Author: borderlesssg1

Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

Productivity

I am British and the British are a lazy race. This must be true because our own governments keep telling us it is. They have been saying the same thing for as long as I can recall. They never grow weary of loudly declaring it, despite the constant effort involved in berating us, thus contradicting the meaning of their message with the method of delivering it.

I think they mean that we should work harder for their benefit, so they can take the opportunity to be more lazy. Because, yes, they are just as indolent as the people they accuse of laziness, if not more so. If national characters really exist (I am not sure they do) then laziness is certainly part of ours. How can this be possible? We wandered the world invading and colonising and that requires drive and vigour, surely? Not necessarily. I suspect we did all that because it was an easier option. Less effort to take than make. But I wish we had been just a little lazier and not even bothered to take.

As the philosopher Emil Cioran pointed out, lazy people cause less trouble than busy ones. Almost all the artificial crises of history are the result of active, busy go-getters, whether they be warlords, emperors or irresponsible inventors. Another thinker, Paul Lafargue, published a book in 1883 called The Right to be Lazy which sets out comprehensive arguments as to how decreasing one’s own workload is the best way forward for the entire human race. This book ought to be read by everyone. It opens with an exquisite quote from Lessing, “Let us be lazy in everything except in being lazy.”

Laforgue suggests that the stated desire of socialist governments for ‘full employment’ is a mistake. More working hours means more servitude, misery and frustration. It might mean more pay too, but what is the use of pay when it is paid for in time? That is self-defeating. And the stated desire of conservative governments for ‘greater competition’ is also a mistake. Effective competition requires more work, and so we are back where we started, in a world where the only thing that radically different political systems agree on is that the innocent people they rule over should be toilers.

It is leisure time that is the fruit of progress, free space in which one can be creative, joyful or just peaceful. Automation is key to making the utopia happen, and when I was young we were promised a future of leisure in which computers would do all the hard thinking and robots all the heavy labour, and we could be released into freedom, visiting friends, taking siestas, writing poetry, composing music, or floating on our backs in the clouds thanks to silent anti-gravity motors and communing with birds and rainbows.

The promise was broken. Automation gave us more free time, but that free time was flooded with more work, at the urgings of the high lords of capitalism. And now the computers and robots write poems, compose music and create art, while we drudge and toil in ever worse conditions, with ever greater pressure on the hulls of our souls, as if we are organic submersibles sinking irreversibly into the deepest depths of the oceans of degradation. One day we must be crushed, a flattened populace, compressed to shadows on the seabed of our aspirations and dreams. The high lords will have triumphed.

Therefore, I regard the laziness of the British nation with affection. And yet I recently saw a map that has been produced from statistical data revealing that not all Britain is equally lazy. On the contrary, some regions are very productive indeed, over-productive in fact. I studied the map and saw that where I lived for many years was in one of the lazy zones. I heaved a sigh of relief. It is good to know that I did not fail to fit in with my environment back then. It reassures me, and we all need reassurance, even lazy people.

Map provided by Rhys Hughes

But my main reaction to viewing the map was to wonder how peculiar it must be to live right on the border that divides an over-productive zone from an under-productive one, especially with your left half in one zone and your right half in another. One of your legs and arms would be moving much faster than the other arm and leg, and presumably you would then rotate in a circle, as you paddled yourself around, which would mean all parts of you would take turns to be basted in both laziness and industriousness!

That was my first thought. But then I realised that I had been quite lazy in the details of my speculation. Actually, you would not rotate in a circle in that manner. You would rotate first one way, then back the other way, as different sides of your body came under the influence of the over-productive zone, and so you would move more like an alternating current than a windmill. Whether this would be an improvement or not, I do not know.

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Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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Categories
Poetry

‘Poetry is a Recipe to Taste Life’

By Nivedita N

Poetry 

Poetry is a recipe to taste life
words, a ladle; silence, a bowl.

Blend what you hear, see, 
touch, feel and taste 
into a scrumptious paste
stir it with a ladle 
and pour into the bowl

Nivedita N is a poet from Hyderabad. She has been published in a few noted journals. Apart from poetry she enjoys cycling, cold coffee, and gallivanting around the gullies of Hyderabad in an auto rickshaw, her dream vehicle. She hopes to work as a postwoman someday.

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Categories
Poetry

Veiled Defences

Poetry by Michael Burch

Courtesy: Creative Commons
VEILED

She has belief
without comprehension
and in her crutchwork shack
she is
much like us ...

tamping the bread
into edible forms,
regarding her children
at play
with something akin to relief ...				

ignoring the towers ablaze
in the distance
because they are not revelations
but things of glass,
easily shattered ...

and if you were to ask her,
she might say—
sometimes God visits his wrath
upon an impious nation
for its leaders’ sins,

and we might agree:
seeing her mutilations.

(Published by Modern War Poems)


DEFENCES

Beyond the silhouettes of trees
stark, naked and defenceless
there stand long rows of sentinels:
these pert white picket fences.

Now whom they guard and how they guard,
the good Lord only knows;
but savages would have to laugh
observing the tidy rows.

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into fourteen languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers.

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Categories
Review

A Tribute to the Human Spirit

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The Past is Never Dead: A Novel

Author: Ujjal Dosanjh

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Ujjal Dosanjh’s latest novel, The Past is Never Dead, sheds light on the stranglehold of caste on Punjabi Sikh immigrants in the UK – a unique perspective of caste violence in a faith outside of Hinduism, one that was born out of the noble teaching by Guru Nanak and his followers that every human being is equal in the eyes of God. Borrowing the prologue from William Faulkner’s famous statement, “The past is never dead. It is not even past,” Dosanjh makes it his project to challenge this idea about Sikhism, as he writes about a poor family that migrates to England soon after India’s independence in the hope of escaping the indignities of caste back home – only to be confronted by it again, and in the most horrifying ways possible, in a western foreign land, where caste is supposed to be an insignificant marker of identity.

In the year 1952, Kalu escaped Banjhan Kalan in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur for Bedford in the British Midlands, hoping to find a life of dignity that he had been denied because of his untouchable caste. He was in his late teens and had grown up believing in Sikhism’s tenet of equality preached by Guru Nanak and Ravidas, a principle the villagers never sincerely practised. They had maimed his father, accusing him of stealing a zamindar’s ox; they had thrown father and son out of a Quit India rally; they had mercilessly thrashed young Kalu himself for daring to enter a temple. He had never been allowed to forget—even by his schoolmates—that he was a Chamar, destined to skin dead cattle like his ancestors. His father Udho was determined to get his son out of this life of indignity and had said, “Son, I don’t want you to grow up a Chamar. You will never do what made my hands and feet like this.” Soon Udho borrowed money from a kind merchant, bribed the officials, got a passport and left for Britain.

England promised a new life of respect and opportunity. Udho laboured hard to give his son a college education and his wife a decent life that was denied to them back in India. The way Kalu and his mother ultimately bribed their way onto an earlier flight to escape from the powerful connections his propertied travel agents had, and who could create obstacles in their journey to Britain, speaks a lot about the plight of scores of rural people in the Punjabi villages who dreamt of building a new life in the West. But freedom was illusory. Kalu’s fellow expatriates had brought caste along when they came to that country, and he would be forced to adhere to its degrading rules just as he was in Banjhan.

Apart from the story of a rural Punjabi family’s search for better life, the novel is also a powerful depiction of the stranglehold of caste over Sikh immigrants in Britain. We have read about honour killings of Sikh women during the riots that took place after the Partition of India when family patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to jump into the well or commit suicide to avoid being kidnapped by the Muslims, but the horror behind the story of honour killing within the Sikh community in England based on caste differences is something terrifying. The construction of different gurdwaras in the same locality according to caste affiliations including local politics, enmity, and gruesome killings by the Jats, who considered themselves racially superior to the other Sikhs, expose the horror and obstinacy of caste even in the middle of the twentieth century, and is just unimaginable. Determined not to bend—as he had refused to do back home—Kalu fights back as he could not suffer indignity silently, but his resoluteness in the struggle puts him and his family at serious risk.

With many turns and twists in the storyline, including the abduction and death of his doctor wife, Kalu’s hair was shaved by his caste-hate-obsessed kidnappers as revenge for what they considered his audacity in describing a Jat’s daughter as mini bell unsuited to be married to his Jat friend. Eventually, he discards his hair; the act acknowledges the impotence of religion and religious symbols in the struggle for equality and against caste. In the end, through his indomitable will force, we find how Kalu manages to overcome all odds and contest for a MP seat in the Parliament as a Labour Party candidate under the name of Dr. Kalha Chamar — “He was done fleeing, escaping or dressing up caste in surnames, unshorn hair or turban.” The concluding paragraph of the novel which gives a positive message of hope for the future is worth quoting here:

“Angad made chai. Between the sips of chai, the humpbacked Banti, the limping Udho, the hairless Kalu and the adolescent Angad danced. When Robert, Janice and Gurbat knocked on the door to congratulate him, Udho Chamar and his son, Kalu Chamar MP, were standing with raised glasses, about to down neat double Johnnie Walkers.”

Though the story of Dosanjjh’s own life and the timeframe of the novel bear a lot of similarities with the incidents narrated in the story, he does not mention it to be an autobiography. Instead, he fills the novel with various other racist perspectives that the Sikhs in Britain still cannot steer clear of. So, he safely adds other issues and titles it “A Novel.” But how far some of the incidents narrated in the novel have moved him becomes clear when we read in an interview given to scroll.in where he states:

“It was emotionally quite exacting to write The Past Is Never Dead. The toll of the issues I wrote about has been a lifelong companion. Age has rendered me shameless enough for me to confess that I often cried as I wrote many parts of the novel…. The human incapacity to learn from the past astounds me. It aids us in veiling the past from ourselves and abets our continuing cruelty in the name of dumb tradition and comatose culture.”

The novel is surely worth reading and is strongly recommended as it pays tribute to the courage and tenacity of the human spirit and its capacity for hope despite all odds.

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Somdatta Mandal, academic, critic and translator is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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Categories
Poetry

‘A Stray Feather of Blue’

By Saranyan BV

Courtesy: Creative Commons
TUMBLED BELIEF

We sit on 
one side 
of the seesaw plank,
and think 
we have conquered: 
When you conquer 
one side alone --
Know ye 
Men of Destiny --
There is 
another side 
which needs defending.
Never sit on 
one side 
of the seesaw
and think 
you have arrived.
It’s like collecting
a stray feather of blue,
mistaking it
for an ostentation.
Courtesy: Creative Commons

Saranyan BV is poet and short-story writer, now based out of Bangalore. He came into the realm of literature by mistake, but he loves being there. His works have been published in many Indian and Asian journals. He loves the works of Raymond Carver.

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Categories
Poetry

Poetry on Rain by Masud Khan

Translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam

Courtesy: Creative Commons
RAIN - 1 

It’s raining abroad now, in countries close by or far away. 
Occasionally a cold wind from some other land blows this way 
This summer evening brings with it sadness and beauty 
Blowing this way from some distant land!
 
A cold, cold wind keeps blowing
Slowly stirring desire, fomenting longing
For alien rituals on such an evening.
 
In the distance, in a riverbank ruled by beauty
In another land, wonderfully wet in the rain,
Lightning flashes time and again
Stirring desire for one’s lover steadily
Inevitably, on such an evening!
 
Towards my homeland
The cold wind keeps blowing
O my alien lover
Where could you be staying?

RAIN - 2
 
It’s raining
Over distant lands
Over Brahma’s world,
Over Rangpur and Bogra’s vast expanse
In alluvial plains,
The rain veils Burma’s evening fields
And keeps streaming down.
 
And below these lightning flashes,
At the rain-formed night’s third quarter
Radiant races
Spring up at home or abroad
Like hyperactive frogs leaping
Into the unknown.
 
Provoked by thunder and lightning’s violent outbursts, 
Allured by their promises,
In the thick veil 
And swirling stream,
In the darkness of the wet wind, 
In the eastern expanse, 
Underneath the sky
In vast and empty fields
Under the vast spread-out arum fields of the east, 
Incredibly, unformed new nations emerge --
Innumerable unsteady chaotic nations,
Restless, perturbed, incapable of standing up, 
Lending themselves to grotesque maps,
Forming unstable, quivering, permeable boundaries
Governed by ill-defined laws and dwarf impotent ombudsmen 
And armies marching past unimpressively,
They spring for no good reason
And seem destined to be doomed.
 
The night draws to a close. The rain too appears spent. 
When day’s first light breaks out,
Those nations that would thrive and grow
And glow with innumerable rituals and fast-spreading religions 
Feel their bodies disintegrating and disappearing
Under the vast spread-out arum fields of the east.
 
*Rangpur, Bogra— Two small cities in the northern part of Bangladesh

Masud Khan (b. 1959) is a Bengali poet and writer. He has, authored nine volumes of poetry and three volumes of prose and fiction. His poems and fictions (in translation) have appeared in journals including Asiatic, Contemporary Literary Horizon, Six Seasons Review, Kaurab, 3c World Fiction, Ragazine.cc, Nebo: A literary Journal, Last Bench, Urhalpul, Tower Journal, Muse Poetry, Word Machine, and anthologies including Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton & Co., NY/London); Contemporary Literary Horizon Anthology,Bucharest; Intercontinental Anthology of Poetry on Universal Peace (Global Fraternity of Poets); and Padma Meghna Jamuna: Modern Poetry from Bangladesh(Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature, New Delhi). Two volumes of his poems have been published as translations, Poems of Masud Khan(English), Antivirus Publications, UK, and Carnival Time and Other Poems (English and Spanish), Bibliotheca Universalis, Romania.  Born and brought up in Bangladesh, Masud Khan lives in Canada and teaches at a college in Toronto.

Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

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Categories
Poetry

Strange New Home

Poetry by Heath Brougher

Outside the frame
                         is where we’re living now.
No big deal. Only a few will remember.

Outside the frame
                         is what we’re leaving in
on the outskirts and borders
of pastorals and self-portraits
of horses with broken legs.

The stallion paints as the bullet
rips through what will become
a headless space in a matter of milliseconds.

In the distance Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
can be heard resonating at a distorted frequency—
one that human ears can barely hear.

Hope is not lost though.

It’s still there — right
                          outside the frame.

Heath Brougher is the editor-in-chief of Concrete Mist Press as well as poetry editor for Into the Void Magazine. After spending the last four years editing the work of others, he is ready to get back into the creative driver seat. 

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Categories
Stories

The Llama Story

By Shourjo

Llamas. Courtesy: Creative Commons

It was a typical day in the marketplace by the river. The streets were overflowing with people of all sorts; from small pedlars to petty thieves. Small shops lined the streets of the marketplace. The shops were filled to the brim with your typical day to day goods, such as vegetables, the very finest cuts of meats, and most importantly, llamas. After all, llamas are an essential part of a human’s existence. It simply would not be possible to go a day without a llama. They are man’s constant companions, their primary source of joy. Being a Llama myself (one of the finest by the way), I can confirm that my owner would have trouble managing his life without me. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. My owner had the bright idea of selling me. I do pity him for making that decision. But I went along with it because he had become rather boring to live with over the years.

“We stock the finest llamas in town!” shouted my owner. “We guarantee their breath won’t stink and — ”

“HE’S A FILTHY LIAR! HIS LLAMAS ALWAYS STINK OF ROTTING FISH!” bellowed a hoarse voice from the left. “GOD KNOWS HE WHAT HE FEEDS THEM — BUY MY LLAMAS INSTEAD!”

That was awfully rude! Did this man not realise that a llama was standing right in front of him? Following this insensitive statement, I spat, showering the man’s own unclean face, as the llama did to Captain Haddock in one of the Tintin comics (yes, I can read, llamas are smarter than you think). In fact, Hergé (the guy who wrote Tintin) based that particular incident on something his llama did. That llama happened to be my cousin. Anyway, I was certain that I smelt better than a sack of rotting fish. I do put on the finest National Llama Association (NLA) approved llama cologne every day. Or rather, my owner, who was now trying to sell me, does. Unfortunately, the other stall owner was absolutely livid. He was drenched. He thrashed around on the street, like a fish out of water, letting out all sorts of expletives, that I do not wish to include in this account. This seemed to attract a large crowd.

“MY DEAR SIR, I SHALL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT MY LLAMA WAS PERFECTLY JUSTIFIED IN SPRAYING YOU WITH WATER FOR THE SLANDER YOU SPEAK! AND I SHALL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT I FEED MY LLAMAS THE HIGHEST QUALITY, NLA APPROVED, LLAMA FOOD!” roared my owner, in an attempt to drown the other’s screaming.

Humans never seem to grow up, do they? They make the biggest issues out of the smallest of problems. I mean, I gave the other man a free shower! He ought to be grateful when I come to think of it. How pathetic is it to fight over a llama? The argument went on, and soon enough, the two men threw punches at each other.  I watched along with everyone else, as my owner and the other man were rolling around on the floor, throwing punches at each other. It was quite entertaining to watch two fat men rolling around and punching each other. You see, this is why we stick around humans. They provide us with constant entertainment, and they stuff us silly with fantastic food (well the nicer ones do).

As the sky turned dark, the men began to tire, and the crowd began to thin. By moonrise, the two men were bloody, bruised, and covered in the centuries of filth from the streets.

“You won’t — You won’t… get— get away… tomorrow you will see…” panted my drained owner, as he collapsed and fell into a deep sleep.

The other man let out a sigh of exhaustion and slowly limped away. I’d imagine he went home.

The next morning, the two men were at it again; Trading punches only stopping occasionally to insult each other. As of then, they had yet to achieve anything. Unfortunately, I began to get terribly bored, as did the other man’s llamas. While the men were fighting, I quietly walked away from the men, toward the riverbank, and the other llamas followed suit. The river had the shimmering look of a great vat of mercury. And it was probably as toxic as mercury, given the amount of waste floating in the river. It was beautiful yet revolting. Just like my owner (and my cousin Llamius, who never seems to brush his teeth, though he has a great personality). Silvery fish could be seen floating on the water, upside down. The two men, in the marketplace, were still fighting over a petty topic, and yet, they took no heed of the destruction occurring just a few hundred metres away. Perhaps I ought to distance myself from him, as I cannot possibly knock wisdom into him, by being near him. My great-great-great-great grandfather Llilius (who happened to be one of the greatest llamas to live) failed to knock sense into Mozart. Shortly after Lilius did what he thought would knock wisdom into him, Mozart proceeded to write a six-part canon about faeces.

After a great deal of thought, I made my decision, and walked away, into the sunrise and the other llamas followed… Perhaps it was cruel to strip two men of their livelihoods, but it was the only way they could learn. 

Courtesy: Creative Commons

Shourjo writes mischievous music scores, computer codes and occasionally bizarre stories in English.

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Categories
Poetry

Pinnacle by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Courtesy: Creative Commons
Crest not bade me soul – not a more perfect sentence in the  
language. Tops! The pinnacle! I wasn't there yet, for the crest had  
not bade me. The shoulders of my shirt cinched down between  
drowsy hanging arms, revealing a scraggly dark patch of chest hair.  
If there were gifts left to give, they would come by those splintered  
brazen workbench hands. Unshuttered windows, that briny  
squawking clime of distant sea air. Great parapets of lost concealments.  
Bilging heels gong-rung together in startled splay.  
Suddenly, like banshees wailing across the moors – it came!  
"Christ hath bathed my soul," the beautiful voice sparkled. I looked  
up from the pew to find a priest standing over me. Cherub-faced  
and nipper drunk. A smile like fresh linens. A great light! – "Crest  
not bade me soul," I muttered inaudibly. His way was fine too

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. 

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Categories
Poetry

Longings

By Vikas Sehra

         Your fingers tinker
          untouched corners
            of my skin.

             Lingering
           sloppy kisses
          wayward embraces

          While I melt in
        the traces of cusps
           left on me.

           Come back
           not today
        but in forever,

       Rested in longing,
     holding the ephemeral
     of us in each other.

Vikas Sehra is a researcher and aspiring poet residing in Hyderabad, India. His work has been published in Economic and Political Weekly and EKL Review among others.

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