by Tzvetan Todorov

(Translated from French by Teresa Lavender Fagan)

The military intervention in Libya has been met with a chorus of approval in France, resounding from all the parties represented in the Parlement, as was the case for the war in Afghanistan, as well as from various commentators.  Everyone says that France has just scored a major coup.  The arch-enemy is now described only with superlatives: he has become a madman, a lunatic, the executioner, the bloody tyrant, or is lowered to his roots as a “cunning Bedouin.”  Euphemisms abound; proponents don’t say we should kill without remorse, but that “we must assume our responsibilities,” nor that we will try to reduce the number of corpses, but that we must proceed “without excessive destruction.”  Convenient comparisons justify going to war: not intervening would be to repeat the mistakes made with Spain in 1937, Munich in 1938, Rwanda in 1994… Those who drag their feet are criticized: Germany isn’t pulling its weight; Europe is showing astonishing reluctance – unless it is its usual spinelessness.  Emerging countries are guilty of not wanting to take risks – as if the warmongers in the French capital are taking any!

Granted, unlike the war in Iraq the intervention in Libya was approved by the UN Security Council.  But does legality equal legitimacy?  Underlying the decision is a concept that has been recently introduced: our responsibility to protect the civilian population from the actions of their own leaders.  Yet from the moment this “protection” implies military intervention by another State and no longer humanitarian assistance, it is very unclear how it differs from the “right of interference” that Western countries granted themselves a few years ago. If every country decides it has the right to intervene in its neighbors’ affairs to defend the rights of an abused minority, countless wars would erupt in a matter of seconds.  We need only think of the Chechens in Russia, the Tibetans in China, the Shiites in Sunni countries (and vice versa), Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, Kurds in Turkey… The Security Council would indeed need to grant authorization for such interventions.  This Council, however, has one unique feature, which is also its original sin : its permanent members have veto power over all its decisions, which places them above the law they are supposed to uphold. Neither they nor the countries they choose to support can ever be brought to justice!  Worse, to avoid the veto, they intervene without UN authorization, as happened in Kosovo and Iraq.  The armed invasion of that country, carried out under false pretenses (the presence of weapons of mass destruction) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead; the countries that led the invasion so far have not seen any official sanctions brought against them.  The international order embodied by the Security Council establishes the rule of force, not of law.

But this time, they say, at least we are defending principles, not interests.  Is that really true?  France continued for a long time to support the established dictatorships in neighboring countries, Tunisia and Egypt; by now choosing to support the rebels in Libya, France hopes to improve its image.  It is simultaneously demonstrating the effectiveness of its weaponry, which will strengthen its position in future negotiations.  On the domestic front, waging a victorious war – in the name of Good, no less – always enhances its leaders’ popularity.  Similar considerations are at play in the U.S. and Great Britain.  Much has been made of the support shown by the Arab League (before it started to change its mind): it is rare that the views of this body are so appreciated by the West!  If we look closer, the member states have several interests at stake in this situation. Saudi Arabia and its allies are prepared to support the Western nations against their Libyan rival, because this allows them to suppress the protest movements at home with impunity.  The Saudis, not known for their democratic institutions, have already intervened militarily in Bahrain and have encouraged repression in Yemen; in these neighboring states, they have chosen to “protect” the leaders against the populations.

Colonel Gaddafi is massacring his population: shouldn’t we rejoice in being able to prevent this, regardless of the touted or hidden justifications for our actions?  The problem is that war is such a powerful means that it overwhelms the ultimate end.  Only video games can destroy weapons without harming the humans around them; in real wars, even the most precise “surgical strikes” cannot avoid “collateral damage,” that is, deaths, destruction, suffering.  These facts lead to essential questions: will the casualties and damage be greater or lesser than if the intervention had not occurred?  Wasn’t there any other way to prevent the massacre of civilians?  Once started, won’t the war threaten to be waged following its own logic, rather than following the letter of the original resolution?  Is it desirable to encourage civil war, or a division within the country?  Won’t we jeopardize the democratic impulses of the people by making them dependent once again on former colonial powers?

There is no clean war, or just war, only inevitable wars, such as the Second World War waged by the Allies; this is not the case today.  Before singing a hymn in praise of this escapade as being truly superior to all others, it would perhaps be better to ponder the lessons Goya learned two hundred years ago from another war waged in the name of Good, that of the Napoleonic regiments bringing human rights to the Spanish.  Massacres committed in the name of democracy are no less horrific than those caused by faith in God or Allah, in the Leader or the Party: they all lead to the same.

Tzvetan Todorov is a historian and essayist.  His latest book in English is ‘The Fear of Barbarians’ (University of Chicago Press) and in French ‘Goya à l’ombre des Lumières’(Flammarion)

Also by Todorov, published by Seagull Books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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And how quiet it is when you look up again, here on the summit, how quiet and lonely. There is just a black chough there that sits on the white cross until it hops into the void and spreads its black wings to break its plunge; then it sails round the cliffs in soundless loops, carried by the wind and floating away over depths that make humans dizzy, almost without flapping its wings at all. And then, when this last living creature has disappeared, there is just your own breath you can hear, or a rustling sound when the wind plays with a piece of paper the bread was wrapped in or a mug that’s fallen over.

Irene, still lying on her back, didn’t open her eyes when she felt him close by her, when he kissed her, on her lips and forehead and eyes—

Later she says, with a smile:

Hasn’t he known for ages that she’s in love with him?

And, for the first time, his face is without doubt, without fear and without mockery. And without ambition. A smiling face that shows how happy he is, how perfectly happy, even if later he might once more claim he doesn’t know what happiness is.

‘Oh, yes,’ he says, nothing more, and lies down on his back as well, clasps his hands behind his head and stares into the blue distance:

It would be heavenly, he says, if they never had to go back down to the valley ever again, never ever again. . .

On a mountain top there’s nothing to disturb your happiness, there is just this unbounded silence, and it’s good to lie on your back with your eyes closed and the glow of the sun through your lids, red and blue and yellow, like a colourful church window. Or like a meadow in bloom. Or sometimes like merry lanterns, all swaying haphazardly and reflected in a pool. The things you can see when you close your eyes and watch the blood in your eyelids! Ships sailing on golden seas and coasts emerging in the glittering distance, foreign coasts with towers and white birds circling round the towers and over the silvery spin drift. And you can see flowers, nothing but flowers, which perhaps signify kisses or tears or ecstasy or death, a blood-bright bouquet, a shimmering bouquet, and shining ribbons and girls dancing, you can see the notes they’re singing, and everything is colour, everything is in a whirl; there’s no standing still and no emptiness, there’s adventure, there’s the blaze of passionate hearts which are not suffocating in grey ash but a fire with love, hate, joy and sorrow, in all the colours that are there in your blood and that float past and want to be lived out . . .

At one point, quite unexpectedly, he asks her:

Would she go with him? Simply go away, leave everything behind?

She has to blink as she turns her head to look at him . . .

To some country, he says, where there’s no humdrum daily round, where they don’t know anyone, where they could really live, without ties and without having to make allowances, without anything that’s not part of it, a real life, a life not stuck in a rut but open to experience, a life we know from our longings, a new, a different life, a life worth living—!

Irene remains silent; but she feels as if she’s already thought that herself.

Why do we not follow our longing? Why is it? Why do we bind and gag it every day, when we know that it’s truer and finer than all the things that are stopping us, the things people call morality and virtue and fidelity and which are not life, simply not life, not a life that’s true, great, worth living! Why don’t we shake them off? Why don’t we live when we know we’re here just this one time, just one single, unrepeatable time in this unutterably magnificent world?

There’s so much you could do, he says, if you have the courage. You could get everything you possess together and sell it all; you’d have enough money to get across the frontier and through the neighbouring country. It would probably be best, he said, if you headed south. You could hike and sleep in villages whose names you’d never heard of; they’d come to designate secret and unique nights. And in the summer you could sleep out in the open, in a field somewhere where a foreign moon floats over the white mist and foreign birds call. You could go to farmers, whose language you don’t understand, and bind sheaves, for a whole day, just to keep body and soul together, and it wouldn’t be an easy life, he admits, it would be a hard, often a desperate, life, a gruelling life with no firm ground under your feet, but it would be a life! And it could be that at some point you might find a place where the other has to go on and there would be farewells, perhaps for ever, farewells in foreign towns where bright ships lie in the harbour, where you kiss and cry and don’t worry about the faces you don’t know, and where you simply sit on a suitcase, alone, with no ties and no address and ready to go with any wind that blows. And it could be that you might meet a pale man on the ship and that you were fortunate, that you might get on a farm where you’d stay for many years doing useful work. It could just as well be that you founder at sea and recognize some god or other before you go under, a real god perhaps, who redeems us when he lets us die. Why should it not happen? The possibilities of our life are like the winds, so why do we never dare to set our sails? Anything is better than a life that is not lived—pain and despair and crime, they’re all better than emptiness! And it could be that you stay true to each other because you made no promises, that you meet once again, somewhere in the world, one evening perhaps, you could say the names of those villages to each other, the names designating secret and unique nights, you could tell each other what has happened since and that would certainly be no small matter, there would be a lot of torments and mistakes, but no emptiness, it would be an evening to make everything good again, an evening worthy of our birth and our death, it would perhaps be in a station, with people rushing past like noisy shadows, or on an embankment where you look out over the sea and hear the endless roar, where you can’t speak, only hold hands. How great could such a love be that refused to hold on! And one morning, when the other is still asleep, why should you not quietly set off, why should you not leave happiness before it leaves you, why should you stifle every longing? Living is longing, and it could be that what was lost is greater than everything you grasped, and that you only really live when you have the courage to lose things, when you throw off everything, your name and your citizenship and everything, just not your destiny, when you live as if everyday were your last day—

Then for a long time they stare up into the blue sky, into a blueness that seems so deep, when you’re lying on your back looking at nothing else, so deep and dark, as if you could see, beyond the day, the cosmic night.

Courage, he says, it just takes courage—

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Read a review of the book at the BookSlut.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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That’s Offensive!
Criticism, Identity, Respect
by Stefan Collini

Criticism offends. Criticism, in the ordinary colloquial sense of ‘fault-finding’, seems almost bound to cause hackles to rise and umbrage to be taken, at least on the part of the person or persons criticized. Resentment figures quite largely in the reaction to being criticized, even where—sometimes especially where—there is some acknowledgement of the justice of the criticism. But resentment may also be felt by a third party, made uneasy by a display of judgemental authority and left feeling suspicious of its legitimacy or standing: ‘What right have you got to . . .?’

At the heart of the matter is the issue of ‘resentment’, especially questions about its sources and its legitimacy. The standard definition of resentment is ‘a strong feeling of ill-will or anger against the author or authors of a wrong or affront’. [...] people often feel resentment, in just this sense, in the face of criticism. One ground of such resentment may be the conviction that the criticism in question is simply not true. But the most interesting case is where we, when we’re the target of criticism, recognize, at some level, the truth of the criticism and still feel resentful—indeed, feel resentful precisely because we recognize the truth of the criticism. We may, of course, try to justify or buttress our feelings by suggesting that it is unnecessary or inappropriate for the criticism to be made, against us, now. And more interesting still is resentment against its being made by them, perhaps by them of all people. ‘What right have they got,’ even if what they say is true?

Resentment is, among other things, a cry of pain. It often expresses some form of powerlessness: we resent something precisely because, though we don’t like it, there’s not much we can do about it. Resentment is characteristically something that builds up: finding no immediate expression in repressive action, it accumulates and turns rancid. In some cases, this experience can result simply from being on the receiving end of good arguments. Such arguments tell us that we are in some way falling short or in the wrong, and what makes them doubly enraging is that we see, or half-see, that they are right. But we also feel, at the same time, that in not just meekly acknowledging their truth we are somehow in the right, too, because we are standing up for our autonomy. As the philosopher Bernard Williams observed, not long ago, ‘the power of persuasion, however benignly or rationally exercised, is still a species of power.’ What we rightly call the ‘force of reason’ is experienced as a force, and an alien one when it is against us. We are resistant to it, yet we also feel intellectually cornered by it. This state of feeling is fertile breeding ground for rancours

But this is where we start to touch on some of the most intriguing aspects of the relations between criticism and offence. For although we all constantly engage in such descriptions, there is something about characterizing or ‘placing’ people in this way that can seem to diminish them. It may seem to suggest that in possessing the itemized qualities they lack others and so are to be found further down the scale of human limitations than any of us may like to think of ourselves as being. And it can suggest that ones doing the characterizing take themselves to be regarding these limitations from a higher vantage point—indeed, that is it only because of this relative advantage in elevation that the characteristics can be so clearly discerned and briskly described. The very confidence with which the characterizations are proposed—whether they are thought to be accurate or inaccurate in themselves—may begin to engender resistance, both in those so described and in others witnessing or reading the descriptions. How, it may be asked, can such categorical critical judgements coexist with the fundamental obligation to show others equal respect?

Perhaps we should start by reversing that question and asking: how does respect exist except in the company of critical judgement?

Read The Guardian and The New Republic‘s review of the book.

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An audio extract of the poem read by Sugata Bose
from the audio CD accompanying the book.

‘Now, tell me, what is the title of the poetry book you dedicated to me?’ Victoria Ocampo to Rabindranath Tagore, 8 June 1940.

‘It is named Puravi (the East in its feminine gender)’.
Rabindranath Tagore to Victoria Ocampo, 10 July 1940.

The volume of poetry, Purabi, was dedicated by Rabindranath to Vijaya (the Bengali name given to Victoria) in 1925. Fourteen years later – on 14 March 1939 – Rabindranath wrote to Vijaya of ‘some experiences which are like treasure islands detached from the continent of the immediate life, their charts ever remaining vaguely deciphered’ – adding, ‘my Argentine episode is one of them’.

The elusive memories of those enchanting days had been ensnared in the web of some of his verses – ‘the best of their kind’. The ‘fugitives’ had been made ‘captive’ and ‘they will remain’, the poet was confident, ‘though unvisited by you, separated by an alien language’.

Seventeen poems from Purabi form the core of this volume of translations of fifty-two selected Tagore poems and songs. Purabi not only signifies ‘the East in its feminine gender’, as the poem put it, but also is the name of a wistful evening ragini whose spirit and mood seem to pervade this remarkable phase of Rabindranath’s poetic life. This phase reveals a very different Tagore from the one the West came to know with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali in 1913.

We open this volume with two poems written late in the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth, when the poet was still in his thirties. ‘Urvasi [pronounced Urbashi] crowns his first great period. ‘wrote Edward Thompson. ‘. . . which in the opinion of many represent his genius at its highest and greatest. If we cannot subscribe to this opinion, remembering the more open-air thought and emotion of Kshanika . . . and the giant’s strength and superbly easy poise of Balaka - a far greater book than Chitra – nevertheless in Urvasi . . . certain qualities showed . . . Never again does he attain this sweep and magnificence of naturalistic poetry, unfettered by any darker questionings of life and fate and unsobered by religious reflections.’ Having assigned her the name of the Pauranic Urbashi, Rabindranath had paid a ‘compliment’ in this poem to someone who had been for a long time receiving compliments from many poets. ‘Whom Goethe had called Ewige Weibliche – The Eternal Woman,’ the poet explained, ‘I have incarnated her in the image of Urbashi to bring her floral offerings. She is not attached to us in any kind of relationship . . . Arjun had invoked his forefathers to try [and] establish a relationship with her, that was Arjun’s mistake – she had no ties with anyone.’

There is little doubt that Rabindranath’s ‘woman’ was the creative imagination of a male mind. Yet it is often supposed that the mind of Rabindranath Tagore had an ‘androgynous’ character. This is to confuse the keenness of observation and empathy with which he generally nurtured the female characters in his fiction with the nature of his thinking. The metaphors and descriptive imagery he used in relation to women in both his prose and poetry make it amply clear that, while he could speak in a feminine voice, his mind was not privy to feminine sensibility. ‘Urbashi’ without doubt had been a male fantasy. That the woman in ‘The Call’ was the product of male imagination was indirectly acknowledged by Rabindranath himself. The day before he wrote this poem, he had written in his diary: ‘When he [man] loves a woman, he wants to see her in the complete form of her individuality with the vision of his soul, with the vision of his imaginative mind. We have seen this in the poems of men over and over again. Shelley’s “Epipsychidon” is a good example.’ In his ruminations on man and woman Rabindranath was not above broaching his own essentialized views on the difference of gender. He engaged in polemical disagreements with ‘the worshippers of solid realism’ for their discomfort with ‘the disturbing ghost of this unreal woman’ and their false faith that ‘once the woman is freed from illusion, solid truth will be found’. Rabindranath for one was not sure that there was ‘anything that can be called solid truth in the creation’ or, if there was, that a ‘pure unwavering mind’ could be found to ‘reflect its pure print’. The way in which he then connected the power of illusion with poetic creativity is best given in his own words: ‘Man’s imagination . . . finds its freedom . . . in a woman. The orb that surrounds a woman is made up with all the suggestivities of the indescribable; a man can enter there without difficulty with his imagination coloured by the hue of his own emotion and taking the form of his own thought. In other words , he finds there a scope for his own creation, which gives him a special pleasure. A man who is totally devoid of illusion may laugh at this, but then a man without illusion never knows the calamity of the creative urge, he lives in the midst of calamity.’

1

Urbashi

(from Balaka)

Not a mother, not a daughter, not a bride

You are, beautiful and fair,

O Urbashi, denizen of heaven!

When evening descends  on the pastures-

You do not in the corner of any home

Kindle your evening light.

You do not in the still middle of night

With hesitant steps and a trembling heart,

With soft downcast eyes,

And a smile on your lips,

Go forth bedecked

Bashfully to meet your lover.

You are unveiled as the coming of the dawn

And no embarrassment you suffer.

 

When did you blossom out of yourself,

Urbashi,

Like a stemless flower?

You arose out of the foam of the sea

In the earliest dawn of Spring

With a pot of poison in your left.

The surging sea fell at your feet

Like a serpent charmed

Lowering myriad of its spread-out hoods.

As white as a lily, in naked beauty, and

Admired of the gods

Blameless you are.

 

Weren’t you ever a budding teenage girl?

O Urbashi, eternally young?

In whose home under the dark sea

You played with gems and pearls

Your childhood’s games all alone?

In whose arms did you sleep

Lulled by the murmur of the sea

With an innocent smile

On a bed of corals in a room lighted up

By lamps of gems?

You woke up in the world a woman,

Full-grown and young.

 

From ages and ages

Only you are the world’s heart’s desire

O resplendent Urbashi!

Ascetics leave their meditation

And lay their spiritual gains at your feet.

At your sidelong glance

All the world becomes restless

With the longing of youth.

The unseeing wind carries

Your maddening aroma all around

And the charmed poet with his wild songs

Wander about tempted like a honey-drunk

bee.

Your anklets tinkle

As you move in dishabille robes

Quick as a lightning flash.

 

When you dance before the assembly of gods

O Urbashi, in a delectable swing,

With the rhythm of your dance

Waves come up dancing on the sea,

Draperies of earth shiver in the stalks of corn

And from the necklace on your breasts

Stars shoot out in the sky.

On a sudden, the heart of man loses itself

Within his breast

And in a twinkling on the horizon

Your girdle comes undone,

O loosely robed one.

 

You are the dawn herself at sunrise in paradise

O Urbashi, Temptress of the World!

The glow of your body is washed

In tears of the world,

And the tint of your toes

Is painted in the blood of its heart.

With your braid hanging l;oose, O Naked One,

You have put your feather-light foot

Within the full-blown lotus of the world’s

desire.

In the paradise of the world’s heart

You exude infinite charm

O Companion of Dreams.

 

Listen, there is wailing for you everywhere

O Urbashi, cruel and deaf,

Will you come back again

To this old and primeval world?

Will you rise again with dripping hair

From the boundaries and bottomless abyss?

When your body will first emerge

On the first dawn of that day

All your limbs struck by the gaze of the world

Will weep in dripping drops of water.

And all of a sudden

The vast ocean will swell in waves

In a burst of wonderful song.

 

No, no, she will not come back again

That glorious moon is set forever

And Urbashi’s sun is set.

And so on this earth a sigh of eternal

Seperation

Mingles and blows with the cheer of spring

When on a full moon night

All around is full of laughter

A distant memory brings from somewhere

The song of a wistful flute

And tears in abundance flow.

Yet hope lives within the sorrows of life,

You are free from all ties.

 

Excerpts from Purabi: The East in its Feminine Gender by Rabindranath Tagore

Translated by Charu C. Chowdhuri
Edited and Introduced by Krishna Bose and Sugata Bose

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Seventeen poems from Purabi (1925) form the core of this volume of translations of fifty-two thematically arranged poems and songs by Rabindranath Tagore. Purabi not only signifies ‘the East in its feminine gender’, as the poet put it, but also is the name of a wistful evening ragini whose spirit and mood seem to pervade this remarkable phase of Rabindranath’s poetic life.

An audio CD of sixteen poems and songs accompanies the volume. Click here to listen to an audio extract.

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