READING AND REMEMBERING COVID-19 ON FATHER’S DAY: 2021
On September 2, via Zoom, I participated in judging an interesting essay competition: the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay competition open to young citizens of any country within the Commonwealth.
Young students, between 14 and 18, wrote in many forms of writing: the criteria were imaginative and the writers responded in essays, poems, stories, diaries, letters.
I was appointed a Senior Judge with two others one from London, the other from Nigeria, the former a famous poet, the latter a theatre person.
We were asked to judge on the basis of creativity and imagination, originality and creative flair, development of an Idea and how the piece relates to the ideas of the topic: Community in the Commonwealth in COVID-19.
COVID-19 seems to affect lives and imagination with the poignant intensity of personal involvement like a fever.
Global perspectives
The best writings is often personal, but most of these pieces were set within the circumference of a larger community in a crisis and the relationships between individuals, community and environment with global perspectives.
However, the overall feeling in the essays exuded a sense of optimism, compassion, hope and the power of imagining the world in a catastrophic crisis, but situated in the ground on which one walks and breathes.
This, of course,is the common spirit in the Commonwealth to which these young, creative writers belong. The quality of their humanity, I found, inspiring and infectious.
Normally I would have declined such an invitation, just as I decline marking theses. Evaluating the writings of others now has little value for me: I wish to explore my own life in the light of the past and present which have shaped the landscapes of my mind and heart in my journeys.
LIFEJourneys:Love and Grief
Hence my forthcoming book, LIFEJourneys:Love and Grief, due for publication later this year.
I’m now in the home straight, as they put it so graphically in the paralympic spirit, after so many laps. Whatever time is left, you want to write your stray thoughts for your children and grandchildren and a few others,friends and foes, if any, who may care to read sitting in the garden of sunset long after you are gone.
Posthumous remembrance is some comfort: while the sands of time continue to slip through one’s fingers.
For once you begin to see the truth of: Time and Tide wait for no man —or woman.
I’ve been a bit fortunate: compiling my books—I decided to write one a year—of prose or poetry—in between papers, articles, talks, conferences, and publishing here and there.
I’ve found writing deeply healing: like an act of worship or loving. It’s not that your wounds stop bleeding; but it’s the sorrows of the world that make you feel and think that your pains of the body, aches of memory, and twists of fate are nothing compared to the heart-wrenching tragedies of millions.
And you connect with others within your spirit and imagination. This is our shared humanity. You walk in their shoes: with an ever-widening empathy and a deepening awareness of your own vulnerability.
Life happens and you see glimmers of light in the encircling gloom of being a human being. Of being a father.
Occasionally I give expression to these in my writings, some of which are generously published in the FijiSun and in magazines and books elsewhere.
And people read them and I do get responses. My aim is to encourage others to give vent to their inner thinking.
This is one thing you learn from the writings of Mohandas Gandhi before he became a mahatma. The fiction is in the facts.
He laid bare his soul in all its utter nakedness, flaws and blemishes. I find that quite magnificent: while others hid their warts, Gandhi revealed them with an openness hitherto unknown in any political leader’s confessions who ever changed the contours of freedom and the configurations of our daily realities.
He called it swaraj—self-rule. Reveal thyself.
He wrote with such integrity that his adversaries didn’t know how to respond to such honesty and humility in another human being.
It was a novel experience for most of his contemporaries. It still smells of the freshness of a dream.
The half-naked fakir revealed himself fully in his words. Most of what he wrote was in Gujarati, and today we read them in translations in English. Possibly some subtle truths are lost in translation but the essential man reaches out to the reader with the stirrings inside a searching, loving soul.
And he became a martyr. Some couldn’t see themselves in the mirror he held to them.
Some worshipped him. India has had many gods and goddesses but only one mahatma not yet lost in the myths of time.
In his absence, he’s one noble, real presence on the subcontinent.
So I accepted the invitation to read through scores of essays. On Wednesday, September 2, we’d a zoom meeting of the three judges. It lasted three hours.
Commonwealth has meant a lot to me. I’ve been a recipient of its fellowships in England and travel grants to attend writers’ festivals and conferences.
It’s really Commonwealth Literature in particular that opened my world to other worlds of literature, travel, writing. Even my foray into politics was inspired by my readings of Caribbean, African, Indian, Canadian, and Australasian writers underpinned by English Literature.
English language was a great gift and the world’s multiple realities came to me through this remarkably rich, resilient and creative tongue. One read in English translations the works by philosophers, poets, political thinkers and literary luminaries from many parts of the world.
With American rise to power and prestige, the twentieth century was a good time to read and study after the horrors of World War II.
Though I read my first novel in English around the age of 16, for me the world has never been the same. My generation grew up without really experiencing the wounds of that War, heroic but also with echoes and scars of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.
Soon after India became free and affected our lives below the Equator in the little islands. And India was where I wanted to go first. I’m glad I did.
Commonwealth Literature
Although I had studied English Literature and done a Masters in Linguistics, it was Commonwealth Literature that gave me the joy of reading history and literature akin to my experience, memory and imagination. Indeed it connected me to my life in Fiji and its deeper resonances that shape us in so many subtle and invisible ways.
My own effort towards writing found its stimulus in the writing of others who understood the Commonwealth experience with insight and empathy.
Two other members of my family have also done their doctoral studies in what is now called postcolonial studies or Literatures in English.
It’s through Commonwealth Literature that
I was able to travel to almost all the centres where this literature was taught and being created by many gifted writers and remarkable teachers.
So many became my close friends and when I was elected the chair of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, ACLALS, in 1996 in Kuala Lumpur, I organised, with the assistance of other three universities in Canberra, the triennial ACLALS conference 2001 with around 700 scholars and writers from more than 60 countries.
Fiji was well represented. Twenty years before,in 1981, I was the Director of the ACLALS conference in Fiji on the USP campus.
As a former Commonwealth Fellow, I’m much attached to things Commonwealth: Australia, too, is called the Commonwealth of Australia.
So when they invited me to be a judge, I couldn’t say no.
Fiji students shortlisted in the long list
What impressed me is the tremendous talent of the young writers from many parts of the Commonwealth. A couple of Fiji students were also shortlisted in the long list. And they wrote so well and wisely.
Many have written with such compassion and passion about their experience of COVID and how to survive it with courage in your heart and creativity of the mind.
It ‘s a rich collection. Reading them I felt so much depends on the freedom of thought of the young: their world is so different from mine, as mine has been so different from my parents and grandparents.
The last sixty years, I feel, have seen more changes than the past 600 years. And this is no exaggeration. Look around you.
The revolution of education is the most radical and enduring and the exchange of ideas through literacy reveals the realities of our daily life like a positive virus that infects all societies.
We’re no longer islands sufficient unto ourselves. Printing, internet and interconnectedness of media are the overwhelming, overarching realities.
They leave you with a sense of deep optimism that is eternally present in the human heart like the waves in our ocean, colliding and creating. They ripple on every shore.
Who knows what your or a stranger’s child may find tomorrow on the beach while collecting seashells.