— The Australian feature on Les Murray (October 17, 1938-April 29, 2019)
𝐹𝑜𝓊𝓃𝒹 The Rest Were All Miscarriages
Posts tagged:poverty
Robin Moger Translates “The Princess Waits: A Verse Play by Salah Abdessabour”
Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar, The Lady Rider, early 1950s. Source: christies.com
We do not see the hut when the lights first come up, and then we see it. Its inhabitants are not interested in us, perhaps because their problems do not concern us. These women spend their days waiting for a man, and they know that one day he will come. Lights shine upstage from the front of the stage, illuminating a door in the back wall. Neither fully open nor quite shut, it swings gently on its hinges, creaking intermittently, as though the fitful wind outside the hut is knocking to make its presence known within. Then the light sweeps downstage and to the right: we see a flight of stairs rising to the princess’s room, mirrored by a flight on the left leading down to their larder. Centre stage is an old-fashioned, rectangular dining table—or rather, it is simply old: it has no identifiable fashion. Around this table there are four chairs, the back of one slightly higher than the rest. The chairs are not neatly arranged but are scattered about as though hastily vacated. Between them wend the backs of two women dressed in black, cleaning the shabby furnishings and complaining.
Saudamini Deo: My Heart Doesn’t Want
Rajasthan in four cities
1909 Imperial Gazetteer of India map of Rajputana. Source: Wikipedia
1-JODHPUR
My great-grandfather, a feudal landowner in West Bengal, had a troubled marriage with my great-grandmother, who finally left him in 1927 and came to live with her mother in Jaisalmer. Her mother, my great-great-grandmother was one of the few female doctors in the country at the time and was employed with the royal family of Jaisalmer. My grandfather grew up in the royal household but left home one unsettled morning. He left just a note: my heart doesn’t want.
He wanted to be a classical musician. Failure meant that my mother and uncle grew up in dire poverty in the dirty back alleys of the blue city. No one knows what happened to my great-grandfather or the house or the land. I have never seen a photograph, only an image narrated to me by a distant relative: a man on horseback with leather boots and the eyes of a snake.
Dhaka Dust: A Portfolio by Saqif Hossain
.Can’t occupy the same space at the same time
unless, of course, you land in Dhaka, rickshaws
.
five or six abreast. They are all here:
studded metal backboards ablaze with red flowers,
.
Pauls Toutonghi: The Gospel of Judas
Caravaggio’s “The Taking of Christ”. Source: newyorker.com
He is arrogant.
Like a Jerusalem oak—growing in the most narrow fissure, the most meager soil—that was his arrogance, at first. There was almost nothing to feed it. It was thin and pale and stood apart from the vast landscape of him—a few dry green leaves that were, at most, a distraction, a distraction from that great and beautiful emptiness. Because that’s what was most remarkable about him—that emptiness—vast and open and almost unimaginable.
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