Color Me Your Color

Above is a photograph featured on the National Geographic website of a woman in India during the spring festival of Holi. Holi is also known as the festival of colors or the festival of love. It is, primarily, a Hindu festival observed largely in India and Nepal but has become popular in other regions of the world.
Holi is basically a pigment throwing free for all. People chase each other and throw handfuls of colorful pigment at each other. Some throw balloons filled with colored water. Really anyone is fair game and it's a magical thing to be apart of and to observe but what is most interesting to me is the unifying factor; people of different socioeconomic classes, gender, religion and gender come together to celebrate Holi and it is really a beautiful thing.

In Midnight's Children, the festival of Holi is only mentioned once and while that mention is fleeting I do believe the colors of the novel hold significance outside of normal descriptive nature to show and challenge the differences in Eastern and Western cultures.The color of Midnight's Children that are symbolic are blue, white, saffron (orange), green, black and red.

The blue is, of course, the Kashmiri blue of Saleem and Aadam's eyes. According to color theorist John Gage, in Eastern cultures blue represents an infinity of sorts. Blue is the vastness of the sky and ocean, specifically in Hinduism, blue is what the love-god Krishna is usually depicted as being. Translated into Western culture (and the novel's dealing with Catholicism), God is love and his love is limitless. The novel's characters like the bishop use this extended meaning to bridge the religious gap between East and West.

The white, saffron and green is scattered throughout the novel but most notable is that of India's flag. Gage states that in Hinduism saffron is a sacred color that represents the fire that burn impurities. White is view by the West as virginal but in the East represents death. In both East and West, green is fertility, youthfulness, renewal; conversely, green is jealousy, envy and misfortune. To me it's interesting that the three come together to represent India to the world. In the novel at the moment India becomes independent the author uses saffron and green continuously to describe clothing and atmosphere, to the point where it seems trite but I think it's an attempt to make the reader understand that with saffron India is burning away the impurities of colonial rule and with the green they are being reborn into a country united (no matter how fleeting that unity may be).

The black and the red are more descriptive than allegorical; in the Eastern sense. Black is used to describe skin and hair color and red is used to describe hair color as well as blood. The novel's use of these two are, again, to show the differences between East and West. In the West, black is the color of death and power while red ranges from love to war. In the East black varies, it is most commonly associated with masculinity and anonymity but in certain regions is the color of evil. Also in the East, red is the color of happiness and in India, red relates to purity and is often worn by brides to bring luck, long life and happiness.

Color used to describe emotion, at an elementary level, is to use red for anger, black for loss, yellow for happiness and blue for sadness. As we move past that and start to deal with different cultures other than our own it becomes more complex. In Midnight's Children we see the mingling of East and West and I think it's very important to acknowledge, however subtle, Salman Rushdie's use of color to further intertwine the two.

Also, the film has an incredibly vibrant color scheme which is hard to ignore.

Curated by: Jasmine Hosein.

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"Celebrate Holi." Holi Festival. Society for the Confluence of Festivals in India.,n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
Gage, John. Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism. Berkeley: U of California. 1999. Print.
Rayhan, Shawon, Khalid. Portrait of Shy Bengali Woman. 2012. National Geographic, Bangladesh, India. Web.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children: A Novel. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006. Print.

Fatalism: Midnight's Children and the Destiny of Mr. Nobody

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie is a fiction novel written in the magical realism style, and spans the genealogical history of its one narrator, Saleem, from his birth at the birth of India’s independence from Great Britain, to his destiny.  The book is written in three parts and first begins with Saleem’s grandfather, Doctor Adam Aziz, then continues with Saleem’s childhood in book two, and finally ends depicting Saleem as an adult in the last book.

The novel is heavy on magical realism tropes from the size of Saleem’s nose leading to telepathic style powers, a buildup of snot, some pickles for preservation, and an island that seems to forget time.  The novel however also deals heavily with the philosophical concepts of fatalism.

Fatalism is a philosophical viewpoint, which argues around the logistics of certainty.  In fatalism, an individual is powerless in performing any task, which may ultimately alter his future existence.  Fatalists also argue that any individual is inescapably tied to predetermined events and thus should not resist, that some future events are unavoidable, and that if actions are to be thought of as free, there is no free point because all actions will lead to a predetermined conclusion.

Now it’s very easy to argue against fatalism, simply with chaos theory alone, but the novel itself provides a clear example of this philosophical theory.  Saleem is not Adam Aziz’s biological son.  Early in the novel we learn Saleem was switched with Shiva, therefore altering his destiny.  However, Saleem is exiled into the poor slums of Pakistan and is therefor unable to avoid the fate set from his birth.  This also repeats with The Brass Monkey Son.  However Saleem’s son is not his own biological.  As it turns out, he is in fact Adam Aziz’s biological grandson and a true child of India.  Rushdie portrays a fatalism of generational hierarchies, and writes about the inescapable destinies of the children of India.

The artifact which aligns rather well with this example is the above clip from the movie, Mr. Nobody staring Jared Leto and directed by Jaco Van Dormael.  Mr. Nobody is a science fiction drama about a young boy named Nemo Nobody, who is forced to decide between the care of recently divorced parents.  The film develops a thesis in that if no single decision is made, than a multitude of decisions is possible.  As Nemo contemplates care with his mother versus father, he also contemplates the different scenarios involved in the decision of a particular female childhood friend.  Depending on which character receives the affection of his love, the movie drastically alters the narrative structure of the film, and even bends the rules of linear timelines, allowing multiple stories to continue on.

The scene above shows the end of the film, the climax in which Nemo runs away in fear.  However, he still ends up with Anna, the most significant of his love interests.  This argues that indeed the film was left to fatalism, and that Nemo, much like Saleem, was destined for a inevitable outcome. 

Who what am I?

Man of Fayum - Anne Ziemienski

            This mosaic titled Man of Fayum, by Anne Ziemienski ties itself intrinsically with explicit themes in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Firstly, the entire novel is set up like a mosaic; Saleem’s stringing together of bits and pieces of stories to form the entirety of his tale is exactly how the fragments in the image above come together to form a coherent picture. At very first though, my mind went to thinking of Saleem’s tale as a puzzle, where you don’t put the pieces quite in order, but you get the full image in the end. But the more I thought of it, the more I realised it wasn’t really a puzzle, because the pieces didn’t fit cohesively. The story bits form a picture at the end, but you’re left with the feeling that something fell through the cracks. Unlike a puzzle, there is clear distinction of separation within the stories, of Saleem and the midnight’s children, of past and present, of the partition and fragmentation of the whole of India, and lastly, of separation within Saleem himself.

            Saleem, like the Man of Fayum, is a whole made of individual pieces. He is made of stories and events, people and places, past and present, the whole of India contained within him.       

“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” every one of the now-six-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world” (440).

To me this quote encapsulates the theme of fragmentation and the struggle of part versus whole, and self versus other in the text. Not only that, but it also perfectly reflects the parallels between the text and the above image. Taking the Man of Fayum to be Saleem, then every single square is an “everything that went before”, a “been seen done”, an “I.” There is no Saleem without these pieces and without Saleem these pieces are just there, incoherent specks upon a plane. “To understand me you’ll have to swallow a world” (440), to see the picture, to understand it, we have to take in all the individual parts of it together, if we break them away, the image changes, and so does then the story.

            So then, Saleem’s end does not in fact signify the end of a story so much as it does the beginning and change of many other stories, many other images. Like the man in the mosaic, Saleem is quite literally cracked, so when the point comes where he can no longer keep the pieces together and lets them go, lets himself go, he disintegrates. Breaking away, the pieces that once made him go back out into the whole of India, to become part of someone else’s cracked self, someone else’s mosaic.  

Curated by: Paula Febles Bustillo

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Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children: A Novel. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006. Print.

Ziemienski, Anne. "Man of Fayum." The Art of Anne Ziemienski, Mosaic Art Gallery. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2014. 

Rosemary Stump- Indira Gandhi and the blood of India

As Midnight’s Children progresses, the novel becomes increasingly political. What’s interesting about the political undertones (that gradually become less and less ‘under’) is how they are intrinsically connected to Saleem’s life. From the beginning of the book we become aware that Saleem’s midnight birth coincides with India’s independence, a coincidence that connects him to his nation’s history for his entire life.

This artifact is important within the context of Midnight’s Children for a number of reasons. Albeit Indira Gandhi’s role in the novel is brief, her eventual influence- and destruction of- on Saleem and the other children is alluded to through Saleem’s dreams of the Widow. I would argue that the entire text works its way up to Indira Gandhi, and the grand political statement Rushdie makes. It isn’t until  Book Three that Saleem briefly summarizes Indira Gandhi’s history, telling readers, “Just in case you have failed to realize that the Prime Minister of India was, in 1975, fifteen years a widow” (484). Marvelous and clever word play aside, Rushdie’s depiction of Indira as “The Widow” is telling of her poisonous effect on India. In Saleem’s dream the Widow tears apart the children, with “green and black hair clutching hand and children mmff and little balls and one-by-one torn-in-half” (485). His dream foreshadows The Widow’s eventual destruction of the midnight’s children which becomes Rushdie’s metaphor of how the actual Indira Gandhi decimated India’s hope of a promising future.

By the time readers meet Indira Gandhi in 1975, she has secured her position as chief antagonist and the fated downfall of the midnight’s children. However, Indira Gandhi was actually highly popular in India, especially after the Indian victory in the conflict with Pakistan in 1971. That same year she was found guilty voter fraud and malpractice. Needless to say, the approval rates she experienced due to reforms made during her first term plummeted. To restore order and avoid facing chargers, Gandhi declared the State of Emergency based on “internal disturbance.” Much like the events Rushdie depicts through Saleem, atrocities such as censorship, reduced civil liberties, imprisonments, and forced sterilization followed. Rushdie weaves together a number of narratives here.  Saleem and his life along with Indira Gandhi and her State of Emergency become the central crisis of the end of the novel. More importantly however, Rushdie weaves together the fictional storyline with actual events of India’s history. Throughout the novel readers are encouraged to contemplate this grand question of identity, as Saleem constantly asserts himself as an integral part of India’s history as though he embodies India itself. By Book Three, Saleem is asking himself “has my life long belief in the equation between the State and myself transmuted into that in-those-days famous phrase: India is Indira and Indira is India?” (483) As she becomes a larger threat to Saleem and the midnight’s children, his confidence in his identity being linked with India’s begins to slip; the confidence that has given his entire life meaning. This reveals Indira Gandhi’s effects on the nation, and how her near-absolute control over India impeded progress toward India establishing an identity.

The quote from my artifact is from a speech Indira Gandhi made in 1984. “I am not interested in a long life. I am not afraid of these things. I don't mind if my life goes in the service of this nation. If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation.” I can’t help but read a bit of irony in this quote, because of the massive disservice Gandhi did to her nation during the State of Emergency and because of her assassination.  I also can’t help but compare Indira Gandhi to Saleem. They share an acceptance of death; Saleem tells us he is falling apart from the very beginning. They also share a resolute self-identification with the nation of India, regardless of whether or not it is grounded in reality (aren’t we question Saleem’s reliability the whole novel?). 

"Time Magazine [United States] (12 November 1984)." Indira Gandhi. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.

Digital Artifact: The Days of Future Past

The X-Men fit with Midnight’s Children so extraordinarily well, it is almost uncanny. A cynic could say that the X-Men’s habit of rewriting and ret-conning the past makes them as reliable of narrators as Saleem; however, there is much more in the relationship between the two texts. At heart, both are tales of a group of mysterious people people who for no real apparent reason display a variety of superpowers (many of the same powers, in fact.) The Midnight’s Children have their powers as result of being born on or close to midnight on the day of India’s independence, the (original) X-Men because they were conceived vaguely in the vicinity of nuclear power plants. Of course, there are numerous differences. Chief among these being the X-Men work to stop evil mutants and fight for their survival, and the Midnight’s wandered around as two of their members hunted them down and placed them in camps. This is where the particular example of the film version of Days of Future Past becomes relevant. The Midnight’s Children are rounded up by the combined efforts of Shiva and a amnesiac Saleem, working for the government to destroy their own. They do this for no reason other than the government said to, and for the destruction it brings. Similarly, Days of Future Past features a brilliant scientist who determines the Mutants are a threat to the world, so he creates a force of giant robots to hunt them down and place them in camps (this leads the X-Men to send one of their own back in time to prevent this from ever happening; The Midnight’s Children simply cease to exist). The X-Men provide an alternate look at a similar situation, Helping to show that this series of events is not unique to the pages of Rushdie’s novel, and may be found elsewhere.

This leads to an interesting conclusion. Both texts feature a group of far beyond average people being hunted down by a government which fears them. While the majority of people involved are not harmful, there is a small segment of the population which is extremely harmful (Shiva for one, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants for the other.) Instead of looking for the actual criminals, they allow fear to rule and wipe out everyone involved. This leads one to ask why this is, and if this occurs in the real world. Both of these texts become a reflection of how fear and paranoia can greatly affect the world at large. In Midnight’s Children, the face of a nation is changed in reaction to fear. In X-Men, the face of the world. After viewing these, we must ask how the X-Men strengthen this portion of the plot from Midnight’s Children, and how likely something like this would be to change everything. At the very least, it shows the dangerous power of fear to the world.

 "X-Men: Days of Future Past Official Trailer 2". Dir. Bryan Singer. 20th Century Fox, 2014. Web.

Curated by Zachary Lewis

Digital Artifact: A Shikara Ride on Dal lake, Kashmir

 

      Although this video artifact was filmed in 2008, The small boats you see, shikaras, are still much the same as they were in 1915 on the morning when the valley punched Aadam Aziz on the nose, and Tai the boatman set “history into motion” by delivering the message that brings Aadam and Ghani the Landowner's daughter, together, only to be divided by a perforated sheet.

      As you watch this video try to imagine that you are the boatman Tai, standing in your particular and peculiar hunched position plying the oldest boat in Kashmiri memory across the “Dal and Nageen Lakes...forever” (9). Look pass the motor boat, “Rolls Royce” (at 1:18) scaring the ancient lake Dal and imagine the “ 'floating gardens' lilting on the surface of the spring and summer water”(9). The oars the men use in this video are nearly identical to the oars, Tai and other shikara owners would have used nearly one hundred years (of solitude?) ago! Note how their “wooden heart on a yellow stick, drives jerkily through the weeds”(7). Can you see Ilse Lubin's tragedy in the blonde woman leisurely stroking the tide in her yellow shikara at 2:13? Upon seeing the lotus flower floating along lake Dal at 3:47, are you reminded of Saleem's precious (dung) lotus, Padma?

     This artifact is particularly significant to the text because it takes the mystical scenery, and lurid landscapes of Aadam Aziz's Kashmiri mornings and makes them real. The beauty of the images in this video is there literal timelessness, and Taiji's ability to reflect them in his own story. “Nobody could remember when Tai had been young”(9) He had watched mountains being born and Emperors die. At 1:38 you even get a glimpse of the mountains Tai witnessed take on life and a taste of the ever so crucial blue of the Kashmir sky.

     Saleem's life may start in Bombay but, his story begins on the shores of lake Dal, with the tussock of earth which created the first hole in his story. The hole is created when the man, Aadam Aziz, that would later become Saleem's grandfather by happenstance, after his long winded courting of a perforated sheet, hits his gargantuan nose upon the earth during a ritual of prayer. It is at this moment that Aadam resolves to never again kiss earth for any god or man, a decision which Saleem says, created a hole in him; “a vacancy in a vital inner chamber; leaving him vulnerable to women and history”(4). Although we come to find out that Aadam Aziz is no more related to Saleem then Tai the Boatman or The Brass Monkey, the many things that created the initial hole in Saleem's story are somehow inherited in him from Aadam Aziz.

     Saleem is not only afflicted with “a cyranose” as Ilse Lubin called Aadam's gargantuan trunk, but he too is plagued by holes, history, and a weakness for women. Saleem though, likely not having any genealogical link to the Kashmiri country side has also magically inherited another one of his “grandfather's” traits: Eyes of Kashmiri blue. “A clear blue, the astonishing blue of mountain sky, which has a habit of dripping into the pupils of Kashmiri men”(7), which brings us back to the beginning. Our peaceful shikara ride through the Srinagar country side, in which we can allow time to settle down. As we watch this video we can focus on a scenery masterfully crystallized throughout history, literature, and all of the instances that take place in our absence, preserved like pickles on the ancient Kashmir lake.

Curated by Aubrey Helm

"A Shikara Ride on Dal Lake, Kashmir." YouTube. YouTube, 22 July 2008. Web. 28 Apr. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZyJ85N6GuI>.