World as Family A Journey of Multi-Rooted Belongings by Vishakha N. Desai

 World as Family

A Journey of Multi-Rooted Belongings by Vishakha N. Desai is one of the best memoirs I read this year. Simply clear, sincere, I firstly met online mrs Desai as moderator during a symposium organized by Columbia University Press on Covid-19 and vaccines: now we both follow each other on Instagram.

Born in Ahmedabad, India, in a family with seven other siblings, parents involved in the profound changes started by Gandhi, with which the father of Desai, journalist, worked with, Vishakha discovered an intellectual and fertile environment. She studied with success in exclusive schools and at the age of 17 her father encouraged her: spending a year in the USA would have been exciting. Vishakha hadn't never left her family, her loved siblings, the connections she had established, the new boyfriend she had, her dancing classes. How could she live well in a different distant country, with a foreign language, different customs, the idea of speaking 24 hours per day just American/English, eating different food, and living a different existence?

It hasn't been a simple choice, but Vishakha, also thanks to another friend interested in the program by the AFS, sent the application. Vishakha was accepted like also her friend and both of them left India for good: that one was their first intercontinental trip. They could not sleep for the excitement, and once arrived in New York City they admired the magnificent skyline. Vishakha was later directed to Santa Barbara where an adorable new family, the Reeds one, would have followed her during the year. New food, at first it was a weird world, a weird school, with weird students with their weird questions on drugs, but as also adds Vishakha, this experience, a complete full-immersion in another culture gradually changed her perspective of the world because these experiences open new horizons and let us think differently. 

She noticed this, when her father stopped by there, invited by the AFS: Vishakha saw him as a provincial man if compared with the people she met in a daily base in Santa Barbara. 

Simply: Vishakha was discovering other realities, more complicated and more different from her own existence in India, more simple and protected.

Once returned home the adaptation was not simple because Vishakha in the USA discovered individualism and privacy: the one she could not have in her own house. Also her accent at first appeared weird: and plus...Smells, perfumes of her own land appeared much more accentuated, and strange: was she noticing this because of her trip to the USA?

Vishakha changed, stopping to consider herself just a citizen of India but of a more big world, that included the USA.

In the while she fell in love for an American soldier, Tom, although their relationship, with a marriage celebrated in India, didn't continue once in the USA.

The end of it was reason of sadness, but Vishakha, who had also decided for an abortion in the while, because she was building her own career, became a name in the field of Indian art. She started to collaborate with prestigious realities and museums, ending in the MFA, Museum of Fine Arts of Boston where she worked with success for several years, before to start another adventure in New York City.

She found in Robert the companion of her existence, while she assisted at the degradation of health of her beloved parents, in particular her father, with a diagnosys of Parkinson.

When she married Robert, her father could not attend the wedding; after a while he suffered of a massive stroke. Vishakha tells that most of her family, now in the USA was hyper-busy and could not stay at long in India: at the same time, after three weeks of choma her father died.

Oh; Vishakha remembers the joy when she started to work at the MFA of Boston, receiving the visit of her parents; in particular her father was intrigued by the city where Gandhi studied in and he loved to search for all the places where he had been, and what influenced him giving coverage to this visit in a regular basis in the magazine where he was writing for; the popularity of Gandhi needed to be remarked in fact. 

I loved a lot the description of Vishaka's parents's second house in India with ten rooms plenty of books and statues of different divinities, a big garden and the fertile intellectual activity breathed everywhere.

But...What is World as Family? And when can we consider the world as a family? I personally consider the world as a family where I am accepted and loved and appreciated; it can be in my close or distant world/connections. 

Vishakha found that the integration or her being Indian didn't change the fact that she was an American citizen:that her world as family can be in India, but also in other parts of the world. 

An important chapter is dedicated to the current COVID-19 pandemics with reflections on economy, social injustices and discriminations in the world.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Radio Empire The BBC's Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel by Daniel Ryan Morse

 Radio Empire

The BBC's Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel by Daniel Ryan Morse is a new book by Columbia Press that this time takes in consideration the modernism passing through radio and...literature. 

When was born, the BBC's Eastern Service wanted to be a completely new, different voice, and an answer to the nazi propaganda. 

Soon, it became clear that these programs offered a new way for appreciating culture; poems, novels, important books that marked that years were narrated and literature started to assume a different shape that only radio could present. 

Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, some of the most important, influential writers passed through the radio with their works.

The first attemp of hypermediacity is not a characteristic of our times; this one was a characteristic of modernism, where a big exposure was searched by the various creatives. 

In doing this, literature and books searched a sort of mediation with a medium, radio, completely different; Bowen adapted her latest novels also for being read on radio programs.

The Eastern Service started to broadcast in Hindustani on May 11 1940. The other service, the English-Language Empire Service started officially on dec.1932; the BBC expanded its offering for giving a different voice, trying for stop the fascist propaganda.

You musn't imagine anyway that the first programs on air were for all people, no: they were for the native elite people of India and for students of universities.

The first chapter takes in consideration the last work of James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, considered absolutely one of the most complicated books every written; this book is one of the favorites of actor Johnny Depp; he confesses that brings this book always with him, because it is a wonderful discovery every time.

Read by the same Joyce on air, we will notice the differentiations that this book will bring with it emotionally before and after the last world war. The Wake offers also an important instrument of knowledge about the cultural dynamics of radio broadcasting during the interwar years.

In the second chapter Forster will create many bridges; he will span his action helping authors, speaking of banned books, including the Ulysses by Joyce. 

Forster: protagonist of the program Some Books from 1941-1947 loved to give a lot of space to all the literature published and written in India. Considered "at best a closet modernist" someone added that he was "irritating in his refusal to be great." 

But Forster, more than to becoming great wanted to expand culture, mixing, promoting, presenting new ideas about british and Indian literature to his listeners. Friendly tone, close to people, Forster for sure was one of the most important vehicles of circulation of people, books, culture from the East to the West, from India, to London and vice-versa. 

In Some Books Forster unified and talked largely of what meant modernism and modernity, and how modernity was accellerating in the entire world. He fought fascism with all himself preferring to treat stories where characters were involved in common domestic problems, not political ones, although one day remarked how, sadly, it was more or less impossible to find books in India where there wasn't commixtion between private existences and policy.

His writing-style was ironic, humble and as a person Forster fought for other writers and their works, while "remaining  reticent about causing trouble with his own fiction" writes Morse. Forster promoted gay literature and helped writers in writing these books. 

Friendship and culture meant to Forster a powerful interaction with social, political, economic forces.

In the third chapter the story of Anand and his vision of modernization, something he felt impatiently, of literature, but also cities, relationship, seeing anyway changes all around him absolutely unsatisfiying. 

Beautiful and stimulating book this one by Columbia!

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori

Una casa di petali rossi - Kamala Nair - Recensione

Una casa di petali rossi di Kamala Nair, titolo originario The girl in the garden (La ragazza nel giardino) mi ha profondamente commosso. Pubblicato dalla casa editrice Nord per l'Italia, ho letto l'edizione Mondolibri.

La signora Nair è diventata scrittrice dopo prestigiosi passaggi presso il Wellsley College istituto femminile tra i più prestigiosi in Massachusetts, continuando in seguito gli studi ad Oxford, in Inghilterra e al Trinity College di Dublino.

Quest'opera letteraria in un certo senso la riporta alle sue origini. La storia di quelle che intrigano.

La famiglia di Rakhee, l'adolescente protagonista del romanzo è apparentemente normale. Con i suoi genitori entrambi indiani e il cane Merlin vive in Minnesota. Ama il luogo, la gente, l'aria, i fiori, il paesaggio la giovane Rakhee. Ama il suo mondo e non le manca niente.

Sua madre, però un giorno comincia a ricevere strane lettere dall'India e cambia. Solare, estroversa, a poco a poco diventa una donna chiusa e cupa. Che misteri nasconde quella mamma così differente da quella che aveva conosciuto sino a poche settimane prima?

Le viene proposto da Amma, sua mamma di andare a trascorrere l'estate in India. La ragazzina è perplessa perché non vorrebbe lasciare la realtà che conosce per un salto nel buio. In più Rakhee è affezionatissima a suo padre Aba e al cangolino Merlin. 

Chissà se i due vorranno divorziare o tutto tornerà come prima? Si chiede angosciata.

Questo è un altro romanzo forte perché come spesso accade nelle famiglie la centralità della storia è un "terribile" segreto celato in questo caso per oltre sedici anni, che, ovviamente, ha condotto nel mentre la famiglia di Amma, rimasta in India alla completa rovina. Si sa: i segreti logorano e sarebbe sempre meglio non averne alcuno per vivere meglio.
I segreti sono destinati a logorare la vita e le menti dei protagonisti coinvolti.

Rakhee non ci sta. Non ci sta all'oppressione, e alla tirannia che incontra dentro la famiglia di Amma. Una cugina data in sposa a un vecchio, non farà una bella fine.
Un'altra bambina, il fulcro della storia, nata con una voglia e delle imperfezioni sul viso, una "figlia di uno scandalo" ridotta a vivere confinata in una bella casa, con un grande giardino, senza alcun tipo di rapporto umano con alcun essere vivente, a parte una signora che lei chiama "la maestra," per paura che il tanto temuto segreto possa essere rivelato.

La stupidità dei segreti.

Non so perché quando ho terminato di leggere questo libro, con le lacrime agli occhi, ho pensato a quanto fosse simile a: "Il colore Viola" di Emily Walker.

No: non nella drammatica fisicità della crudeltà degli abusi narrati nel romanzo della Walker, ma nella crudeltà mentale che ha portato una famiglia a un'ottimale auto-distruzione e a odi che sono cresciuti e maturati per decenni.

In più, come nel romanzo della Walker i protagonisti si rincontreranno dopo molti anni e la struttura del romanzo è di tipo epistolare, sebbene in questo caso non ci siano carteggi significativi. Solo una lunga lettera che Rakhee scrive al ragazzo che l'ha chiesta in moglie.

Rakhee infatti all'inizio del libro riceve una lettera. Una lettera dal passato, da qualcuno che non ama granché ma che le chiede di aiutare una persona che un tempo le è stata cara.
Allora, la ragazza, sospirone, scrive una lettera lunghissima al futuro sposo spiegandogli perché deve andare  in India e cosa non gli ha ancora raccontato del suo passato.


Il ritratto dell'India fatto dall'autrice può esser riassunto così: terra mitica, magica, calda,ospitale, ombrosa, terribile, antica, dura.



Anna Maria Polidori