BERNADINE EVARISTO’S GLORIOUS POLYPHONY
THOUGH BERNARDINE EVARISTO SHARED THIS YEAR’S BOOKER PRIZE, SHE DESERVES OUR FULL ATTENTION
WWhen the Booker committee broke its rules to award Bernardine Evaristo’s
Girl, Woman, Other a joint prize with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, we knew it had to be a special book.
Evaristo has many novels to her credit, and her work is sometimes described as ‘fusion fiction’. In this instance, her text looks like poetry on the page, the lines broken so that each ends with a punch. But her story is always fluid. While maintaining the emotional control of a poet, she creates a novelist’s universe. Before we know it, we are deep in the story of Amma, an actor, playwright and director from up north with Scottish, Ghanaian and Nigerian ancestry, whose work has steadily marched from the fringes of English theatre into the spotlight. She is staging her play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, at the National Theatre in London. Her family, her friends, and
their families have swarmed the first night’s performance, and everyone, from her unreconstructed Commie pal Sylvester to her daughter Yazz, who will roll her eyes no matter how edgy her mother is, has opinions about whether Amma is storming the Bastille or selling out.
The novel fans out to tell the interlinked stories of all these many, many women and men, sometimes spanning five generations. Some of them call out others for playing “privilege Olympics”. Life events circle back so that we see them from other characters’ eyes. It is a common technique of novelists to flip perspectives to solicit empathy for one and then the other party to an encounter, but Evaristo gets us well into their heads, economically building her characters and their histories to make each one a magnificent whole. We roll their bitter histories around our minds without flinching because she narrates with understanding and simultaneously an ironic detachment.
In Evaristo’s mosaic, where lines demarcating race, gender and sexuality are nearly but not quite lost in the overarching effect, one odd tessera is Penelope. She is a retired schoolteacher living in her own house in London, twice divorced, and always landing in clover. Penelope’s presence in this narrative is a mystery, till light is shed on her past. In the scene in which we find out where she gets her high-stepping, imperious manners, Evaristo’s mosaic truly dazzles. The novel is sure-footed and triumphant, and the wonder is that it had to share a prize with anyone. ■
Felipe FernandezArmesto, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, has built on themes dispersed in many of his books to produce Out of Our Minds—a scholarly yet legible journey through history, science, religion, philosophy, politics and economics. Human development and innovation have always relied on imagination, the capacity to see what is not there. While humans may not match the brute strength or skills of many animals, they stand out because they are able to refashion the world after the vision in their minds.
FernandezArmesto, who is editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of the World, says our Ice Age ancestors explored their surroundings and developed ideas since they had all the food they needed and, therefore, all the time to observe Nature. His conclusions, often, are themselves a product of imagination, given that there are no written records available of what those ideas were.
The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, he argues, led to the holding of land and on to the urge for control, rulers, armies and justifications for slave labour.
In the first and second millennia
BCE, India, Southwest Asia, China and Greece, though widely separated geographically, produced brilliant ideas on life. But their religions were culturally specific and did not appeal universally. Christianity, and to a lesser extent Islam and even Buddhism, he contends, bucked the norm and demonstrated remarkable elasticity. He reserves the bulk of the book to detail the development of ideas in the Christian era, peppering it with mini-biographies of saints and thinkers: St Francis of Assisi, St Augustine, Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, Rene Descartes and Noam Chomsky, among others.
His theme resonates in the modern context: when cultures are optimistic and in dialogue, ideas seem to breed, enriching each other and generating new thoughts. Such a cycle gave birth to the concepts of democracy, socialism, industrialisation. Pessimism, on the other hand, inspires authoritarianism. Order and homogeneity in thought and language are valued.
Robotics, genetics and virtual socialisation, he says, create cyberghettoes, cutting off dialogue, debate and disputation. Globalisation will encourage convergence. ‘Sooner or later, we shall have only one worldwide culture,’ he writes, and we will struggle to come up with ideas that might change the world. ■
Far from the bustling, big-ticket shows of Dutch Masters or Camp fashion, beyond the high-ceilinged galleries of large American canvases, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a maze of jewel-box galleries. Hosting exhibitions like Sita and Rama: The Ramayana in Indian Painting, these dimly lit chambers hint at the museum’s even vaster subterranean collections.
When airing out its cache of South Asian miniature art, the Met has periodically shown groups of paintings from the Ramayana—most recently in 2005 and 2010. This current exhibition, on view in two rotations until August 2020, includes 30 paintings and a couple of textile pieces.
Mounted in a room painted deep vermilion, Sita and Rama is accessed via a landing—installed with the dome and balconies of a 16th century Jain prayer hall from Patan—in the museum’s Asian wing. Its limited size has advantages. In larger exhibitions, like the National Museum’s 2013 Ram Katha, it can be difficult to take in much detail from any one miniature before moving on to the next; minimal placards devoid of information about style or provenance also tend to flatten such shows, emphasising the unity of their mythical subject over the specific history of each object.
Sita and Rama is as intimate a viewing of a collection of miniatures as anyone who isn’t a royal patron, at leisure to rifle through their folios, could hope for. Of course, unlike the complete manuscripts commissioned by such patrons, the works here are distilled from a range of sources, spanning various Pahari and Rajput courts between the 17th and 19th centuries, and arranged
in rough narrative order.
At least one of them, though, plays fast and loose with the narrative order, adding Hanuman to a scene of Rama’s early exile. This early 19th-century Pahari painting, ‘A Thorn is Removed from Rama’s Foot’, is a compositional masterpiece full of harmonious rounded shapes—the curve of Rama’s reclining body; Sita and Lakshmana’s bent, leaf-covered heads; a pair of bows and swords; rolling hills; a meandering stream lined with smooth white stones; and, Hanuman’s rump, turned skyward as he bends to drink water. The scene is a rare idyll among the others. There’s the unsettling ‘Rama and Lakshmana Search in Vain for Sita’, a 16th-century Mewari painting that sets off the anxious search against a blue background with sparse trees, a cave and a lake. A painting from Jammu, ‘Indra Offers Sita a Plate of Payas’, vibrates with danger— Sita’s demon guards sleep nearby on a yellow field.
The sense of loss in ‘The Death of King Dasharatha’ is heightened by this Mughal-style miniature’s missing portion, damaged in a fire. This mysterious folio is part of a set from circa 1605, possibly commissioned by the Bundela Rajput noble who assassinated Abu’l Fazal (author of the Akbarnama) as part of Jehangir’s plot against his father. It’s not the only object with an interesting history. For example, several of the works belong to the Kronos Collection, amassed by art collector Steven Kossak, a curator at the Met. For the engaged viewer, each object has space to come alive in this concise show, strengthening the idea of the Ramayana’s multiplicity over its sometimes monolithic stature. ■