Some time in the middle of the month, the mango trees began to bloom. There are a quite few in my neigbourhood, the closest is a street away. The air is still filled with the smell of mango blooms, it wafts in through the windows and fills the room, and out on the streets it hangs heavy in the air. This heady springtime will not last, the sweat-drenched summer is approaching, by April we'll be swimming in it.

Yesterday afternoon, a tremor shook the city; an aftershock of the earthquake that struck Khulna and Jessore. There was some panic in the neigbourhood, people screaming and running out into the street, but i continued with my work. I've been aware of minor tremors on and off since 2012, ones that enter the seismographic record, but not necessarily public memory, they don't faze me much. We live close to the north-eastern edge of the Indian plate, tremors come with the territory.

However, as mining and major construction activity in the region continues, plundering the land and its people, with no thought of its consequences, tectonic or otherwise, the frequency of these tremors will mount, they will grow in magnitude, they already have been.

1. Samuel Delany,
   The Jewel Hinged Jaw (1978)

   The development of a particular literary technique or theme over several decades through several writers, often in several countries, is not completely solved by a chronological listing of who did what first. (.epub)

   Review:

   Being a book of essays, this collection has its highs and lows; there were long tracts on Robert Zelazny and Thomas M. Disch that i could not follow, for i am unfamiliar with their work, far too much praise for Robert Heinlein, and the earnest belief that James Tiptree Jr. is a man, in a Letter to the Symposium on Women in Science Fiction no less. Though i have both hindsight and history on my side, i could not help but admire the efficacy of Tiptree's literary transsexuality.

   To Read the Dispossessed was the essay i'd found most engaging, partly because i'd read The Dispossessed just last year, and for the very interesting points the essay made on the pitfalls of constructing a literary utopia, and how much writing reveals of a writer's politics. Delany's detailing of science fiction's references to literary canons established in the imperialist university grounds the book as a concerted effort to legitimise science fiction as a literary genre as opposed to one that is merely popular.

   Delany's efforts were, of course, ultimately successful, but i'd argue that the science fiction works that served as clarion calls in support of the U.S. empire (Heinlein's, for example) had a greater effect than Delany's theorising did. I'd go so far as to argue that Delany was more productive in legitimising science fiction by writing some of those clarion calls himself; consider Babel-17 in terms of its place as a Cold War novel.

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2. Frantz Fanon,
   Black Skins, White Masks (1952)

   What does this mean? Quite simply this: when an Antillean with a degree in psychology says he is not sitting for the agrégation because of his colour, my response is that philosophy never saved anybody. When another desperately tries to prove to me that the black man is as intelligent as as any white man, my response is that neither did intelligence ever save anybody, for if equality among men is proclaimed in the name of intelligence and philosophy, it is also true that these concepts have been used to justify the extermination of man. (p.12)

   Review:

   In his introduction, the author explained to me that the analysis set out in the first three chapters "is above all regressive" (p. xiii), and despite this, chapter two sent me so far up the wall, i had to set the book aside and stew in my anger. If anything, this accounts for how effective Fanon's writing is. His account of racism is resounding, it draws objectivity out of the subjective experiences of black men and lays it out for the reader in no uncertain terms.

   I also found the explication of the concrete relation between philosophy and psychology in the contrasting chronicles of Adler and Hegel's theories of subjectification especially interesting, something i would like to delve deeper into at a later date. Fanon's writing is quite singular, and to me, it stands as a definite limit to the rationality professed by colonialism and imperialism in general, and psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis in particular.

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3. Leo Zeilig,
   Frantz Fanon: A Political Biography

   Increasingly, Fanon balked at the vague and confused notions of African unity he encountered. For the concept to have meaning it needed to be tied to practice, action and practical support. Nkrumah criticised The Wretched of the Earth for being without a practical revolutionary philosophy, yet this was exactly Fanon's rejection of Nkrumist ideas of 'unity' and African socialism. (.epub)

   Review:

   I want to consider this one more seriously when i have more time, but i'll leave a few first impressions here.

   The book is most effective when it has historical and political facts to tie in to instances in Fanon's life, but it lapses into straightforward literary analysis when these run dry; the chapter The Whole of Existence - Liberation and Leukemia suffers from this the most. In it, the author indulges in a very rushed recapitulation of The Wretched of the Earth, which was particularly superflous for me, because i'd just finished reading Wretched for the third time last December.

   I was also a little suspicious of the author's Trotskyite tendencies which surface in editorialising statements that appear abruptly and sometimes feel out of place. This in turn makes me question the veracity of the book's discourse, which is precisely why i'd like to revisit it.

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4. Terry Pratchett,
   Mort (1987)

   But not any Death. This is the Death whose particular sphere of operations is, well, not a sphere at all, but the Discworld, which is flat and rides on the back of four giant elephants who stand on the shell of the enormous star turtle Great A'Tuin, and which is bounded by a waterfall that cascades endlessly into space. (.epub)

   Review:

   Meh.

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5. Terry Pratchett,
   Sourcery (1988)

   “My father spent some time in Khali when he was hunting for the Lost City of Ee,” said Conina. “And I seem to remember he spoke very highly of the soak. It's a kind of bazaar.” (.epub)

   Review:

   You know, for a novelist who is hailed as exceptionally progressive, Pratchett does indulge in an awful lot of orientalism, and over a decade after the publication and critical acclaim of Said's work too...

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6. লীলা মজুমদার,
   টং লিং (1963)

   ইস, নৌকাতে একটা লোকও আছে দেখলাম — দু-হাতে প্রাণপনে নৌকা আঁকড়ে রয়েছে, মাঝে মাঝে ঠ্যাং দুটো নৌকো থেকে আলগা হয়ে ভেসে যাচ্ছে। (p.23)

   Review:

   Leela Majumdar's children's books are inevitably set in a labyrinthine বনেদী বাড়ি quite alien to children who are not born into immense generational wealth. Majumdar herself was born into an immensely wealthy and well connected literary family, and her stories were originally published in a children's magazine called সন্দেশ, which had been founded by her uncle, Upendra Kishore Ray.

   The book itself is fine, i suppose, a rather realist children's tale, it lacks the finesse of পদিপিসির বর্মিবাক্স, and constructs its narrative in a series of lucky coincidences. i only read this to get back in the sway of reading longer works in Bengali, because at some point i want to tackle Sukumar Sen's বাংলা সাহিত্যের ইতিহাস which is a behemoth that stands at four volumes, each roughly a thousand pages long.

7. Virginia Woolf,
   Orlando (1928)

   He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando's father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him. (p. 3)

   Review:

   Now, i know this book is considered a queer classic, but personally, i found it to be more of an affirmation of the bisexuality — i.e., the co-existence of masculinity and femininity in a given subject, as theorised in 19th century psychoanalytic literature, rather our use of the word as a form of sexuality — expressed by the suffragette wave of feminism. And like the English and American suffragettes, this book unapologetically racist and imperialist. About a third of the way into the text, i found myself underlining every instance of racism, and ended up expending three entire lengths of 0.5mm mechanical pencil lead for my efforts.

   Of course, the book is not entirely devoid of queerness, its dedication and the conditions of its production attests to this fact, but i found that aspect of the text to be rather understated, and quite often omitted entirely. Not to mention, its logic of transition is so utterly fantastical that it completely obviates any relation to the actual process of transition which, to this day, is fraught with medical and legal obstacles, to say nothing of the fact that transition is a continuous process that cannot be accomplished in one night. To transition is to live, the two are inseparable.

   This is not to say i completely despised the book, i did find it interesting and funny for being such a complete send-up of the biographical form, and i appreciated Woolf's style and her erudition in the realm of English literature. I also rather enjoyed Orlando's method of time travel, which was clearly modelled on what i like to call the Rip Van Winkle School of Time Travel, which saw broad use before H.G. Wells invented the time machine.

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8. Stefan Zweig,
   Chess 🐛 (1942)

   'I don't know how far you've ever thought about the intellectual situation in this king of games. But even the briefest reflection should be enough to show that as chess is a game of pure thought involving no element of chance, it's a logical absurdity to try playing against yourself. At heart the attraction of chess resides entirely in the development of strategies in two different brains, in the fact that Black doesn’t know what manoeuvres White will perform in this war of the mind, and keeps trying to guess them and thwart them, while White himself is trying to anticipate and counter Black's secret intentions. If Black and White were one and the same person, you'd have the ridiculous state of affairs where one and the same brain simultaneously knows and doesn't know something, and when operating as White can forget entirely what it wanted and intended a minute ago when it was Black. Such dual thinking really presupposes a complete split of consciousness, an arbitrary ability to switch the function of the brain on and off again as if it were a mechanical apparatus. Wanting to play chess against yourself is a paradox, like jumping over your own shadow. (.epub)

   Review:

   I'm still chewing on this one, give me a minute.

1. Dean Parisot,
   Galaxy Quest (1999)

Essays

1. Meena Kandasamy,
   Casteist, Communalist, Racist. And Now, A Nobel Laureate (2001)
2. Kathleen Gough,
   Antropology: Child of Imperialism (1968)
3. D.N. Jha,
   Monumental Absence: The Destruction of Ancient Buddhist Sites (2018)
4. T.R. Sharma,
   The Indian Communist Party Split of 1964: The Role of Factionalism and Leadership Rivalry (1978)
5. Stanislaw Lem,
   On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction (1973)
6. Sara Nafisa Shahid,
   After After a Dictator, Bangladesh Turns Right

Short Stories

1. Imogen Clarke,
   Notebooks
2. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o,
   The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright