This poem explores themes of change and permanence. It describes the arrival of the monsoons and changing sky from clear to cloudy (lines 1-8). It then reflects on how while the clouds, rain and breeze change and meet again each year, the speaker remains unchanged, like the sands at Marina beach that experience different footfalls but don't change (lines 9-20). The final lines assert that while the physical and mental change, the essential self or soul remains permanent, watching the transient experiences of others, just as water can take different forms but remains water (lines 21-28).

1. CLRI
CONTEMPORARY LITERARY REVIEW INDIA – journal that brings articulate
writings for articulate readers.
CLRI Print Edition ISSN 2250-3366
November 2012
Editor-in-Chief: Khurshid Alam
Rs. 20.00 / $1.00

2. November 2012
contents
1. KHURSHID ALAM ............................................................................................................................ 4
CLRI Annual 2013 Print Edition ....................................................................................................... 4
2. MAHIMA GIRI .................................................................................................................................. 7
Roots ................................................................................................................................................ 7
Time ................................................................................................................................................. 8
3. SCARLET MONAHAN ..................................................................................................................... 9
Spider 1 - Spiders can swim ............................................................................................................ 9
Spider 2 - Revenge .......................................................................................................................... 9
The while now hid .......................................................................................................................... 10
The soft search .............................................................................................................................. 11
4. SMITA ANAND SRIWASTAV ........................................................................................................ 12
Spring Lingers ................................................................................................................................ 12
5. YAMINI VIJENDRAN ..................................................................................................................... 14
Eternity ........................................................................................................................................... 14
6. REZA GHAHREMANZADEH ......................................................................................................... 16
Freeze a Moment ........................................................................................................................... 16
7. RAHUL CHATTERJEE .................................................................................................................. 17
The Death of a Star ........................................................................................................................ 17
8. VIHANG A. NAIK ............................................................................................................................ 19
Truth ............................................................................................................................................... 19
Desire ............................................................................................................................................. 19
9. PEARSE MURRAY ........................................................................................................................ 21
Gujarat Night Dancers.................................................................................................................... 21
Dis-assembled Desire .................................................................................................................... 22
10. ZINIA MITRA .................................................................................................................................. 24
Skies............................................................................................................................................... 24
11. BRINDHAMANI BBM ..................................................................................................................... 26
Humanism ...................................................................................................................................... 26
12. PSYCHE AS REPRESENTED BY DIFFERENT ARTISTS ........................................................... 27
13. TARA MENON ............................................................................................................................... 33
Pilaf ................................................................................................................................................ 33
Stalked ........................................................................................................................................... 33
14. MR. KERSIE KHAMBATTA ........................................................................................................... 35
Culture Shock ................................................................................................................................. 35
15. DASU KRISHNAMOORTY ............................................................................................................ 38
It’s Good to Watch TV .................................................................................................................... 38

3. November 2012
contents
16. TATJANA DEBELJACKI ................................................................................................................ 42
An Essay About Love ..................................................................................................................... 42
17. MAITREYEE B CHOWDHURY ...................................................................................................... 44
The Pursuit of Knowledge .............................................................................................................. 44
18. EL HABIB LOUAI ........................................................................................................................... 47
Love Relationships as Central Mechanisms for Narrating Colonial Contact and its Aftermath by El
Habib Louai .................................................................................................................................... 47
19. REVIEW ON JOSEPH CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS ....................................................... 60
Aakansha Singh Reviews Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness .................................................... 60
20. THE TRAGEDY OF FIDEL CASTRO BY JOÃO CERQUEIRA ..................................................... 62
Preview of the Novel The Tragedy of Fidel Castro ........................................................................ 62
21. HS CHANDALIA STROLLS WITH ANIL GEORGE ....................................................................... 71
Anil George treads the Red Carpet at Cannes and Says it is all ‘He’ who Did It........................... 71
22. BOOK RELEASES ......................................................................................................................... 74

4. November 2012
editorial
Digital medium is not simply a medium, it is a space to our life. All
its shortcomings stand tiny before its advantages. It is the best
alternative to saving paper, thus to saving plants and forests. It is the
fastest means of communication, you can fly your documents and
files across the globe in no time and at no costs. You can share your
heart and mind to the world without coming under any hammer.
– Khurshid Alam, Editor-in-Chief, Contemporary Literary Review India
www.quickheal.com
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1

5. November 2012
editorial
A Tribute to Sunil Gangopadhyay
(Sep 1934 – Oct 2012)
Sahaj (or Easy) by Sunil Gangopadhyay
With ease I make a million flowers bloom,
All at once I light up some suns, moons, stars,
In a passing whim I blow out the moonlight
(Remember that moonlight?) or the sunlight (remember that too?).
Don't believe a thing my detractors say.
They might say that I am a child or a fool,
or a magician, —
Ragged tents, broken drums, patches
on his black coat, but look what a deadly dance he's dancing
on the pupils of her eyes, onlookers aren't fooled, they laugh
2

6. November 2012
editorial
but the girl will hear no reason oh how she ails from this dose
of illusion; — Don't believe them.
Hey you revilers, look,
look with what ease I hold up the three worlds —
on the little finger of my left hand.
The darkness, the seas, hills all look on amazed,
You, only you, have forgotten the language of surprise!
Come on into my house, and see what a wondrous house I keep.
The roof overhead — see, but no walls have I on the sides,
(Bounded by walls all round, dreams and phlegm in your hearts,
marking age on your fingers, drawing fancy pictures on walls,
carefully you guys will live!)
While look in my house breezes of all kinds
like faithful retainers move around, brush away cobwebs,
test colors on cornices, busy day and night.
I sit in my wall-less room and paint on the girl's pupils,
Much easier this than making pictures without.
Go back, you revilers, you are foolish children, and you,
Don't believe them when they call me magician.
[Translated from Bengali poem 'Sahaj' by Nandini Gupta]
Sunil Gangopadhyay]
Source: http://www.poemhunter.com/
3

7. November 2012
editorial
1. KHURSHID ALAM
CLRI Annual 2013 Print Edition
Contemporary Literary Review India (CLRI) is gearing up for its annual print issue (ISSN 2250-
3366) by late January 2013 or early February 2013. Contemporary Literary Review India Annual
2013 Print Edition is special in many ways. CLRI will include the best original pieces from
around the world and some of the best pieces published with online literary journals in India
only.
Original Pieces in CLRI Annual 2013
CLRI invites submission for the annual issue in the categories such as poetry, stories, reviews,
criticism and interviews with literary stalwarts. Please keep the following details in mind while
submitting:
CLRI Annual Issue (ISSN 2250-3366): Print
Categories: Poetry, Stories, Reviews, Criticism, Interviews
Submit to: writersdeskinfo@yahoo.co.in
Subject Line: CLRI Annual Print Issue (without this subject line, your submission cannot qualify
for the print version.)
CLRI print issue has three deadlines to suite writers from all walks of life and professions.
Early Bird Submission Deadline: 31 October, 2012. 10 November 2012 (deadline extended).
Reading Fee: Rs. 250 for the entries from India, US$ 5.00 for all overseas entries. This deadline
has passed.
Late Submission Deadline: 30 November, 2012.
Reading Fee: Rs. 500 for the entries from India, US$ 10.00 for all overseas entries
Deadline Waiver: 31 December, 2012.
Reading Fee: Rs. 750 for the entries from India, US$ 15.00 for all overseas entries
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Payment via bank: HDFC Account: 0069-105-01-73106.
Note: Our subscribers are exempted off the reading fee.
4

8. November 2012
editorial
To get waiver off the reading fee you can subscribe to our CLRI online edition for at least one
year. Check the details at: Subscribe to CLRI.
Online Best Pieces
CLRI is making efforts to include some of the best writings published with online literary
journals in India only during January 1, 2012 through December 31, 2012. Writers, publishers,
editors and representatives are requested to send their entries to the CLRI Annual 2013 print
edition.
CLRI Annual Issue (ISSN 2250-3366): Print
Categories: Poetry, Stories, Criticism
Submit to: writersdeskinfo@yahoo.co.in
Subject Line: CLRI Annual Print Issue (without this subject line, your submission cannot qualify
for the print version.)
Deadline: December 31, 2012 (But please do not wait till the last deadline)
Reading Fee: None
5

9. November 2012
poems
At one time poetry was a large part of mainstream readership. The
public seemed to lose interest with the advent of gaming and the
Internet, and now the Internet can be the avenue of restoration of this
important genre of entertainment and enlightenment.
– Jack Huber, Poet & Author, http://www.jackhuber.com
Subscribe to
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CLRI is published online per month, in digital versions occasionally, and in print
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Subscribe to our CLRI online edition. Our subscribers receive CLRI digital copies
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6

10. November 2012
poems
2. MAHIMA GIRI
Roots
Seeking and creeping through
the cold dark depths of the soil,
You breathe the air of long life
And firmly embrace the earth.
You befriend the earthworms
As they wriggle around and
Seldom unbolting the soil,
For you to stretch and relax.
You grow in several directions
And stay together as a family,
Offering a reliable support,
For the tree to stand aloft.
Your strength is unparalleled,
For the nurture, the tree receives
Reaching every branch every leaf
Every flower and every fruit.
A dedicated responsibility
You share with the mother earth
And the tree promising the fruits
Of effort through the ages.
7

11. November 2012
poems
Time
TIME
moment
duration
age spins into days
and nights through heat and cold
changing the world everyday
“an irreversible marvel”
Note: Accepted
Mahima Giri is an Electrical Engineer currently based in Oklahoma, USA. She has
passion towards poetry particularly translating art into poetry. She is an active member at
allpoetry.com and has contributed several poems in different forms.
8

12. November 2012
poems
3. SCARLET MONAHAN
Spider 1 - Spiders can swim
“For the love of God, don’t touch me
I’ve just reached the top
Christ!, You’ve broken a leg
Don’t turn the tap on
I cant swim, I’ll drown.
You speciesist Sociopath”
Spider 2 - Revenge
Little Beth Muffet
Sat at the table
Dipping her bread in her yolk
Down came the spider
That sat down beside her
Beth Muffet died of a stroke,
Eventually.
When they found her, three summer
weeks later, she’d been dead a fortnight.
The flies wept, for reasons of their own,
but the seven legged spider…
Just smiled.
9

13. November 2012
poems
The while now hid
Silently the night will move
From twilight through to day
And costing nought but time of us
At morning we must pay
In darkness, things first seen in light
Put forth a change of form
Twisting in the shadows of
The mind, from whence are torn
And those may take advantage
Of the blanket held above
Who question not, the mood of wood
More busy with their love
The rain may come and give a sound
Too lonely at the start
Of hollow thought and memory
Found hiding in the heart
Quick closing eyes, protect us all
Behind the falling lid
Dark without, forgotten soon
Till wake, the while now hid
10

14. November 2012
poems
The soft search
Images move quickly through
With distant rhyme or reason
Surging passed the gates of mind
In metaphoric legion
Soon to reign and take upon
The mantle of a friend
The whisperings in solitude
Baptismal thoughts to send
Thoughts somehow caught up in time
Made lonely, may come late
And tell of innocence and hope
That might communicate
For all we know and all we show
Religious to the page
Hypnotic, like the childish dance
Upon the wooden stage
Soft search in light and thrice the night
Canyon, edge and cliff
To ask of self in puzzlement
Of what and only if
Scarlet Monahan is an England based poet. These poems are from From One Moment
to Another – A collection of more than fifty poems.
11

15. November 2012
poems
4. SMITA ANAND SRIWASTAV
Spring Lingers
spring lingers in
boudoir of cinnamon fall,
in geometric contours
of fall-denuded twigs,
stealthily dappling leaves~
once a drab green,
in rich shades from
the palette of eventide,
to pantomime as
blossoms painted on
the aisle of Vertumnus.
it lurks in the scents
of the potpourri breeze which
tries to imitate zephyr,
in the sturdy blooms
of dahlia, chrysanthemums, hibiscuses,
the syllables of the threnodies
of colorful spring reverberate,
it is just like
the lingering yesterday
in the vision of every today or morrow,
the baby in every heart,
the juvenile streak behind
every wreathed wrinkle...
12

16. November 2012
poems
Dr. Smita Anand Sriwastav is an MBBS doctor with the heart of a
poetess. One of her poems, 'Unsaid Goodbyes' has been published in a
book titled, 'Inspired by Tagore' published by British Council and
Sampad. She has written poetry all her life and wishes to continue
doing so forever.
13

17. November 2012
poems
5. YAMINI VIJENDRAN
Eternity
The news reader exclaims with glee,
“The monsoons are here!”
The cuckoo on my courtyard's Gulmohar,
Echoes her joy with 'coo's.
The clear patch of blue,
Where the brilliant orb shone yesterday,
Is a thing of past.
Replaced today,
By a muddy patchwork,
Of Cumulonimbus's ,
Straight out of a cotton farm.
While the sky sheds tears,
Bemoaning the cloudy infestation,
I muse.
The clouds are same,
The drops are same,
And so is the breeze.
Meeting up in the heavens every year,
Before they come visiting,
At my window sill.
Only to be greeted by,
A different story.
A new movie each time.
New characters, new plots, new settings,
All new, save me.
I am like the sands of Marina.
Numerous footfalls,
On my static grains.
A light tread here,
A heavy one there,
Some fast and some slow,
All, all over me,
14

18. November 2012
poems
While I remain unchanged.
No storm, no tide has ever
Caused me to budge.
The physical me totters,
The mental me sways,
But I, I remain unmoved.
Absorbing the experience
Of varying footfalls,
As they come and go,
While I remain.
I was, I am, I will be,
Here along with the clouds,
The rain and the breeze.
Living the ultimate truth,
Watching the transients pass.
The revelry of joy and pangs of despair,
Are only for body and mind.
As ice, liquid or vapour,
Water still remains water,
and so remain I.
Yamini Vijendran is a freelance writer who strongly believes in the
idiom ‘home comes first'. Her values and beliefs get amply reflected in
her writings, which mirror to the world the things she stands firmly by.
Her writing is inspired by people and incidents around her and her
impetus comes from her loving family.
15

19. November 2012
poems
6. REZA GHAHREMANZADEH
Freeze a Moment
If I could freeze a moment
it would be when the swing reaches its highest point;
that moment just before the descent.
For it is in that moment
that I feel I can pass the threshold
and enter the world of birds and stars and glittering freedom.
Reza Ghahremanzadeh, twenty-two years old, currently lives in Northern Ireland, is an
aspiring writer and poet.
16

20. November 2012
poems
7. RAHUL CHATTERJEE
The Death of a Star
The twinkling is often all that stars do.
The river is never at peace with its flow.
Street lamps flicker as the winds started to blow
While drunk moths drank more out of the blue.
The crumbling of wizened yellow leaves
On the sere face of the one lying below...
Waiting for life to make the suffering slow.
A shy drop of lonely tear
Hoping, under tremulous fear,
To make the one lying near,
Of anguish, his heart to clear.
That heart, it knew not, had seen brighter days
When the stars on laps of heavenly boughs
Hung onto desires, that would not douse.
The cheated heart: ‘Oh, anguished love, come not near’
The winds blew up more of the dry dust.
The languid darkness seeped under the crust
Of the star who lay under the dying tree trunk,
With pale hopes to let go of
And dreams which moth-ball smells haven’t sunk.
The brightness which once dazzled creation
Had eons go by with thoughts not thought.
He dimmed now into a slumber that
Did not remind him of the happiness he brought
To everyone who looked up to him.
But, tonight he was intent on being the sallow and dim.
The one above had the one below.
The tree could not shelter him from winds which blew
17

21. November 2012
poems
As the moths, away from the remnant glow, flew,
Which to mortality offered himself and suffered no more.
Rahul Chatterjee is a poet who has rhythmic inclinations and loves
nature. He prefers a style which reminds his readers of a flow with the
natural phenomena which he uses to reflect human sentiments.
18

22. November 2012
poems
8. VIHANG A. NAIK
Truth
Truth is a mirror
he has lost
in the dark
beyond the edge.
He has come
at the age
where he
cannot afford
to look at himself.
Desire
the octopus
of desire
stirs
arteries and veins
tears flesh apart
feeding upon fire
swallowing air
19

23. November 2012
poems
Vihang A. Naik, born in Surat, Gujarat, is a widely published and anthologized poet and
has won many awards. His poems have appeared in many literary journals including
Indian Literature: A Sahitya Akademi, Kavya Bharati, POESIS: A Journal of Poetry Circle
(Mumbai), The Journal of The Poetry Society (India), The Journal of Indian Writing In
English, The Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, The Brown Critique, The Poetry Chain
among other significant journals.
His anthologies include Poetry Manifesto (New & Selected Poems) IndiaLog Publications
Pvt Ltd ( New Delhi , 2010), Making A Poem (Allied Publishers’, Mumbai, 2004), City
Times and Other Poems (1993), and his Gujarati collection of poems include Jeevangeet
(Navbharat Sahitya Mandir, Ahmedabad, 2001) dedicated to the cause of victims of
Gujarat Earthquake 26th January , 2001.
He also translates poetry in Gujarati into English including his own and teaches English at
Shree Ambaji Arts College, North Gujarat, India.
20

24. November 2012
poems
9. PEARSE MURRAY
Gujarat Night Dancers
On that side of earth
all four of them
dance in their light, wing and petal:
Day star, silver wheeler
fretful shadow-maker
binding-blinder
Pale light, slivering etcher
reflector, bouncer
craggy surfaced spherer
Flutterer, pollinator
terpsichorean timer, spiraler,
ephemeral helical wonder
Moonlight seductress, as Phryne,
Cestrum Nocturnum as the Queen
moth lover, nose arouser
We watch these blossomed dancers
eye-smell in nightshade lustrations
drawing out infinity’s brief perforations
in all contrapuntal awe
sun, moon, moth, flower
And they do as earth does—
enchant us
21

25. November 2012
poems
Dis-assembled Desire
…desire is born of defective knowledge... — Thomas Mann
My right eye to watch Vermeer paint The Kitchen Maid
To see that source of light, not the reflected one
My ears to hear a child’s laughing voice
To appreciate getting the joke-affirmation life
My right palm to touch the face of Lady With an Ermine
So to make me feel connected to the past
My nose to a wet chamomile lawn at Sissnghurst
So as to relive that soft history of smug peace, only in England
My taste buds to Andechs beer and Bavarian bread
To identify with a monastery’s paradoxical judgments
My left palm to stroke the cheek of the real Mona Lisa
So I can understand the source of her smile
My fingers to play Beethoven’s Tempest
To go further into the joys of his kind of madness
My left eye to watch Giacometti sculpt
To train me to do the same in my next life
My lungs to sing Ode to Joy
It is the only natural instrument I know
My arse to sit on a stepped well in Gujarat
These mysterious structures are best understood by sitting
My arms to hold the Messiah Stradivari
So as to sense the forest of strings
My lips to kiss my first kiss again, and again
So as to defeat the ephemeral moment
22

26. November 2012
poems
My thighs to wrap around…, the list is long
Desire on this has to remain private
My knees to beseech for an earthly peace
I have no other way to echo Gandhi’s yearning
My legs to dance with Lubovitch to Brahms Piano Quintet
So I can return into a more tumbling role!
My feet to a warm wave splash on a Seychelles shore—
I suppose to have some memory of the Amion Sea
My hair to the wind on Rosses Point below Ben Bulben
Because it is wild Yeats country and I know it
My mind with the questions of Galileo, Darwin, Einstein
All subsequent questions come by their breakthroughs
My heart to the blood-pulse of love forever
It is obvious…
My soul to remain in this blest, blue-bliss globe, eternally
For it is all I know…
Pearse Murray, a native of Dublin, Ireland, lives in upstate, New York.
He has had several poems published in a variety of anthologies, Voices
Israel, Child Of My Child, Tree Magic, Poems for Peace, and with many
online and print magazines such as Poetica, Cyclamens & Swords,
Blue Collar Review, Revival Literary Journal, The SnailMail Review and
forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review. He was recently one of the
award winners in the short story series The Lonely Voice sponsored by
the Irish Writers Centre.
23

27. November 2012
poems
10. ZINIA MITRA
Skies
The years have been terrible you said
with all our faded curtains
ruffled by the wind
only boiled rice, potato
salt and chilly.
I thought you would write me a poem
on the nameless flowers
that bloomed and died
on the roads
I have never walked
as you gazed at your piece of sky.
You calculated debts
they grew like beards you said
chose cheaper brand
of cigarettes and threw up smoke
making hazy your piece of sky.
I grew flowers in my garden
they bloomed
a lot of yellow and red
fed the sparrows with grains.
How little it takes to feed them.
We must grow you said
like our neighbours
but when they walk
have you noticed they look so small
under the swaying trees.
I planted a tree in my courtyard
someday it will grow
to tell you
24

28. November 2012
poems
we are all so small,
we can only have
a small piece of the sky each.
You had yours
and I had mine
pieces of skies that had no suns
I floated mine in the lake the other day
today I shall ask you to do the same.
Zinia Mitra is presently the Head of the Department of English at
Nakshalbari College, Darjeeling. She has done her PhD on Jayanta
Mahapatra and is a critic, reviewer and translator. Her poems,
travelogues, articles, reviews have appeared in The Statesman, the
Sahitya Akademi. Kavya Bharati, and Muse India among others.
Her forthcoming books include Indian Poetry in English Critical
Essays (Prentice Hall), and Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Imagery
and Experiential Identity (Authorspress). Her online articles include
A Science Fiction in a Gothic Scaffold: a reading of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (Rupkatha Journal), Through a Different Window: I
Can But Why Should I Go, (Muse India), Master of Science and
Non-Sense (Parabaas).
25

29. November 2012
poems
11. BRINDHAMANI BBM
Humanism
Rustling leaves chanting symphony,
Whistling mind’s unheard melancholy;
Sharp scorching sun burning ablaze,
Parching lips with unquenched Thirst:
Decisive Feel of being in the desert,
Determinant though among people adequate!
Dutiful Dove plucked of all the feathers and crushed,
Dexterous immaculate lamb unheeded and crucified!
Father cruelly murdered by the son,
Mother brutally killed like a hen,
Brethren looting their own kiths and kins
Relatives kidnapping the young ones!
This perhaps isn’t the world
The LORD wished to see;
This definitely isn’t the place
The ALMIGHTY desired to be!
Killing people for money
Has become the way of life honey,
We can bring a change many,
If at all we live with humanism and love leftover any!
M. Brindhamani is an Assistant Professor, Dhanalakshmi Srinivasan College of
Education, Perambalur Tamilnadu, India.
26

30. November 2012
arts
12. PSYCHE AS REPRESENTED BY DIFFERENT ARTISTS
Sleeping Psyche, by Michelangelo Palloni, (c. 1688).
27

31. November 2012
arts
Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, by Antonio Canova,1793.
28

32. November 2012
arts
L'Amour et Psyché, by François-Édouard Picot, 1819.
29

33. November 2012
arts
Psyché aux enfers, by Eugène Ernest Hillemacher, 1865.
30

34. November 2012
arts
Psyche, by William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1892.
31

35. November 2012
stories
Flash fiction is fiction with its teeth bared and its claws extended,
lithe and muscular with no extra fat. It pounces in the first paragraph,
and if those claws aren’t embedded in the reader by the start of the
second, the story began a paragraph too soon. There is no margin for
error. Every word must be essential, and if it isn’t essential, it must be
eliminated.
– Kathy Kachelries, Founding Member, 365 tomorrows
To enquire for placing ads, contact us at:
contemporaryliteraryreview@yahoo.com
32

36. November 2012
stories
13. TARA MENON
Pilaf
Mary liked everything about her new house in Boston. She hadn’t cooked anything in her kitchen
yet because she liked the pristine look of the room and didn’t want to spoil it. However, it was
tempting to make something when her surroundings were so clean. She decided to cook pilaf.
She’d seen Madhur Jaffrey, the cookbook author, make it on TV. Soon the kitchen was filled
with a delicious aroma. Mary took a tablespoon of pilaf and closed her eyes, ready to be
immersed in the sensual pleasure of spicy rice. Instead she swallowed the food as if it were
castor oil! Mary was startled when the doorbell rang. She wiped her hands on the apron and
raced to the front door. An Indian woman stood near the front door with a Wilson Farm bag. She
beamed when she saw Mary and took out two square corning dishes from the bag. “Hi. I’m
Neelima and I wanted to welcome you to our neighborhood. This is for you.”
That night when Mary served her husband pilaf and raita, cucumber yogurt, he complimented her
on her cooking. She savored the praise as long as she could. Then for prudence’s sake, in case he
talked to Mary, she said it was from their neighbor. He didn’t believe her as he looked beyond
her to the oven which had a few sticky grains of pilaf clinging to the surface. He even confessed
to an affair, his fourth, and promised his wife that she deserved better. They got divorced seven
years later. By then Mary had learned Indian cooking from her neighbor and she worked as a
chef in an Indian restaurant. Her customers always came back for her pilaf. As Neelima, her
current best friend said, “When God closes one door, He opens another.”
Stalked
Ellen didn’t know it, but she was being followed. The man who was behind her wore sunglasses
and carried a briefcase. He wondered when she would notice him and how he would do it. At
that very moment she glimpsed him in the window pane. He looks like a terrorist, she thought.
Five blocks later, she noticed him again in a reflection off a bookstore. She tried to shake him
off, but he bridged the distance. What can he do to me here in a big crowd? she thought. She
tried to think about her upcoming trip to India. His shadow began merging with her shadow.
Ellen whipped around. The man looked at his briefcase. Ellen was sure there was a gun inside.
His hand went into his pocket. Ellen wanted to scream, but words wouldn’t come out. To think
she was about to die before she saw the Taj Mahal! His manicured fingers handed her a business
card. “Have you ever considered a job as a model?” he asked.
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Tara Menon is a freelance writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her poems have
been published in Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves, Tales of the Supernatural, the
view from here, and 10x3 plus poetry. She also has poems forthcoming in Azizah
Magazine, aaduna, Cartys Poetry Journal, and Damazine. Her fiction has been published
in the following journals and anthologies: Catamaran, The APA Journal, Elf: Eclectic
Literary Forum, Many Mountains Moving, India Currents, The South Carolina Review,
Living in America, A Thousand Worlds, and Mother of the Groom. She is also a book
reviewer.
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14. MR. KERSIE KHAMBATTA
Culture Shock
“When I eight, …my ma, …she shake us up at sunrise…in Chechnia…out in sleeping
suit……put snow over us…minus forty…change to uniform…walk to school fourteen
kilometers…fourteen kilometers….”
“But pa” complained Dora “This is not Chechnia, this is New Zealand. All we ask is that you
don’t wake us at sunrise. School is just ten minutes away”.
“How you be strong,…how you be healthy? You spoilt” muttered Pa.
Dora, Augusta and I are sisters. We were born in New Zealand. Our parents escaped to France
from a concentration camp in Chechnia decades ago. Pa wore the scars. Ma was quiet,
withdrawn.
Pa didn’t go out much. Neither did Ma. They were never comfortable in English. We sisters had
a lot of friends. Dora was the eldest, next Augusta and then I. There was about two years gap
between each of us.
Dora started dating. Henry particularly liked her. Pa couldn’t accept the idea of her going out to
dance parties, clubs, bars and coming home in the wee hours of the morning with strangers. He
revolted. He blew up. You could all but see the steam whistling out of his ears. But he loved us.
And we loved him. We loved Ma too, and she adored us. Ma went with what Pa said. That was
the way it always was in the culture.
There was tension in the house every weekend. Dora is stubborn. So was Pa. Yet there had to be
a compromise. Dora could go with Henry, provided Augusta and I went along. Pa didn’t much
like this arrangement, but he liked her going out only with Henry much less.
So Augusta and I went too. I was at the acceptable age for the places we went to, provided I
showed I.D. I always carried that in my purse. But I didn’t like the way the bouncers and barmen
looked me up and down and then at the I.D.
I even now clearly recollect the night we were at the Stranger Bar on Merry Road in town. A
friend of Pa saw us and Henry. He shuffled rapidly up to us with a deep frown on his weather-
beaten face, and snorted like a war-horse:- “What you doing? Why you not home? Who this is”
pointing solidly to Henry. “In my country …you be slit…” and ran his chubby fingers across his
throat. We gulped down our drinks, paid the bill and slipped out. Henry’s face was chalk-white.
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He said later that he couldn’t forget that ghastly creature with smoke trickling out of his throat.
(Pa explained to us that that man had cancer, and had had an operation on his gullet, and so when
he smoked, the smoke came out of his throat). He looked like a dragon!
Then came the fateful day Henry announced to Pa that Dora and he were getting married. Dora
had been fretting, worrying, dreading the moment. When it came, Pa just chocked. He went into
shock. His eldest daughter marrying outside the community! At night, after Henry had left, he
shouted angrily: “He tell me! He not ask me!
He tell me!…He…He…”
Henry’s parents invited themselves to our house to discuss wedding plans. Pa walked and talked
like a zombie. We are Catholics.
They are not.
The wedding day arrived. Augusta and I were brides- maids. The whole community attended,
with solemn faces. While we went up the altar, two tough characters walked behind us…in
reverse…facing the other way! Pa said that was the way it was in the place where he grew up,
and it should be the same here. The toughies were there to protect the bride and bridegroom from
the mafia!
Months later the stork came flapping in with a crying bundle. Pa had a peek inside. His old eyes
became moist. He nearly stumbled as he groped for a chair. “What it be?” he stammered “Boy?
Girl?” We knew what his feelings would be if it had been a girl. But it wasn’t!
It was a boy.
Tears of joy rolled down Pa and Ma’s faces.
Hendrik grew up fast. His parents and he lived miles away.
Dora came with Hendrik to visit us once a month. Henry never did. He always felt rejected. Pa
never went there, so they didn’t see each other at all. We tried desperately to bring them together,
but to no avail.
Neither relented.
Ma suddenly collapsed in the kitchen and we rushed her to hospital. Pa was devastated! So were
we. She didn’t live long. The earlier hard life took its toll. She passed away in Pa’s arms. Pa aged
rapidly thereafter.
Since Dora and Henry were working, they decided to leave Hendrik with us during the week. He
went to a school near our house.
Pa and Hendrik bonded like grandfather and only grandson can. But Hendrik was not quite
happy. He sensed that his dad and grandpa were not on talking terms. We heard long whispered
conversations between Hendrik and Pa but couldn’t catch the words.
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I remember the day. Not many moons before Pa went to the happy hunting grounds. It was a
beautiful sunny day. Pa dressed like he was going to church. Dora waiting in the car with the
back door open and inviting. Pa walked slowly up holding Hendrik’s hand.
Hendrik winked at me. He was smiling broadly.
“Grandpa’s coming to our house” he said. “Dad’s waiting!”
Kersie Khambatta, Auckland, New Zealand writes poetry and stories.
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15. DASU KRISHNAMOORTY
It’s Good to Watch TV
We’d prevailed upon the builder, a short, stumpy man who sold us our first flat, to erect for us in
the living room of the second flat we were buying from him a long glass shelf along its northern
wall, rising three feet from the floor. Unable to stand our nagging he built it. We high-fived our
little victory. You’ll agree, life after all, is a collection of small and big victories and defeats. We
filled the glass and masonry shelf with books we’d brought from Delhi as part of our intellectual
narcissism. Some of the books were borrowed. For ever. We argued one entire day hurting our
vocal chords whether the books should be lined up in an alphabetical order of their titles or
according to the size of their spine. We did neither. We just let the books fall into an order of
their choice. The marble top of the shelf became for us a long and low mantelpiece on which we
showed off some nonliterary cargo: two toy horses made of leather by Rajasthani craftsmen and
gifted to us by a neighbor. We didn’t check with him about the breed of the stud remembering
the old advice about not looking into the mouth of a gift horse. Both are saddled and ready to
ride. They have uniform coffee complexion. If God were a human, as his devotees believe, he
would invest these chargers with life and ride away.
On the marble tarmac we parked a red Albion double-decker toy bus such as the ones we’d seen
on the roads of Hyderabad on our first visit — the first elevated runway for any bus in the
country. On top of a library. I look at it fondly remembering how as children we would run up
the spiral stairway at the entrance of the bus, sit on the upper deck and look down on the tops of
foreign cars and sun-scorched scalps of the pedestrians. Great fun it was to ride from Charminar
to Ranigunj. Not anymore. Some urban arts dork took them off the roads. They later surfaced at
the Central Park in New York. A replica of a derailed steam locomotive I’d played with as a
child also claimed space on the top without its steam and steel mass. Tokens of middleclassness,
you might say. We also kept a few porcelain figurines of European men and women my father
had brought from Dresden for my sister long, long ago, beyond the reach of memory. My
childless sister gave them to me because I’d a daughter. At the wall-end of the shelf my wife sat
our new BPL color television in a diagonal position. When it is switched off you can see the
kitchen counter appear on its screen. It would show the gas stove readily, and the Corelle
crockery if you strain your eyes. The short stump walked in one day and said the placement of
the TV violated the laws of the Hindu Vastu Sastra. We laughed behind his back.
We watched TV very little in the morning when the rush of daily chores ruled out such
indulgence. When we bought our first black and white Crown TV in Delhi, we could get only
Doordarshan, the media-maligned state television outfit, for a couple of hours in the morning and
four hours in the evening without advertisements. The transmission would close with Salma
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Sultan or Protima Puri reading out the Hindi news from a teleprompter and ending the bulletin
with a smile that needed some effort to eject. Teleprompter was a novelty at that time. We
acquired a color TV when we shifted to Hyderabad and continued to consume Doordarshan’s
Spartan fare.
Thank God, the Gulf War came for no fault of ours, a couple of years after our arrival in
Hyderabad, after a long exile in Delhi. The TV showed images of the war and the skies lit up
with color and Patriot missiles. It reminded us of July 4 pyrotechnics in New York across the
Hudson where our daughter lived. Soon the number of channels multiplied and we’d to change
for a BPL set with a magic wand that changed channels as if it had read our minds. That set, the
gift of the Gulf war, is the protagonist of today’s story. For a few months after we bought the
new TV, we marveled at the magic of the remote to shuffle channels at will. We could never
enjoy the programs unless the remote was in our hands. We first saw a remote in Ek Baar Phir
flick featuring Deepti Naval filmed in London. We were amazed at what technology could
achieve. Taking over our minds. Though my wife and I were united in amazement we couldn’t
stop the remote from becoming a menace to domestic peace like Siachen between Pakistan and
India. Each would part with it to the other with an air of martyrdom and unconcealed disgust.
At the time of this story there were at least fifty channels and I would go on hopping from one
channel to another until my wife snatched the remote from me and delivered a lecture on mature
adult behavior. If you wanted you could see at least a dozen movies in a day winding yourself
around the sleek TV cabinet. Then there was this Fashion channel for lovers of wardrobe
malfunction. Models reveled in textile minimalism. Remember Janet Jackson. This channel
choice aplenty called for mechanics of mutual agreement and understanding that, like Indo-Pak
détente, we didn’t have in plenty. So we were both happy and unhappy with the TV. Life is a
mixed bag. We also agreed that however much we loved each other TV and love were two
different things.
The TV held us together for most part of the day in a state of conjugal tension, alternating
between bickering and bonding. Short of writing it down we came to an understanding that my
role was to simply stand and stare when serials of my wife’s choice are aired. This understanding
marked our watching a film that evening when the defining event of the story began closing in
on us stealthily like blood pressure. The movie was The Burning Train featuring a crowd of
heroes and heroines. Dharmendra and Hema Malini were my wife’s favorites even after they had
married and had children. My favorite Madhubala had died long ago.
‘What kind of dress is that Dharmendra wearing,’ I comment unwarily, forgetting our
understanding, and raise my wife’s hackles. Prickly girl.
‘Why don’t you watch the film? Commenting on everything as if you are very perfect,’ she
shouts at me without taking her eyes off the awkwardly gallivanting Punjabi guy thumping the
screen. It is the ageing hero that made me open my mouth, my wife doesn’t realize. With my
right hand I seal my mouth and turn towards her to show I’ve carried out her writ. She is amused
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and endows me with a wifely smile making sure the romping hero is not watching us. The smile
was not meant for him. Poor girl, my wife, she never gets angry with me except when she is
angry.
The gangly Amitabh Bachchan appears on the screen with his ungainly steps and a body that
appears to have emerged from a medieval rack.
‘I can’t stand this guy. He should stop acting,’ I mumble to myself.
Much against my calculations, the mumble reaches, traveling on what vicious wind I don’t
know, the ears of my wife. I brace for another show of anger.
‘My god, can’t you sit quiet till the movie is over? Leave me alone for a while,’ she raises her
voice. I evaporate.
Making sure there has been a change in conjugal weather I come back when the scenes of the
burning and speeding train were lighting up the living room. We are now friends again and
watch together the blaze with interest and anxiety. The train is speeding into a dark uncertainty
with half of its cars ablaze. At that point I see in the right corner of the BPL set flames that
looked like a chain of orange pyramidal mountains. They were distinct in a three-dimensional
way from the indolent fires of the Burning Train. Then I find a part of the kitchen come alive
over the TV screen. I sense imminent danger. Come, I frantically call my wife and dart into the
kitchen. One of the two burners of the stove we had switched off before sitting before the TV is
burning. In the fraction of a second I detect that the fire had spread without the assistance of
wind or an accomplice to the stove’s tube connecting it to the gas cylinder. With a terror-stricken
face my wife reaches for the water canister in the kitchen alcove and empties it on the blazing
burner. Riding on the tube, the flames now reached kissing distance off the mouth of the
cylinder. I really didn’t know how it occurred to me to turn off the valve of the cylinder. When I
did that the fire died down at once as if responding to a command of the gods. Another second or
two, my wife and I would have become smithereens and a memory. End of tomorrow for us.
We stumble back from the kitchen into the living room, each able to hear the drumming of the
other’s heart. The TV is still coping with the fires of the smoldering train. It has stopped at a
station where fire tenders summoned to go into instant action. The burning cars are detached
from the train. The platform is full of water. Relatives of the passengers, gathered after learning
of the fire, rush towards the cars. There is a lot of hugging in relief among the parents, children
and friends of the passengers and tears of joy. And a huge crowd of unconnected onlookers and
TV crews pushing through the throng to interview the survivors.
My mind is too clogged to imagine the sort of obit that would have appeared the next day if we
hadn’t escaped certain death. We needed some one’s shoulder immediately. So we call our friend
Surendra and his wife and ask them to come up at once. They come up three flights from their
second floor flat suspecting from the tremor in our voice that something out of the ordinary had
happened.
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‘What happened,’ Surendra asks me.
I’m still dazed and incoherent in my speech. My wife sits in the sofa not recognizing their
arrival. She is crying. Sailaja posits herself next to my wife gently patting her on the back to take
the fright out of her. Surendra asks Sailaja to go down, make and get some tea. They coax us to
drink tea. After tea, we become who we were before the mishap.
‘What happened,’ Surendra repeats his unanswered question.
‘Don’t ask me,’ I tell him, meaning it too scary to be narrated.
My wife tells them the whole story in unconnected bits and pieces.
‘You’ve done a foolish thing. You should have come down immediately and let the cylinder
explode and do its damage. You’ve risked your lives. It’s a miracle that both of you are alive and
telling us the story,’ Surendra nearly chides us.
The four of us go into the kitchen. Surendra inspects the innocent-looking wet tube. It showed no
wear and tear. The floor became wet with the water my wife had emptied. And some water fell
on the food receptacles we’d kept ready on the kitchen counter for our dinner.
‘We will buy a new stove,’ my wife tells the couple.
‘Let’s go now and buy it,’ says Surendra.
We got to one of Abid Road shops. Surendra examines several stoves before approving one. We
come home and thank Surendra and Sailaja for reviving us.
It’s now three hours after our brush with death. It would be 8.30 in the morning in the US where
my daughter and family live. We call her and tell her the story. She yells at us both and repeats
her advice for tens of times to come away and stay with them.
‘You would have made me an orphan,’ she cries.
That night we couldn’t sleep well thinking about what would’ve happened to us if we had not
been watching TV. We learnt a lesson: always watch TV.
Hints: Doordarshan is India’s state TV company.
Dasu Krishnamoorty is a retired journalist and journalism professor from India. He now
lives in the US as a US citizen. India mainly was the subject of his writing that appeared in
print, radio and net media. At 86, he began writing short stories and this story is his first
one.
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essays
16. TATJANA DEBELJACKI
An Essay About Love
As if I am invited to do something great that could last.
As if with your love I am willing to cope with myself, my weaknesses, my fears and my
immobility.
Let me tell you that the shadows that haunted me this evening have your face, both those living
and those dead, and those that have brought me the pain, and those that have brought me the joy.
Shadows of some of my lives I recognize, but I’m craving for them the same I’m craving for
your love, your touch, your being.
I love you; it means to look for the meaning, to be prepared and open.
I love you, it means to live truth and tremble at the thought of you. Thank you for everything no
matter how long it lasted.
My love, the poor are those who have never loved! I do not want to teach you but to love you; it
is the higher level of knowledge. If you believe in yourself, as a consequence you will have the
agility, defying any storm.
So love and life will be the one. I love you, I really love you.
Thus my life gets its meaning. My fate gets new forms designed by you.
Because of your love, these forms are of priceless value. Could I expect more? Currently only
my love has a purpose, it is the only thing adding the value to this writing, only that deep sense
of belonging to you makes a sense, which, though coming out of me slowly, is leaving me
helpless and squashed no matter how much I wanted to kiss you, and yet again to make love on
the hot sand…
Oh desire, you exist in vain! Why, for goodness sake, we could have gone to that secret trip
together. What a pity, because my love for you is nothing. I do not know what I am saying, I am
trying to explain, describe my present situation.
How could I describe you this condition, this hangover of the soul, this instinct and that anxiety,
that wandering, that humiliation. How I hate you sometimes, I can’t get rid of you, can’t
separate, can’t wish for another man and yet your face only makes sense to me. Sometimes I
dream, I survive through the dreams of those days when you presumably loved me. It is not hard
to be a slave to the one you love. I’m not going to ask why this is so obvious. Only to increase
my pain, I sometimes think that it is just one moment in time, the time between two strokes. As a
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moment in which consciousness pressures my being and squeezes it, pulling out the essence
which is called love. Sometimes I am boring even to myself. Love and then again love.
Sometimes I wonder where love comes from, where strength and weakness at the same time
stem from. Where do shapes of your face that haunt me from hour to hour come from?
Why are you so persistently in me, why can’t I detach you from the main core of my life? How,
why, it is not enough just to say I love you.
I’m scared of you, I want you and I fear from you, I hate you and kill you every day, as you are
my fear and my fever and my non-having, my limitations and my bluntness and all of my
stupidity. And all of my work and you are the truth, and that spiritual solitude through which the
words pass as miraculous as journeys. When I say I love you I think about what that word does
all that you have lived, all that you live and you will be living.
Oh how much the pleasure of caressing and tenderness could be missed....
Loving you during periods of numerous lives means to beat the death, means hope and meaning
of life, paths towards you…Maybe the current love in this life is the way to learn to suffer. This
world is sometimes cruel, sometimes I am unable to understand, sometimes I accept it, and I do
not like anything I know. I have a feeling that you’ll be gone, that you’ll be pulled away from me
by the streams of life. What is the point of searching for oneself if we had got lost before we
could find ourselves? There are no shortcuts on the roads of life. It is the clear light of
knowledge. I can. I am leaving you. I am saving you from my presence, my complexity, my
insomnia and excessive love that you get bored of…It’s always something different from what
we currently think it is. I can always expect more from my love. Why do we want to get rid of it?
Why sudden overcoming of sadness and joy, two different feelings at the same time? I know, I’m
going away from you but not from my love. You understand its depth and my pain.
This departure is not a death sentence for our love. Sometimes I want to suggest that you go with
me to share the life that remained. But I feel that I would make a mistake and scare you away. I
do not doubt your honesty, in all that you have given me during this time of love. Now I know
where this love comes from and with that knowledge I can go on the journey, knowing that you
will always be with me, in the frozen existence without pain and suffering. A time that does not
redeem the gracious and does not punish the sinners. That’s all for now, for time of one life, for a
bit ancient time in which all of my joys and all of my sorrows are renewed. Indeed you are my
love for all times!
Tatjana Debeljacki writes poetry, short stories, stories and haiku. She is a Member of
Association of Writers of Serbia -UKS since 2004. She is Haiku Society of Serbia - Deputy
editor of Diogen. She also is the editor of the magazine Poeta. She has four books of
poetry published.
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essays
17. MAITREYEE B CHOWDHURY
The Pursuit of Knowledge
Source: With due permission by Dipanjan Mitra
The pursuit of knowledge seems to be bizarre in its very wanting, in its madness, the thirst that it
brings about and in a strange way it makes you let go of everything that you have learnt,
accumulated over the years and hoarded thinking they were milestones that were the guiding
lights of your life. Yet often this very urge makes islands out of you from those very people to
whom you have been clinging all your life, in whom you have seen relations, love and normalcy.
Then what is it you would say, about this thirst for learning that makes you do the wildest things
that you didn’t think yourself capable of, that you had no idea existed within you. This total
surrender to something so powerful that it’s like a macabre, a slow dance of death awaiting the
light of dawn when one is to be killed having had one’s fill of knowledge, power and sustenance
thus.
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essays
I remember an instance when I watched the sea from very close quarters at night, something
about its eeriness struck me as fascinating. While I did like the sea during the day, at night it was
all pervasive, strong and overwhelming. Like the elusive siren, who carried within her the flavor
of the earth in sanctums sacred since time immemorial. I decided to walk towards it, to feel its
waves engulf me and talk to me, to hear what its depths had to say, perhaps to walk into it and
taste that illusive knowledge that, drowns the deepest of souls. And yet I knew that if I entered I
might not be able to swim back, indeed I could not. I did not enter the sea that night, neither did I
walk towards it; instead I sat there looking at it. It brought to me shells, sick things from different
shores. I wondered if it would bring forth corpses with no names, no home, no destinations, not
even a caste, nor a Gotra that helps us distinguish one blood from another, in spite of the color
red.
I guess I sat all night dissecting the water, wondering if it would bring about that elusive
knowledge that I knew was in store for me. And then I felt a foamy caress, of the mighty sea
itself, it was dawn, time perhaps for the magic to end I thought, like the delusions and dreams
that we carry all night long, in every mind that makes a night out of a day. I watched fascinated
like a retro dream being played out in the 2000 s, as if within the sea was being played out life
after life, death after death and yet there was room to fill for the exuberance and thirst to know
more.
The night was gone, but the sea seemed to whisper in some remote echo, ‘In me lies all that you
need to find and more. All that needs to be unlearnt before you learn copulate on and make your
own. But then don’t drown in me, I hate corpses. Don’t be merged in waters that drown as well
as give life, don’t be the island that looks good from afar, where birds of prey sing and butterflies
die. I shall give you back, such knowledge, even throw it back on land and puffed with your
body full of knowledge filled from waters deep, useless and stale. Then you shall lie there and be
eaten by the crabs running hither and thither and be sniffed at by dogs and men at night for
experiments that I know not of. Look for in me, the wise-ness of the centuries and feel in me the
impermanence of the now. Life is but thus, complete in all its impermanence. Complete even in
the stark knowledge that nothing lasts, not even knowledge. I went home that night; I was not
dead, maybe not alive too, but wet, tired and happy. I had become an island unto myself and yet
not.
Maitreyee B Chowdhury, is a web columnist and poet. Besides poetry
she writes on art and social issues.
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49. November 2012
criticism
I criticize by creation - not by finding fault.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
www.gentlyread.wordpress.com
To enquire for placing ads, contact us at: contemporaryliteraryreview@yahoo.com
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50. November 2012
criticism
18. EL HABIB LOUAI
Love Relationships as Central Mechanisms for Narrating Colonial Contact and its
Aftermath by El Habib Louai
Both with a deep legacy of a colonial history and consciousness of difference, Jean Rhys and
Tayed Salih composed their famous novels, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Season of Migration
to the North (1966), in totally different socioeconomic circumstances and geographical spheres
and within slightly diverging historical realities. Nevertheless, despite these obvious disparities
in terms of economic and social conditions, the inclusion of love relationships in their narratives
as a fundamental mechanism to speculate on the colonial encounter and its subsequent
foreseeable repercussions reflects a common awareness of the colonial domination and
exploitation through such relationships of love. Undoubtedly, love relationships have already
been investigated in different contexts because they constitute the fabric of both narratives.
Nonetheless, little attention is paid to the ways in which love as a sublime human value can be
used in total opposition to its innocent ordinary employments, mainly as a strategic technique to
subvert or subjugate certain hidden intentions imposed by a Eurocentric colonial mindset. In this
paper I intend to investigate love relationships as they are used in Wide Sargasso Sea and Season
of Migration to the North in an attempt to prove that love relationships are cunningly subverted
to satisfy certain concealed desires pertaining to either colonial or post-colonial purposeful plans
of exploitation or retaliation.
…that love relationships are cunningly subverted to satisfy certain
concealed desires pertaining to either colonial or post-colonial purposeful
plans of exploitation or retaliation.
It is very important to point right from the very beginning to the fictional techniques of
subversion, revision and re-inscription to which Jean Rhys resorts in her novel. This technique of
subversion as a distinctive feature of post-colonial literature is indeed a significant strategy of
undermining any presupposed theoretical stance or ideological position that a particular different
individual may have formulated on the ‘Other’. This feeling of the need to rectify a racial
inequity exercised by the colonizer is expressed when Jean Rhys inquires “why should [Charlotte
Bronte] think Creole women are lunatics and all that. What a shame to make Rochester's wife,
Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I'd write a story as it might really have
been.” 1 By thwarting Charlotte Bronte’s famous story in her novel Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys
1
Teresa, O’Connor, Jean Rhys: the West Indian Novels, New York : New York University,
1986, p144.
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criticism
assumes the position of a responsible and probably conscientious novelist who reacts in total
awareness of a wrong that has been done in colonial history. Although some critics may easily
disparage Rhys’s use of such a technique as subversion of an already-existing story, I find myself
quite comfortably identifying with a premise postulated in one of Jacque Derrida’s essays when
he argues that all repetition is also alteration 2. Undoubtedly, Rhys writes her novel with the
intention of recontextualizing Charlotte Bronte’s story in a spaciotemporal post-colonial setting
so as to reconsider certain colonial practices of injustice and inequality. These acts of oppression
and injustice are to be intelligibly discerned when we consider relationships of love, marriage,
bondage, hatred and tenderness in Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea.
Undoubtedly, Rhys writes her novel with the intention of recontextualizing
Charlotte Bronte’s story in a spaciotemporal post-colonial setting so as to
reconsider certain colonial practices of injustice and inequality.
In Wide Sargasso Sea the characters represent a diverse set of racial and social classes that
consciously transfix each other through classifications of inferiority/superiority,
domination/supremacy, power/subjugation. Despite the fact that they constitute the same social
fabric, these different racial and social categories are oppositional in their nature because they
are originally from different parts of the world: France, England and Africa. Consequently, the
relationships that hold these categories together differ from one class to another and they are
usually defined by the position of the individual as belonging either to the colonizer or colonized.
If we consider love relationships between different characters in the novel, we can quite easily
notice that these relationships are created and maintained within a set of stereotyped prejudices
towards the individual as a racially and linguistically different other.
Love relationships in Wide Sargasso Sea can be traced to investigate the idea propounded by Bill
Ashcroft about the emergence of both a national and regional type of literature that seeks to
counterpose the colonial/imperial center. It was quite obvious from the beginning that the
conjugal relationship between the unnamed husband (Rochester) and his wife Antoinette is based
on certain corrupt purposes. Marriage as a social institution is turned here into a materialistic and
financial affair just as any other forms of trade in the West Indies Company. Marriage is
thwarted in a sense to reflect certain hidden colonial intentions that aboriginal people could not
understand. As we discover in the novel, Rochester was reluctantly driven into this affair by his
friend Richard Mason who promised him a huge inheritance in case he managed to accept
marrying Antoinette. It becomes therefore obvious that the love relationship between Rochester
and Antoinette is built on a colonial negotiation of the legacy of the colonized. Antoinette and
Rochester’s marriage is characterized by this absence of love and tenderness. Rochester has
repeatedly stressed the fact that he does not ‘want’ his wife anymore. This kind of repugnance
drives him to turn to another woman, the black servant, with whom he sleeps in the same family
2
Jacque Derrida, « Signature, événement Contexte », (Mirage, Paris : Minuit, 1972), p 375.
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house shared with his wife. Antoinette's anxiety caused by her husband’s indifference mirrors the
angst of the indigenous people as a colonized nation, while Rochester's coldness and infidelity
reflects English cruelty towards the colonies. Robert experiences this anxiety when he first
begins to think of the repercussions of his marriage to Antoinette and its influence on his private
life as an English gentleman. His stereotypes and attitudes, cultural prejudices and racial
classifications start to emerge as well shortly after his marriage. Although the external beauty of
Antoinette fascinates him at the beginning, Rochester begins to notice that his wife’s eyes are
“too large and can be disconcerting, long, sad, dark, alien eyes”. 3 This relationship of love is
equally changed when Rochester first becomes aware of the racial and social inferiority that may
be associated with the notion of creolity; a racial condition that defines Antoinette as being of
“pure English decent...but [she] [is] not English or European either.” 4 Interestingly, Rochester
discovers through his internal monologue that he did not really love Antoinette and that he is
only forced into this relationship by a certain kind of lust and that she was “a stranger to him, a
stranger who did not think or feel as I did”. 5 Love relationship is therefore employed here as a
pretext or rather a strategic colonial tactic that the colonizer, represented by Rochester in this
context, proceeds to different stages of colonial exploitation to secure his resources and reinforce
his politics of dominance and subjugation.
The crisis of identity and alterity, as two issues discussed in post-colonial literature in
juxtaposition with love, emerges at that moment when Rochester names Antoinette ‘Bertha’ in
reference to a prototype of madness widely known in English canonical literature. In addition to
his transgression and oppressive act of looting Antoinette’s inheritance through marriage,
Rochester proceeds to an act of self-effacement through a pejorative renaming. ‘Bertha’ as a
female character in Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre represents a figure of insanity that
categorizes all women as being inferior in terms of sex and gender. By resorting to this act of
oblique renaming, Rochester forces his wife to think of herself as being a different person from
what she really is; he forcibly intends to drive her to “subsume her identity and all the cultural
and personal associations that go along with it into one he has constructed for her.” 6 This act of
subverting the native identity is quite reoccurring in all the colonial practices since the first
imperial conquest of Native American lands. Nevertheless, Antoinette, no matter how hard
Rochester tries to undermine her presence, manages to stand for her right to an authentic and
genuine definition of the self when she exasperatedly answers “you are trying to make me into
someone else, calling me by another's name." 7 This sudden braveness that Antoinette shows
helps her in fact to thwart those oppressive power relationships of language that link her to her
3
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, London: Penguin, 2000, p37.
4
Ibid, p37
5
Ibid, p56
6
Maude. Madeleine Adjarian, Looking for home: postcolonial women's writing and the
displaced female self, College Literature , 22.1 (Feb. 1995) p202.
7
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, London: Penguin, 2000, p 95
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husband and in a way allows her equally to move in that in-between space, in a Bhabhaian view,
where she can easily fit herself into both black Caribbean and white Creole definitions of identity
and cultural belonging. Ironically, this oppressive renaming of Antoinette/Bertha by her English
colonial husband is a conspiracy that her half-brother Daniel Cosway contributes to when he sent
Rochester a denigrating letter about Antoinette in an attempt to lay his hand on the same
paternal, inherited legacy. Fortunately, Antoinette’s love relationship with the unnamed husband
(Rochester) goes beyond the boundaries set for her by the same husband when she stops thinking
of him as a necessarily complimentary part of her life. Her resort to Christophine to use obeah or
ritual magic in an attempt to procure a magic love potion that will make Rochester love her again
is regrettably shattered when Christophine protests that "if the man don't love you, I can't make
him love you. 8" Eventually, the magic potion Christophine concocts for Antoinette only repels
Rochester from loving her, a sentimental state which consequently results in her total loss of
power in this unrequited love relationship.
It becomes obvious that Rochester represents the English colonizer in all its characteristics when
we read through those parts of the novel which describe direct encounter of Rochester and
Antoinette, even before the marriage takes place. Rochester is depicted right from the beginning
as that pompous English subject who symbolizes those “imperializing desires deeply embedded
in the education of privileged Englishmen — the narcissism, the will to domination, and the
inevitable tragedy that it breeds” 9 Right from the start, Rochester shows this insecurity and
uneasiness towards the island which he considers to be “not only wild, but also menacing.” 10 As
part of this inherited imperialistic feeling of sexual and racial supremacy, Rochester never stops
to suspect and mistrust the indigenous people that serve him, a feeling of difference which drives
him to see himself as being superior to his wife who enjoys the same white physical, yet not
purely on the same scale as his English native people. This racial superiority that Rochester feels
stand between a possible mutual love of his wife Antoinette whom he deliberately conceives of
as being a degenerate object: ‘this Creole girl’ 11 His subversion of love as a mutual affection
into a mere mechanical sexual activity evokes this greediness of the colonizer for domination and
subjugation. Rochester admits in a subsequent passage that he “did not love her. [He] was thirsty
for, but is not love….. She was a stranger to me.” 12 Despite his continuous attempts to hide a
reciprocal love towards Antoinette, Rochester is betrayed by his internal emotions. He knows
deep in his heart that he loves Antoinette not only for her physical attractiveness, but also for
something unusual about her to the extent that he wants to “break her up” as Christophine
repeatedly confirms. Even at those moments when Rochester realizes that his wife is insane he
8
Ibid, p70
9
Virginia Woolf, a Room of One’s Own and Three Guinas, (London : Hogarth Press, 1984)
p106
10
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, London: Penguin, 2000, p39
11
Ibid, p45
12
Ibid, p 56
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still strives to control her any other commodities and properties: “she’s mad but mine, mine.”13
This propensity of Rochester to possess his stems originally from a colonial tradition that heavily
influences the constitution of Rochester’s cultural identity. Veronica Marie Gregg’s premise is
perhaps much explicative of this tendency when she propounds that,
The West Indian novel insists that the imperial tradition- out of
which the husband emanates and into which he dissolves- depends
for its existence on the reconstitution of others as creature of
European will and a belief in Europe’s right of appropriation. Yet,
at the same time, it anatomizes and displays the ravages of such a
system on the person who appears to be privileged and dominant. 14
The unrequited love that Antoinette unconditionally shows to her unnamed husband (Rochester)
is inevitably the reason behind her gradual decline into madness. Thus, the reader may
legitimately notify that the unnamed husband plays a principal role in this madness because he
permits Jamaican indigenous prejudices to influence his love of Antoinette as being an insane
Creole. Yet, Jean Rhys draws our attention to a side of the story which is not narrated in
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, especially at that moment when Antoinette bursts “and you won’t
believe in the other side.” 15 Though Charlotte Bronte emphasizes the fact that Antoinette is
confined to a certain inferior position just “like her island, she is colonized, her independence
and autonomy subsumed to British culture and to British law,” 16 Rhys reminds the reader that
Rochester equally suffers from the misfortunes of the same colonial regime. Despite the fact that
Rochester and Antoinette’s marriage is urged by reasons having to do basically with social status
and finances, Rochester still believes that Antoinette has equally benefited from this relationship
when he speculates that “I haven’t bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks.” 17 We can
understand from this statement that Rochester tries to attribute the failure of this relationship of
love to other reasons beyond his personal responsibility. There is a possibility that Rochester and
Antoinette could love each other without any intervention from the colonial system influences
with all its ethnic, racial or cultural categorizations. Rochester should not have recourse to
transplanting Antoinette from her native land where she can at least enjoy various cultural and
historical remnants that constantly remind her of how beautiful and lovely was her past life in
Jamaica. For Antoinette, there are no other places like the idyllic Granbois and Coulibri which
can make her jubilant and enthusiastic because Rochester’s presence unfortunately taints them
13
Ibid, p108
14
Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination, USA, University of North
Carolina Press1995, p105- 106
15
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, London: Penguin, 2000, p 81.
16
Teresa O’cConnor,Jean Rhys : the West Indian Novel, New York : New York University
Press, 1986, p193
17
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, London: Penguin, 2000. p39
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forever. Though Rochester decides by the end to take Antoinette to Thornfield, his presence is
reduced while crossing the wide Sargasso sea to a mere past memory. Antoinette ceases to
believe anymore in any kind of love when she discovers that is transferred to Thornfield not in
order to help her recover, but rather to imprison her just as Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane
Eyre. Nevertheless, Antoinette’s end is totally different from Bertha in the sense that she does
not die in her cold attic as all the other madwomen, she rather dreams to burning the house and
retaliate for herself. At last, though it is only in dreams, Antoinette comes to realize why she is
brought to Thornfield when she says “now at last I know why I was brought here and what I
have to do.” 18 The act of setting the house on fire is emancipatory for Antoinette, a woman who
is imprisoned and coldly unloved by an English husband. By voicing the silence of Antoinette as
a subaltern in the last part of her novel, Jean Rhys in this way launches a counter discursive
subversion of the colonial canonical text as it is represented by Charlotte Bronte’s version of the
story. Although Antoinette’s language is included in a fantastic dream, it can still emphasize a
possibility of change that may result in a fundamental transformation of English social and
cultural structures. Interestingly, Judith Butler argues in the same vein that “if the subject who
speaks is also constituted by the language that she or he speaks, then the language is the
condition of possibility for the speaking subject, and not merely its instrument of expression.” 19
By voicing the silence of Antoinette as a subaltern in the last part of her
novel, Jean Rhys in this way launches a counter discursive subversion of
the colonial canonical text as it is represented by Charlotte Bronte’s version
of the story.
Comparatively, the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih on the other hand employs love relationships
to ponder on and reconsider colonial oppression and its post-colonial subsequent repercussions
on the post-independence generations. There are mainly two perspectives when it comes to the
critical reception of Season of Migration to the North in its examination of gender and race
subjugation as they relate to love. The first view tends to explicitly endorse the central character
Mustafa Sa’eed’s illustrious achievements in England as an oriental conqueror while the second
deem differently his exploits to be primitive and savage. Strikingly, both critical positions
proceed from a fundamental premise that Mustafa Sa’eed’s presence in England can be regarded
as “an attempt to reestablish the dominance of the emasculated, colonized male by attacking the
women of the colonizers.” 20 In this sense, Mustafa Sa’eed’s diverse love relationships can be
18
Ibid, p123
19
Judith Butler, “Excitbale Speech : a Politics of the Performative” London : Routledge, 1997,
p 28
20
John E. Davidson, « In Search of a Middle Point : in Search of the Origins of Oppression in
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, » Research in African Literatures, Vol. 20, No.
3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 385-400, Indiana University Press.
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viewed as strategic tactics to narrate colonial contact and its aftermath. This account of the
colonial encounter and its backwash is announced by the first lines of the novel when the central
character, an eminent native intellectual, returns to his homeland; a coming back that divulges
slowly the details of his life in England. In this part of my paper, I intend to trace Mustafa Sa’eed
diverse love affairs as an example of anti-colonial subversion and resistance through love.
…Mustafa Sa’eed’s diverse love relationships can be viewed as strategic
tactics to narrate colonial contact and its aftermath.
The first English woman Sa’eed meets is called Mrs. Robinson and she stands waiting for him
together with her husband, the schoolmaster, while coming from Khartoum. Despite his very
young age, Sa’eed already experiences this strange sexual desire towards Mrs. Robinson who is
an old English married lady. Upon his arrival to Cairo, Mustafa Sa’eed, a twelve-year-old boy, is
greeted by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson who take him for an entertaining visit to various museums,
antiquities and mosques distinctive for their historical and cultural value. In a very unconscious
manner, Mrs. Robinson titillates Mustafa Sa’eed’s sexual desire when she first kisses him. Sa’ee
depicts this scene in a much more exciting manner when he narrates “with the woman’s arms
round my neck, her mouth on my cheek, the smell of her body — a strange, European smell —
tickling my nose, her breast touching my chest, I felt — I, a boy of twelve — a vague sexual
yearning I had never previously experienced.” 21 However, this kind of motherly love Sa’eed
feels towards Mrs. Robinson metamorphoses into a lascivious, but wary love as soon as she asks
him tauntingly to show cheerfulness shouting “"Can’t you ever forget your intellect?"22
Wittingly, Mustafa Sa’eed realizes from this very moment that the English colonizer constantly
urges him to forget about the potential of his mind in an attempt to perpetuate that Eurocentric
prototypical conception of the Oriental subject as a symbol of savagery and primitiveness. This
deep-rooted racial and ethnic categorization, one which is mainly produced by a colonial
mindset, constitutes perhaps the primary reason behind Sa’eed’s choice to stay in England after
finishing his studies so as to engage in civilizational war whose primary hope is to avenge his
people and his country. It is ironical how Mustafa Sa’eed subverts the entire colonial enthusiasm
associated with his early extraordinary academic aspiration as soon as he sets his feet on the
colonizer’s territory. Sa’eed’s mind is entirely preoccupied with plans and schemes that can
eventually assist him in retaliating for his native country from the English empire and its ulterior
representatives. The immediate academic success and fame that Sa’eed easily earns through
publications and teaching positions secure his social status within English society and equally
help him to “win the attention and affection of several English women.”23
21
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 1969. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991, p25.
22
Ibid, p28
23
Lance Rhoades, “Mimetic Desire and Rivalry in Season of Migration”. Washington District:
University of Washington, 1998
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London with all its cultural diversity, its tumultuous post-war atmosphere, and openness to
various world artistic productions allows Sa’eed to experience different possibilities of cultural
encounters and love affairs. He even becomes a bohemian who rambles from one pub to another
reciting poetry and talking about oriental spirituality only for the purpose of seducing more
western white women. He incessantly tempts white women belonging to different classes and
social groups such as “the Salvation Army, Quaker societies and Fabian gatherings” 24by
appealing to their phantasmagoric illusions of an exotic and erotic South. Mustafa Sa’eed’s first
love affair is with Ann Hammond, a well-to-do daughter of an officer in the Royal Engineers and
a mother from a wealthy family in Liverpool. Sa’eed perhaps finds it much easier to seduce her
since she is already in total enthrallment with the oriental languages, a bait that he can easily use
being himself interested in Islamic poetry and languages. Hammond, a seemingly pious girl who
spent her childhood in a nunnery, turns out to be an easy prey for Mustafa Sa’eed who takes her
to his Rashidian bed. She was fascinated by Sa’eed’s representations of a warm south where
tropical sun sweeps over everything. Unfortunately, her sweet and young body is conquered by
this very rough oriental new Haroun Rashid who seems to exemplify “a symbol of all her
hankerings.” 25 Conclusively, Ann Hammond chooses to commit suicide when she discovers that
Mustafa Sa’eed betrays her with another white English women leaving behind her areprobating
piece of paper which closes her story “Mr. Sa’eed, may God damn you.” 26 Thus, Mustafa
succeeds in vanquishing the first English woman, eventually a representative of the colonial
male, while maintaining his position as a famous intellectual from the South.
Mustafa Sa’eed’s second love affair is with Sheila Greenwood whom he probably meets during
one of his frequent visits to Soho restaurant where she works as a waitress. Sheila is a charming
and innocent daughter of a Scottish coal worker. She is an extremely attractive, playful, simple
girl with “a sweet smile and a sweet way of speaking.” 27 Mustafa Sa’eed entices her by lavishly
showering her with gifts brought all the way from the South/East and through what he calls his
hackneyed, yet “honeyed words.” 28 Even the atmosphere that reigns in Sa’eed’s apartment is
orientalized with all its exotic, fragrant smells of sandalwood and incense. Again, this awareness
of a deliberate revenge which Sa’eed brings to the colonizer’s land as an Arab conqueror is
obvious when he depicts his seduction of Sheila Greenwood; Sa’eed recounts “[she] entered my
bedroom a chaste virgin and when she left it she was carrying the germs of self-destruction
within her.” 29 This whole romanticized oriental world that Sa’eed reconstructs in the heart of the
English colonizer’s civilization is what lures Sheila Greenwood in the first place. She had an
idyllic love relationship with Mustafa Sa’eed until she commits suicide when she discovers that
24
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 1969. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991,
p 30
25
Ibid, p 142
26
Ibid, p 31
27
Ibid, p 34
28
Ibid, p35
29
Ibid, 35
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he has no intention to marry her. Sheila dies without leaving the slightest indication of the
reasons behind her act of suicide. Her suicide introduces another English, white, attractive
woman that is eventually going to be Mustafa Sa’eed’s last prey.
Mustafa Sa’eed’s third mistress is a forty-year-old wife of a middle class surgeon and mother of
three children. Her name is Isabella Seymour. He hunts her on a beautiful summer morning
while going for an occasional walk in Hyde Park. His rapacious eyes behold Seymour’s well-
shaped bronze legs while surveying the faces of people promenading. Sa’eed realizes from
Seymour appearance that she is eventually his prey for today. He approaches her in such a meek
manner surprising her with his different looks and complexion. Interestingly, Isabella Seymour’s
first question is directed to Sa’eed’s race, a steady ground on which Sa’eed constructs an
orientalized conception of the East/South that properly meets Seymour’s cultural stereotypes and
satisfies her fantasies towards it. Mustafa Sa’eed assembles imaginatively exotic pictures from
his hometown to back up his deception of Seymour, who credulously pictures Sa’eed as “a
naked, primitive creature, a spear in one hand and arrows in the other, hunting elephants and
lions in the jungles.” 30 It is interesting here to notice that the kind of attraction Seymour feels
towards Sa’eed is inextricably associated with his representation of a primitive race. Little by
little Seymour is entranced by Sa’eed’s honeyed talk about his homeland to the extent that she
“gazed hard and long at [him] as though seeing [him] as a symbol rather than reality” 31 At that
particular moment when Seymour whispers “I love you,” 32 Sa’eed succeeds in objectifying
another Western female body as a strategic tactic to subvert an inherited colonial, Eurocentric
oppression.
Jean Morris is the last English mistress who would terminate Mustafa Sa’eed’s staunch and
savagely phallic conquest of the colonizer’s land. He meets her first at a party somewhere in
Chelsea while probably leaving to his room together with two other English women. His first
impression of her is that of a boastful female, a shimmering mirage that dazzles his eyes.
However, Jean Morris is the first white English female who dares to disrespect him when she
contemptuously enunciates “I’ve never seen an uglier face than yours.” 33 This denigrating
conduct on the part of a white female causes an extreme emotional wound with long-lasting
effects on the psyche of Mustafa Sa’eed. Consequently, this emotional wound, especially for an
oriental person who believes deeply in what Bordo calls “male superiority,”34 results in a sort of
abhorrence that will eventually lead to Jean Morris’s demise. However, Jean Morris is not an
30
Ibid, p 38
31
Ibd, p43
32
Ibid, 43
33
Ibid, p30
34
Susan Bordo, "What is a phallus?" The Male Body. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
1999. p87
55