Magazine Review: Almost Island - The Concept of the New

A pigeon has brought this letter to you. You cannot ask any questions of it, but you can try and guess to whom this letter, without a name, without an address, has been written.

A new literary journal, edited by Sharmistha Mohanty and Vivek Narayanan just came out, Almost Island. It is a high concept artsy affair, fairly nice to look at, and delivers a whole set of interesting prose pieces to read in the debut issue, although it promises poetry and interviews in issues to come.

To make things more juicy, there is a kind of editorial schizophrenia in it as well. An inveterate preface reader from way back, I immediately perused Mohanty's editorial. Now one can only assume that a tremendous amount of thought went into it - it is the first editorial of the first issue. I can hardly imagine a more likely opportunity for literary self-scrutinizing than this.

It doesn't disappoint - the monsoon obligingly wreaks destruction on the city of Bombay, bringing with it - you'll never guess - new life. I, too, was surprised by this metaphysical turn of events, but apparently that's how it works: first nature brings death and then it brings rebirth! But seriously, it is a dark and stormy editorial. I have no problem with such things. It is certainly better than beginning with a long, extended metaphor based around the various ingredients that go into mango pickle, for example, a literary trope which tempts unwary exoticizers into its sticky, sentimental embrace with an alarming frequency.

The monsoon bit is fine - though I wish Delhi had had one this year - but my in-built theory curmudgeon widget began to flash red at this:

In India today and in many parts of the world, there is a false new as well. This is a writing where information does all the work, so it can hide the depletion of thought and feeling which is behind it. I would like to speak of the genuinely new as something which allows unknown connections to arise in the relationships between things; which has abandoned something, and so made space for the new to enter; and which is above all new because it has risen from inside the self.

Usually my eyes would glaze over while reading this stuff, but unfortunately I had just finished a strong cup of coffee and was briefly alert. All those years of training finally, albeit involuntarily, paid off and sent up red flags: what does this concept of the "new" imply?

The part that bothers me the most is the one that differentiates a special, superior form of "newness" as something that "has risen inside the self." I was immediately, and unpleasantly, reminded of the romanticizing subjectivity that plagues so much novelizing these days--the anxiety behind this attempt to demarcate a special pure, interior form of novelty depressed me and I almost gave up. However, driven by forces that were outside my self, I clicked on "next" and read on.

Almost Island would like to be concerned with writing which does not have a purpose outside itself. In times where information is seen as revelation, Almost Island would like to publish work which is in no way sociological, or a travel guide to a foreign culture, or a substitute for historical or anthropological knowledge. Literature seeks wholeness, not fragmentation, and information is never whole. Almost Island will seek work which is philosophical, internal, individual. It will seek work which either threatens, confronts or bypasses the marketplace by its depth and seriousness and form. This market is not one where the seller faces the buyer, both having walked miles, a once a week give and take of goods, honour, and guile.

Literature seeks wholeness, not fragmentation and information is never whole. Literature is too fastidious to transact with the world. Like a snot, it probably sends out a servant to buy the vegetables. I suppose it must be something contrary, broken and fragmented in me--or whatever swirling configurations of physical motes, rehashed memes, puffs of emotional tempests in teapots, and lustful yearnings that together currently conspire to fool me into believing that such a thing exists in the first place and is somehow identical with the one that went to bed last night after a stiff peg of Old Monk with soda--but this retreat into a self-contained, information-free, world of wholes is something that will never appeal to me.

Suffice it to say: no one at Almost Island is knocking down my door, looking for informationless prose (but if they do, I know how to fake it!). It is as hard to disagree with the ideas of self and world that structure this editorial as it is to argue with a parent who tells you that their child is really and truly special and unique, just like them. If you ever find yourself having this conversation, nod, smile and seek help. Then perhaps write about it in your sad, self-contained, readerless blog.

The wrenching emotional power of Sandhya Suri's film, I For India, derives in large part from its sympathetic depiction of the ultimately quixotic, tragic and impossible nature of this sort of misplaced quest for authentic interior wholeness. The longings evinced by Sharmistha Mohanty in her programmatic editorial would make a fit subject for a similar treatment, deftly and gently transformed into - information.

It was with some relief that I soldiered on over to the content that interested me most in this first issue - a set of three prose stories by members of the pathbreaking Cybermohalla collective, a project done in association with SARAI and Ankur. Its inclusion here comes as no surprise - the associate editor of Almost Island, Vivek Narayanan, is a key collaborator in Cybermohalla. I can only assume that it is his voice we hear in an editorial introduction to the three pieces by young Cybermohalla participants. In it he quietly, and productively, calls into question the romantic self-identity that Mohanty threatens her readers with at the outset.

He describes the backgrounds of the three authors--Jaanu Nagar, Yashoda Singh, and Rakesh Khairalia:

They are children of autorickshaw drivers, tailors, embroiderers. Their parents have almost all arrived here from the rural areas, and set up homes in colonies which are often deemed illegal and demolished. Many of these young men and women have dropped out of school in order to work, or because they could not clear their exams. I am here to talk to them about their texts, which I deeply admire.

Narayanan writes this about the experience of going to interview them:

Why is it, I ask them, that the texts they write are not usually narratives, even though what they see in films and on television is inexorably driven by the idea of a “story?” How is it that these texts are so open? Niloufer, Rakesh, Jaanu, Azra, Lakhmi, Shahana and many more. There are about twenty of us here this morning. They think for a few moments. They say, when we write there is no weight of presentation within us, like there is in a Bollywood film. We are free of that.

There is an announcement on a loudspeaker. It is hard to hear what they are saying.

They say, in a Bollywood film and on television, people have desires, they have hopes and dreams, and they live their lives so that those dreams can be realised. There is a sense of travelling towards a goal, of reaching somewhere. Here, our lives shift, change, every day. The place where we live may be demolished, someone might lose their livelihood, nothing is a certainty. There is no end to anything. So a “narrative” is often not possible.

How do they come upon the form they will write in, each time? Sometimes it’s easy they say, like leaning your head against a wall. The oil in your hair will leave a mark, and the mark will have its own shape. At other times, it’s a struggle.

The midday azan begins. All sounds seem to be unfolding right outside the two windows of the room. They accumulate as layers upon one another, or interrupt the previous sound, or distort it. Almost Island is privileged to be able to present three of these texts here. These are not voices of protest, they are writer’s voices, inclusive. They are valuable precisely because they are not texts with, as they say, the weight of presentation. They are texts of watching, the outside, and the self.

A perfect example of what he describes as a "text of watching" is the short story by Jaanu Naagar, "A Welcome To Those Who Come", a desolate description of a friendship that lives briefly and ambiguously before sliding into loneliness and loss:

He came among us at a time when we were doing our daily work. We were afraid even to touch him, in case we injured him in any way. He would close his eyes and keep listening to us quietly. But some words would sting him like a mosquito. He would open his eyes suddenly and say, “Where did you get that mosquito from?” The mosquito would buzz for some time and then become silent. The dream would think about something and then make notes in his notebook.

This much is easy to bear, but a time comes when the dream leaves us while we are asleep. Then, we remember him in dreams. But when we turn over on our beds, we see that the place where he slept, next to us, is empty.

This young author travels through an emotional landscape that reads like modernist sketches from an Urdu poet's notebook, an unlettered shahrashub, a portrait of a city disjointed and dismantled by longing for a beauty that leaves as soon as it is found. There is no possibility for the consolations of wholeness here, only letters sent and not received, letters received with no return address, incomplete circuits of communication left dangling:

A pigeon has brought this letter to you. You cannot ask any questions of it, but you can try and guess to whom this letter, without a name, without an address, has been written.