Glass Walls: Stories of Tolerance and Intolerance from the Indian Subcontinent and Australia
-Samik Chakraborty, B.A.(H) English, Semester VI (Batch-2018-21)
Glass Walls: Stories of Tolerance and Intolerance from the Indian Subcontinent and Australia, Edited by Meenakshi Bharat and Sharon Rundle, Orient Blackswan( 2019)
Glass Walls is a book that is very pertinent with regards to the times that we are living in. With the rise of populism across the world , the alarming rate of documented hate crimes on the rise, with an open disregard to liberal and tolerant values as a backdrop, Glass Walls seeks to navigate the meaning of the common thread of humanity. The anthology of short stories has been edited by Dr. Meenakshi Bharat and Dr. Sharon Rundle and published by Orient Blackswan in 2019.
What is consistent in all the stories is the truth that we are all human beings in the end on the face of this earth. Through the stories of tolerance and intolerance from the Indian Subcontinent and Australia, the book tells us that we might have different identities with regards to race, religion, sexuality, gender and sexual identity, et al, but one common identity makes us one and that is the common human identity.
In the forward, Amit Dasgupta quotes Wilde, “Most people are other people”- this book seeks to look at this other and bring out that alternative voice of seeking tolerance through and after having an understanding of different types and forms of intolerance. This is especially important with the growing intolerance that seeks to overshadow and diminish the space of mutual coexistence and acceptance through employing sheer brute force. This anthology resists that enterprise by documenting the varied voices and the varied stories that they tell, which are the lesser known stories of you and me.
Some of the stories document microaggressions, some document macroaggressions, and some do both simultaneously. Through looking at the stories ‘Closer’, ‘The Wedding Gift’ and ‘Henry’ I will attempt to review the anthology.
The short story ‘Closer’ by David Malouf imagines the possibilities of queer desire and explores the conditions of queer existence while it being loaded with Biblical references. An important leitmotif in the short story is the idea of the queer individual having the potential to corrupt morality and people and thereby pollute the lives of the normative.
The idea of acting against one’s heart because of societal dictates and punishing the homosexual through isolation, seclusion into a space of non-belonging can be seen here. However, this is reversed by the end of the story when the dream of the child exposes how seamlessly Uncle Charles fitted their family.
Grandpa Morpeth is the patriarch in the family who at heart misses his son terribly but his disposition as the patriarch of a heteropatriarchal household will not allow him to welcome his son. The negation of the son’s existence by his parents as if he was never there is contrasted with the unmissable beauty that he embodies. The story reaches its climactic ending with the articulation of the little boy’s desire of having Uncle Charles come closer to him, thereby unfolding multiple possibilities of homo-erotic and homosocial undercurrents in this desire being present in him or the possibility of a future germination of the same in the least.
Meenakshi Bharat in her short story ‘The Wedding Gift’ highlights the issues vis-a-vis the politics of hate and the cultural symbols that are used as tools to justify hate. The Swastika symbol is a symbol that has been found in parts of Europe and the Mediterranean by archaeologists and is also a much celebrated symbol of the Hindu theological space in the Indian subcontinent. The motive behind gifting the silver swastika was never to terrorise the Jewish grandmother who suffered persecution in the hands of the Nazis.
The usage and symbolism of the symbol varies greatly in these two locales in two different ends of the world.
Bharat portrays the trauma that has occupied deep roots in the grandmother’s heart and shows how potent the trauma-accompanied negative associations can be .
The two grandmothers in the story(Nona and Dadi) have experienced their lives in different countries in two different parts of the world but the fact that violence had caused their trauma connects them. It reflects the common human predicament and that violence and terror have no particular race or culture, that they can erupt anywhere and from any populace. Dadi saw her family being decapitated in the midst of partition violence in the hands of the other group, “the Musalmans” and Nonna saw her family being massacred in the hands of the Nazis.
Asma is not a Muslim who wants to kill Nani’s family and the Swastika that Rishi had gifted Luigi is different being straight from the Nazi symbol that is titled at a forty-five-degree angle. But still, both the grandmothers are reminded of their painful memories when they encounter something that reminds them of their perpetrators. This testifies the fact that memory never leaves one, that memory comes back to us, that we live and re-live memory again and again.
Bharat also delves into the question of time healing the pain of atrocities. We see that even though the grandmothers have come to nearing senility, what happened to them when they were infants has not only never left them, but also has had a deep and entrenched role in the decisions that they made in their lives.
The story therefore, implicitly calls for world peace and the shunning of violence altogether that can probably be a means to lessen such hounding traumatic experiences that accompany individuals till the dusk of their lives.
In the short story ‘Henry’, Libby Sommer brings out vignettes of complexities of desire. The short story has a distinct form with a confessional voice narrating her conversation with her friend, Maxine. This conversational format comes out more vividly throughout the short story when abrupt comments from Maxine are interspersed in the midst of a flowing narrative, giving the story a realist effect. It uncovers the intolerance in the minds of people who view transgressive gender-expressions as a disease that is transmittable from one person to another and therefore, the only way to avoid it is to abandon the one who has such non-normative tendencies of expressing gender. This trope of a candid conversational format between two close friends equips the author to reveal and unveil the inner prejudices and concerns that the normative individual might harbour towards the non-normative queer.
The stories are vivid and varied in their form and politics. Glass Walls is therefore, a much needed attempt to break the glass walls, thereby creating a possibility of the splintering of oppressive structures, and ultimately trying to imagine a better society. Glass Walls attempts to respond to the need of the hour, asking us all to meditate and contemplate, and be thinking, conscientious human beings.
TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE
–Viveka Goswami, B.A.(H) English, Semester IV, (Batch-2019-22)
Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom, Doubleday (1997)
A New York Times bestseller penned down by Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie is a series of interviews conducted by an ambitious young man who during the course of this
correspondence is taught to stop and savor life by his dying professor. Morrie Schwartz is a Sociology professor with an undying passion for dance and a zeal to learn and to teach
everything life has to offer. His former student Mitch on the other hand, has been lost in the human rat race of money and fame since his graduation. The two worlds, thought juxtaposed in the beginning of the narrative, seem to collide when Morrie contracts ALS and Mitch learns about the same. Over the course of the book we constantly see how being faced by death puts things into perspective for Morrie, who is keen on sharing his learnings with Mitch and through him, the world. The non-fiction piece touches on love, marriage, career and children and how humans often get caught up in the web of their worldly follies.
Tuesdays with Morrie doesn’t shy away from highlighting and discussing the importance of
human touch and how we all, as beings of the flesh, crave it. Every chapter in the story
reinforces the theme of brotherhood and unity and offers ways of practicing co-operation with those surrounding us. Love begets love and thinking of oneself as an isolated island is both impractical and egotistical. The professor is gradually seen to concede to his lack of self-sufficiency due to physical impediments, thereby gracefully accepting his want and need for physical and emotional support without inhibitions. A teacher in heart and spirit, Morrie’s legacy incessantly urges the reader to think about what truly matters. It answers the questions we didn’t know we had and gives us more to find answers to ourselves. With nothing to gain or lose, his diseased body slowly melting away, his ideology of ‘carpe diem’ or ‘seize the day’ proves to be powerful enough to leave one overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for life, the greatest teacher among all. The professor and his insightful maxims laced with wit are sure to keep reminding one of the phrase, ‘If we treated everyone as if they were dying, the world would be a much better place.’
Mosaic SVC 