Archives for 2010

Reading Wright

I’ve just read Richard Wright’s memoir, Black Boy, about how discovering books changed his life in oppressive Mississippi. “I hungered for books,” he writes, “new ways of looking and seeing. Reading grew into a passion. It had been only through books–vicarious cultural transfusions–that I had managed to keep myself alive. From them, I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen light.”

It reminded me of my own discovery of the excitement of literature as a teenager in India, of how books were a drug, an enchantment , a dream I could live in for days. Like an oyster cleaver, they opened up the world, its strangeness and richness.

I was carefree then. Today literature offers not only the gift of enlargement, but of self-forgetfulness–leaving behind the world of chores, bills, and careers to enter another mind, another universe, to leave enlarged. Especially when we practice what Emerson calls creative reading: a margin-scribbling, feisty , mental dialogue with the writer.

And yet when I walk around the neighbourhood at evening, I notice neighbors–who sigh they have no time to read–sit mesmerized by a flickering screen. Why?

Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener: A beautiful and exquisite conclusion

By Anita Mathias

Isn’t this a heart-breaking and exquisite conclusion to Melville’s wonderful short story, Bartleby the Scrivener.

“The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration.

When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me.

Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?

Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames?

For by the cart-load they are annually burned.

Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:

–the bank-note sent in swiftest charity:–

he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more;

pardon for those who died despairing;

hope for those who died unhoping;

good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.

On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”

Upton House, Warwickshire

By Anita Mathias

Upton House, Warwickshire

Roy and I visited Upton House, a National Trust property yesterday. I enjoyed the pool with water lilies floating in it, and the magical delphiniums, shimmering iridescent shades of blue. I also enjoyed the well laid terraced gardens. It made me feel recreated and refreshed.

Upton House was the playground and plaything of Viscount Bearstead, heir of the Shell fortune.

It would be fun to inherit a fortune, I think. Though perhaps not as creatively satisfying as making your own!!

Review of Ann Hood’s Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles.

By Anita Mathias

Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time Ann Hood Picador, USA, $23, 256 pp.

Review by Anita Mathias

Commonweal Magazine

Teach us to care and not to care,

Teach us to sit still

Our peace in His will.

In “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot describes the perfection of faith.

When a loved family member lies dying, that serene relinquishment is not easy to achieve. Faith can then become a kind of wrestling, a desire to wrest Lazarus from the jaws of implacable fate by brute will. Ann Hood’s memoir Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time limns this exhausting odyssey.

When her sixty-seven-year old father is diagnosed with lung cancer, Hood decided “to get him a miracle.” She goes to El Santuario de Chimayo, in New Mexico, to pray that his tumor would vanish. It does, but then, in one of the bewildering twists not unfamiliar in the life of faith, her father dies of fungal pneumonia.

The shock of this apparently divine betrayal is amplified by the earlier death of her only brother who, following arguments with his estranged wife, and then his soon-to-be wife, drowns in a bathtub. When, soon after the death of her father, Hood has a second miscarriage, the powerlessness of sheer grief plunges her into despair. “I became immobilized by my sadness. I believed in absolutely nothing at all.” The loss of faith left her “deadened” by “dark numbness.”

Funded by a book advance and glossy magazine work, Hood travels searching for evidence of miracles that might help her believe in God. She introduces us to much of the colorful efflorescence of Catholicism, including Guadalupe, where she sees the sun’s rays form a cross, and Padre Pio’s tomb. In Worcester, Massachusetts, she visits “Little Audrey,” a teenage “victim’s soul” in a coma, who lies surrounded by osmogenesia, the odor of roses, weeping statues, and Communion hosts flecked with blood. Despite the Catholic church’s protests, thousands of visitors pray to Little Audrey, rather than for her. Seeking to be spiritually moved, Hood visits Joan of Arc’s birthplace; Rocamadour in the Dordogne; and Mont Saint Michel in Normandy. She weeps before a veil of the Virgin in Chartres, “spiritually stirred” at last. Hood’s is not the absolute faith of Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him,” nor the rationalist creed of Thomas, “Unless I see and touch, I will not believe,” but a narcissistic, emotional creed–“Unless I feel and thrill and weep, I will not believe.”

Finally, Hood decides that, since she absorbed her faith unquestioningly from her Italian Catholic family, she might be able to resuscitate her faith by visiting her ancestral village in Italy. She describes her family with a quote from Rudolph Vecoli, “Italian Catholics are only nominally Catholic. Theirs is a folk religion, a fusion of animism, polytheism, and sorcery, with the sacraments of the church thrown in.” (In fact, Hood’s own faith, with its reliance on symbolic dreams, omens, psychics, tarot cards, and healing candles strikes me as positioned somewhere between the Dark Ages and the New Age.) This trip works. When an old relative advises her in cliches–“You have to have faith for prayer and healing to work,” and “Saint Anthony will help you find your way home”–she cries hard, feeling convicted. Soon afterwards, the familiar twentieth-century miracle of finding a lost contact lens restores her longed-for faith.

I remember reading the nucleus of this book as an article in Doubletake magazine. The present narrative is undermined by the attempt to inflate an essay into a book. Do Not Go Gentle evolves into a family memoir, a popular genre in an increasingly rootless and isolated America. Hood gives us the history of each parent’s family, and is especially deft in describing her abusive grandmother, revealing the petty verbal abuse that often lurks beneath the shiny exterior of the large happy family.

More than anything, the book is a testimony to the therapeutic and palliative effects of time and travel. Travel plunges you into a new setting, filling you with fresh ideas. In this new way of existence, the griefs of your old world seem less sharp and poignant. Gradually, time blunts the edge of Hood’s sorrow and she comes to accept a lonelier world “whose common theme is the death of fathers.”

Ann Hood calls this book “a spiritual odyssey.” Unfortunately, her story ends where real spiritual adventure begins: she decides that God exists, that God is benign, that there can be power in prayer. This is tame stuff compared to The Seven Storey Mountain or Surprised by Joy, whose electrifying apprehension of the holy leaves us with a gasping hunger to follow. Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Pascal, and Augustine dive from Scripture into the deep sea of God. The response of these writers to God is quirky and individual; yet, since their quests begin by grappling with the story that culminates in the radiant figure of Christ, their journeys offer wisdom and illumination to anyone who wants to dive into the same sea. If Ann Hood sought comfort or light in the concentrated wisdom of Scripture at any point along her search, it does not show. With an irritating self-absorption, she seeks to base her faith on “spiritual stirrings,” intuitions, flickers of emotion–private stars with a private light with little general significance.

“Do Not Go Gentle” is a lively, gracefully written memoir, full of vivid descriptions of the beautiful places in which–possibly, not coincidentally–people have experienced miracles. It is a pleasure to read. To my husband’s despair, I took notes for future vacations. But finally I was more amused than inspired by the self-indulgence and emotionalism of this very American spiritual quest. For a guide on my own “spiritual odyssey,” I think I’ll stick with Merton or Thomas a Kempis, and, even better, the Word that was in the beginning.

Anita Mathias wrote “I Was a Teenage Atheist” in Commonweal’s October 8, 1999 issue. It was selected for inclusion in The Best Spiritual Writing, 2000, Philip Zaleski, ed., HarperSanFrancisco.

Summer late evening joys

By Anita Mathias

I am so enjoying these magical summer days, and the light lingering till so late in the evening. Roy and I have discovered that we sleep so soundly if we drag ourselves out on a late evening walk/run through the wheat and bean fields, with the odd sprinkling of red poppies, serendipitiously self-seeded!

And now, good night world! Good night blog. Good night Facebook. Good night, readers everywhere!

The Relationship between Physical and Spiritual Health

By Anita Mathias

Physical and spiritual health are interlinked.

Not inextricably, because I have known utterly selfish, greedy and stingy people with radiant good health, and living to a ripe old age.

I have also known and known of saintly people who are sick.

So, it’s not a infallible rule.

It’s just something I have observed in my own experience and that of others. When all is well with my soul, I rarely have colds, coughs, or other illnesses.

When I am under stress, I get a cold relatively easily. Get allergies. Acid reflux!

My spiritual health and my happiness spill over onto physical health.

Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones. Proverbs 3 7-8.

Jesus makes the connection between sin and sickness. He tells the paralytic, “Go and sin no more, lest something worse befall you.” John 5. In Luke 7, he tells the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven.”

So when one is sick, it is worth repenting, and surrendering one’s life to God again.

As has often been observed, sin (hatred, envy, unforgiveness) has physical consequences, will spill over into physical or mental illness. And radiant spiritual health is often mirrored in radiant physical health. If one continues exercising.

Though this rule, as I noted before, has exceptions.

In Which Remembering Your Original Call Proves a North Star When You Have Lost Your Way

By Anita Mathias

One’s original call often contains clues for the way you are to go when you have lost your way.

I started writing oh many, many years ago. I was praying about what my next move should be, and was setting my sights entirely too low.

I heard God say, “Apply to Oxford University.” I was living in Madras, India.

I asked, “And how will I get the money to go there?”

And I heard a reply, “You’ve got your pen, haven’t you?”

And I started writing poetry in an ecstatic rush. 8 poems I remember. I probably don’t have them any more, and probably wouldn’t be proud of them if I did.

A little later, I entered a national creative writing competition, and won the first prize.

So I started writing as a gift from God.

And then tried to do it with my own strength for many years. Focusing on prizes, praise, money, recognition…

And it never went the way I hoped it would.

I took a break from writing for nearly 4 years to establish a family business, a publishing company.

And had the greatest difficulty in returning to writing. Writer’s block, or maybe a plenitude of distractions.

I was able to return to writing through a renewed surrender of my life to God, a request for living waters to flow through me, and repenting and letting go of unforgiveness, and of sin revealed to me.

I was able to write again as easily as I did at first, and with the same joy.

Writing for the joy of it, not worrying about what editors or publishers or critics thought.

And that revitalises me when I get tired and writing palls. I remember how I will get recharged: By returning my writing to its giver, to write with his strength, not mine.

To be a conduit for the living waters of the spirit of God.

“White Teeth” by Zadie Smith. A review by Anita Mathias

By Anita Mathias

Here’s an old review I wrote of “White Teeth,” Smith’s first book, for Commonweal Magazine in 2000

White Teeth Zadie Smith Random House, $24.95, 448 pp. A VIEW FROM THE MARGINS.

by Anita Mathias
So-called multicultural literature in many ways extends the enterprise of the early feminist writers: “the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret:/ Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity,” as Carolyn Kizer

puts it. In this first novel, Zadie Smith, the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant to Britain, continues the enterprise of giving us the view from the margins, as she sweeps Jamaican and Bangladeshi immigrants into mainstream literature in English. For a rambunctious and quirky take on our modern cities in their color and diversity, the melting pot simmering and boiling, we could do worse than turn to the dark eyes, pressed against the window, eyeing the party within with wistfulness and scorn.

White Teeth is the saga of World War II buddies, Archibald Jones–a self-effacing Englishman “whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble: Beach. Raindrop: Ocean. Needle: Haystack”–and Samad Iqbal–a Bangladeshi torn between Allah, alcohol, and women. Archie marries Clara, an attractive Jamaican (and as a consequence is no longer invited to company banquets). Samad’s marriage is arranged to Alsana, who can kick and punch her husband with a ferocity that matches his own; her in-laws speculate that her family has “some funny mental history.”

The children of these two couples, Irie Jones, and the twins, Millat and Magid Iqbal, are strangers in a strange land. Irie Jones (whose name means, in patois, “everything OK, cool, peaceful”), battles with “the bird’s nest of her hair,” and her weight: her body has “brown bulges for children, bags of fruit, buckets of water, ledges genetically designed with another country in mind.”

Magid Iqbal, a freak genius, “given a glorious name like Magid Mahfooz Murshed Iqbal,” wants instead to be called Mark Smith, and attend the Harvest Festival at school “like some wood sprite,” instead of accompanying his father to Mecca. “It’s not fair. I can’t go on haj. I’ve got to go to school. I don’t have time to go to Mecca. It’s not fair.” Magid is returned to Bangladesh “to be brought up proper” by his grandparents, where he eerily turns, in a twist of poetic justice, into Macaulay’s “brown-skinned Englishmen, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” He returns seeing God “in the millionth position of pi, in the arguments of the Phaedrus, in a perfect paradox. And what more is God than that?”

Meanwhile Magid’s twin, handsome Millat Iqbal, is trouble, an exemplar of the predicted decline and fall of Western civilization. After continual scrapes with white women and authority, Millat finds his clan in KEVIN, Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, militant immigrants with “an acronym problem,” hate and anger and revenge seething beneath the shibboleths of orthodoxy.

This edgy, hip, funny novel does for today’s London what Salman Rushdie did for Bombay in Midnight’s Children, or Dickens and Thackeray did for their more homogeneous city. We meet, skewered on Zadie Smith’s Bosch-like canvas, Indian lesbian feminists, topless hippies in a commune, and teenagers wriggling in anomie and angst. Much of the plot hinges on the cultural and generational conflicts that spiral when their school’s at-risk program subjects Millat Iqbal and Irie Jones to being mentored by the third family at the nucleus of the book, the liberal Jewish Chalfens. When Marcus Chalfen, an eminent scientist, seeks to patent his genetically engineered FutureMouse, the many groups on the loony fringe of this panoramic novel–black Jehovah’s Witnesses, Islamic fundamentalists, radical animal rights activists–converge in outrage.

Smith limns the sadness of the immigrant experience in which, for the first generation, dreams steadily shrivel. Samad Iqbal, who becomes a waiter after the war, wants desperately to wear a placard saying, “I am not a waiter. I have been a student, a scientist, a soldier.” And in the background, always, is the mist of racism, overt or covert: “the oldest sentence in the world, ‘if you ask me, they should all go back to their own….'”

Smith attributes the range of her characters to “Books, books, books.” She is certainly familiar with the multicultural canon, the best thing to emerge from the rapacity and crimes of slavery and colonialism. Her characters cut their teeth on The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the books of Alice Walker. They burn Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Samad owes something to Michael Ondaatje’s (The English Patient) Indian soldiers fighting in Europe during World War II. We encounter twins forcibly cleft by the corrupt older generation as in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. The sprawling novel covers Smith’s life, commencing in 1975, the year of her birth, a device borrowed from Rushdie who set Midnight’s Children in 1947, the year of his birth.

White Teeth is technically inventive, a refreshing original. Its exuberant high jinks can remind one of Rushdie’s pyrotechnics. Smith captures the dialogue of London’s contemporary tribes. “The F-word acts like padding to him; he can’t help it; it’s just a filler like beans or peas,” she explains. Her relentless sly wit, however, can be wearing and remind you that Smith is only twenty-five. Many of her characters are flat, one-dimensional, almost caricatures, their inner lives reduced to blurbs. Samad Iqbal: “Can’t say fairer than that. To the pure all things are pure.” Millat Iqbal: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” I think of Hieronymus Bosch again. The novel ends with a bang, the major characters unsatisfyingly and irritatingly freeze-framed in medias res.

In the end, Smith is no Rushdie, or Toni Morrison. Compared to their iridescent prose and inventive, anguished meditations on history, love, evil, and God, White Teeth is slight. Smith, however, is something of a multicultural Garrison Keillor, and her snappy novel is delightful, hilarious, and interesting, a good companion for what remains of these hammock
and deck chair days.

Anita Mathias’s essay, “I Was a Teenage Atheist,” appeared in the October 8, 1999 Commonweal

Archives for 2010

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