The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Voices in the Dark
Ten writers and a hundred readers lit up the Long Night of Literatures
THE SECOND edition of the Long Night of Literatures was held at Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish Cultural Centre on Hanuman Road, Delhi, on Friday. It started at 6 pm and stopped at 11.30 pm, a few strokes short of the witching hour when, as Roald Dahl has warned, “all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves”.
The ghosts emerged, anyway. The Long Night of Literatures, an initiative of the European Union to introduce readers to foreign writings that have, largely, not been translated in English, reflected the colours of a conflict-ridden world. Embassies and cultural centres, such as Goethe-institut/max Mueller Bhavan and Pro Helvetia, brought in writers who have explored deep political and personal anxieties.
Makenzy Orcel, from Haiti, read in French from Les Immortelles about the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake when he had walked down the main road in Port-au-prince that was lined with destroyed buildings. From the debris, emerged his protagonist, a sex worker, who had lost a loved one. Also writing in French, Jean-pierre Orban was prescient in creating the character of Vera, a young Italian immigrant living in London but yearning for her own identity and worshipping Mussolini. “I wanted to write about the feelings of immigrants in Britain. Vera, published in 2014, is a way to understand their mind and fears,” he said. Norwegian Johan Harstad’s doorstopper Max, Mischa and the Tet Offensive is a story about Max Hansen, a Norwegian who lives in the US. “You don’t know how weird it is to read your own language to people who don’t understand it,” said Harstad. Roland Orcsik, who was born in Serbia and lives in Hungary, bases his poems on the allegory between life and the River Tisza, once called “the most Hungarian river” because it flowed entirely within the country. Today, it crosses several national borders, as does Orcsik’s poetry.
If the pendulum of the refugee discourse travels far enough, it would stop with writer Laila Wadia, who was born in India and lives in Italy. She knows Italian, French, English, Spanish and a little Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati and uses them in her writings — often in the same piece. She shared a poem from Kitchensutra, called I Speak Pav Bhaji .“I speak pav bhaji / grindingmincingblending/ the tastes of India/on the streets of Bombay./ I speak lasagna /layering saucesdialectsflavours of Italy/ in the windy blind alleys/of Trieste,” she read.
The structure of Long Night of Literatures could be inspired by Wadia’s melting pot that had “languages falling into each other”. The hundred-odd readers were formed into colour-coded groups. A group visited a writer for 20 minutes of storytelling and, when music played to mark the end of a session, moved to another room and a different writer. The readers, who made up the audience, belonged to different parts of the world and came from different corners of the city, from expat enclaves to universities and book clubs. The air buzzed with conversations in many languages and accents. English was the lingua franca and all readings included translations. To fuel the literary globetrotters, a room with long tables was kept stacked with sandwich, canapes and tapas at all times.
Food inspired an important motif in Spanish writer Gabriela Ybarra’s debut book El Comensal. Its cover has a single image of an empty chair. “One of the moments that a family realises the loss of somebody is when they sit at the table and there is an empty chair where the person used to sit and now somebody has to move to occupy that space,” she said. The book is an immersive account of two deaths — of her grandfather, Javier Ybarra, at the hands of Basque terrorists and of her mother recently from an illness.
Comic artist Line Hoven also used her family narratives to explain a political crisis. She presented her graphic novel called Liebe Schaut Weg, a memoir about her German and American grandparents who lived during World War II. The author provided dialogues and recorded music as a screen ran images from the book. “I like to combine dark pictures with happy things,” she said.
Polish writer Jacek Dehnel enlivened his reading by using a range of voices and dramatic gestures to bring alive passages from Saturn, in which he explores the flawed relationship of Spanish painter Goya, his son Javier and his grandson Mariano.
Every so often, writers shed light on the act of putting pen to paper. Markus Kirchhofer from Switzerland, read poems on love and death and used the metaphor of ice fishing to describe a writer’s search. The poems, Ice Fishing, reads, “Baiting/ in the unseen/ Listening/ in the deep/ Hoping/ for a blessing/ for luck”. “This is the first time I have had a chance to meet a German writer outside the university,” said Nandan Kumar, a postgraduate student of German at Delhi University.
Vea Kaiser from Austria had advice for future writers. Her first novel, Blasmusikpop about a boy who wants to get out of his little Austrian village, is dedicated to her grandfather and her ex-boyfriend. “If you ever write a book, never ever dedicate it to the person you love even if you are married. You never know what will happen and you will still have your book dedicated to that person and you can’t erase that,” she said.