Cheryl Snell's Blog, page 10

...in which Cheryl plays you a melancholy tune

practicing

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review) by Matthew Biberman

Any one who frequents the fiction section of a good independent bookstore knows that there is something of a cottage industry of writers currently churning out fiction invested in capturing the lived experience of ex‐pat Indians who have moved to America. One of the more distinctive elements of this sub‐genre is its investment in detailing life in India as well as in America, most often in ways that include, often in great detail, the back stories of the
characters before their decision to move away from their home land.
A recent addition to this stack of books is Cheryl Snell’s first novel, Shiva’s Arms. I know and admire Cheryl first and foremost as a poet, a fact that inevitably colored my reading of this book. Indeed I would encourage anyone who begins Shiva’s Arms to keep this fact in mind because I believe it influences the writing of this novel all the way down to its essence. Cheryl’s poetic eye is not just visible in the felicitous phrase, though the book is filled with such moments. A conversation in an Indian cab takes place in a dialect that sounds “like gravel in their mouths.” When a character unravels, we see that her eyes are “blue puddles in her slack face.” Food gets sopped up “in a baseball mitt” of bread. But to read Shiva’s Arms for its precise, poetic imagery is to skate along an iced over lake without any thought to the depths below.
The true challenge of Shiva’s Arms is to recognize that it is a very ambitious—indeed, innovative piece of writing. It is an experiment in what I would call a transversal novel. Shiva’s Arms takes shape somewhere between the sonnet craze that swept Shakespeare’s England four centuries ago and the cinematic techniques often identified as producing the Rashomon effect in twentieth century avant garde film.
First we must think about that now largely obsolete form—the sonnet sequence. Generally understood to have been popularized by Petrarch with his love poems to Laura, the sonnet sequence flourished in the late sixteenth century in London. Shakespeare’s effort is a very late example, and perhaps for that reason, breaks new ground. For the first time, the poet is repeatedly identified with the speaker of the poems (think of all those puns on Will) and the beloved is not simply idealized (famously, her eyes are nothing like the sun) but also unfaithful. Nor is the narrative clear. When you read Shakespeare’s poems it is as if you are reading a novel in snap shots, but with this twist: as you read it dawns on you that somehow the poems are no longer in chronological order
While keeping that experience in mind, let us flash forward to the art house movie. Famously, Kurosawa made a film‐‐Rashomon (1950) that retells a crime from four different perspectives, a device that highlights the complex and dynamic nature of reality. What the Rashomon effect
highlights is the truth that though reality is intersubjective (that is, reality is a collective formation), this “collective hallucination” (to use Freud’s term) is inevitably being made by individuals who are experiencing what is happening in ways that are always at once congruent and divergent.
What Cheryl has done in Shiva’s Arms is to present the story of an extended family in a novel that combines both of these techniques. The result can be described as a novel where each chapter operates as a kind of intense short poem, that is‐‐ as a sonnet. The chapters do not,however, anchor the reader to one character. Rather, the reader is passed from character to character. We begin tied to the American Alice, but then pass on to her husband Ram, and then their child Sam. This primary pattern is however interrupted with detours into Ram’s mother Amma, and ‐‐ with increasing frequency as the book builds to its conclusion ‐‐ the shunned sister Nela. With each shift, a different perspective is showcased. In strategy, the result is reminiscent of some of our most celebrated modernist novels, books such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come immediately to mind. But in those works, the effect encourages the reader to separate out the characters so that the readers gains a satisfying sense that people are unique, yet isolated, grounded but limited to their bodies.
The effect that Snell produces in Shiva’s Arms is striking because it works in reverse. People in families get caught up in each other so that the configurations shift and change. Suddenly the notion that we are limited to our physical bodies falls away. We meld in our struggles, mix and combine in ways that defeat the macro laws of physics both in terms of space and even time. In this, Snell’s work is reminiscent of Djuna Barnes cult masterpiece Nightwood, though the overall mood is far more evocative of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
For me the high points of Shiva’s Arms come when Snell renders the rapid blooming of a state of existential dread. The effect is positively unsettling in its intensity, most especially early in the novel after Alice’s marriage precipitates a psychological crisis. The concluding confrontation between Amma and Alice is even more impressive, coming as it does so effectively after the dramatic resolution of the dinner immediately preceding it. Fights in Shiva Arms do not end with characters walling themselves off. Everything drives toward mixture, a fact highlighted by Ram when he observes that “we are all just chemistry labs.” This theme is made overt via the role food plays in this novel complete with Recipes, a crowning touch.
According to western cliché, cooking and food illustrate how each of us enjoys a unique and colorful heritage of goodness. True to its radical nature, Shiva’s Arms upends that idea and puts in place the notion that each of us is but an ingredient, a blend that makes up the bigger whole.
Shiva’s Arms is a satisfying novel that demands much from its reader. Its strengths are many but if I had to pick one on which to end I will stress that this is a book that provocatively challenges many of the most cherished presumptions propping up many well known examples of Indian – American fiction, or indeed of multicultural literature generally speaking. Despite paying lip service to the idea that western notions of subjectivity are not universal, most writers working in the genre of the English novel continue to present nonwestern forms of consciousness via free standing western characters. In stark contrast, Shiva’s Arms invites you to imagine characters that are interconnected parts of a larger whole. Such a radical insight can only come from a novelist of great talent and skillful execution. With luck, future novels from Cheryl Snell will deepen this exploration. As a reader I certainly look forward to the adventure.

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review) | Matthew Biberman | Blog Post | Red Room

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review) | Matthew Biberman | Blog Post | Red Room

Review of Ranu

A review of my novel RESCUING RANU written by Sufi Swarup  appears in a Toronto newspaper today.
Thanks to all involved.

Golu in Shiva's Arms

Navaratri marks the beginning of a semi-annual festival celebrating female divinity. Nava means nine and Ratri means nights. During these nine nights and ten days, women visit one another in their homes, decorated with lights and Golu displays of dolls.Dolls for Golu often represent major deities recreating mythological events, but the quotidian is also well-represented, often by Barbies dressed in native outfits ,as I describe in my novel Shiva's Arms. A doll-couple is often included --no,not like Barbie-and-Ken. My husband remembers a particular pair of wooden Marapachi dolls his mother used in the ceremony, carefully put away after Dusshera, for the next time.

The golu display stand is made up of an odd number of tiers, ideally nine, and the dolls are arranged like this --
Tiers 1-3: (Kalasam) Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma and all other gods and goddesses are set here.
Tiers 4-6: Saints and national leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Ramakrishna Paramahamsar, and Swami Vivekananda occupy this level.
Tiers 7-9: Scenes depicting family, marriage,nature, and festivals go here, with the ornamented Marapachi dolls last.

In my novel, Shiva's Arms, I use this celebration of female friendship as a way to get my warring women to come together.
"It was late when Alice wandered downstairs. She expected that Amma would have gone to bed, but she was still at her task, busy with the display. She motioned to Alice to help her set up the rest of the dolls. There were brass and sandalwood gods and Malibu Barbies, an American bride doll and Japanese geishas collected one at a time, each one with a history.
“We will make kolam on the porch tomorrow,” Amma said. “You have colored chalks. My son is keeping big lamp in Christmas trees?”
“In the box of Christmas decorations, yes.”
By two in the morning the display was finished, Sam’s toy trucks and metal sport cars tucked among the stuffed Santa, Russian stacking dolls and Marapachi dolls. The suitcase and Christmas box were hollowed out at last. “Very multi-culti,” Alice said. She stood back from the creation and looked at it critically, squared off the crèche with both palms. She had somehow made Amma understand that sand made of lentils was no replacement for cotton-ball snow. She turned tiny white blinking lights on, and the sequins on the cotton glittered. Amma clasped her hands to her heart.
“Just a sec. One more thing,” Alice said. She ran upstairs and returned with an angel from the back of her closet, the one relic from her childhood. She handed it carefully to Amma, blue felt skirt first. The wax face with the wistful smile, blonde curls and gold wire halo were miraculously untouched by time.
Amma reached up and put the little cherub right in the center of the top tier. The women stood in front of the rows of dolls, mesmerized for a long minute. Alice broke the spell first, yawned and stretched her tight lower back. She turned away, shuffled into the kitchen and warmed some milk, enough for two, on the stove. Amma followed her on bare feet, cut a banana in half and handed one part to Alice. “Take,” she said. “Eat some.” Alice received the fruit like a gift."

Samsara

Shelter

Shadows striped with light
fall across the shade-seeking tiger.

A caterpillar swollen with butterfly
dangles from a banyan branch
laddering backward into the ground
that feeds it.

The hard earth cracks, opening like arms to the prodigal root latching onto its second chance.
In the plunge underground, fissures widen.

Between tendril and trunk, the tiger settles into its green cage with nothing else to do
but bat one great paw at painted wings lofting above the split-skin's molt.



Durwan

Their charity brings her here, crouched low
behind the iron gate, warding off danger
with her broom of river reeds and her set
of jangling keys. For her service they drop
spice into her sambaar, coal onto her grate.
They let her live in the stairwell, sleep
on their used newspaper. In the morning
her sari is printed with words black as dirt.
She can't remember how long she has been lost.

A whiff of wind-borne jasmine pulls her back
to the luxury of a bathtub, a blanket of cashmere.
When a servant shoos a vagabond off the veranda,
she takes up her keys and rattles them. Where are his alms? She pictures her old doors opening, hands tugging her inside, her fists that once held up the world saved from a lifetime of pounding.
 

The Provider

Appa's handkerchief follows him like a mongrel.
At the bazaar, he pulls the cotton tongue to hammock
the best bananas. Haggling price from behind mirrored
sunglasses, he's anonymous as a movie star.

Sandals slap the dust road home, past rickshaws,
trams and beggars chanting Rama, Krishna, Govinda.He steps out of the Evil Eye’s reach, though Amma hissesWhat to do? the moment his harvest spills on her table.

For years, banana leaves bleed green through the kerchief and Amma pounds out the stain on a rock by the river. Appa's face continues to fall, features slammed shut, the lines in his forehead etched as if by some god.

To snatch cloth out from plantains was not real magic--
it bored us very soon. On the day Appa gave up the trick,
he pocketed his cloth with a touch tender as apology,
and surrendered to a silence so deep that all our need
could not shatter it.



Avatar

The boy sits astride the dagger of land,
watching jesus lizards skip toward the bottom
of the world. From his left hand, the moon rises.
In his right, he catches the setting sun.

Pilgrims come to witness the phenomenon.
With cones of bhel-poori in their hands, they watch
blue shadows lengthen in the boy's brain. A shiver ascends the knuckles of his father's spine.

In the temple, the father sits with back bowed. His head is in his hands. Quarter-tones float past like speech obscured by a trick of air. From the sanctuary of carved white pillars, priests with sun-bleached eyes chant slokas. Against a cycle of relentless beginning, they believe that nothing ever dies, though the world is made of tears and sweat. The sea.
 

Dosa Afternoon

Mortar and pestle pulverize dal
to dust; batter sours, fermenting
while potatoes pile up, whittled
by Amma's wicked blade. Lashings
of cumin on onions and peas release
a scent that makes our mother
miss our father.

It takes two days to make dosa.

On certain Sundays, we proceed
to Paru's as if entranced, join our fellows
in a room shabby as an afterthought. Moody
gods glare down at us. We who had lost ourselves
touch the Ganesh around our necks, inhale
aromas of origin, reclaim the masala of home.
 

How The Chipmunk Got Its Stripes

A squirrel stares down green- veined
petals blocking the passageway home.
Thought stutters as it tries to think.

Scrambling atop wood stacked to the sky,
it shrinks from the god's wraparound reach,
sizzling in his three-pronged grip.

The reinvented chipmunk tumbles back to earth,
striped by a divine tattoo, chittering all over
the woodland, a witnessing evangelist.

When an unseen hand vouchsafes the days' unravel
of platinum light, we never sense the night approaching.
We never hear it stumble and fall.
 

Puja
 1.

my son the youngest son
of a scholar

books on the altar
his only legacy

pages yellowing
between cloth covers

the boy's first shri emerges
on the slate his father left behind

2.

at the altar, a scholar's son
offers red -wrapped tools
of a humble man

a scythe that cuts through chapters
needs no blessing from Saraswati,
but here we believe in ritual

red silk sliding
along the family's steel blade
 

Koyakkatai

Amma spoons jaggery and coconut on rounds of rice-and-dal dough,brings the edges up and crimps theminto drawstring purses. She sets each dumpling in hot water, and the steam fogs her features. She becomes young again, wearing the yellow sari.
All night, I dreamed of koyakkatai. She pinches my cheek like pastry, and I can see her as she was—barefoot on the way to temple, one-hundred-and-one sweets hugged to her chest, her children clamoring for their share, galled she would give away their bounty.

Ganesh Chaturthi

On a palanquin lofted
by four garlanded men,
the pot-bellied Elephant God
leads a seaward procession.

A believer cradling a small
earthen version of the god
mutters last-minute prayers,
supplications hurried to shore
by a trick of the wind.

Ganapati, let the train come
that I may keep my job. Let my son
pass exams, my daughters marry
into good families.

Water slaps sand, the air clacks
with finger cymbals. The pilgrim
wades out waist-deep, the murti
in his elbow's crook. He releases it
like a bad debt, a broken covenant.

A pyune rushes into the train station
from a street strewn with obstacles.
He tugs the hands of a stopped clock
into a likely hour while outside, a flotilla
of figurines streams by, streaked features
half- erased, trunks of clay dissolving.
 

Krishna's Wife

Sari-clad gossips sneer love match,
level me with evil looks from all over the mall. I duck under a door where sandalwood circles sinuously as Radha's bangles in a Moghul miniature.

Her image beckons me. We listen together
through gold thread and mirrors as Krishna plays
his silver flute. We watch his breath blow blue.

She was first of sixteen thousand wives.
So when I see the switch-hipped girly sidle up
within grazing distance of your blue-stubble chin,
Radha sizzles in my cells like disease, though my hair
is halo gold and my eyes gray as a headstrong sea.
 

Vishu

She bends over daffodils,
clippers glinting in moonlight.

Bells harvested, she blots dew
in a wad of nightgown, slides
back into the house like a thief.

She arranges good luck objectson a mirror: silver rupees, an oil lamp, flowers, the scripture.
Her ponytail pantomimes a question.Her palms slide down her throat to her wedding necklace
and she touches the vermillion Ganesh. Upstairs, the alarm goes off.
Pulling the chain over her head, she kisses it like a Catholic,
and drapes it on the mirror.
 
Stung
She takes his hand to examine the nature of the swell. Wasp or bee? He shrugs, swearing in another language.
She lifts his fist and a map of foothills opens in his palm, splayed geography split by a river’s jagged floor.
Her lips hover over his palm’s red ring and a hitch-hiker thumb jerks toward the city spilled longitude by latitudefrom its grid.
An emptying hive buzzes nearby. This is the dying season. Bees build in the crevices, she says.

Ketu

Odds are that something else will kill you,
something that hasn't already been worried
to death, the not in a million years event.

You'll get caught in a shower of meteors. Planes
and pianos fall from the sky often enough.

I heard the screech, the metallic crumple. The sun
rose anyway, in a shattered goblet, a bubble this red
convertible could easily swallow.

The roadside altar pantomimes a warning. Daffodils
with torn throats loll beneath a string- tied cross,
pictures and messages already dissolving with weather.

Tonight's eclipse obscures the tongue-drag of yellow
paint over smeared asphalt; the snake full of moon
wakes before dawn.

All night long, it scallops the edge of the world.
In the morning, we proceed with caution.
 

Stone

A man splits a coconut
over a stone. Sweet milk flows
from the hemispheres.

When the stone, unscathed,
leaves the man's hand, it's the air
that cracks during the long hurtle
toward the woman's skull.

Her daughters wail behind her,
tongues trilling against the wind.

Review

So nice to wake up to a positive review! Thank you, Sufi!

Intermission

Happy Fourth!

Kyoto Prize

http://www.inamori-f.or.jp/laureates/k28_c_gayatri/prs_e.html