Abstract
Editor’s Note
2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Given the Bibliographic Issue’s retrospective coverage, as indicated in the title above, its relationship to the number 50 is somewhat more complex – being, as it is, in a position of catching up with the present by observing, recording and commenting on creative and critical output from the various regions of the Commonwealth from the distance of a year. Historically, this observational distance has fluctuated as has the “object” of observation. Such complexities are fascinating to explore as testament to the shifting meanings and maps of the Commonwealth, of the development of postcolonial and world literature discourses, of the history of publication and dissemination of texts, and of the position and role of JCL’s bibliographic coverage in relation to them. In this brief editorial note, however, I would like to focus, on this celebratory occasion of the number 50, on the significance of numerals and dates, their elusiveness and unreliability, their haunting anxieties, their auspiciousness and magic potential, in no particular order.
Looking backwards and forwards to his birth and that of his country, Salman Rushdie’s Saleem mock-insists on the importance and precision of time, having been, like India, multiply forged and interpellated in relation to Lord Mountbatten’s tick-tocking clock, among other temporalities, and claiming the “riddle of midnight” against, for example, William Methwold’s ritualistic cocktail hour. The significance of India’s midnight arrival at independence in relation to national, Western and storytelling temporalities in Midnight’s Children has been extensively explored. It is interesting to juxtapose it here with a more contemporary revisiting of the date. The example comes from the experience of a friend and its now anecdotal nature is something I also find pertinent to a discussion of alternative temporalities. An English friend of mine received a cold call from a company located in India. When asked for the company’s name and address, the caller cited instead the company’s registration number, spelling it out, digit by digit: 15081947. Incidentally, the digits (although they may also include letters) of company registration numbers (CRNs) in Britain are 8 as are those of dates. That the date of India’s Independence should serve as a CRN is particularly ironic and, of course, meant to be tongue-in-cheek. The implications, nevertheless, are worth considering – that the fact of India’s independence and, by extension, India as a nation, is, at once, reduced to and posited as a “legal incorporated entity”; that the “real” company it is made to stand for has a dubious existence in Western legal terms; that the “number” itself also suggests an attempt and a desire for legality and visibility; that the caller’s otherwise punch-line claim to his country’s national sovereignty is through a date etched on his mind and of little significance to this particular English interlocutor, something of which the caller is well aware and on which his joke relies. Such acts of resistance – “calling back” as a variation of “writing back” – evoke Michel de Certeau’s (1988) conceptualisation of “speech acts”, pedestrian or ordinary walkers’ uses of power and, of course, Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry (perhaps one he did not envisage in this particular articulation) – “almost the same [as a CRN] but not quite”, “at once resemblance and menace” (1994: 86, original italics). The Indian transnational office has given rise to what Stephanie S. Southmayd terms “call-centre lit”, a popular Indo-Anglian genre of fiction, that she finds to be politically ambivalent, at once “overly optimistic” about “the liberating powers and utopian qualities of the heterotopian transnational workplace” and “indicating a suspicion that globalized, transnational labour is merely one symptom of a new form of imperialism” (2013: 18).
Aside from these uncanny (call) returns, symbolic numbers figure in the 2014 bibliographies from South Africa and Australia. 2014 marked the 20th anniversary of “the new South Africa”, since the first democratic elections. Crystal Warren points out the lack of literature celebrating this event, with the anxieties of the number 20, standing for years of democracy, having occasioned a collection of political cartoons bearing the title Democrazy: SA’s 20 Year Trip by Zapiro (pseud.). A more positive, recuperative potential of numbers is foregrounded in the title of a collection of short stories listed in the Australian bibliography and discussed by Van Ikin and Margaret Stevenson. Bapo, by Nicholas Jose, means, as the author explains, “eight broken”: “eight is a Chinese lucky number and broken (damaged, worn) suggests that luck has run out” but that “there is another kind of luck in simply surviving, less glorious maybe, but not so bad in the long run” (Introduction, n.p.). Bapo also stands for a nineteenth-century style of Chinese painting which represents “torn fragments of calligraphy”, used as an auspicious decorative pattern in the design of artefacts in celebration of events such as Chinese New Year (Cody and Terpak 2011: 62). Under the sign of bapo, then, Jose’s stories celebrate the fragmentary and the incomplete, charting out cross-cultural connections and claiming the potential of the part against totalising narratives.
A notable tendency in the 2014 bibliography is writers’ experimentation with form and genre – including speculative fiction in New Zealand and South Africa, linking, in the latter, conspiracy theories and oral histories; multi-media experimentations in Indian poetry and drama, drawing on technology and visual art; the emergence of a new sub-genre in East and Central African life writing noted by Grace Musila (police and civil servants’ autobiographies); explorations of soundscapes in fiction listed in the Malaysia and Singapore bibliography; an interweaving of re-incarnation motifs with elements of historiographic metafiction, a graphic novel based on the Ramayana from Hanuman’s point of view and an “autobiographical account” of Krishna in fiction from India, on which Shyamala Narayan comments in her Introduction. Muneeza Shamsie notes the abundance of memoirs published in Pakistan, including the brilliantly titled I, Migrant, telling of author Sami Shah’s migration to Australia after death threats he received in Karachi as a result of his journalism and stand-up comedy.
An interesting mapping out of genres onto landscape is performed in works from Australia where a poetic “hinterland” is counterbalanced against urban fiction. A strong connection is also established between poetry and land in the critical discussions listed in the Caribbean bibliography, pointing to a similar poetic focus on the geography of place.
It is pleasing to note the translations of works from South Asian languages – Hindi, Gujarati, Bangla, Urdu, Pashto, Tamil and Sinhala – listed in the 2014 bibliographies, reflected also, as Shyamala Narayan comments, in the rise of university courses in translation in India, as well as the particular focus on translations of feminist writings into English in 2014, noted by Muneeza Shamsie, and of bilingual authors’ translations of their own works into English, for example, Aamer Hussein’s English translations of his short stories, originally written in Urdu.
Several contributors comment on the state of publishing in their regions. Although new literary journals have appeared in India and East and Central Africa and existing ones continue to grow in Pakistan, Terry Barringer laments the lack of an adequate publishing and bookselling infrastructure in Nigeria, pushing authors to self-publish, and quotes author Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani on the greater visibility of works published in the West that serve to sustain Western stereotypes of Africa and Africans. Ismail Talib also notes the limited visibility of local publications and the resultant disadvantage of local authors in their access to marketing and publicity in Malaysia and Singapore. Two titles discussed in his Introduction further illuminate the precariousness and vicissitudes of the state of literary production in the region. A phrase used by the late Prime Minister of Singapore describing poetry as “a luxury we cannot afford” has served in 2014 as the ironic title of a poetry anthology. Similarly, the name of a Singaporean non-profit theatre company, The Necessary Stage, encapsulates an imperative of stoic heroism that points back to the idea of hope in the number “eight broken”.
My personal number – of years as JCL’s Bibliography editor – is also, coincidentally, 8 – a testing, yet deeply rewarding 8 – during which time I have had the pleasure and honour to work with editors John Thieme, then co-editors Claire Chambers and Susan Watkins; with SAGE editors Kerry Barner and Livia Melandri; with production editors Sweety Singh, Abhishek Silas and, currently, Monaz Gandevia, and, most importantly, with our dedicated and inspiring contributors whose excellent work makes this important bibliographic record possible.
With Claire Chambers’ help, JCL will be expanding its bibliographic coverage to include Bangladesh from next year and we look forward to working with writer, editor and translator, Khademul Islam.
I want to express my gratitude to Susan Watkins, who is regrettably stepping down as co-editor at the end of 2015, for her astute and kind support, and to welcome her successor, Rachael Gilmour of Queen Mary University, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at JCL’s 50th anniversary party at the University of York and with whom I look forward to working in London.