Srikanth Reddy, Voyager. University of California Press, 2011
Srikanth Reddy’s second book of poetry probes this world’s cosmological relation to the plurality of all possible worlds. Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt Waldheim—Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht—who once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddy’s universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity.
Many of these poems were written while Srikanth Reddy worked for a rural literacy program in the south of India, a fact reflected in the imagined postcolonial world of lyrics such as "Monsoon Eclogue" and "Thieves’ Market." Yet the collection moves beyond the identity politics and ressentiment of postcolonial and Asian-American writings by addressing the fugitive dreams of shared experience in poems such as "Fundamentals of Esperanto." Mobilizing traditional literary forms such as terza rima and the villanelle while simultaneously exploring the poetics of prose and other "formless" modes, Facts for Visitors re-negotiates the impasse between traditional and experimental approaches to writing in contemporary American poetry.
Srikanth Reddy, Underworld Lit, Wave Books,
2020
Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.
Excerpt 1:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/153228/from-underworld-lit
Excerpt 2: http://www.jubilat.org/jubilat/archive/issue-35/from-underworld-lit/
Excerpt (scribd): https://www.scribd.com/read/470375794/Underworld-Lit
UNDERWORLD LIT, Srikanth Reddy’s third book of poetry, returns to questions of complicity, corruption, and the unquiet dead, which were also prominent in his two previous literary works, Facts for Visitors (2004) and Voyager (2011). In a series of sequential prose poems, Reddy descends into not one, but several underworlds. Somehow the ballcourts of Xibalba (the Mayan Underworld) sit adjacent to the pyramids of ancient Egypt, which happen to be on the road to the celestial courts of the Qing dynasty. In each realm of the dead, the nightmarish mingles with the ludic as Reddy offers a trippy crash course in global literatures of the afterlife, including Dante’s Inferno, the Popol Vuh, The Egyptian Amduat, and Journey to the West.
These source texts imagine that we continue to have a relationship with the dead after they have passed on, a relationship organized by a cosmic justice system. Underworld Lit thus asks: What is the underworld literature that can guide us now? What is the justice system that could address the sheer scale of death in our modern era, achieved by colonialism and racial capitalism? I don’t think that Underworld Lit aspires to be that text, perhaps ultimately suggesting through its intertextuality that any one book would be inadequate to that immense task. However, it does school readers on the fragility of innocence in a world where violence is epistemic and our sense of accountability is conveniently circumscribed.
This journey through the realms of the dead is held by a leaky frame narrative in which the unnamed narrator — a university professor with dim tenure prospects — attempts to rehabilitate his teaching after some poor student evaluations “Made me question things, including the value of higher learning.” Ouch. Fueled by the willed optimism of someone with few options, the narrator rethinks his approach to teaching HUM 101 Introduction to the Underworld. Artifacts from his endeavor to breathe life into the course are scattered throughout the volume in the form of quizzes from the class. Of course, when the living enter the underworld they must expect to be tested — and to be judged. In these tests, those who have benefited from Western colonialism and US imperialism are especially called to report:
1) The entrance to the Mayan underworld is located in _________.
A. An underwater cave system in Bolivia
B. The dark rift in the Milky Way
C. A locked vault in the back office of the United Fruit Company
D. All of the above
The United Fruit Company, whose successor is Chiquita Brands International, was a US-based multinational corporation responsible for decades of regime change, instability, and violence in Latin America executed in the interest of their own profits, especially from bananas (hence the term “banana republic”). In a notorious example, UFC successfully convinced the US government to engineer a coup against Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, after Árbenz attempted to redistribute unused lands owned by UFC to landless farmers. The coup resulted in 30 years of military dictatorship, brutal civil war, and hundreds of thousands of deaths. How are those of us who materially benefit from the legacies of colonialism to properly understand our complicity in these deaths? How are we to bring ourselves into just relations with the dead? These are some of the ethical, political, and metaphysical questions that animate Underworld Lit.
We meet the narrator as he embarks upon an inadvisable research project: translating Léon Wieger’s Folk-lore Chinois Moderne (1909), a French translation of an obscure work of Chinese folklore as told by a French Jesuit monk. Much of Underworld Lit is the narrator’s translation of the story which follows the adventures of Chen, a magistrate’s assistant in the district of Hóu-tcheou-fou during the Qing dynasty, who is called to the underworld to answer for war crimes committed in a previous life. [1]
On his way to the trial, Chen’s journey through the underworld is full of misadventure, as tends to be the case on such visits. Chen encounters characters and situations drawn from ancient and contemporary sources, including Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the hero twins of the Popol Vuh, and a pregnant war refugee who may be Nephthys, the mother of the funereal deity Anubis in some ancient Egyptian myths. In the narrator’s hands, the translation of Wieger’s translation takes on absurd and anachronistic components. The “ornate sedan chair” that carries Chen through the underworld in the original becomes a talking motorized airport staircase in the narrator’s version. While in Xibalba, Chen encounters the Mayan gods of death, who in this translation are death-metal-loving black ops agents who wear “wraparound Ray-Bans, battered flip-flops, and matching ‘United Fruit Company’ baseball caps.” Once he finally makes it to his trial, located in a techno-dystopian Hóu-tcheou-fou in the year AD 2172, Chen is escorted by an abyssal Pinkie Pie, a character from the My Little Pony franchise, which is genuinely terrifying to imagine.
Chen’s relationship to the crime bears similarity to another bureaucrat from Reddy’s previous work. In Voyager, Reddy uses the poetic method of erasure to surface dark truths from the sentimental humanism of The Eye of the Storm, former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s 1985 memoir. After his tenure as Secretary-General, but before being elected president of Austria, it came to light that Waldheim had lied about his wartime service during World War II and had been party to Nazi war crimes, including the execution of Yugoslav civilians and the deportation of thousands of Greeks to concentration camps. While Waldheim had not ordered these murders, he certainly facilitated them in his position as a lieutenant in army intelligence. Chen’s relationship to the execution of 500 rebels who had already surrendered is murky, but, like Waldheim, his complicity is clear. As in Voyager, we must grapple with the seemingly benign if we are to understand the violence that organizes our world.
Such unexpected malignancy is a theme throughout Underworld Lit. As the narrator is navigating his less than promising translation project, he is also struggling with reminders of his own mortality as a recent survivor of melanoma in an “old birthmark gone bad.” The narrator’s cancer is in its “catabasis” period, that is, in remission. However hopeful this news, the brush with death remains unresolved for him. In addition to its medical definition, “catabasis” is a term referring to a trip to the underworld. As the narrator glosses, “It means a trip to the coast, a military retreat, an endless windstorm over the Antarctic plateau, or the sadness experienced by some men at a certain point in their lives.” Elsewhere, in another etymological grand jeté, the narrator notes the linguistic connection between melanoma and Dantean darkness:
But I can’t refrain from wondering at how a description, black, becomes an action, to blacken, which in turn becomes a thing, melanoma, a darkening. There’s a whole grammar and metaphysics to this black traffic. The root may be traced to the Sanskrit mala-, dirt or filth, which flowers over time into our modern English melancholy.
This story of how chromatic blackness takes on connotations of impurity and depression carries racial meaning in a book that centers on colonial violence. The trajectory of the term “melanoma” from a description to a thing, as well as the heavy phrase “black traffic,” reflects Western colonialism’s dependency upon racial objectification. Language is rotten with this history. Like Chen, the narrator is also on a melancholic catabasis, a descent which requires a reckoning with the dead.
This accounting is often intertwined with Underworld Lit’s satirical portrait of contemporary liberal arts education and the contradictions at its heart. Reddy’s humor is biting as he compares the humanities classroom to a kind of purgatory. The increasing corporatization and financialization of the university, which imagines students as consumers and treats teaching labor as a disposable workforce, would seem at odds with the ostensible commitments to democracy, deep truth, and empathy in the humanities. Yet, in practical actuality, the ideologies are complementary.
We see this slippage in the narrator’s course description:
HUM 101. Introduction to the Underworld. [Cross-listed with Divinity and Comp Lit.] In this course, students will be ferried across the river of sorrow, subsist on a diet of clay, weigh their hearts against a feather on the infernal balance, and ascend a viewing pagoda in order to gaze upon their homelands until emptied of all emotion. Texts will include the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Mayan Book of the Dead, the Ethiopian Book of the Dead, and Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead. The goals of the seminar are to introduce students to the posthumous disciplinary regimes of various cultures, and to help them develop the communication skills that are crucial for success in today’s global marketplace.
Without taking a breath, Reddy shifts between the lyricism of funerary mythology to the administrative prose of the learning objective, mimicking how the rhetoric and genres of the university manage oppositions so that they appear to be in sympathy with each other. Spiritual enlightenment prepares students for a lifetime of gainful employment. After all, what company wouldn’t hire an employee capable of sending a professional email to a demonic client? Employers value workers who are sensitive to such cultural differences. Reddy marks the ways that the humanities are embedded in racial capitalism, in which the spirit is only worth its market value.
Reddy would ask us, what is it that we think we know? In this way, Underworld Lit should be of particular interest to readers with investments in humanities education. Reddy’s painfully accurate send-up of university management speaks to the competing objectives of monetizing learning and an ethical approach to knowledge. But the critique is not limited to the present. Underworld Lit reckons with our historical inheritance and complicity in systematized violence. This should prompt us to consider how the American university has always been a colonial project connected to settlement, death, and extraction. A recent increase in work by historians and journalists studying the American university gives us a clearer sense of the ways that early American universities were founded through profits from the slave trade and a plantation economy. Land-grant universities were funded by wealth stolen from indigenous people in the interest of maintaining white settler control over indigenous land. We should be thinking about how the humanities as we know it has always been the virtuous face of a bloody business.
The narrator’s course on Underworld Literature is obviously a play on “World Literature,” a course which frequently satisfies both humanities and diversity requirements in an undergraduate core curriculum. But who gets to say what the world is? In Underworld Lit, we are asked to consider: what is the literature that can teach us to live justly in a world so structured by violence? Reddy suggests that anyone of us could be called to answer for the crimes of history, also known as our previous life. As the narrator says of Chen’s journey, “It could happen to anyone I suppose.” Palpable in Underworld Lit is the desire for something that is bigger and wiser than the tools we have for justice and a conception of the human that is not based in domination and genocide. If there is hope to be found in Reddy’s powerful collection, it is in the possibility of a literature that might repair our relationship with the dead. - Rachel Carroll
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/all-of-the-above-on-srikanth-reddys-underworld-lit/
The problem with death is what comes next. Someone you love dies, the cloth of life is ripped, and it takes time and tears and others and time, so much of it, to gather the resources and begin the stitch again: different now, but happening. The self-story you are always projecting is joined by a fellow traveler, a symbiote, which is the finished story of that other’s life. This is also the root of fiction: a contained narrative cut off but still in some phantom way attached to the running, messy, enduring present out of which it is written and read. The other’s life is refracted through the stories worth telling; we frame it in ways to inject the feeling of what was into a stranger. We give it form and tone. One answer to the problem, then, is telling the story of what is no more to keep it around, somehow. To make death an object, a tombstone, an art, and thereby carry it with us during whatever comes next.
But the speaker in Srikanth Reddy’s Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), a professor shuttling between disillusion and depression, faces another side of this problem: what comes next when it is your death at hand, not some other’s? Trickier still, what happens when that death doesn’t happen? What happens after the end that is not the end, in the moment of a return to normalcy that you did not expect to make?
In this sardonic (until it’s tender), funny (until it’s sad), and surreal (yet strikingly real) prose poetry collection/fantasy tale/auto-eulogy, such questions are asked again and again, corkscrewing around the same points at different altitudes. Deeply personal confession gives way to ironized academia, which in turn gives way to dreamscape narrative, accumulating course planning materials, texts, translations, and myths, often even in the same individual section. One early example moves from a dreaded call to the speaker’s doctor (more on that in a moment) to a barely intentional dialing of 1-800-inferno to mystical poetry (“Oh creature, gracious and good…traversing the dusky element to visit us / who stained the world with blood”) before undercutting the experience via a do-not-call list, all while, “Outside, the honey locusts sprinkled their pale spinning leaves in real time.” These moments of true poetry, operating with an almost Homer-like surprise (and quasi-religious rhetoric), break through the professor’s mundane actions, the fireworks of the dream narratives, and the humorous intertextuality. This is, after all, a book of poetry, and the fragments of glass that catch the light in the writing undercut the professor’s weariness and dread, reminding of a beauty still capable of being expressed. A reader is tempted to trace over the lines to feel more closely their mechanics, how we move from the laughably overwrought “dusky element” and “us / who stained the world with blood” to the heart-stopping honey locust trees sprinkling their spinning leaves.
I’m writing additively to highlight the extraordinary diversity of this braided piece whose most astonishing feat may be how wholly these elements cohere while remaining distinct. The scaffolding of a course—Underworld Lit follows an academic year, its chapters beginning with the Fall Term and ending with Summer—is largely responsible for this cohesion and is never overplayed. Mock exams, frustrated student interactions, portraits of the baffled professor, these are humorous types that toe but do not cross into cliché, kept restrained by a style and speaker with something else always on the mind.
That something else is a melanoma: the diagnosis, operation, and aftermath of which accompany the speaker as he translates the tale of Chen, a Qing dynasty magistrate condemned for crimes he committed in a past life. In his translation, the speaker follows Chen through different underworlds as he is accompanied in turn by a number of partners, co-travelers, and guides—including his Virgil-like motorized airport staircase (this entity conjured by a mistranslation). Though the melanoma proves to be an obviated danger, its scar leads the professor into a kind of stasis, a living-after-death, an afterlife stripped of its religious majesty and instead filled with the prosaic greyness of experience and experiencing. The story seemed to have an ending—the ending, the great final punctuation mark to close the third act—but then the ending opens into more happening, continuing.
Reddy stages the anxiety of this unspectacular next by weaving the speaker’s life as a father and professor with his translation project that is suddenly imbued with narrative life. As the professor struggles to return to the straightforward meanings of baby talk and Halloween—rather than finding a condemnation for simply existing when perhaps he shouldn’t be—he turns to Chen’s journey, academic distraction as self-counsel. These latter sections take on a style akin to Tlooth-era Harry Mathews: an understated and accepting nod to the absurdity (and violence) occurring around the protagonist. They whirl around plot and action, filling Underworld Lit with the events that seem absent in the speaker’s everyday life.
In the tale of Chen, what happens next is an actual journey, literally incorporating each of the myths that build the various worlds Chen passes through. Meaning is in the hands and under the feet, something that takes the shape of a person or a demon or a motorized airport staircase. That is, meaning is object, not word, and as such it is faced down and forced upon you. Meaning is, also, violence: Chen’s passage through different underworlds brims with threat and disaster, with a brutality that crosses from amusingly exuberant to uncomfortably excessive. Next to the speaker’s professional struggles and uncertainties, his brush with and avoidance of illness, his sadness that he cannot find a compelling name for (“postpartum depression” doesn’t seem to fit, “catabasis” comes close), this mythical violence is loud, too loud.
The speaker senses this. There is, after all, another thread incorporated into the book’s weave, which are the lists and fragments and subtexts of American imperialism that encroach upon the speaker’s mundane moments: he is interrupted watching a special on the Antigones of Afghanistan, a mistaken voice command pulls up information on the Uyghur people and a migrant leatherworker who became imprisoned at Guantanamo, he reads lists of “the day’s dead” from unnamed Middle Eastern nations. The world is brutal and haphazard, random and absurd as Chen’s journey, just not in the immediate vicinity of the speaker’s life as much as beyond his borders, outsourced and mostly unseen.
The reader understands, now, the obsession with Chen, a magistrate accused of ordering a massacre in his past life, and the “generalized pain” the speaker complains of that has no physical diagnosis. The death that is important is not the subject’s, as one has been led to believe. What is at stake is rather the victims’ death, so often framed as massacres, that are tied, yet only tenuously, yet for that still really, to the subject’s life and existence as a harmless magistrate, as an “Associate Professor of Global English.” Reddy hints at how his and similar academic roles support imperial violence while remaining more or less impotent and disconnected from this violence throughout the text. The lists of “the day’s dead,” for example, are given a literary reading to uncover anapests in the names or question the relations: “Bassam, cousin of Maha al-Khoury. Where was Maha al-Khoury herself on that day? Maybe she’d skipped the evening service to purchase vegetables for the coming week.” This perceptive, trained reading leads to more darkly comedic turns as the speaker begins a job search and is reminded of the expansion of American universities across the world, advice the speaker turns into a list of war-torn places: “1. AMERICAN U OF ARMENIA… 3. AMERICAN U OF PHNOM PENH… 7. AMERICAN U OF AFGHANISTAN IN AFGHANISTAN.” Underworld Lit becomes a study not of how to live after the death of a loved one, nor even of how to live after one’s own death, but of what life is as a complicit killer. The problem with death is what comes next after you—your past self, your nation, the ideology you support even in a classroom—are guilty of murder. There is a difference, after all, between an Afterlife and an Underworld: the latter requires judgment. This can be a fear. It can also be a hope. - Tim DeMay
https://www.chicagoreview.org/srikanth-reddy-underworld-lit/
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