Anyone who has diligently read my Millions posts over the years (and I know you’re out there, somewhere) will know that I’m drawn to stories written by or about immigrants, whether it’s Mavis Gallant as the ex-pat Canadian writer in Paris writing about European post-war dislocation, Goran Simic writing in his adopted home of Canada about Sarajevo in the 90s, Rawi Hage, also in his adopted country Canada writing about the streets of Beirut in the 80s, or Michael Ondaatje returning to his Sri Lankan roots to write about the generations that came before him.So I’m more than a little embarrassed to confess that until about five minutes ago, I hadn’t realized that the three readings I attended a few weeks ago at the Toronto International Authors Festival could also be linked by this same theme. I’ve already written about Sarah Vowell on the Puritan immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1630s, and then Junot Díaz, together with Rawi Hage, speaking of the experience of being immigrant authors writing about immigrant families in modern cosmopolitan North America.The third reading I attended was by Amitav Ghosh, the Calcutta-born writer who, in a little over fifty years has also lived in Sri Lanka, Delhi, Goa, Egypt, Britain, and the United States, where he lives part of the year with his American wife. A multiple emigre with an admitted sense of dislocation, he’s the first in fourteen generations to marry outside his Bengali home district. He has spent a lifetime writing about dislocation and displacement, with their resultant sense of loss, but also with their capacity for opportunity.Ghosh spoke with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel for well over an hour on his extraordinary life and on his latest novel, Sea of Poppies. The interview was recorded and edited down to 45 minutes for Wachtel’s Writers & Co. radio show. A few quotes and observations:On the Maoist insurgency in Calcutta during his boyhood, on the upheaval around him: it was “formative to see places that are convulsed.” On the anti-Hindu riots of 1964, as hundreds of Hindus took refuge at the Ghosh family compound, Ghosh says that “because there were so many people, you don’t feel that palpable threat.”From age nine to eleven, he lived in Sri Lanka; with its beaches it proved to be “a kind of wonderland” for young Amitav. But even as a child, he sensed that “normal is never normal,” and with the ethnic strife he was aware of “tectonic plates shifting underneath.” This led to an interesting sidebar on the false assumption of security that many people have. When something horrific like 9/11 happens, Ghosh continues, those with that mindset tend to swing to overreaction.College in Delhi was “intellectually stimulating,” more so than the time he would later spend learning and teaching at Oxford and Harvard. Ghosh went on to live in Egypt in the 1980s which led to a discussion on India’s forgotten relationships: with Egypt, with China. India attempted and failed at one time to rebuild bridges between cultures whose relationships were interrupted by colonialism.On his beloved Indian ocean, Ghosh affirmed his affection for the “multiplicity of it.” Every part of it is different – Calcutta from Madras from Burma from Mauritius. On the repression in Burma, Ghosh believes that “politics is not capable of devouring the entirety of life,” so even in an oppressive Burma, friendships, and a life outside of the political reality, can form and flourish.His latest novel, Sea Of Poppies, is the first part of a proposed trilogy, and deals with indentured migrant workers in the 1830s, replacing African slaves after the abolition of the slave trade. They were poppy growers during the Opium Wars. Ghosh spoke of the roots of the wars: China, due to mass-addiction, bans the importation of opium; consequently Britain goes to war to reinstate the “free-trade” of opium. This led to Ghosh musing rhetorically: “How is it free if governments wage a war to enhance the trade?”Ghosh commented that portions of the novel – bits of dialogue – are written in a kind of pidgin English. He comments that “as writers, language is the equivalent of a mise-en-scene.” It serves many purposes, one of them being as “white noise,” rather than to communicate information. Consequently, there’s no need to understand every word, no need to decode the pidgin English.And Ghosh also commented that there are few narratives of departure among immigrant writers. Most tend to write about the life of arrival, rather than the life of leaving.
I enjoy your web site and wanted to drop you a line to thank you for sharing the writing queue with your visitors.
I recently started my own writing blog hoping that it will inspire me to begin taking my writing more seriously.
Keep up the great work. We enjoy it immensely!
Hey, whaddayaknow – someone else uses random numbers to manage large to-be-read piles of books. I started about a year ago to randomly choose my next book. I love the not knowing aspect in that even though I bought the book, it seems like surprise or treat. Which is very nice compared to looking at a full bookshelf and despairing (not unlike Ozymandias…)
Randomness is so much fun. I use it to decide what I will play on the piano, what I will wear, and like you, what books to read. I have about 400 books in my house that I want to read or reread sometime. I look them all over once in a while, just so I won't forget what they are. The top shelf of one bookcase is for current and next-in-line reading–six books each. If any book has a commentary, like the one I'm using for Ulysses, it can be beside it. I read my six current books in turn, a chapter or ten pages at a time, and alternating commentaries with the books they explain. When I finish a book, the first of the next-in-line books moves over, and I pick a new next-in-line book based on whatever book, author or subject I have recently read about in a journal. There are only two rules: each new book has to be as different as possible from the previous one(The Interpretation of Dreams follows Moby Dick) and there is always, these days, a Shakespeare play among the current reading. I pick those according to their order in Hazlitt's commentary. Thanks for letting me know I'm not alone.
Terrific blog,
Regarding your to be read stack, have you thought of asking your readers to give a vote to a book they'd like to see further up your pile. Nothing like a little reader involvement. I may try this out myself.
My strategy for what's on my to-be-read shelf is that I read the last book on each shelf going down the right side, then the first book on each shelf going up the left side. It manages to keep things mixed up reasonably well. At the moment, everything is shelved by color, but every few years, I rearrange by some odd criteria (height, author, title, order of purchase as best as I can remember, etc.). I've been toying with setting up a web page where people can vote on what I should read next, although that's some point in the future.
For four years I read using a regime I created to deal with the enormous number of number of books I had. I decided to choose a number of random themes and read everything I had that could fit that theme, which meant I would read the poetry and criticism and heavy non-fiction I had instead of reading novels all the time. I started with the Romantic era, leading me to read Byron's Don Juan, Blake's Jerusalem, Shelly's Prometheus Unbound, as well as De Quincey, Hazlitt, Lamb and Howard Bloom and Frank Kermode's books on the Romantics. I went through Crime fiction, Central Europe, the Renaissance, London and History, and I was in the process of reading the Greeks and the Romans when David Foster Wallace died and I thought I really wanted to read the copy of Infinite Jest I had had sitting on my shelf for years. Then I abandoned my thematic reading and went back to reading randomly, which I have mixed fealings about. I just finished The Savage Detectives and when I googled Roberto Bolano your review came near the top, which is what led me here. Looks like a cool site.
my reading queue sometimes reaches above 15 books, which pile up by the bedside. Then in a mad fit of tidiness I reduce it to three or four that I have read in the last week or so, the rest ' falling off the edge of the desk' so to speak. But then I run a second hand bookshop, so I'm in no real danger of not having something to read.
I love the random number generator idea! I often use a coin flip when I have simple, inconsequential decisions such as which of two delicious-sounding meals to eat from a restaurant menu, etc. This way you can never regret not choosing the other meal… this meshes with Barry Schwartz’ “Paradox of Choice” which he describes here: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html.