Dhyan Chand

            On Tuesday morning I finished posting my translation of “J'ai déjà donné” (I Already Gave) by Serge Gainsbourg. I gave a quick listen to part of the penultimate song on the 1980 Gainsbourg song list, “Mes idées sales” (My Dirty Thoughts). I’ll start learning that one tomorrow. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before breakfast. I had time to eat about three grapes and drink a glass of orange juice before leaving for class. It rained a tiny bit along the way but by the time I got to University College the sun was breaking through. There were only two students in the classroom when I arrived. 

            Someone said, “If Nietzsche wrote it, it's Burkhardt.”

            Apala continued talking about Season of Migration to the North. It does not present a simplistic pluralism. This novel is deep in the idea that relationships are not simplistic. Root out the differences, such as between Christianity and Islam and they go centuries back. Agonism is important to take an account of the unnegotiability of differences and how they coexist. How the binaries of east and west continue and coexist agonistically. 

            The novel pushes the limits of hybridity. Like the lemon and orange tree but more fluid and abstract. Can we assume the integrated hybridity of an apple before it is combined with a lemon? I didn’t mention that apples and lemons can’t be crossed. 

            Everything is always already hybridizing. 

            I pointed out that Mustafa’s hybridity begins with his education. Before that, he was just blank.

            Education is an entry door for Mustafa's hybridity. Mustafa didn't feel anything. 

            We were talking about Mustafa’s mother, and I started saying that the mother is traditionally the teacher of culture, but Apala shut me down, saying she didn’t want to talk about the assigned role of the mother as a teacher. I had been about to say that his distance from his mother represents lost culture.

            Sexuality fuels the drama in Mustafa's life. Sexual imagery explaining exploration. Reverse Occidentalism. Indigenization through the body of a white woman. 

            Self-orientation is a common trope of post-colonial literature. 

            The ephemerality of life and identity is tentative because we don't know the truth. The tentativeness of identity. 

            Early 20th Century philosophy. Foucault from Nietzsche. In a novel like this the philosophical, the cultural, and the political are all related. One can't think of life philosophically in a life like Mustafa’s. 

            Modernism is a lens for intersections. The ordinary truth lies. Everything boils down to the ordinary. Grappling constantly with the ordinary being transformed into the extraordinary. 

            Clash of disparate accounts of Mustafa’s life. 

            We took a break and then Apala asked those who hadn’t done so to do their course assessments and then she left the room for ten minutes so as not to influence the students’ answers with her presence. 

            After that the plan had been for us to read the last few pages of the novel, beginning from just before the narrator enters Mustafa’s locked room. But instead, Apala handed out sheets of various texts from the articles we’d read throughout the course. Each of us got different texts and she wanted us to read from the sheets and call out the various keywords we noticed. Then she wrote the keywords on the board. 

            Keywords: 

Cultural borrowings

authenticity

expressionist

inevitability

nationalism

interiority 

cosmopolitan

asymmetrical power relationship 

human values

east-west

universalism 

transcendence

modernisms

translation

difficulty 

irruption (The action of bursting or breaking in; a violent entry, inroad, incursion, or invasion, esp. of a hostile force or tribe)

impressionism 

abstract 

world 

planet 

globe, global 

decadence 

beginning-end 

peripheral 

core 

marginal 

multicentric 

narrative 

uncertain 

lived experience 

figurative 

radical materialism 

syncretism 

epistemology 

multi-axial 

migration 

world system 

sublimity 

materialism 

alternative 

decolonial 

provincialized 

exchange 

duality 

spatial 

allegory 

empirical 

ruralism 

romantic longing 

rationality 

industrial age 

hegemony 

consumption

ambiguities 

empowerment 

gaze 

cultural criticism 

self-sufficient

industrial 

capitalism 

differences 

flexibility 

latescence (becoming latent, hidden, or obscure) 

occultism 

bricolage 

beauty in ugliness 

scale, scalability - local concept globalized and vice versa. 

Infinity 

apocalyptic 

representation 

private 

objectivity 

convention 

newspapers 

whole 

            This list didn’t do much for me. The words mean more inside of the literature but in a list, they just seem like fish taken from the ocean and left to die and dry while lined up on the land. 

            After class, I explained to Apala what I’d been trying to say about Mustafa’s mother, and she said “Absolutely!” so I guess she had misunderstood what I was about to say when she shut me down.

            Apala said that someone like Mustafa could exist at any time. I agreed and said that he has the profile of a serial killer. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos before lunch. I had an avocado, lettuce, grape tomato, and olive salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos at 17:30. 

            I finished editing my lecture notes, posted my Discussion board comments, and got caught up on my journal just before 19:00. 

            I worked for about an hour on my essay, comparing the ways in which Uncle Tom was designed to make the black man appeal to white readers, through his passiveness and his Christianity; with Bakha in Untouchable being constructed to appeal to international readers through his desire to be contemplative and his athleticism applied to the sport of field hockey in which India excels. 

            India was a field hockey superpower. In 1928 the Indian team went to England to play against the British team. They beat the Brits eleven games in a row. The story goes that it is because England did not want the humiliation of losing to one of its colonies on the world stage that it withdrew its hockey team from the 1928 Olympics. At the Olympics, with its star player Dhyan Chand, the Indian team began their dominance of the sport, shutting out all of the other teams. It went on to win gold again in 1932. In the Berlin Olympics the only national team that managed to even score a goal against India was that of Germany. Hitler was so impressed by the playing of Dhyan Chand that he offered to make him a German citizen and a colonel in his army, but Chand turned him down. The Indian team is still historically the best overall field hockey team in Olympic history and Dhyan Chand is considered to be the greatest field hockey player of all time.

            For dinner, I had a lettuce, avocado, grape tomato, asparagus, scallion, mushroom, radish, and olive salad with balsamic vinaigrette while watching an episode of Astro Boy.

            In this story, Astro Boy, Dr. Elefun, and Mr. Pompus go to Lake Boggybottom to investigate reports of the sighting of a living dinosaur. Astro Boy dives into the lake to look around and finds several turtle shells that have been emptied. 

            Elefun decides to get a permit to drain the lake. The work begins but with just a few more hours before the lakebed is exposed, Pompus hears a voice from the bushes saying, “Stop draining the lake” and a large lizard hand grabs his leg. Astro Boy saves him, then grabs the lizard’s tail and pulls, severing it from the body. Then the workmen who are draining the lake are sprayed with a venom that hypnotizes them so that they obey the command when the giant lizard tells them to “pour back the water.” Then several smaller dinosaurs cause a herd of cattle to stampede. Astro Boy stops the stampede but then he is attacked by the lake-draining crew who shoot ray guns at him and render him immobile. Then another hypnotized man drives toward him with a massive steamroller. Then Pompus comes on like a cowboy and with his revolver shoots the guns from the workers’ hands. Then he climbs onto the steamroller and has a fistfight with the driver. He is able to stop the machine at the last minute. 

            Elefun fixes Astro Boy. They return to the lake to find it’s been refilled. Astro Boy dives in and finds giant lizard eggs, which he crushes with his feet. Then he is attacked by the mother. They emerge from the water fighting until Astro Boy wins and the dinosaur is captured and taken back to the Institute. But the dinosaur’s hypnotized slaves sneak into the Institute and break the dinosaur out. On the way out the dinosaur spits hypno-venom on several scientists and orders them to construct a giant robot shaped like a grasshopper to fight Astro Boy. The military attacks the robot with rockets but it disintegrates their equipment. Astro Boy breaks off one of the robot’s long arms and uses it to sword fight with the other one. The robot shoots its heat ray and dries up the lake. Astro Boy goes inside the robot and turns its heat ray around so the robot shoots itself causing an explosion that kills all of the talking dinosaurs. I didn’t expect that. I thought that Astro Boy would make friends with them like he does most of his enemies and simply persuade them to behave themselves.