Trees of meanings from seeds of colours

I am not a scholar. Neither am I an artist.

Chinua Achebe is a scholar. Edel Rodriguez is an artist.

Being a novelist Chinua Achebe is an artist as well, but let that aspect stand aside for the time being because what now concerns me is his collection of essays named “Hopes and Impediments – Selected essays” and the Book Cover designed by Edel Rodriguez for that commendable collection of essays.

As we know Achebe is perhaps one among the loud voices that proclaim that black isn’t synonymous with ‘Impediments’ and white with ‘Hopes’. In fact almost all the essays in that collection touches on that topics – how can we enhance the dialog between the White Europe and the Black Africa, how sad it is to have superstitious and harmful fictions like the color black is not as good as colorlessness, how we can retell the hard asserted fables of the White Europeans about the Black Africa, how can we cleanse the mind of Africa (and of Asia's too, if with a reader's freedom I can add so) off the stains left in its mirrors by the colonialists.

But the sketch of Edel Rodriguez that is used as the front cover of the book “Hopes and Impediments” (Anchor books, Random House Inc, New York) seems either like a paradox or an underhand effort by artistic history and common aesthetic tradition to undermine the efforts of Achebe.

http://www.drawger.com/edel/?article_id=8403

The sketch depicts two trees growing out from black soil (everything began from African soil). A white tree and a black tree (essentially the White and the Black civilizations). The main trunk of both are cut (perhaps showing that after the Europe’s sins towards Africa/Asia both the civilizations have lost their main trunks – they cannot perhaps grow to their full growth). The cross section of the cut black tree is white and the cross section of the cut white tree is black (perhaps showing the deep divide between the black and the white). There are two branches growing out from the stump from both the trees and intertwined. The black tree is as big as the white tree. The red background eludes my thought (perhaps the Artist’s affinity towards that color).

So far so good. But the twist comes when the handwritten words give name to the book. The word “Hopes” is imprinted in white against the red background and the word “Impediments” is painted in black against the red background. We cannot interfere with the Artist’s freedom and say that you should do this and that. But we can easily notice this aspect and wonder how and when will the words and efforts of Achebe percolate to the world of art and alter its base foundations and preconceived notions and meanings of colors. If both the words were written in the same color (be it be white or black) we wouldn’t have noticed the usage of colors in this matter. The artistic/aesthetic tradition has chosen to express itself through the artist and forced him to choose white for hope and black for impediments.

Like a comic mask that hides the tragic emotions of a face, the sketch in the front cover undermines the intellectual and emotional efforts of Achebe’s words.

The artist cannot be blamed. If we are so much inclined to point fingers maybe we shall blame the aesthetic tradition of associating Black with ‘Impediments’, maybe it is too difficult to blame anything. It is how things are. The artist, surely, is innocent like his art. But still this aspect sticks out rather conspicuously. And sadly.

Four

--

Trying to turn myself into syllables
and searching in their ripples the wavering images
of father, mother and you, my brother,
have become lately a sad, forlorn pursuit.

--

In my notes, which I boastfully call poems,
I have never written about you, mother,
for I didn’t want to begrime you
with myself, with my words, with any words.

--

When you cried you hid your face from me, father,
and since then I saw you only as a hand masking a face
and now I know that you have confined yourselves
to being just the hand, your face having withered behind it.

--

In your dead face I saw nothing, brother,
not even the calm Death was supposed to gift you,
maybe you were too young to know about calm
maybe you were too young to feel your own death.

The Attic

He was sitting on the old wooden chair in the darkness of the attic. The evening sunlight sneaking through the gap in the roof tiles showed his profile silhouetted against the blackened roof. There was a book in his hand. I tried to read the cover of the book, but I couldn’t make out anything in that faint light.

He didn’t notice me standing on the wooden ladder and peering into the attic. I felt that even if he had noticed me he wouldn’t acknowledge my presence even by glancing at me.

Finding him there again, I held my breath and I watched him for a few more minutes. Though he was just seventeen, with such a serious face he looked almost twenty four. When I began to feel a little bit bored by seeing just his profile and when I felt that I couldn’t stop myself from striking a conversation with him, I pinched myself hard remembering my mother’s rebukes.

Slowly, without making any noise, I began to climb down the ladder. He still sat there and went on reading in that darkness. As I stepped down two rungs, the wall on which I had leaned the ladder hid him from my eyes.

Almost stealthily, still my heart beating irregularly, I came down to the bedroom in the ground floor. Through the windows I saw mother sitting in the garden. No. She hasn’t seen me climbing up the attic.

But seeing her sitting like that alone I couldn’t keep myself from going to her. And being with her I couldn’t keep myself from asking her, perhaps the thousandth time, why doesn’t she like me talking to him. Before I finished my question she looked at me angrily. Her eyes were like embers and I read the words written in them once again, perhaps the thousandth time.

“Will you ever grow up and stop disturbing him? Do you expect me to go on living like this forever, safeguarding his death from you?”

What will become of all these men?

Buddha, Descartes, Soseki, Biko,
Chaplin, Tansen, Cryuff, Li Bai.

What will become of all these men
when, on a morrow coming sooner or later,
the memory, mind, breath and body of the last man
on our mystic cosmos fleets into the oblivion of death
leaving behind a terrifying silence, like that of primeval earth?

What will become of men’s worlds of colors, lies, sorrows, morals,
republics, questions, remembrances, aesthetics, sciences, kisses and music?

To Banaras

By the time you telephoned me after all these years we had already lost almost everything. Along with the boxy cassette decks from our beloved seventies and along with the memories so much etched in the music of those times, you and I had lost to ravenous time a couple of more things too. We had lost the sweetness with which we had written letters. And our hearts had forgotten the rhythm in which it used to beat for postmen.

You in the North and me in the South, did we not had many Saturday evenings and late nights devoted only for writing letters, letters in which we wrote our amateurish poems reeking with love and longing? You writing about music and I writing about politics. And were you ever tired of writing about music? And didn’t that woman made of iron made me talk too much about politics, and made you complain about my obsession with her antics?

After all these decades when, on the phone, you said that you were going to Banaras and from there, after a week, to Delhi I somehow felt that you were going to make that journey in the backdrop of our beloved seventies. If you were making that journey in the phoneless seventies, then I shall be talking to you only in the way seventies allowed us to talk – through letters, through those envelopes of scripted love. So I thought once you have set out on your journey I will write two letters for you, in the way I used to write to you in those days. I thought that maybe, just maybe, the days and times of letters are not yet over; I can still revive it with my eccentricity.

I daydreamed that my first letter to you will be opened somewhere in Banaras with the faint music of the gharana tickling your ears as you read.

And then I dreamt of my second letter being opened while you walk the corridors of the Powerful Delhi.

But then the day before you were to leave to Banaras everything changed so much, so quickly. Suddenly you grew beyond distances and beyond cities. Or else you dwindled yourselves into a tiny, tiny dust lost in the trodden paths, you became as small as a syllable. Or else you simply ceased to exist and your soul returned to pure nothingness. You vanished. This time you vanished not only from my life, but from yours too.

With you – the lover of nights, music and Rumi – died all my need for ciphering my love in letters. And with you died all my hopes of reviving that world of letters.

After your death, your life – with all its lost possibilities – ceased to flourish in my mind. But your death began to grow feeding on my thoughts that wriggle through the pores of numerous possibilities. Just like how deaths usually does in the minds of living.

Was what happened just your death alone – the death of a woman who had lived lives which others too lived and loved things others too loved? Or are there more significances to your death? Is it a sign of the deaths of profounder truths and wider worlds?

Your death might be just a scene in the more melodramatic death of handwritten letters. Perhaps you do not solely own your death. But it is a part of the more schematic death of letters. Your death was indeed one more pillar foundering as the world of letters crumbled, one more letter fallen as the stack of letters collapse. Through your death, the world of letters lost one more chance to resuscitate.

Again, with your death what I might have witnessed is a more tragic death than the mere death of handwritten letters and the fall of the world of letters. For millennia men and women of our beloved country have travelled incessantly to the Serene Banaras with the hope of ascending to the Eternal Delhi. What I might have witnessed, and what you have gone through, is not simply your death but the systematic death of such hopes and cessation of such attempts.