The Invention of Wings

There were several books that I read last year but the most memorable among them is Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings published in 2014. The book, which was was selected for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0,  is set against the background of nineteenth century Charleston in North Carolina and deals with the story of the Grimke sisters who fought against slavery not just in writing but in practice as well. 

The two sisters Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké were famous for their abolitionist thinking to slavery as well as for their fight for women’s rights. In the history of the United States, Sarah Grimké was famous as the first woman to have written a comprehensive feminist manifesto Letters on the Equality of the Sexes published in 1837 and Angelina was the first woman to have spoken before a legislative body. Moreover, they wrote together the pamphlet American Slavery As It Is , which was an anti-slavery bestseller until Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. 

The Grimké sisters spoke extensively in public against slavery and Sarah even taught her slave to read. However, these women had to struggle hard because they were much ahead of their times in their ideas of racial equality and gender equality. They faced plenty of opposition in the society that they lived in. Sarah even taught her slave Hetty to read and for this both of them were severely punished. 

The novel The Invention of Wings opens with Hetty Handful’s mother telling that “there was a time in Africa the people could fly”. She tells Hetty that this was how they had lived in Africa but lost their magic once they moved away from their homeland. She explains to Hetty pointing out her shoulder blades that these are what is left of the wings that she once had and that some day she will get back her wings.  Through her stories and her cleverness, Hetty’s mother Charlotte , who is a seamstress for the Grimkés instills in young Hetty’s mind, the desire to find her wings. 

The novel alternates between the narrative voices of Sarah Grimké and Hetty Handful. Sarah gets Hetty as a slave when she is twelve years and they bond quickly. Sarah is educated and wants to become the first female jurist but her dreams are dismissed as nonsense as she is a girl. In her childhood, she had a witnessed a slave being maimed and this leads to a speech problem in her. She is banished from Charleston and when she comes on a visit to her mother, she helps both Hetty and her sister Sky escape from slavery. Though it takes her many years, Sarah helps Hetty to find her wings. 

Pensiamento Fantastico: Reading

Sometimes, it might be a chance meeting or a coincidence that connects you with someone who really appreciates the books that you love or the words that you like or even the crazy feeling of Nodens Tollens , (a word that a friend shared with me today) which means “the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore and that it requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure”. 

When this strange chemistry happens between a booklover and me, I am so ecstatic that I lose my concentration on day-to-day life.  At times, when I discuss books, some friends show surprise, sighing and implying that I am a lucky bitch to sit and read whatever I like whenever I want. But then, I think I do it at the cost of television, films and even life, which I don’t think might sound convincing to others. 

Many women complain that they lack time to read or that they don’t have a place to sit quietly and read. What they probably meant was that they could not possibly carry all the books that they wanted to read to a place where they can sit and read. That kind of a bliss of being far away from the maddening crowd of family and friends happens only to a few people, according to them. But on the other hand, what I thought of was that my best reading experiences were at the unlikeliest places and times possible. 

During most summer vacations, our family visited my mother’s friends, who had a huge collection of books at home that satiated our reading appetites. Once, they took my brother and me to a library, where I think I sat and read for around half an hour completely losing my sense of time. Another favourite space was obviously the dentist’s reception, where I had my weekly appointments for the braces. Sometimes, I hated it when my turn came to go inside. 

It was only last week that while waiting for someone to arrive in the reception of the office that I managed to read an Outlook Special Edition on Shakespeare and his contribution to the English language because of the ambience that the place had. But then, there were times when I could skip my beauty sleep to sit and read till the wee hours in the morning and still manage to look presentable in the morning. But now, if beauty and sleep are directly proportional, then I will be the most beautiful woman in the whole world. 

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can  apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.

Pensiamento Fantastico: Travel

There are so many self-help books that tell you to make a list of all the things that you want to do in life, ‘goals’ as the terminology goes. These books even make a distinction between long-term and short-term goals detailing ways in which you can turn them into reality. 

Most  of us fall into three categories: the ones who have no such dreams or the ones who have long lists of wishes that are too unrealistic or the ones who have lost this habit of having wishes, a classic case of dreams deferred. But many, I would say many are quite contented with what they have. 

Earlier, from an overdose of reading positive thinking books, I had this habit of writing down my wishes, so many of them that even ran in contradictory directions, like travelling and staying just here in my good old Thiruvananthapuram. However, the experience of adulthood taught me to live in a world where I had to be grateful at the surprises that life throws in my direction. 

This year, though I did not take any New Year Resolution, from the first week, my decisions have been quite contrary to my usual nature. I decided to go on a study tour with the students from the college where I teach and it was a risk provided the fact that it involved a week of moving around with my twenty odd companions. 

I think I camouflaged myself pretty well in the crowd, so much that in Wayanad, our tour guide was so surprised that I was the lady teacher in the group. In the middle of the forest after his strange discovery, he went on endlessly about Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, probably with his failed English papers in mind. After listening patiently, I finally admitted that I've never read the book, which shocked him considerably. 

The most amazing thing that I experienced was the perfect silence inside the Buddhist temple at Coorg; it was always in my wishlist to visit a Buddhist temple. The blessings from the journey is the joie de vivre that I felt after a very long time, may be caught from my young companions who practically had to hold me by the hand at times especially when we went for canoeing in Coorg or for the watershow in Mysore (where Falguni Pathak’s ‘Meine Payal jo Jhankayi” was playing when it began). 

This shot of wanderlust has given a surge of positive energy, a stretch of some mental boundaries, and a feeling that anything is possible.  On a different note, I feel that I have some clue as to why exactly Chaucer must have composed his tales about his Canterbury pilgrimage! 

Photo: Kamal Varghese

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can  apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.

Yom Ha'Shoah

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is the day designated by the United Nations Organisation to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. It falls on January 27^th on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of concentration camps for Jews in Poland under the Nazi rule. The UN wants every member state to pay their respect to the victims of the Nazi era and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.

The word ‘Holocaust’ originally meant the animal sacrifice offered to the Gods in burnt form but during the 1950s, it acquired a very specialised meaning of the genocide of the Jews under the Nazi rule. This mass extinction of Jews was initiated by Hitler’s belief in the superiority of the Aryan races. The Nazis were of the belief that their race, the Aryan race was superior and that all the other races had to be exterminated using different methods.

The Holocaust began in 1933 when Hitler came to power and ended only in 1945 with the defeat of Germany by the allied forces in the Second World War. Though the extermination of the Jews was happening at a huge scale, the other countries of the world did not come to know about the concentration camps until it was too late. 

The Nazis wanted to keep the fate of the Jews a secret and they destroyed all evidence pertaining to the mass killings such as the crematoria, gas chambers and people. But the truth is that the existence of concentration camps to annihilate the Jews was something hard for the allied powers to believe in.

When survivors who escaped described the Holocaust based on their experiences, most of listeners were full of disbelief at the cruelty of the Nazi soldiers. Many survivors went through this experience and were crestfallen when nobody wanted to believe them.

The Jews were subjected to unnameable acts of torture and many of the survivors are of the opinion that this enormity of their trauma made their memories and testimonies incoherent and unbelievable. Even sharing of these testimonials was a difficult act for many of the survivors.

The horrors of this historical event have been portrayed in historical documents, survivor testimonies and memoirs. But the Holocaust was a not single event but an annihilation process that had many locations across Europe and millions of victims who were tortured and killed. 

One common thread that runs through survivor testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust is the hunger that the Jews suffered in the ghettoes and in the concentration camps. They were given soups that were more like vegetables in hot water. The physically weak, the old and children were immediately sent to the gas chambers.

Pensiamento Fantastico: Bibliophile

I have always wanted to read more about the craft of writing as my ambition during my college days was to become a writer. Earlier, the idea was to tell everyone of my dream books and plans about writing a novel. The novel never materialised nor do I hope to live by writing alone but I have managed to write in my blogs whatever I have wanted to write. One serious consequence of this hobby is that since 2006, I have managed to accumulate a pile of books on the art of writing. 

Many of these sit gathering dust on the bookshelves and I can’t find all of them but here are a list of books that have definitely had an impact on me. Rather than becoming a writer per se, I have become a bibliophile of books on writing. Here are a few of the books in my collection:

• Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury: From the author of The Martian Chronicles comes this beautiful book on writing published in 1990, where he highlights the importance of writing with Zest and Gusto. He is of the opinion that the greatest reward that a writer can have is a positive remark from an admiring reader. He advises that a writer has to practise frequently and work hard to learn the rules of the language yet find new ways of using them.

• Delighting the Heart: A Notebook by Women Writers edited by Susan Sellers is a book on writing by women writers who share their experiences- starting from the process of inspiration to publication. Susan Sellers shares in the Preface how she was inspired by a visit to Jane Austen’s writing space, which was a table tucked behind the main door to the family room. It is strange to note that she deliberately left the hinges of the door unoiled so that she could stop writing whenever someone came in and she could resume her role as the mistress of the house.

• Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul: Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit of Writers is a book that I really love except that I do nothing but read my favourite stories again and again without even thinking of writing one single word. The book has inspirational stories about writers who have managed to get published despite of getting rejected countless times.

• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke are a collection of letters that the poet Rilke sent to a young soldier named Franz Kappus who wanted to be a poet. This book is a beautiful read as it offers much for a beginning writer. Read More!

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can  apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.