TISS-PARZOR Parsi Literature in English: Poetry
What is Parsi literature? Is it writing by Parsis? Or is it the content like traditional CanLit (Canadian literature)? Or both? I enrolled in this module to find out.
Prof. Coomi Vevaina, a vivacious, caring teacher, runs this module. We’ll have many guest lecturers, but she taught the first class and interacted with us for the two hours. Coomi is very much a teacher who likes discussion with her students. She likes how virtual classes allow anyone from anywhere on the planet to sign up, but not how virtual limits interactivity. I thought how if TISS-PARZOR used Airmeet instead of Zoom, that limitation would vanish. I miss getting to know classmates in the usual in-person way, but those organizations that used Airmeet were able to provide after-class discussion time around virtual tables. Oh well. It’s super hard to pry people, never mind organizations, away from what they know even when it’s deficient and not accessibility friendly.
I saw some familiar names from the Foundation module, but new faces mostly spoke up or answered Coomi’s questions.
I really appreciated how we received the syllabus beforehand, how Coomi supplied us with the poems we’d be reading today in plenty of time to read them before class, how she outlined discussion anchors (don’t know what those are; I guess it’s an academic thing new since I attended university in the last, ahem, century), and provided us with the questions she’d pose for each poem. And I liked how clearly laid out each slide was for each poem with an illustration and the questions neatly listed.
Although apparently there are well-loved Parsi writers from previous centuries, this class focuses on contemporary Parsi Literature.
The Value of Art
What is literature worth? Is Parsi literature its own genre?
Prof. Coomi began with a question: In a STEM world, what is the value or worth of art?
STEM: science, technology, engineeering, medicine.
A few gave their own definitions that I rather liked. STEM is for work. Or science is for practical life. But art is what you do at home.
What do we do at home? We watch TV, sit on a couch, eat food, dress in clothing. Television shows are entertainment, and that is art, for they arise out of the imagination. A couch is designed out of someone’s imagination. Created for a practical purpose but also for esthetic value. Food may be humdrum; but the dishes we eat are creativity manifested. Clothing is fashion, and fashion is art, no matter how fast and climate-destroying. As Prof. Shernaz Cama talked about in the Foundation module, the intangible culture becomes tangible culture.
Another said science provides the practical aspect of life while art provides the quality.
I thought about architecture of practical spaces then and now.
Compare the purely practical concrete rectangles contemporary architects draw for warehouses today versus the centuries-old practical yet not unattractive brick ones with their portrusions and columms, some even with gargoyles. They may have looked bland in their early industrial era, but they retained imaginative aspects from the built world around them.
Keki Daruwalla and Gieve Patel
Keki Daruwalla was a police officer who said that his work provided the raw material for his poetry. Although Poetry International, Wikipedia, etc. call him an Indian poet, it’s clear from the first poem of five that we discussed that he’s a Parsi poet. Asp-i-Siha is a reworking of a Zoroastrian myth that forms the foundation of Parsi culture and religion. You can listen to it here. Ignore the errant pronunciations!
This poem is found in his poetry collection Fire Altar, which a reviewer quoted him as saying, “I thought no one would be interested since it’s on Persian history. Once I had a reading at home, a very fine publisher was also here, and she asked me ‘why did you select this theme?’ That would have been the general response, so I didn’t bother…”
In the second poetry class on Gieve Patel, the idea of the “author is dead” came up. Did we need to know Patel is Parsi in order to be able to read meaning into his poem, On Killing A Tree? Listen below; pauses are line breaks.
I think Daruwalla’s quoted words answers that question. Without knowing Patel is both a Parsi and a physician, you would miss the underlying lament of a person belonging to a community going extinct. Or Daruwalla’s poem The Mistress (my personal favourite with my writer’s mind), with its twist that makes one laugh out loud at the end, would lose depth if you didn’t know about Parsi history with the British and the adoption of English almost as the community’s mother tongue. How many were and still are like my grandfather who didn’t know Parsi Gujarati but was a native English speaker? Or didn’t realize that Avesta is the true Zoroastrian language and both Parsi Gujarati and English are the languages of the scattered?
Roland Barthes claims that once a piece is written, its meaning is created by the reader in the act of reading. The author’s identity and personal history are irrelevant.
Humbug.
Now that’s an old-fashioned word that arose out of my memory of Zoroastrian relatives speaking about nonsense.
Is Parsi Poetry Its Own Genre?
Parsi literature and poetry cannot stand as its own genre or category if one negates the cultural and religious background of the Parsi author. And given the unique status of this community — thriving for a thousand years after genocide; going extinct in the last 50 years; fighting to be known — literature identified as Parsi is the way to keep the culture alive and to make it known, not just history classes and interesting YouTube videos.
Gieve Patel was a physician and a Parsi. Our parents are as hell bent as other Asian parents on us becoming doctors and lawyers or engineers, so Patel seemed to fit into this ethos while rebelling enough to write poetry and becoming published. His doctoring in the poor communities of Surat fulfills his duty to his parents, his duty to his religion, but also seems to have provided the raw material for his poems as in How Do You Withstand, Body?
In this poem, the reader knowing medicine and how patients are labelled as compliant or non-compliant, can read his physician’s mindset into the poem. Once I knew he physicked the poor in Surat, I saw yet another layer of meaning, for insurers and governments don’t fund medical treatments for the poor. Doctors like Patel must get creative to treat their impoverished patients and face frustration at watching disease take hold for lack of funds, which comes through in the poem. Yet a reader can also see other non-medical possible interpretations.
Parsi literature is a new-to-me genre. I’m pretty sure my readers, like me, would not have known of any Parsi poetry or fiction. I’d read Rohinton Mistry’s books as they came out (except for the ones after the year 2000 as my brain injury prohibited reading that kind of complex fiction). But had seen his books as CanLit, the kind where the ethnic author writes about their community (Canada’s publishing industry is so effing racist), or as stories by a Zoroastrian living in Canada set in a Bombay Zoroastrian community. As this video by Library and Archives Canada shows, identifying an author as Parsi is not a given. A reader/viewer would never know Mistry is a member of a tiny, dying community and his books are located in that community that exists within yet separate from India, a condition that Patel voiced in his poem The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, He Being Neither Muslim Nor Hindu.
I’m processing that a Parsi writing about anything adds to the oevre of Parsi Literature by dint of being a Parsi. That includes me. A rather stunning, unreal thought.