January 3, 2005. Three paintings by the Indian poet-painter Gieve Patel, who writes in English and translates from Gujarati, and whose paintings hang in the National Gallery in New Delhi, and in galleries, museums, and private collections around the world. First: Drowned Woman, 1983, in the collection of Guy and Helen Barbier, Geneva. A grotesquely distended face and neck, bloated by the sea. Eyes, nose, mouth, the flesh itself, no longer human. A mucus-like fluid congealed beneath her nostrils, beside her contorted lips. A twisted length of rough white cloth (the raw cotton of poverty) straggling diagonally across her bare upper torso. Haunted in death by the image of the child inside the grown woman. Patel, a self-taught painter, is a doctor by profession, and works as a general physician in Bombay. For the past four decades, his clinic has served the poor and the abandoned: among them, the young and old who end up every week in the Arabian Sea, mostly by accident, sometimes as lonely suicides, and are carried ashore by the waves, to be hauled in for an attempt at resuscitation or for an autopsy. In the 1970s and 1980s, Patel couldn=t get those images out of his mind. Hence his second book of poems in 1976, How Do You Withstand, Body?, in which the doctor=s verse mapped out the anatomy of the human body/self in its innumerable transmutations. (Other doctor-poets: William Carlos Williams in America, Gottfried Benn in Germany.) Hence Drowned Woman a few years later, one of a series of canvases on that subject, trying to capture the pathos of death by water.
Second: Fishers, 1989, in the collection of E. M. Schoo, Amsterdam. Two men molded out of wet clay, as it were, standing knee-deep in brine, holding the cords of long nets spread beneath the surface, with a wall of water rising behind them, about to break. Wet blue, gray, and white, no sky, the human figures themselves so much at one with the water, they can=t really be detached from the element of the sea. That wall of water like a vivid premonition of what arose out of the blue-green-gray-white depths of the Indian Ocean one morning fifteen years later.
Third: Patel=s new series, on display recently in New Delhi, of images in/of a well. Roughly circular compositions in acrylic on the rectangles of canvases: what you see when you look straight down, like a hovering bird, or a man/woman leaning far over the well-curb, into an Indian well. Sometimes only the sky, sometimes yourself, sometimes a garland of trees looming behind a figure or a face; sometimes, nothing, only the opacity of water, at the bottom of the dark interior walled with stones decades or centuries ago. In one, blue and silver of water and sky at night, their boundaries indistinguishableCand the luminous disc of the moon, mother of moods, upheavals, tides. So three sets of pictures painted over a quarter century, images of water and its world, the most elementary and elemental of themes, all prefiguring the images that flooded our world on the morning of December 26, 2004. Poets and painters help us to remember what we negligently forget.[1]
January 7, 2005. When I wrote the fifth section of ABreath@ in February 1998, I was thinking of the Pacific off southern California, mixing memories of the oceanfront near Malibu with that near Big Sur from five years earlier. And also the Arabian Sea outside Bandra in Bombay. And also Whitman=s sea, and the figures of leper and dancer in Madurai, inland in Tamil Nadu but not far from the landfall of December=s tsunami, in A. K. Ramanujan=s early poem in English published in Quest.[2] ABreath@ was, at that time in my life, about love and death, without prevarication; it uses lines of variable lengths, using Ginsberg=s notion of the Apenumatic line@ (hence, in part, the title of the poem):
5. ASeveral Miles Inland@
Several miles inland the salt air still carries the smell of the sea
The foliage is always different where mountains line the coast and cliffs mirror the sun
Where boulders crash into the waves and the sky falls all afternoon into the swinging cradle of the sea
The brine is full of ghostly lovers rocking in its arms
Inside the water there=s a mountain of water moving as nothing else can move
We=ve ridden these waves swaying like fields of grass as they licked our bodies with the salt on their green-white tongues
They=ve lifted and tossed us on the surf, then sucked us back and lashed us with the sand swirling up from the submarine floor
Under this sickle moon the sea is deeper and darker than we=ve ever known it
One night we=ll enter its liquid heart and go down into the earth=s body black as ink [3]
January 10, 2005. How can I help? I=m not a doctor, a nurse, a geneticist, a therapist, a counselor, a coroner, a trained emergency- or aid-worker. I can=t get up and go where the tsunami struck. Even if I had the means, could afford to volunteer my time or labor, it would be useless. I=d merely be in the way of those who know what to do in such circumstances, who=re part of the division of labor for disaster-relief. Even if I wanted to, I won=t fit into that framework: I=m over the hill, my body won=t allow me to lift and move heavy things, to clean up after the flooding, to clear the wreckage. I=m not qualified to operate a bulldozer, I don=t even know how to work a winch. I=d end up needing help myself, adding to the burden of those on the scene who=re there to help others. My helplessness is connected directly to my uselessness in a situation of this sort. I=ve never acquired the skills needed to be useful to others in simple, practical ways. I draw, I paint, I write, I translate, I read, I speak, I think, I teachCI=ve been absorbed into Athe life of the mind.@ I help others every day, inside and outside my classroom and my office, but my help is not of the Auseful@ kindCat least not for those most deeply affected by this tragedy. So how can I help? Whom can I help, with what, and where? Is it really possible for me to escape from the prison of my helplessness, my uselessness?
January 14, 2005. Amitav Ghosh, writer, anthropologist, activist, author recently of The Glass Palace (2002) did it swiftly and exactly right. By January 1st, he had flown (presumably from New York, where he now lives) to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are, in his words:
one of those quadrants of the globe where political and geological fault lines run on parallel courses. Politically the islands are Union Territories, ruled directly from New Delhi, but geologically they stand just beyond the edge of the Indian tectonic plate. Stretching through 700 kilometers of the Bay of Bengal, they are held aloft by a range of undersea mountains that stands guard over the abyssal deep of the Sunda trench. Of the 572 islands, only 36 are inhabited: Athe Andamans@ is the name given to the northern part of the archipelago while Athe Nicobars@ lie to the south. At their uppermost point, the Andamans are just a few dozen miles from Burma=s Coco Islands, infamous for their prisons, while the southernmost edge of the Nicobars is only a couple of hundred kilometers from the ever-restless region of Aceh. This part of the chain is so positioned that the tsunami of December 26, 2004 hit it just minutes after the coastline of northern Sumatra.[4]
Between January 11th and 13th, Ghosh published a three-part eyewitness account in The Hindu, a national English-language newspaper in India which, despite its name, stands on the left of the political spectrum. He vividly captured several key things about the effects of the tsunami on the islands, and the aftermath, that none of the wire services were able to pinpoint.
One: The tsunami took different forms on different islands in the archipelago, and therefore had different effects in different locations. In general, it had the most devastating effects on the southern islands, which lay closer to the epicenter under the sea. (By implication, the tsunami was also varied in its impact on Sri Lanka and on the coastal areas in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Orissa on mainland India. The variation over time and space meant that different regions needed different kinds of emergency response and reconstruction aidCa conclusion that has been borne out quite precisely in the weeks since Ghosh=s articles were published.)
Two: The islands are administered locally by seemingly obtuse and incompetent bureaucrats who function like Aminor potentates.@ In the first three days after the tsunami there were thousands of people in temporary camps on the islands, and there were said to be plenty of supplies at hand, but adequate help did not reach those in need of immediate help. The bureaucratic pipelines were clogged, slow to start flowing. (India was the first of the affected countries to announce, before the New Year, that it had enough internal resources and therefore did not need foreign aid, a position it reversed only after the middle of January.) The national government in New Delhi actually moved faster than the local bureaucracy in Andaman and Nicobar, announcing a major overhaul of the emergency-relief system on January 2nd. In contrast, the Indian armed forces stationed on bases in the archipelago responded swiftly, generously, efficiently, and independentlyCpilots whose own lives and families were affected by the tsunami flew multiple sorties each day, airlifting hundreds of stranded victims to safety. In the midst of the devastation, one of the bureaucrats actually organized a feast for friends and family at his unaffected home on New Year=s eve, incurring the wrath of the refugees on the island.[5]
Three: In the days after the tsunami, those in need of help helped themselves and each other much better that thought who ought to have helped them the most. By the time Ghosh arrived on the islands, people were already picking up their lives on their own with astonishing emotional clarity and resilience. In the most complex case that Ghosh encountered, the Director of the Malaria Research Institute in Malacca, Car Nicobar, was on his way to the mainland when the earthquake and the wave hit his home: his son survived by clinging to the dispersed rafters of a church, but his wife and daughter were swept away, without a trace. The Director managed to locate his son by phone through intermediaries, found his way back to Car Nicobar, trudged through wreckage to where his office and his home had once stood, but retrieved from there only a set of photographic slides symbolizing the thirteen years of research he had conducted. As Ghosh put it:
[H]is mind had fixed upon a set of objects that derived their meaning from the part of his life that was lived in thought and contemplation.
There are times when words seem futile, and to no one more so than a writer. At these moments it seems that nothing is of value other than to act and to intervene in the course of events: to think, to reflect, to write seem trivial and wasteful. But the life of the mind takes many forms and after the day had passed I understood that in the manner of his choosing, the Director had mounted the most singular, the most powerful defence of it that I would ever witness.[6]
January 15, 2005. In the halcyon days of another Republican administration, Paul Wolfowitz was America=s ambassador to Indonesia. Today, after a helicopter tour of Aceh province, Ahe said he was shocked at what he saw.@ He remembered the region from the late 1980s as a Averdant landscape.@ AI can=t believe the scale of it, the devastation. And I only saw a small part,@ he said on Saturday in Banda Aceh. Why was he there? To demonstrate that the AU.S. mission is to care.@ But why was he there? To put a band-aid on the disaster of initially pledging only A$15 to $20 million dollars@to help the tsunami victims in southern Asia, before being insulted into raising the pledge to some $300 million dollars, still short of the $500 million pledged by Japan. But why was he really there? Because the tsunami disaster had forced the Defense Department to reconsider Athe U.S. relationship with Indonesia=s military@Cto help supply spare parts for AAmerican-made C-130 cargo planes,@ to help feed a few million dollars to those starving private-sector contractors at home.[7]
January 19, 2005. What was the logic behind George Bush=s initial pledge of A$15 to 20 million@ for the countries ravaged by the tsunami? Just First World niggardliness, as a spokesman for the United Nations alleged days later? Or the more cynical pint of view that all the affected nations were Apoor@ nations, and therefore needed no more than token assistance, because they only needed to get back their pre-tsunami level of Apoverty@? Or the Republican ideology of self-interest and self-reliance that seeks to dismantle the welfare state and says, the poor are poor because something must be (morally) wrong with them, we aren=t obliged to help those who need help, they need to learn to help themselves for their own good? Character-building through self-help in the crucible of adversity? Poverty as something intrinsically dishonorable?
One of the classic slogans of national electoral politics in India since Independence that various parties and governments have used to target specific urban as well as rural Avote banks@: garibi hatao, put an end to poverty. Writing in the 1980s, fed up with the economic cynicism of both the right and the left, the Hindi poet, fiction writer, translator, and journalist Raghuvir Sahay noted that even poverty is Ahonorable@:
We=ve set out to put an end to poverty
and in a society that still doesn=t equate
poverty with dishonor
but sees it as a mark of Indianness,
an opposite of servitude, a rejection of abjection
we=ve set out to put an end to poverty
we who detest and despise the poor
and keep them at a distance
when we root out poverty
we rob them of their token self-respect
that=s why I object to the ethics
of this method of removing poverty
for sometimes poverty=s the only
artifact of honor left to human beings[8]
In the Andamans and Nicobars that Amitav Ghosh toured some two weeks ago, in the face of complete devastation and in the absence of prompt helpCfood, water, medicine, clothing, basic amenities, reconstructionCself-help became the only Aartifact of honor left to human beings.@ But not for the reasons the Americans had in mind when they thought that a token gesture of help would be enough.
January 21, 2005. In 2001, Nike, Inc., had worldwide sales of $9.5 billion; that year, the personal wealth of Phillip H. Knight, co-founder and CEO of the company, was estimated at $5.4 billion. In 2004, Nike sales topped $12 billion, and Knight still owned a huge portion (in what are mathematically Aabsolute@ numbers) of the company. On November 19, 2004, Knight announced that he would step down as CEO (but not as Chairman of the Board) by Christmas. On January 12, 2005, he converted 5.7 million shares of Nike Class A Common Stock to the same number of Class B stock, and entered into a pre-arranged sales plan for the latter, meticulously following the applicable rules set by the Securities and Exchange Commission. As a corporate press-release explained a couple of days later:
The shares converted represent approximately 8 per cent of Mr Knight=s total direct Nike shares held. If these shares are sold under the plan, Mr Knight would continue to retain direct ownership of approximately 92 per cent of Nike=s outstanding Class A shares, and 25 per cent of Nike=s total outstanding common stock.
The number of zeros in the cash value of the last two quantities of stock is mind-numbing. Knight himself contextualized this news-worthy item with his usual elegance: AAs I evaluate my long-term philanthropic and estate planning goals@ (he=s now 66 years old), Athis is a prudent time for me to prepare to diversify a small portion of my total assets.@[9]
This is happening three weeks after the earthquake and the tsunami hit Indonesia, killing some 166, 320 peopleCthe same Indonesia where Nike set up some of its most lucrative Aworld factories@ in the 1980s, and where, as late as 1999, employees of its clothing suppliers were still being Aexpected to work in excess of 65 hours a week and yet [were] struggling to survive on less than $US1 a day.@ Three weeks in which the official Nike website had not announced a single corporate donation from its coffers to the aid and reconstruction effortCand in which Bush had justified capping the revised American aid package at $300 million because individual and corporate donations and American help in kind (rescue missions, cargo planes, warships and personnel at hand) would supplement and far exceed that amount. Three weeks in which the Nike website only provided links to four independent relief organizations, directing visitors to make donations to them, without revealing whether Nike had donated anything to them.[10] Three weeks during which Phillip H. Knight could not take time out from his retirement celebrations, his prudent estate planning, his diversification, and his long-term philanthropic goals to announce even a modest personal donation to the post-tsunami effort. Three weeks in the unchanging history of the iron law of capital: help yourself, don=t help others; use others only to help yourself; help others only if they help you to help yourself.
January 28, 2005. But the politics of help and helplessness, the helper and the helped, is always more complicated. K. Nissar Ahmad (b. 1936), the most notable Muslim poet of his generation in Kannada, the primary language of the state of Karnataka in southern India, is a geologist by training and profession (retiring from Government Science College, Bangalore, in the 1990s). As a Atechnician of the earth,@ he would be able to tell us what happened deep inside the Indian Ocean in the final days of 2004. But in the early 1970s itself, in a famous poem called AAmerica, America,@ he told us even more precisely what the politics of imperial help in the postcolonial world actually amounts to. In A. K. Ramanujan=s English translation, prepared sometime in the second half of that decade and published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), Ahmad=s poem speaks for itself, without any help from us:
Whenever your American Way of Life is raised to the sky,
I feel like pulling off one by one you folks= ties, suits, skirts,
lifting from the blood-baths the Spaniards, the Germans,
the Portuguese, the Englishmen, the Negroes,
the pirates, the killers, the adulteresses,
and throwing them at you and laughing aloudC
but I see Lincoln, Kennedy, King,
and I stutter, stumble, bow my head, and keep quiet.
Whenever, in the name of stamping out Communists and Nazis,
you fuck up people=s lives and brag about it in Life, Time, etcetera,
I want to spit on you, drink vodka,
and talk to Castro, De Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh, and NasserC
but the Chinese and Pakistani invasions stab my memory,
and I see your hand of friendship, terrifying
and six thousand miles long,
and I shut my mouth.
When you fly flags of culture on the Empire State Building,
I see the male macho eyes in nightclubs and on the beaches, the 007s,
the Hollywood beat, the twist, the mental somersaults,
hashish, marijuana, LSD, the condoms, the perverse itches,
the mafiosos, the divorces at the rate of twenty-five a minute,
and I want to crow, clap my hands,
and broadcast it all to the world.
Lady Liberty faces the world and keeps her back to youC
I=d turn her around so that she can face your heart=s slums, the black HarlemsC
I=d snatch away the toy guns you give to your children as birthday gifts,
and give them Bibles, Gitas, and Korans insteadC
I=d like to give the luster of Eastern sages
to your folks= pale morning-after bedsheet facesC
I=d like to rub the Nehru rose on LBJ=s lips
and iron out all the knit brows
and the lines on his foreheadC
America, America,
whenever you brag about your power
I=d like to tweak your ears and tell you about
the victories of the young Vietcong
rubbing out armies like bedbugs,
the shame and defeat of your CIA
overturning governments and setting up yes-men,
and your ladders to the moon and the satellites
that fell into the sea.
But then I remember
your wheat loans, your PL480s,
and foreign policy seals my lips.
I stomach the fact
that there=s no country quite like you,
that when an elephant falls
it=s still taller than a horse.
So I sew up my lips, America,
and I bow to you.
Whenever I bitch about and resent
all that growth of yours
which devours me silently in the news,
our poverty
our overpopulation
our geography
stop my tongue
and teach me lessons in patience.[11]
Notes
1. For reproductions of Gieve Patel=s Drowned Woman and a detail from Fishers, see Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 4 (Fall 1989), pp. 180 and 187. For a selection of Benn=s poetry, see Gottfried Benn, Primal Vision, ed. E. B. Ashton (New York: New Directions, 1971).
2. See A. K. Ramanujan, AMadura: Two Views,@ in Ten Years of Quest, ed. Abu Sayeed Ayyub and Amlan Datta (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1966), p. 345.
3. From Vinay Dharwadker, ABreath,@ in Someone Else=s Paradise (forthcoming).
4. Amitav Ghosh, AOverlapping Faults,@ The Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/2005/01/11/ stories/2005011108991100.htm.
5. In addition to AOverlapping Faults,@ cited in note 4, see Amitav Ghosh, ANo Aid Needed,@ The Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/2005/01/12/stories/2005011205841100.htm.
6. Amitav Ghosh, AThe Town by the Sea,@ The Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/2005/01/13/ stories/2005011309081100.htm.
7. All quotations from AWolfowitz: U.S. mission is to care,@ CNN.com, January 15, 2005.
8. Translated from Hindi by Vinay Dharwadker, included in the manuscript of an anthology of modern Hindi poetry, currently under completion.
9. Here I combine references to and quotations from the following: ANike, Inc. Chairman Phil Knight Converts 5.7 Million Shares,@ http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/news/pressrelease, January 22, 2005; AKnight stands down as Nike boss,@ BBC News, http://news. bbc.co.uk. com, November 19, 2004; http://www.nike.com/nikebiz; and http://www.cabezal.com/ blog/archives/000066.shtml.
10. Http:/www.cleanclothes.org/companies/nike-99-9-22.htm; and http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/ news/article.adp?id=20050119112709990009.
11. K. Nisar Ahmad, AAmerica, America,@ trans. A. K. Ramanujan, in The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, ed. Vinay Dharwadker and A. K. Ramanujan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 167-68.
The Politics of Help–Vinay Dharwadker
THE POLITICS OF HELP:
A Collage
Vinay Dharwadker
University of Wisconsin, Madison
January 3, 2005. Three paintings by the Indian poet-painter Gieve Patel, who writes in English and translates from Gujarati, and whose paintings hang in the National Gallery in New Delhi, and in galleries, museums, and private collections around the world. First: Drowned Woman, 1983, in the collection of Guy and Helen Barbier, Geneva. A grotesquely distended face and neck, bloated by the sea. Eyes, nose, mouth, the flesh itself, no longer human. A mucus-like fluid congealed beneath her nostrils, beside her contorted lips. A twisted length of rough white cloth (the raw cotton of poverty) straggling diagonally across her bare upper torso. Haunted in death by the image of the child inside the grown woman. Patel, a self-taught painter, is a doctor by profession, and works as a general physician in Bombay. For the past four decades, his clinic has served the poor and the abandoned: among them, the young and old who end up every week in the Arabian Sea, mostly by accident, sometimes as lonely suicides, and are carried ashore by the waves, to be hauled in for an attempt at resuscitation or for an autopsy. In the 1970s and 1980s, Patel couldn=t get those images out of his mind. Hence his second book of poems in 1976, How Do You Withstand, Body?, in which the doctor=s verse mapped out the anatomy of the human body/self in its innumerable transmutations. (Other doctor-poets: William Carlos Williams in America, Gottfried Benn in Germany.) Hence Drowned Woman a few years later, one of a series of canvases on that subject, trying to capture the pathos of death by water.
Second: Fishers, 1989, in the collection of E. M. Schoo, Amsterdam. Two men molded out of wet clay, as it were, standing knee-deep in brine, holding the cords of long nets spread beneath the surface, with a wall of water rising behind them, about to break. Wet blue, gray, and white, no sky, the human figures themselves so much at one with the water, they can=t really be detached from the element of the sea. That wall of water like a vivid premonition of what arose out of the blue-green-gray-white depths of the Indian Ocean one morning fifteen years later.
Third: Patel=s new series, on display recently in New Delhi, of images in/of a well. Roughly circular compositions in acrylic on the rectangles of canvases: what you see when you look straight down, like a hovering bird, or a man/woman leaning far over the well-curb, into an Indian well. Sometimes only the sky, sometimes yourself, sometimes a garland of trees looming behind a figure or a face; sometimes, nothing, only the opacity of water, at the bottom of the dark interior walled with stones decades or centuries ago. In one, blue and silver of water and sky at night, their boundaries indistinguishableCand the luminous disc of the moon, mother of moods, upheavals, tides. So three sets of pictures painted over a quarter century, images of water and its world, the most elementary and elemental of themes, all prefiguring the images that flooded our world on the morning of December 26, 2004. Poets and painters help us to remember what we negligently forget.[1]
January 7, 2005. When I wrote the fifth section of ABreath@ in February 1998, I was thinking of the Pacific off southern California, mixing memories of the oceanfront near Malibu with that near Big Sur from five years earlier. And also the Arabian Sea outside Bandra in Bombay. And also Whitman=s sea, and the figures of leper and dancer in Madurai, inland in Tamil Nadu but not far from the landfall of December=s tsunami, in A. K. Ramanujan=s early poem in English published in Quest.[2] ABreath@ was, at that time in my life, about love and death, without prevarication; it uses lines of variable lengths, using Ginsberg=s notion of the Apenumatic line@ (hence, in part, the title of the poem):
5. ASeveral Miles Inland@
Several miles inland the salt air still carries the smell of the sea
The foliage is always different where mountains line the coast and cliffs mirror the sun
Where boulders crash into the waves and the sky falls all afternoon into the swinging cradle of the sea
The brine is full of ghostly lovers rocking in its arms
Inside the water there=s a mountain of water moving as nothing else can move
We=ve ridden these waves swaying like fields of grass as they licked our bodies with the salt on their green-white tongues
They=ve lifted and tossed us on the surf, then sucked us back and lashed us with the sand swirling up from the submarine floor
Under this sickle moon the sea is deeper and darker than we=ve ever known it
One night we=ll enter its liquid heart and go down into the earth=s body black as ink [3]
January 10, 2005. How can I help? I=m not a doctor, a nurse, a geneticist, a therapist, a counselor, a coroner, a trained emergency- or aid-worker. I can=t get up and go where the tsunami struck. Even if I had the means, could afford to volunteer my time or labor, it would be useless. I=d merely be in the way of those who know what to do in such circumstances, who=re part of the division of labor for disaster-relief. Even if I wanted to, I won=t fit into that framework: I=m over the hill, my body won=t allow me to lift and move heavy things, to clean up after the flooding, to clear the wreckage. I=m not qualified to operate a bulldozer, I don=t even know how to work a winch. I=d end up needing help myself, adding to the burden of those on the scene who=re there to help others. My helplessness is connected directly to my uselessness in a situation of this sort. I=ve never acquired the skills needed to be useful to others in simple, practical ways. I draw, I paint, I write, I translate, I read, I speak, I think, I teachCI=ve been absorbed into Athe life of the mind.@ I help others every day, inside and outside my classroom and my office, but my help is not of the Auseful@ kindCat least not for those most deeply affected by this tragedy. So how can I help? Whom can I help, with what, and where? Is it really possible for me to escape from the prison of my helplessness, my uselessness?
January 14, 2005. Amitav Ghosh, writer, anthropologist, activist, author recently of The Glass Palace (2002) did it swiftly and exactly right. By January 1st, he had flown (presumably from New York, where he now lives) to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are, in his words:
one of those quadrants of the globe where political and geological fault lines run on parallel courses. Politically the islands are Union Territories, ruled directly from New Delhi, but geologically they stand just beyond the edge of the Indian tectonic plate. Stretching through 700 kilometers of the Bay of Bengal, they are held aloft by a range of undersea mountains that stands guard over the abyssal deep of the Sunda trench. Of the 572 islands, only 36 are inhabited: Athe Andamans@ is the name given to the northern part of the archipelago while Athe Nicobars@ lie to the south. At their uppermost point, the Andamans are just a few dozen miles from Burma=s Coco Islands, infamous for their prisons, while the southernmost edge of the Nicobars is only a couple of hundred kilometers from the ever-restless region of Aceh. This part of the chain is so positioned that the tsunami of December 26, 2004 hit it just minutes after the coastline of northern Sumatra.[4]
Between January 11th and 13th, Ghosh published a three-part eyewitness account in The Hindu, a national English-language newspaper in India which, despite its name, stands on the left of the political spectrum. He vividly captured several key things about the effects of the tsunami on the islands, and the aftermath, that none of the wire services were able to pinpoint.
One: The tsunami took different forms on different islands in the archipelago, and therefore had different effects in different locations. In general, it had the most devastating effects on the southern islands, which lay closer to the epicenter under the sea. (By implication, the tsunami was also varied in its impact on Sri Lanka and on the coastal areas in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Orissa on mainland India. The variation over time and space meant that different regions needed different kinds of emergency response and reconstruction aidCa conclusion that has been borne out quite precisely in the weeks since Ghosh=s articles were published.)
Two: The islands are administered locally by seemingly obtuse and incompetent bureaucrats who function like Aminor potentates.@ In the first three days after the tsunami there were thousands of people in temporary camps on the islands, and there were said to be plenty of supplies at hand, but adequate help did not reach those in need of immediate help. The bureaucratic pipelines were clogged, slow to start flowing. (India was the first of the affected countries to announce, before the New Year, that it had enough internal resources and therefore did not need foreign aid, a position it reversed only after the middle of January.) The national government in New Delhi actually moved faster than the local bureaucracy in Andaman and Nicobar, announcing a major overhaul of the emergency-relief system on January 2nd. In contrast, the Indian armed forces stationed on bases in the archipelago responded swiftly, generously, efficiently, and independentlyCpilots whose own lives and families were affected by the tsunami flew multiple sorties each day, airlifting hundreds of stranded victims to safety. In the midst of the devastation, one of the bureaucrats actually organized a feast for friends and family at his unaffected home on New Year=s eve, incurring the wrath of the refugees on the island.[5]
Three: In the days after the tsunami, those in need of help helped themselves and each other much better that thought who ought to have helped them the most. By the time Ghosh arrived on the islands, people were already picking up their lives on their own with astonishing emotional clarity and resilience. In the most complex case that Ghosh encountered, the Director of the Malaria Research Institute in Malacca, Car Nicobar, was on his way to the mainland when the earthquake and the wave hit his home: his son survived by clinging to the dispersed rafters of a church, but his wife and daughter were swept away, without a trace. The Director managed to locate his son by phone through intermediaries, found his way back to Car Nicobar, trudged through wreckage to where his office and his home had once stood, but retrieved from there only a set of photographic slides symbolizing the thirteen years of research he had conducted. As Ghosh put it:
[H]is mind had fixed upon a set of objects that derived their meaning from the part of his life that was lived in thought and contemplation.
There are times when words seem futile, and to no one more so than a writer. At these moments it seems that nothing is of value other than to act and to intervene in the course of events: to think, to reflect, to write seem trivial and wasteful. But the life of the mind takes many forms and after the day had passed I understood that in the manner of his choosing, the Director had mounted the most singular, the most powerful defence of it that I would ever witness.[6]
January 15, 2005. In the halcyon days of another Republican administration, Paul Wolfowitz was America=s ambassador to Indonesia. Today, after a helicopter tour of Aceh province, Ahe said he was shocked at what he saw.@ He remembered the region from the late 1980s as a Averdant landscape.@ AI can=t believe the scale of it, the devastation. And I only saw a small part,@ he said on Saturday in Banda Aceh. Why was he there? To demonstrate that the AU.S. mission is to care.@ But why was he there? To put a band-aid on the disaster of initially pledging only A$15 to $20 million dollars@to help the tsunami victims in southern Asia, before being insulted into raising the pledge to some $300 million dollars, still short of the $500 million pledged by Japan. But why was he really there? Because the tsunami disaster had forced the Defense Department to reconsider Athe U.S. relationship with Indonesia=s military@Cto help supply spare parts for AAmerican-made C-130 cargo planes,@ to help feed a few million dollars to those starving private-sector contractors at home.[7]
January 19, 2005. What was the logic behind George Bush=s initial pledge of A$15 to 20 million@ for the countries ravaged by the tsunami? Just First World niggardliness, as a spokesman for the United Nations alleged days later? Or the more cynical pint of view that all the affected nations were Apoor@ nations, and therefore needed no more than token assistance, because they only needed to get back their pre-tsunami level of Apoverty@? Or the Republican ideology of self-interest and self-reliance that seeks to dismantle the welfare state and says, the poor are poor because something must be (morally) wrong with them, we aren=t obliged to help those who need help, they need to learn to help themselves for their own good? Character-building through self-help in the crucible of adversity? Poverty as something intrinsically dishonorable?
One of the classic slogans of national electoral politics in India since Independence that various parties and governments have used to target specific urban as well as rural Avote banks@: garibi hatao, put an end to poverty. Writing in the 1980s, fed up with the economic cynicism of both the right and the left, the Hindi poet, fiction writer, translator, and journalist Raghuvir Sahay noted that even poverty is Ahonorable@:
We=ve set out to put an end to poverty
and in a society that still doesn=t equate
poverty with dishonor
but sees it as a mark of Indianness,
an opposite of servitude, a rejection of abjection
we=ve set out to put an end to poverty
we who detest and despise the poor
and keep them at a distance
when we root out poverty
we rob them of their token self-respect
that=s why I object to the ethics
of this method of removing poverty
for sometimes poverty=s the only
artifact of honor left to human beings[8]
In the Andamans and Nicobars that Amitav Ghosh toured some two weeks ago, in the face of complete devastation and in the absence of prompt helpCfood, water, medicine, clothing, basic amenities, reconstructionCself-help became the only Aartifact of honor left to human beings.@ But not for the reasons the Americans had in mind when they thought that a token gesture of help would be enough.
January 21, 2005. In 2001, Nike, Inc., had worldwide sales of $9.5 billion; that year, the personal wealth of Phillip H. Knight, co-founder and CEO of the company, was estimated at $5.4 billion. In 2004, Nike sales topped $12 billion, and Knight still owned a huge portion (in what are mathematically Aabsolute@ numbers) of the company. On November 19, 2004, Knight announced that he would step down as CEO (but not as Chairman of the Board) by Christmas. On January 12, 2005, he converted 5.7 million shares of Nike Class A Common Stock to the same number of Class B stock, and entered into a pre-arranged sales plan for the latter, meticulously following the applicable rules set by the Securities and Exchange Commission. As a corporate press-release explained a couple of days later:
The shares converted represent approximately 8 per cent of Mr Knight=s total direct Nike shares held. If these shares are sold under the plan, Mr Knight would continue to retain direct ownership of approximately 92 per cent of Nike=s outstanding Class A shares, and 25 per cent of Nike=s total outstanding common stock.
The number of zeros in the cash value of the last two quantities of stock is mind-numbing. Knight himself contextualized this news-worthy item with his usual elegance: AAs I evaluate my long-term philanthropic and estate planning goals@ (he=s now 66 years old), Athis is a prudent time for me to prepare to diversify a small portion of my total assets.@[9]
This is happening three weeks after the earthquake and the tsunami hit Indonesia, killing some 166, 320 peopleCthe same Indonesia where Nike set up some of its most lucrative Aworld factories@ in the 1980s, and where, as late as 1999, employees of its clothing suppliers were still being Aexpected to work in excess of 65 hours a week and yet [were] struggling to survive on less than $US1 a day.@ Three weeks in which the official Nike website had not announced a single corporate donation from its coffers to the aid and reconstruction effortCand in which Bush had justified capping the revised American aid package at $300 million because individual and corporate donations and American help in kind (rescue missions, cargo planes, warships and personnel at hand) would supplement and far exceed that amount. Three weeks in which the Nike website only provided links to four independent relief organizations, directing visitors to make donations to them, without revealing whether Nike had donated anything to them.[10] Three weeks during which Phillip H. Knight could not take time out from his retirement celebrations, his prudent estate planning, his diversification, and his long-term philanthropic goals to announce even a modest personal donation to the post-tsunami effort. Three weeks in the unchanging history of the iron law of capital: help yourself, don=t help others; use others only to help yourself; help others only if they help you to help yourself.
January 28, 2005. But the politics of help and helplessness, the helper and the helped, is always more complicated. K. Nissar Ahmad (b. 1936), the most notable Muslim poet of his generation in Kannada, the primary language of the state of Karnataka in southern India, is a geologist by training and profession (retiring from Government Science College, Bangalore, in the 1990s). As a Atechnician of the earth,@ he would be able to tell us what happened deep inside the Indian Ocean in the final days of 2004. But in the early 1970s itself, in a famous poem called AAmerica, America,@ he told us even more precisely what the politics of imperial help in the postcolonial world actually amounts to. In A. K. Ramanujan=s English translation, prepared sometime in the second half of that decade and published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), Ahmad=s poem speaks for itself, without any help from us:
Whenever your American Way of Life is raised to the sky,
I feel like pulling off one by one you folks= ties, suits, skirts,
lifting from the blood-baths the Spaniards, the Germans,
the Portuguese, the Englishmen, the Negroes,
the pirates, the killers, the adulteresses,
and throwing them at you and laughing aloudC
but I see Lincoln, Kennedy, King,
and I stutter, stumble, bow my head, and keep quiet.
Whenever, in the name of stamping out Communists and Nazis,
you fuck up people=s lives and brag about it in Life, Time, etcetera,
I want to spit on you, drink vodka,
and talk to Castro, De Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh, and NasserC
but the Chinese and Pakistani invasions stab my memory,
and I see your hand of friendship, terrifying
and six thousand miles long,
and I shut my mouth.
When you fly flags of culture on the Empire State Building,
I see the male macho eyes in nightclubs and on the beaches, the 007s,
the Hollywood beat, the twist, the mental somersaults,
hashish, marijuana, LSD, the condoms, the perverse itches,
the mafiosos, the divorces at the rate of twenty-five a minute,
and I want to crow, clap my hands,
and broadcast it all to the world.
Lady Liberty faces the world and keeps her back to youC
I=d turn her around so that she can face your heart=s slums, the black HarlemsC
I=d snatch away the toy guns you give to your children as birthday gifts,
and give them Bibles, Gitas, and Korans insteadC
I=d like to give the luster of Eastern sages
to your folks= pale morning-after bedsheet facesC
I=d like to rub the Nehru rose on LBJ=s lips
and iron out all the knit brows
and the lines on his foreheadC
America, America,
whenever you brag about your power
I=d like to tweak your ears and tell you about
the victories of the young Vietcong
rubbing out armies like bedbugs,
the shame and defeat of your CIA
overturning governments and setting up yes-men,
and your ladders to the moon and the satellites
that fell into the sea.
But then I remember
your wheat loans, your PL480s,
and foreign policy seals my lips.
I stomach the fact
that there=s no country quite like you,
that when an elephant falls
it=s still taller than a horse.
So I sew up my lips, America,
and I bow to you.
Whenever I bitch about and resent
all that growth of yours
which devours me silently in the news,
our poverty
our overpopulation
our geography
stop my tongue
and teach me lessons in patience.[11]
Notes
1. For reproductions of Gieve Patel=s Drowned Woman and a detail from Fishers, see Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 4 (Fall 1989), pp. 180 and 187. For a selection of Benn=s poetry, see Gottfried Benn, Primal Vision, ed. E. B. Ashton (New York: New Directions, 1971).
2. See A. K. Ramanujan, AMadura: Two Views,@ in Ten Years of Quest, ed. Abu Sayeed Ayyub and Amlan Datta (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1966), p. 345.
3. From Vinay Dharwadker, ABreath,@ in Someone Else=s Paradise (forthcoming).
4. Amitav Ghosh, AOverlapping Faults,@ The Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/2005/01/11/ stories/2005011108991100.htm.
5. In addition to AOverlapping Faults,@ cited in note 4, see Amitav Ghosh, ANo Aid Needed,@ The Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/2005/01/12/stories/2005011205841100.htm.
6. Amitav Ghosh, AThe Town by the Sea,@ The Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/2005/01/13/ stories/2005011309081100.htm.
7. All quotations from AWolfowitz: U.S. mission is to care,@ CNN.com, January 15, 2005.
8. Translated from Hindi by Vinay Dharwadker, included in the manuscript of an anthology of modern Hindi poetry, currently under completion.
9. Here I combine references to and quotations from the following: ANike, Inc. Chairman Phil Knight Converts 5.7 Million Shares,@ http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/news/pressrelease, January 22, 2005; AKnight stands down as Nike boss,@ BBC News, http://news. bbc.co.uk. com, November 19, 2004; http://www.nike.com/nikebiz; and http://www.cabezal.com/ blog/archives/000066.shtml.
10. Http:/www.cleanclothes.org/companies/nike-99-9-22.htm; and http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/ news/article.adp?id=20050119112709990009.
11. K. Nisar Ahmad, AAmerica, America,@ trans. A. K. Ramanujan, in The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, ed. Vinay Dharwadker and A. K. Ramanujan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 167-68.