The Personal and the Political

by Prakash Kona

part 1 of 3

I celebrate the bodies of the oppressed. I fight the jealousy of a lover’s imagination. I wait that death may not come too easily in a remote time when the present is a desperate mediator between past lies and lonely innocence of the future.

The power to give is the most ennobling of human traits. Politics emblematizes the morality of giving. Politics is communication of spirit. The oneness of spirit does not need to speak to itself. Politics is spirit where differences of peoples come together to make a point of oneness.

We reject the banner of human as a spiritually depleted term. In the power of earth is the spirit of giving. The sensitivity to vanishing images makes a person alone. Images of suffering make me forget time. I become one in spirit with those who suffer. The word pain is empty if the happiness of another person is not my own.

The devil of circumstances sways me. I am a slave to situations. My spirit knows the weakness of moral failure. Infinitely I fall though once in a way I rise to feel turquoise seas reveling in the eye of imagination. Death and beauty are themes that spell the longings of spirit. Death I see in injustice wrought by self-deception in which men hide their faces. Beauty I experience in marginal lives that produce joy against the cruelty of oppression. In black I saw white. In poverty I saw dignity. In homelessness I saw the future. In humility I saw hope.

My rejection of whiteness is a rejection of what it stands for in a racist society. My rejection of wealth is the blatant atrocities the rich commit without the conscience blinking for a second. My rejection of homes is because they stand for possession that fetters spirit.

* * *

Oppression might be as old as history but not as old as earth. To think that oppression is natural is to condemn oneself to deadly ignorance. In fact the argument that the earth is free of owners and the owned comes close to the truth of a classless society as a natural one.

In the evanescence of adolescent love I was outside the prison of time. The spirit is deathless unlike time that must constantly prove its presence through the death of the body. The equality that brings one body close to another comes from spirit of the earth. I choose that spirit for my guide.

The politics of compassion is spirit that protests against suffering of another body not its own. The dancer moves in pointless spaces if the dance must come to an end. The composer makes music in emptiness if music must fade into silence of its origins. Compassion seems to possess no intrinsic value in the event of one’s death.

In spite of pointlessness the dance moves. In spite of silence the music is made. In spite of death life reflects its sweetness in compassion. When things happen in spite of themselves we attribute naturalness to them. The same naturalness I attribute to compassion. That I am bound to the world of others outside the categories of class, race, religion, caste and gender is what makes me protest against suffering inflicted in the name of those very categories. They are unnatural and go against the timeless spirit of equality.

* * *

I appeal to moral instincts that precede the making of the person. We were morally coded beings in the inorganic state from which we evolved into beings with consciousness. Self-preservation is a moral instinct since preservation of oneself automatically implies preservation of the world around us through the act of personal sacrifice. The world is preserved when I communicate the joy of dying to another person. Death ultimately is the normal state of the universe that is not hindered by consciousness of time.

All possessions are vain if it means that I must stay alive as memory. Time and memory are useless in the spirit of death that moves the universe. In sacrifice I make a move toward that inorganic state of death that brought me into being. In recognizing the sanctity of rock and tree I recognize the spirit of the person. I see the child in you. I see the body that passes through perennial circles before it comes to the single point of reaching out to one’s death. I appeal to the moral instinct that refuses to possess or be possessed. I call the instinct the compassion of being.

Instinctually the body knows pain of injustice when it happens to any other creature. Instinctually I feel anger when I see that men have divided the world in the name of privilege. Instinctually I know that death is meaningful if it can change the way the oppressed live bringing them out of the dreadful inertia of their condition. The resistance of the oppressed is as old as the oppressions of history. Compassion is born in spirit of the oppressed who see their oneness as alternative to injustices of history. History is preservation through murder and lies. The historic body is amoral and conditioned to fight for its own petty existence with no other thought in view. The compassion of the universe rejects such a body as concoction. The morality of the person denounces history that falsely implicates the body in its devious ploy to perpetuate regimes of liars and hypocrites. The innocence of body is restored in the act of sacrifice that reunites body with spirit of the universe. Through sacrifice I clarify a simple point that life is inseparable from death.

* * *

I reproach the world with my sensitivity to dust. The idiomatic everybody is what I really am emerging from the depths of emptiness. I am passive as water. My body is the future of an idea. The freedom of body is imperative for the idea of a future. Where creative energies are stifled with the power of money the body is lost in illusions. Everybody suffers in consequence.

Dirt-bound scenarios fill the eye’s vacuum. Narrow alleys entice me the way ugliness exerts fascination upon the beautiful. Like bourgeois readers I’m prone to imagine danger rather than physically encounter it. Jealousy preserves the outer face of order. The malice of age is reflected in its antagonism to freedom of youth. Eternity has the face of youth. My heart feels with nothing as easily as with the feelings of a child.

The word must be dispossessed before it is completely understood. I can’t imagine writing for reasons other than marginality. The word experiences pain, guilt and longing like any living body. The word grows old but never dies. The word enters the blood stream through the eye seeping out of the fingers as ink on paper. The word struggles against possession. The untranslatable word in the language of oppressed means revolution.

In the end the oppressed are friends of the oppressed. It is a friendship of condition imagined without territorial bounds of race, nation and language. I have to strip the world of illusions that buy me freedom. What can that freedom be but the illusion of an illusion! My subsequent understanding of class as the moving force of history is the greatest eye-opener of my intellectual life. Class supersedes every other category in manifesting the true face of order. Through the eyes of class I saw every other illusion that bound me to bourgeois life. Death erases material possibilities of the body. In the future of a classless society death seemed a mere passage into the memory of a generation that will not know the greed and cruelty of class society.

* * *

I have reached a point in my life when I’m incapable of inventing a character any more. Real characters are obnoxiously retarded by their sense of self-preservation. I find them undeserving of being fictionalized. I accept the classical argument that fiction dramatizes the real. Those moments of nobility in a person’s life gain prominence in the dramas of fiction. In that sense fiction is a necessity. I find it ridiculously patronizing to construct a character out of the blue. It suits the complacent comforts of the bourgeoisie. Therefore I wrote as if I was the character of characters.

In all honesty I say that I never meant a word of what I said about myself simply because it was not myself that I was referring to. Possibly I was referring to my face in mirror. That still didn’t make me the person I was talking about. The fact that I fictionalized myself to such an extent that I could be a character made me view history as a verbal illustration of characters. I produced doctored versions of myself on page. That was neither a lapse in memory nor a writing strategy.

Marginality is one of the essences of writing. Words marginalize certain spaces of social reality. In acknowledging marginality as fundamental I touch the core point of a life that rejects mainstream values, which is another name for appropriation with its disguises. I choose fiction to make my point as a means to bring out my own marginality within the social order.

I am naturally orientalized in using a language with dubious antecedents to refer to myself. Alternately I might be searching for a language free of duplicity, a pristine classless language. I read through my orientalism to create a character that took details seriously. Generalizations were viewed as generalizations. I learnt the art of reading through the duplicity of one word with many meanings. I choose the marginal word that came closest to liberating me from a sense of possession.

I did not amalgamate one word with one meaning. On the contrary I kept the disorientation alive in using marginality as a resource base to make meanings out of meanings. I assumed quite rightly that there was no language that actually represented the person as one entity. I was attracted to tentative premises that sincerely challenged the authority of the finest truth made of the finest fabric from the forests of language.

* * *

The fantasy of being an actor is at heart the desire to become one with everybody. I call it the actor fantasy that goes to the root of a plant called fiction. The popular term for fiction is history. I prefer the general word of ‘life’. Duplicity I detest but you can’t help thinking about the meaning of a word in more than one way. Disorientation is the outcome of meanings that manipulate one another in their bid to power. I visualized power as smoke from a magic lamp with feetless jinn emerging from the lamp.

Actors live in the fantasy of solid cages. How could the one act that did not live alone in exorbitant realms of bewitching loneliness! I exorcised the witches of desire. I made jinn out of lamps of nothing. I smoked them out in the very motion of my footsteps. The desire to punish the world for my wounds makes me a natural born actor.

Without striving to be original I strove to perfect one scene all my life; that of the wounded animal in a cage dreaming of revenge. The animal can never escape the cage. It needs the cage for its fantasies to have a touch of the real. If it escaped into the world outside it would be lost like a bird in a strange country.

The world that wounded me is not the world outside. It looks changed from the eyes within a cage. If my fantasies were not made of escape, the point of being in a cage would be meaningless. I must escape for revenge to happen. If I escaped there is no revenge awaiting me but more wounds that I fear in my subconscious mind. In the process there is the terrible probability that my body has been aging all along.

I live with such paradoxes. I create and recreate scenes with doors and windows in every possible direction to realize the perfect stage for the perfect scene of revenge. On one side is a prison. On the other side a house and on yet another a frame of the sky. There was no sea in view. The pain of watching the sea is too much for an actor. I might break down and collapse. My eyes suffer. My brain is congested. My will is weak. My spirit is drugged. The body persuades me that I must go on. I believed the body against other points of view.

My body is the product of a bourgeois lifestyle. It speaks in order to be understood. Communication is established between one word and another. Words are both means and end of communication. I suffer because my words are from the truth of my body that has never tilled the soil nor swept city streets in the early hours. My body never worked where I would have to sell my labor for a livelihood.

In bourgeois life sale is the key word of communication. Something is bought and sold in terms of property in order for communication to be established. What makes the sale a form of disguised prostitution is the fact of disguise. False comforts make the apocryphal sale seem authentic by all standards.

The bourgeoisie is soulless while the working classes are bodiless. My wounds are unreal as the soul that produces these wounds. I live by this eternal wound syndrome that transmuted becomes the ideal love syndrome. I live in torn privacies. I discount real bodies with real failures and real triumphs. I create a soul as if it existed on its own and the body a mere appendage. A lonely body in a lonelier soul.

* * *

The bodies of the oppressed speak in incomprehensible tones. They bear the wounds of history. These are not imaginary wounds of mentally caged animals. These are wounds that are social in character and moral in origin. The oppression of minorities is a moral failure that entered the making of history. Through the restoration of social justice built upon individualities outside dominant institutions morality begins to play a conscious role in the history of daily life.

Oppressed bodies are entitled to speak of oppression. The experience counts as a matter of fact. I held to the core of my being as one would to a raft in mid-seas. I held nothing in the process that I was thinking of my death. I came out of my death into halls of life when I touched bodies of the oppressed. It seemed that I was touching nothing for some time. I was so caught in the past of my bodilessness. Obsessed with a soul my bourgeois upbringing cultivated in me a hypocritical attitude toward my body. I pretended that I did not exist for the body. I was doing exactly the contrary in the meantime. This pretence is most obvious in our attitude to money.

Money is made to seem unreal as if it were the last thing that mattered and yet nothing is further from sanity than to liberate oneself from the deadly power of money. We live to eat while we are constantly told that we eat to live. What makes the oppressed incomprehensible is that our languages are chained to property relations that blind us from seeing our responsibility as a class to the oppression of the poor and the consequent failure to recognize that no army or ideology can save us from the indignation of those who resist in the name of justice.

* * *

Patriarchal society creates its victims and then enslaves itself to those victims to confirm its mock-heroic stance. The powerlessness of women to control the sale of their bodies is shown as power at home in the family. The resistance of women is treated as social and mental abnormality.

The oppressors take away the labor of the oppressed; the oppressed take away the peace of the oppressor. The oppressor’s life on earth is haunted by insecurity of losing one’s dearest possession the appropriated labors of marginal people. Though I steal labor, intrinsically this labor exists in bodies of the oppressed. It is their intelligence that guides their capacity to make and unmake the world.

As an oppressor I must continue to be wary of this intelligence of oppressed peoples. I cannot trust the ground on which they walk. It could be a deathly trap that the oppressed invented in the wee hours of the morning when I am in my deepest sleep. My innermost self comes from labors of the oppressed. To protect this self is the aim of my existence. I’ve to crush the bodies of oppressed and make them incapable of resistance. I’ve to make them believe that they exist for the noble cause of my self. I need them and I want them to believe that my need brings out the highest element in themselves their labors offered as a sacrifice to fulfill that metaphysical need making my existence worthwhile.

I have to believe that I exist outside myself. I transcend in labors of the oppressed. This transcendence I’ve earned through a moral deprivation that brings me close to the fringe of reason. Having made certain that the oppressed are in their place, I must safeguard this body from the irregular motion of the stars. I must appease that idiosyncratic element in nature that could turn against me at any point in time. The unexpected turn of fortunes is a possibility that could strike all that I’ve made of my self. I master the human while I make sure the superhuman is quietly disposed toward my aims. I am bedeviled by the truth that I’ve brought to life in the emptiness of days that resemble nights.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2005 by Prakash Kona