The irony of having to order Nisha Susan’s translation of K.R. Meera’s Qabar on Amazon, after the corporate behemoth shut down Westland and it’s politically strident imprint Context, was not lost on me. In the continuous debate on which of the big 4 (apple, facebook, google, amazon) would emerge from the global bloodbath, holding the keys to our futures, prepared to imprison us with code and data - I would bet on amazon. This is simply because, by dint of AWS, their highly profitable cloud computing and database storage vertical, they own a significant percentage of the code in the world. One simple line of enquiry to open up the political economy of digital (virtual and offline) infrastructure is to ask the question - ‘Where does Google drive store my data?’
This is one of the reasons why the amazon marketplace model doesn’t need real profitability in the larger scheme of things. Many large companies operate like this, of course, where one offering hits the sweet spot of marketability, convenience and consumer corporate need, while the other less attractive but more popular products serve as fronts. Westland is literally very small fry for amazon, they are interested in bigger things - such as becoming the world’s biggest grocers, the biggest library of audiobooks, and, of course, the go-to digital hardware and software vendor for any business in the world. Their conversation is with governments. The rumour machine has been rife with speculation that Westland’s brazen political stance - its array of incisive works that critique the current political regime -has what has brought on this decision.
But for Amazon to do this to a publishing company interferes not just with the tastes of a nation, but with a nation’s ability to tell its own stories; to critique its own government; to express, openly and without fear, its immeasurably many selves. In short, it interferes with a nation’s very democratic processes, its right to dissent and voice
While this could well be one of the factors for doing this - this is a small loss for Amazon. Business don’t run on empathy.
But storytellers do. For some of the most passionate poets their art was activism. For others, poetry was a tool of survival. Anna Akhmatova wrote her story of persecuton, not on paper but into the minds of her fellow inmates. To resist Stalin’s ‘reign of terror’ while committing to public memory her testimony, she was forced to burn the poem Requiem, after writing it, and she taught the final version to her friends in prison, complete with punctuation, sentence layout and emphasis. This is what it means to speak truth to power, is it not? In the era when political control takes many avatars, the power of critique is immense. Any honest representation of oppressive realities is a threat to a regime that operates with the twin hammers of duplicity and brute force.
There is not much that I can add to the discourse on Westland shutting down, but I stand in solidarity with the writers whose wings have been clipped mid-dream. To give a valuation to the cultural impact of this move is complicated. Many writers and critics are already doing this, some amazing must-buy lists are doing the rounds, and I sincerely hope that many of these titles that haven’t been uploaded yet in underground pirate platforms will find a space there. My personal favourites include the works of Arundhathi Subramaniam, Perumal Murugan, Sampurna Chattarji and Karthika Nair, Meena Kandasamy, Christophe Jaffrelot, Aakar Patel, Narendra Dabholkar, Sharanya Manivannan, and Josy Joseph.
This news of Amazon shutting down Westland hit me soon after I had finished reading K.R. Meera’s Qabar - in a translation so evocative and uncompromising that it made me want to better focus my energies on learning Malayalam, simply so that I could read the work in its original. This is the kind of book that changes, not only one’s view of the self and its relationship with the world, but also, one’s view of writing and the impact of narrative. K. R. Meera is a well established writer in the contemporary Malayalam literature landscape. Many of her works have been translated into English, and have found tremendous success.
Meera’s narative zest turns the reader’s experience of allegory into a response that is rooted in the physical. But even ‘allegory’ or ‘magic realism’ or ‘love story’ are labels that are too weak to hold the incandescent flood of feeling that envelopes you when you read Qabar. The blurb is unassuming, and does its best to translate the cultural setting of the story:
‘As the foundations are laid for a temple to rise on the site of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, voices rise from the ground in a small town in central Kerala. She is a judge in a district court, and he a petitioner in a seemingly banal property dispute. But the very first hearing tosses the judge’s life into disarray…’
While it mentions the demolition of the Babri Masjid, it must be noted that there is no direct reference to this event in the book. (Also, the upside down rose motif graphically represented on the jacket of the publication has a dome-like appearance)
This is what struck me most when I read the book. What kind of voodoo is this that it flays the reader without them knowing? The story of Qabar plays itself out in the complex metaphorical no man’s land between reality and phantasmagoria. It is not that the reader is confused about what is real - but real events take on a texture of dream that seems perfectly natural in the geography of emotion.
In the attempt to translate affect in this genre-bending work, words like ‘hypnosis’, ‘hallucination’, ‘psychedelia’ and ‘synaesthesia’ line up, before feebly receding into the background, unable to carry the rapture that is Meera’s testimony of real encounters through the emotional imaginations of her magnificent female characters. It is not that she uses the surreal as refuge - rather she uses it to go deeper into a situation with the persistence of one who has seen, and whose duty is revelation. These characters are written into colourful relief with the torrential current of empathy. They embody complete surrender, and an intensity of feeling that surges to the foreground both in its conviction and its expression of lack. The female protagonist is conjured up in the richness of metaphor, once again, through feeling rather than simplistic description.
When I discussed this book with a friend (I had got it for her after reading it - I wanted someone else to read it simply so that we could discuss it, and I could put into words what the novella made me feel) we shared a few moments of breathless wonder, before she said “Halfway through, I was like, What is happening?!” It is a rare skill, to rip open a reader’s mind simply with words, to take them to places they did not know they had visited before, and to invoke muscle memories that they did not know they had. Meera uses repetition both consciously and with intuitive vigour. Images return again and again, metaphors alight, changing colour with each new departure, sharp critique and social commentary waits just outside the threshold of immediate assimilation. Rather that typifying this as a conventional story with ‘strong female characters’, one is aware of a feminist sensibility whose truth-telling is so obvious in the universe of the narrative, that the ludicrous oppressive elements and the warped moral compass of the social environment within which it operates is laid bare. Allusions are thrown in with murderous nonchalance. This one’s my favourite:
I don’t want to reveal too much about the novella, I would like you to experience what I felt, first hand. Meera’s pen conquers the heart with cinematic panache, and biting political insight. Her prophetic gaze opens up questions about the legal framework, religion, gender and performance, abusive relationships, the social institutions of marriage, the nation, the family, and the individual, myth and folklore.
After reading the book, I think you will echo the reaction that my friend had - “What just had happened?” I read the book a few days ago, and I am still reeling. I hope you decide to pick it up.
For those who already have, I’d love to hear what you have to say!
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