"Find the truth and then live by it"

Urban Retreat 2010 at the London Buddhist Centre, 11-19 September 2010

Nawal el Saadawi

"my mother's name - Zainab - disappeared in history; disappeared"

Nawal el Saadawi @Southbank, London - 15 April 2010

These words sum up much about our patriarchal world. Aspects too that I have thought about myself - and felt at times alone and almost mad in these tumbling reflections. There was a time that I changed my own name upon the turn of them. Yes, I have not always been Caroline Watson! For some that know this fact about me, it is an amusing anecdote - and for me I too laughed (and continue to) at the linguistic, cultural, societal conundrum that I was trying to weave my way through (the process is ongoing... and not resolved... ). That story is for another day - for today belongs to Nawal el Saadawi: born in Egypt (1931); Feminist; Writer; Activist; Physician; former Presidential candidate; former Prisoner; Woman.

Tonight, Nawal el Saadawi raised a standing ovation. Sprung by her force, her smile, her positive composure, her clarity, her bravery, her resiliance, her politics and wisdom, we had absorbed something of her formidable spirit.

Her achievements, and her radicalism and stridency, are extra-ordinary. She spent 50 years campaigning in Egypt against female genital mutilation - for which she was punished. In 2008, the practice was finally outlawed. Most remarkable in this, is her breaking through language - for language is a matrix in which we are all held. Imagine taking words used to name and describe sex organs and sexuality at a time and in an atmosphere where they were unspoken, and for which almost everyone would spit on you for doing so - and writing about them. Publicly.

She has suffered recrimmination for her writing, for her ideas, and - ironically and powerfully (since we are talking about his-story and her-story) - for what her daughter has written. In 2007, her daughter Mona became the target of contraversy when she wrote an article on Mother's Day, and undersigned it absorbing her mother's name "Nawal" into her own. She was making a point of gratitude, connection, respect - visibility - to her mother (and also a legal point). Two years of prosecution for heresy ensued. The case led to a new law for the rights of the child, giving children born outside marriage in Egypt the right to carry the name of the mother.

Nawal el Saadawi had much to say:

"writing is like breathing;
it is very natural,
it is like talking.
We are all born writers"

"What is feminism?> Feminism means that you become angry when they treat you unjustly"

"I became a feminist when I was a child"

"veiling and nakedness [ref. women] are two sides of the same coin"

"when you become creative, you become dissident"

"when/if you challenge, you win;
if you are afraid, you lose"

"we live in a world that separates everything;
but everything is connected"

(all quotes are from tonight's event at London's Southbank, where I had a front-row seat and Nawal spoke directly into my eyes)

where Three Dreams cross

Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh

(@Whitechapel Gallery, London, E1)

Self-assured and celebratory: this exhibition brings together the works of 82 photographers spanning 150 years, 3 nations and many more (sub-)communities besides. It is quite a remarkable collection, with many of the images being displayed together for the first time.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the "the crucial moment when the power to hold a camera, frame and take pictures was no longer exclusively the preserve of colonial or European photographers". These images of "self-representation" and "self-determination" are presented thematically in five broad groups - The Portrait, The Family, The Performance, The Street, and The Body Politic. The curators have opened themselves up to inevitable critique by presenting in this way, as naturally there is overlap between the categories - but it works. More conventional categorisation would have supressed connections that are there to be made in the eye of the viewer. I enjoyed hearing the echoes whispered between sections, and between time and place.

Unabashedly, it is the content that is strong in this exhibition.

D. Nusserwanji - Studio Portrait, Bombay, c.1940s
Arif Mahmood - Hanuman Temple at Soldier Bazaar, Karachi, 2008

Both above images are black and white prints - the studio portrait having been touched with glitter and paint. Arif Mahmood's three works from Karachi were striking - including this one of the Hanuman Temple at Soldier Bazaar. Painted over beautifully by Shaukat Mahmood (no relation) who died of cancer shortly after completion of the project in March 2009, the images revisit the dying art of the painted photograph as well as bring into play the very contemporary contention over post-production.

A collection of images from the exhibition is nicely presented here. And here are some more:

Above:
1. Anay Mann, About Neetika, 2005
2. Dileep Prakash, Christine Fernandes, Khurda Road, 2005
3. T.S. Satyan, Boys Cooling off on a Summer Day in Bombay, 1970
4. Umrao Singh Sher-Gill, After a Bath: Self-Portrait, 1904
5. Munem Wasif, Illegal Immigrants from Myanmar, 2007

Top:
Gauri Gill, Balika Mela, Lunkaransar, 2003

Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan

I did not for one moment take for granted that performing before me - full-belt, alive and present; giving his heart, his craft, his music - was Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. Glorious was the word, and really there are not many words that can begin to capture it. This blog post will be short.

I smiled throughout, felt expanded and became one step closer to my own dreams and destinies.

Kitty&Kitty loved the evening - and what a fabulous and apt way to spend the turning of the spring equinox. The equinox arrived at 5.30pm and by 7pm we were in our seats. As the evening gathered pace, and the songs layer on layer worked to their ecstacy (as happens also within many of the individual songs) we were in raptures and enraptured.

Rahat did not interrupt his music with chat. He didn't need to. A quiet air of ease on his plump red and gold cushion, and a voice that belted to the Gods. It is hard to believe he is just 35 years old.

The evening was a mix of Bollywood and Qawwali. Last autumn he was in London for his Remembering Nusrat tour. That seemed a project in establishing himself as heir-apparent to the Nusrat legacy, and this year he is back to establish brand Rahat.

His version of Akhiyan Udeek Diyan was the one that really lifted the roof. It injected new energy, and was the turning point of the performance and evening. From the Bollywoods, I loved O Re Piya. After the roof-lifting, Dam Mast Qalandar (Ali! Ali!) and Afreen Afreen were just terrific too.

Afreen was the encore, which delighted me a lot as this is a song I have discovered through repeated listenings. I have a Nusrat MP3 bought for 45Rs (about 60p) in an Indian bazaar (actually I have several!) - it contains 20hours of tracks and on the digital display all are unnamed... it really is Nusrat by number! I have learned over time that if I go to track #3 in the section after the one totalling 17 songs, I get uplifted with Afreen Afreen. This is one of a number of tracks that I locate in this way. And so I heard it again at the spring equinox and Nusrat by number is fleshed out a little more.

-

(Rahat Fateh Ali Khan @ Royal Festival Hall, London - 20 March 2010)

back from Wonderland!

(Alice in Wonderland @ The IMAX)

Behind the giant 3D glasses my fidget nature was set free! It's a bit like going to a masque ball perhaps: you become something different.

Everyone encased in their own goggled worlds, I was set free from convention of sitting still and behaving well (I wriggled, rustled my sweets and my head roved in giant wonder at the screen). And as Alice ran from the party - from the dreadful marriage proposal and the crowd - I thought again about Ben Okri's uncomplicated yet powerful message. >Every day is a challenge in navigating and overcoming the fears and limitations placed on us, and which ultimately we place on ourselves.

I felt too a glimmer of what it might've been like attending the first Talkies or when black&white film shifted into techniclour. "It talks!" ... "It's in colour! - like the real world, like us!"... And now: "It has dimension!"

After Alice had returned from Wonderland and set out for the far East, this army of bugs took off their glasses and left the auditorium. The IMAX exit, as it is - is a level below the street and in the middle of a roundabout, with various tunnels leading up to the surface. You can see the street high above and sense the traffic moving in orbital. My friends said our goodbyes. "Which way are you going Caroline?" I pointed abstractly upwards, towards the street. "My bike... my bike is up there somewhere... on the railings... I just have to get to the surface and I will see." I felt like Alice, trying to exit through a rabbit hole!

Happy 300th Birthday Dr Thomas Arne!

On pew, I sit. For the first time I am in St. Mary's Church, Stoke Newington (not far from my East London home) - a building most-glorious in its gothic illumination at night.

It is 6.30pm Sunday, and I am here for the 300th Birthday celebratory concert by Linden Baroque Orchestra.

Dr Thomas Arne, now 300, was the most successful song writer of his day, and produced a sound that today feels regal, gallant, and to many ears "typically English".

Electric connection with this music came for me in Steven Devine's solo in the Harpsichord Concerto (No.5 in G). The notes fell like crystal rain, and I imagined myself pushing aside curtains of beaded glass and entering a palace of fine diamante. Fine diamante?! - djinn kitty, kitty djinn (I inwardly balked) you cannot compare English baroque with that most pedalled ingredient of democratised jewellery!

Yet, I could. In the mid-eighteenth century, Dr Thomas Arne was a most popular and commercially successful feature at London's pleasure gardens - unmissable hubs of cultural entertainment where all of London irrespective of class gathered. At the famous pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone (and others), Londoners delighted in varied and eclectic programmes of song, glee, chorus, sometimes opera, alternating with overtures, symphonies, and concertos. The old mixed with the new, and there was much pastiche. Thomas Arne was central to this pastiche - he prepresented the new, the shiny. His songs often plumped out programmes and drew in the crowds (yet represented a most popular choice of "taste" - that great C18 value). Pleasure-garden gatherers might've enjoyed a solo song by Arne (like 'The Lover's Rencantation' we heard this eve) followed by a symphony. In Thomas Arne we can find a fine, glistening, democratised crystal, that sparkles and sings, and mixes with the party atmosphere and brings pleasure to many. Diamante!

This great and interesting historical music was brought alive by Linden Baroque Orchestra, who specialise in performing Baroque music on period instruments (find them on facebook). The music was accompanied by a programme written with wit and dexterity - the care in fine writing and precision of information added a grace to the proceedings and warmed this damp-cold January evening with a sense that you were somewhere most interesting and special.

UK premiere of 'Kashf' / Q&A with Director Ayesha Khan

(@ the UK's first Himalaya Film Festival, currently on in London)

Kashf - The Lifting of the Veil is a fascinating exploration of questions of destiny, and takes us into the worlds of Sufism (the mystical heart of Islam) and Lollywood dreams.

I especially liked the style of it - it felt very fresh, raw, and all the more so for hearing from director Ayesha Khan of the "guerilla-style" film-making process. Shot in 28 days on a very low budget, the result was a genre-bending fusion of camcorder documentary, Lollywood cinema, and 'conventional' film crew work (although the crew later appear on screen as cinema audience!).

A young man returns to Lahore, the city of his birth, and begins to uncover mystical circumstances around his conception and the promise his mother made to a Sufi Pir, that in adulthood he would take the Sufi path. Meanwhile, his cousin is also being drawn into another established tradition in Lahore's culture as he pursues his calling to be an actor.

With dream sequences and hallucinations, magic realism is a strong element - reality is explored through apparent non-reality, and the physical and metaphysical merge. A most interesting aspect of this upturning and unveiling is Director turns Actor, as Ayesha Khan literally melds onto the screen and becomes a major presence in its landscape.

As the pull on our hero towards his spiritual destination becomes irresistibly and irreversibly stronger, he is told: "you have to acknowledge you're on the path." This film is about facing up to destiny, and meeting it, and is about the quest we each face to find out who we are and why we are here.

I enjoyed that this film took me to the streets and doors, and sometimes behind those doors, of Lahore (the green door is a strong motif in the film). Ayesha was just great too - I admired that she had made the film as an experiment: rather than go to film school, why not just try to make a film? And I admired her a m a z i n g l o n g hair!

"We can wake to the power of our voice"

My meeting with writer Ben Okri this week has shaken me. And I suspect it will continue to for a long time to come. His message and his art is powerful, clear - perceptive to the core. This guy has gravitas, is tough and is inspiring. From my front-row seat I spent one and a half hours sitting 2metres from him, and I spoke briefly with him afterwards. But it was not this proximity that moved me so much: he had exceptional presence, personality and poise that could reach far to (and beyond) the back of the room.

He talked about freedom - freedom of the mind. "There is nothing we can do/If we don't begin to think anew." If we are not free in our minds, he said, we are not going to be free anywhere else. Every day is a challenge in navigating and overcoming the limitations and fears placed on us, and which ultimately we place on our ourselves. And this is true. We can let our fears govern us - or we can be governed by our dreams. He talked about self-realisation - about striving for and becoming the best possible version of ourselves that we can be. It sounds so simple, and in principle it is. But it could also be our greatest challenge. The power is within, but how many of us "wake to the [full] power of our own voice", and, in turn, what of our voices - the collective human voice? This voice, this shining, this gold - has to come from within, no one can do it for us. Ultimately, he said, "people have to wake themselves up, and shake the world, shake the world." Every word he delivered was of resounding value and thought. These words were delivered like the beat of a drum, connected to the earth's heartbeat itself. - Or, how the world's heart should and could be beating. Ben Okri is a human metronome for all of us.

Ben Okri is currently tweeting a poem, line by line - one line a day. I share some lines with you here, and urge you to follow it. (twitter/benokri.com) (you can also follow on his Facebook page)

We ought to use time

Like emporers of the mind:

Do magic things that the future,

Surprised, will find.

[...]

We can wake to the power of our voice

Change the world with the power of our choice.

But there is nothing we can do

If we don't begin to think anew.

We are not much more than what we think; in our minds we swim or sink.

If there is one secret I'd like to share It's what we are what we dream Or what we fear.

So dream a good dream today

And keep it going in every way.

Let each moment of our life [...]

Ben Okri was 'In Conversation' @ Richmix, Shoreditch/East London.