Perhaps the world’s most powerful gathering of contemporary fiction-writers was on view on the third day of the Jaipur Literature Festival as the crowds swelled on the weekend. Our highest points:
Bilingualities
Despite the crushing Saturday crowds, this remarkable talk about language and writing was poorly attended. Those of us who were there listened to Yoko Tawada, Cornelia Funke, Abdourahman Waberi, and Ira Pande speak to Mohini Gupta about thinking and writing in two languages.
The speakers began by sharing their experience of how their own selves are shaped by writing in two or more languages. Yoko Tawada, who grew up in Japan and moved to Germany in her early thirties, pointed out that most of us are influenced by more than one language, saying, “You develop your own private philosophy made up of two or more realities.” She argued that one’s relationship to one language is never the same as with another language.
Fantasy writer Cornelia Funke shared what a language coach once told her, that a particular language always brings up emotional memories of the time in one’s life that one learned the language. Like many Germans, Funke only learned English around the age of ten. “I feel that I can forget about my past when I speak English. Then I learned Italian at the age of twenty-five, and I feel very different when I speak Italian.”
Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A Waberi also alluded to the multiple personas that are created with the intimate use of more than one language, saying that when he writes in French, he is a different person from the one he is when speaking to his mum in Somali.
The conversation turned to translation, of which Tawada said, “Translation is similar to writing… to me, writing German is a kind of translation.” She spoke about the surprising images that this act of translation can lead to, saying that since the English word “cell” once made her feel that she had prison cells making up her body.
Ira Pande pointed out that perhaps translations should not be restricted to form, saying, “Maybe a novel in one language isn’t necessarily right as a novel in another.”
The speakers agreed that their bilingualities were liberating rather than limiting. Tawada said, “You have many languages, but one body. You modify the foreign language with your accent. I create my own German, it is full of smell and sound.” Waberi said, “Each serious writer must make a home in a language.”
“People often ask me if I dream in Somali. I don’t dream in languages, I dream in images.”
— Abdourahman Waberi
The Global Novel
Talk about star-studded. This panel was moderated by publisher Chiki Sarkar, and had Margaret Atwood, David Grossman, Colm Toibin, Sulaiman Addonia, Aleksandar Hemon, Sunjeev Sahota speak on the subject.
Despite the less than reputable origins of the novel as an art form, it has endured. As Toibin said, “The novel inclues many matters without excluding anything. [...] It remains a hybrid form; there is no single way to read or write a novel.”
Both Toibin and Sahota pointed to the rise of the novel in conjunction with the rise of secularism, while Atwood contradicted the notion of the Nineteenth Century as a highly literary age, saying that “an ocean of text poured forth” from the time that Gutenberg invented the press. “We have simply forgotten about them. We go around saying that standards have fallen, but this is not true.”
Grossman argued that literature is the balm to the damage done by the notion of mass media. “We think it is meant for the masses, but it turns human beings into masses, or even mobs. [...] In such an atmosphere, literature comes in and fills our need to be unique in a unique way.”
Addonia pointed out that the novel isn’t necessarily the popular form that it was being spoken of, saying that he had grown up watching cinema in a refugee camp, and had to take risks in order to be able to read novels when he eventually moved to Saudi Arabia.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t look for global novels, but universal ones. Without them, we would not be the persons we are, even if we haven’t read them.”
— David Grossman
Being Mortal
Author, surgeon, professor, and public health researcher Atul Gawande was in conversation with Aarathi Prasad about his latest book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Gawande, whose writing and research on public health has been so influential that it has been cited by Barack Obama during Obama’s advocacy for health care legislation to pass in the USA, tackled the difficult subjects of ageing, illness, and death.
Gawande was incredibly candid about the limitations of current healthcare paradigms, saying that of the many things he learned at medical school, how to handle mortality was not one. He said, “You go into medical practice to be a hero, but I realised there was a large percentage of things I cannot fix.”
When his own father was diagnosed with a brain tumour that could not be cured, Gawande was faced with the question of grappling with mortality, not as a surgeon, but as a son. “How do you even think about talking to a parent, a child or a patient about their own mortality?” he asked.
Gawande also addressed what has changed about ageing and health-care in India. He said that a lot of the care of the elderly used to be dependent on the labour of young people, especially women. Now that there is more freedom to leave, people find themselves confronted with the problem of who will take care of elderly parents.
The answer, he pointed out, is not as simple as the elderly moving into the homes of grown children. “As economies improve and people develop independence of wealth… the last place the elderly want to live in is their children’s houses. They often end up choosing to live alone.”
Gawande stressed the importance of a high quality of life, which can be quite subjective, saying, “It is about whether you can live as a patient, or as a person.”
“The question isn’t about what treatment to give, it is about what is the meaning of life for patients.”
— Atul Gawande
