ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Subhash Jaireth is one of my favourite authors.  Everything he writes is rich with insights.

To Silence, Three Autobiographies (2011) is just such a work of art.

Through the gently detailed lives of its subjects whole civilisations the fifteenth-century India of the dying and illiterate poet, Kabir; the Stalinist Russia of Chekhov’s younger sister, Maria; and the early seventeenth-century, Inquisition-ravaged Italy of the Calabrian theologian and poet, Tommaso Campanella. The characters, at the end of their lives, are haunted by their pasts, and in prose of simple, meditative, elegiac beauty, Jaireth suggests that this nostalgia is neither a longing for a lost place or a lost time, but is, rather, a homelessness in time – his own included – an uneasiness that has driven all that they have and have not done.

Kabir with a Disciple, C1835, artist unknown

Kabir (1440-1518) was a mystic poet associated with the Bhakti Movement of religious and cultural reform in India.  Wikipedia says he was a saint, but in this monologue he rejects that label.  He is dying, and he wants to be left alone, but he understands that those who love him want to care for him.  He tolerates it knowing that it will not last but he maintains a stubborn silence:

They think I am rude and perhaps a touch cruel.  But I am merely tired and wish to remain quiet.  My silence upsets them, but I know that they harbour nothing but kindness for me, and I am sure very soon they’ll give up and leave me alone to walk my lonely way to death. I also know that they feel concerned because they love me and love me more than I have ever loved them.  This makes me sad because it definitely should have been otherwise.  (p.13)

It is more troubling that his Hindu and Muslim admirers are quarrelling over possession of his body.  Jaireth’s brief introduction tells us that Kabir was influenced by Shaivite Hinduism, Tantric Yoga and Sufism, and that his songs criticised both Hindu and Muslim orthodoxies and beliefs. But both claim him: the Hindus want a cremation and the Muslims want a burial and no one is ready to give an inch. In real life, Wikipedia tells us, there are two temples dedicated to Kabir located in Benares. One of them is maintained by Hindus, while the other by Muslims. Both the temples practise similar forms of worship where his songs are sung daily. But in Jaireth’s telling of it, there is an elegant solution which brings peace to Kabir and they all receive what they have come to claim.

Maria Chekhova 1882, portrait by Nikolay Lukich Pushkarev (1841-1906)

The second monologue features Anton Chekhov’s sister, Maria Chekhova (1863-1957).  She was a teacher and also wanted to take up painting seriously, but instead she spent her life in the Chekhov House-museum in Yalta, caring for her brother’s legacy. Jaireth tells us that she compiled, edited and published most of Chekhov’s letters.  

Chekhov died in 1904 aged 44, so he did not live to see the Russian Revolution or Stalin’s reign of terror.  In her monologue dated 1953, Maria addresses her friend Olechka (Olga), rejoicing in the news:

‘You ask me, dear Olechka, if I have heard the news.  I certainly have.  Who hasn’t? And it’s such good news.  Slava Bogu he is dead.  Such a long and frightful wait! I am happy, and both you and I can be sure that Anton would have been happy as well.  At last the tyrant is dead…’

But she doesn’t send this letter.  Who could be sure about what might replace Stalin?

I didn’t continue with the letter.  Instead I wrote a short ‘everything over here is fine’ sort of letter.  I wrote about the Spring rain, Anton’s rose beds in the garden and the leaking roof in his story, meaning I would have to call in someone for repairs.  I told her that she should look after herself; that we are both old and frail and need to deal with joys and sorrows in a measured way.; that I am looking forward to her visit in June; that although I am suffering from mild but persistent headaches, by then I should be all right, and ready to welcome her.

She will be intrigued to find the date 6 March at the bottom of the letter, just above my name.  The drawing of a smiling face beside it will certainly amuse her, and I know that she’ll understand its meaning. (p.45)

Why the 6th, and not the 5th? We join the dots and realise it is ‘insurance’.

Much of this monologue is gentle and even light-hearted, but the ending is sombre.  Maria belatedly learns of the fate of an old friend and at the end of her life, it almost takes away her stoic acceptance of what Russians now call ‘Soviet Times’.  Chatting in idle reminiscence, she mentions that Dunya must be quite old by now, a few years older than me.  

As soon as I said these words, I realised there was something wrong.  The words somehow didn’t feel right.  Yes, words are only words, but often they give away the lie they are supposed to mask. The voice betrays us.  It betrayed me too and, as I looked up, the expression on her face confirmed it.  ‘She was eighty-two, perhaps a few months older’, Olga S said, when she must have walked naked, her head shaved, up the path to the gas chambers of Treblinka’.

‘Oh, Bozhe!’ I wanted to say, but soon realised there was no place for God in this conversation.  None whatsoever.  If there was no God for Dunya at that railway station, how can I let Him near us now?

There was nothing else to say after that.  I decided that silence would be my abode, my escape, my way to cope with the dreadful news. (p.65)

Portrait of Tommaso Campanella (Wikipedia)

The third monologue is about the Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer and poet,  Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639).  Jaireth tells us that though he enjoyed the patronage of Pope Urban VIII for a short time, his views, including his defence of Galileo Galilei, brought him to the attention of the Inquisition, and his rebellion against the Spanish Occupation of Central and Southern Italy led to nearly thirty years in prison.  He wrote a utopia called City of the Sun. 

I’ve been to the Forum in Rome, and this scene captivated me.  These ruins were ancient even in the 16th century… but tourists today don’t contend with bulls at large!

The grandeur of the city scares me and I often walk to the ancient ruins in search of peace.  The ruins abound in the city and flocks of goats graze freely among them; the bulls lie in the shade of tall obelisks, and many courtyards, criss-crossed by the shadows of shattered columns, have been turned into henruns and cowhouses. My favourite place is the Forum, now the site of a large cattle market; the weeds grow everywhere and the walls of the ruins are buried under heaps of dirt and refuse.  The arches near the Basilica of Constantine are surrounded by mounds of rubble and the space between the arches is walled and used as stables. (p.77)

The Spouse, on pilgrimage to the site of Bruno’s execution.

Jaireth’s Campanella muses on the steady encroachment of nature over man-made creations and finds it sobering.  He is sobered too, by stumbling on Campo de’ Fiori, a market plaza then as now, but then also the site of grisly executions. Thirty-three years before Campanella’s monologue takes place in 1633, the philosopher, poet, and cosmological theorist Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake there, and Campanella is aware that he might well suffer the same fate. Bruno’s statue sculpted in 1889 by Ettore Ferrari (1848–1929) now graces the plaza, but it wasn’t there in the 17th century, only memories and gossip.

People are also hanged and burnt for other offences, such as smuggling tobacco…

Campanella also writes an imprudent letter.  He writes with enthusiasm to Galileo Galilei, about his exciting discoveries, his invention of the telescope from the toy glass of the Dutch maker of spectacles and his sorrow about the death of a young castrato whose body was dissected at the surgical theater of the university.  He doesn’t send his letter either because it sounds too confessional and pitiful. Instead he sends a short letter to Galilei, warning him to be more tactful and cautious.

A calmness settles over me and I begin to recognise that although the world around me is going mad, the refuge from it, my Lord tells me, isn’t very far.  Keep looking for it and be ready for the moment when it announces itself. (p.77)

That’s good advice, I think.

Author: Subhash Jaireth
Title: To Silence, Three Autobiographies
Publisher: Puncher & Wattmann, 2011
Cover design by Matthew Holt
ISBN: 9781921450426, pbk., 110 pages
Source: Review copy courtesy of the author.

Image credits:

• Kabir with a Disciple: By Unknown author – internet: http://oldsite.library.upenn.edu/etext/sasia/aiis/mini-paint/company/004.html physical:Jaipur, Central Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15248939
• Maria Chekhova: By Nikolay Lukich Pushkarev (1841-1906) (Николай Лукич Пушкарев) – http://www.photographer.ru/resources/names/photographers/185.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15713318
• Portrait of Tommaso Campanella: By Francesco Cozza – http://www.repubblica.it/2007/12/sezioni/arte/gallerie/cozza-roma/cozza-roma/2.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4436848
• The Spouse in Campo de Fiori, personal photo.