Diwali is a festival of lights. It is the Hindu New Year. The word ‘Diwali’ originated from the Sanskrit word ‘Deepavali’. It means a row of lights. It is a joyous occasion and you could celebrate Diwali at some of the spectacular places mentioned below:
A typical scene at a Kolkata puja Image courtesy: Bodhisattva Sen Roy
Kolkata, West Bengal– Kali Puja coincides with Diwali. The celebration of the goddess Kali (Hindu goddess) is associated with creative power. A day before the Puja, little candles, diyas and colourful electric bulbs light up the ‘city of joy’.
Deepawali in Varanasi
Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh– This place wears a colourful look throughout this festival. The city is known as the ‘holy city of India’. Varanasi is illuminated with thousands of diyas (earthen lamps) on the day of Diwali giving it a mesmerizing and spectacular sight for whoever is present there.
Diwali in Amritsar
Amritsar, Punjab– The Golden Temple is a spectacular sight when it is draped with lit diyas. The preparations for this festival begin weeks in advance. Every house is decorated with leaves, flowers and rangoli’s (an art form of colours and powder) at the entrance. Sweets are prepared to be shared with friends and families.
Diwali in London Image source
London– The festival of lights is not only celebrated in India but also by people of all religions and national backgrounds on the London streets, exchanging gifts and sweets. There are various venues that have Diwali events during this time. Trafalgar Square is one of them.
Diwali in Singapore Image source
Singapore– It is one of foremost destination for Indians during Diwali. There are massive decorations on the streets and homes in little India of Singapore. Many events have been planned, keeping in mind the festive spirit.
Fireworks in Macau
Macau– Another destination that Indians prefer is Macau. Villas and resorts are decorated with Diwali lighting and there are fireworks too which the guests enjoy.
Diwali Festival in Cape Town
South Africa– It is celebrated with joy and enthusiasm. Prayers are offered and sweets are prepared. The festival spirit is the same as in India.
Last week, on October 27, was 83 anniversary of Sylvia’s birth. Pulitzer Prize-winning author who left in the wake of her own disaster, a legacy of lyrics that join alarming force and amazing creativity. With the brutally frank self-exposure and emotional immediacy, Plath’s poems, from “Lady Lazarus” to “Daddy,” have had a continuing impact on contemporary verse.
Her novel ‘Bell Jar’ was published in January 1963 under Plath’s chosen pseudonym Victoria Lucas.
Plath can be analysed from various perspectives as feminist and feminine, mythological and political, an English Romantic and an American Modernist.
Image courtesy voiceseducation.org
Here is her a well-known poetry ‘Daddy‘
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—-
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—-
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Sandra M. Gilbert’s essay on Plath, collected in the seminal study of women’s poetry, ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’, is one of the first critical studies to define Plath primarily as a woman poet, powerfully arguing that she seeks a true female authorial voice through the restriction of the masculine, lyrical ‘I’. This can be seen in ‘Daddy’ as Ich, Ich, Ich, Ich. (German).
All the poems have a common preoccupation: the relation between the individual self and the process in which it comes to identity, to which it is always irreparably bound, and which sooner or later reclaims it. {Plath’s poetry goes beyond the polarised image of self and world, of the transcendent subject and immanent object, which characterises the poetry of most of her contemporaries. It is precisely, because her poetry is intensely private that it records so profoundly and distinctly the experience of living history.} In Plath’s poetry, there is no gap between private and public.
In a famous comment on one of her poems, ‘Daddy’, for the BBC Third programme, Plath spelt this out in explicitly Freudian terms:
‘The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra Complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter, the two strains marry and paralyse each other, she has to act out the awful little allegory before she is free of it.
Though the daughter identifies with the ‘Jewish Mother, by the end of ‘Daddy’ she has become a phallic aggressor herself, rejoicing as ‘the villagers’ drive a stake through the fat black heart’ of the vampire father, cutting the black telephone off “at the root”, in an inescapable image of emasculation, so that “The voices just can’t worm through”. Cutting off the telephone means voices of the past out of which the self has been shaped.’
In that almost unnoticed progression from a single speaker to the collective image of the villagers, Plath gives a further twist to the revolt. She refuses the unitary self-imposed by the parental images, a unity always splitting into two opposed principles, of male and female, active and passive, Nazi and Jew.
The following lines suggest a female speaker whose latent desire for love and approval of her father is mixed with anger and resentment about his premature death:
“I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.”
The persona of the poem has even resurrected her father (symbolically) by marrying a kind of perverse surrogate father:
“I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And love of the rack and screw.
And I said I do, I do.”
I have read these lines over and over and could not choose another poem from her collection as I feel this is the ultimate and appropriate to celebrate her birthday with her other poetry lovers.
References-
The Poetry of Sylvia Plath- A Reader’s guide to essential criticism Ed. by Claire Breene- First ed. 2000 Icon Books Ltd.
Suzanne Juhasz- Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, a New Tradition. New York; Straus and Giroux, 1976.
Her novel ‘Bell Jar’ was published in January 1963 under Plath’s chosen pseudonym Victoria Lucas.
