Sula - an escape into fine writing

SULA
Toni Morrison

Today I heard the voice of Toni Morrison in my head for the first time. As she read out each line of her book “Sula”, a clear and flowing narration from the right distance - the exact line that divides the real from fiction, I felt a powerful connection to the world in which Sula lived and the lives she entered and destroyed. Each word was so perfectly placed, it seemed like they were all holding hands with the right partners. Each line that she created was beautiful; the way in she describes a thought or a scene or an emotion. When I started reading, I was curious because of the way her name was written on the cover or maybe the name itself struck a chord. I knew she must be famous but I didn’t subject this book to the usual scanning of reviews and the summary at the back. I didn’t even read the note about the author. I turned to the page one and began to read as if I was in a hurry to get on with the reading.


Set in a town called Medallion, during the days of the first and second world wars, the story is woven around the lives of two black girls, Sula and Nell. The girls are friends who come from very different households and have completely contrasting personalities. But once together, their chemistry spawns a beautiful friendship. Sula is the free bird, the wild one who stands out from the rest of the town girls with her curiosity and individuality. On the exterior, Nell is the typical sweet and simple one but underneath she has a mind more interesting. The reason she loves Sula is because only she can bring out the real Nell who has thoughts as daring as those that shouldn’t be allowed. Nell is the person that Sula reaches out to when she seeks tranquility. She is the only person who means anything in Sula's restless, free world. The book starts with their lives as girls and later Sula leaves the town in search of freedom only to come back to Medallion after being unable to find peace or that intangible substance of life that she was after. Her uncompromising, wild and seemingly evil ways make the townspeople brand her as a witch. The bond that she once shared with her best friend becomes hazy as their differences take over and soon they are left to themselves, their lives empty and ugly.

It is a typical story if you try to summarize it, but what makes the book enchanting is the compelling writing that sucks you into its depths with its metaphors, wonderful moments and sadness. One moment you are free falling through Sula's mind and the next you are caught in Nell's. It is like poetry came home disguised as a novel. Great writing is being able to make the reader entirely abandon the environment she inhabits to step into the book and smell the earth the characters walk on, to be them, to lead their lives. I felt that because I couldn’t bring myself to close the book and I kept hoping that I hadn’t read the last line. I couldn’t switch on the TV and expose myself to my ordinary life after such fine writing. More than Nell and Sula, what I wanted was more of the words, the writing. That’s when I read about Toni Morrison on the first page. It was only right that she was a Nobel Prize winner with other awards in her bag such as the Pulitzer and the National Critics award. What I loved most about it is the irony of calling the town “The bottom” in spite of it being at the top of the hill and not the valley. That’s because it was inhabited by the black people of the region and the white people lived in the valley. The Bottom of heaven is how she described it.

“It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no top and no bottom only circles and circles of sorrow”

.....Will soon be forgotten

"My achievements may weigh a ton,
Might have many a battles won,

But like him, and a million others,
I ,too, will soon be forgotten"

(Attempt at poetry looking at the picture.....)
(I have spent half an hour formatting this, but some how cannot get it to display properly, have faced this problem earlier also especially when i have a picture, wonder if any of you have faced this problem)

Soul Mate

Note:I hope the readers shall excuse me for the abuse of English language!

Subhadra did ask him finally – “would you be my soul mate?” She couldn’t understand why he was left so startled by the question. He replied though, “I don’t have one, I have lost it, haven’t found it back yet”. She started saying –“I know you don’t take me seriously, doesn’t mean you have to make the situation awkward, I am really asking you, would you be my soul …” He wouldn’t let her complete – “I have really lost it”. She then had to ask him “What have you lost, Abhi”. “My soul”, said he.

“Oh God, have you bee reading too much poetry or something?”

“No, n-no, I don’t understand poetry, I have really lost my soul, I hadn’t realized, thank you for making me realize”, he told her this. He had become serious.

Subhadra wouldn’t feel bad about it. She didn’t ask him why he was playing games with her. She wouldn’t even get confused. She finished her coffee and went out. He left his coffee and followed her. Of course he liked her. Actually, he saw it coming; he was not the game playing kind. Had she asked him some thing like – “would you be my husband”? He would have said yes. If she had told him “I love you”, he would have said, he loved her too.
Subhadra loved Abhi as deeply as one could ever love another, romantically that is; she knew, he is given to emotional blackouts and was given to confusing himself, she had also known how he switched jobs and did not stay put anywhere. But she was confidant of herself. “I would make this happen, I would make this marriage work” she always thought. She, as they say, was blinded by love.

For a moment Abhi thought, he is possibly behaving oddly. He thought, may be he was not ready for it –though he saw it coming – and may be his mind started playing games with himself at the precise moment. But how could he deny it, it was clearly on his face, he could feel it. In fact he could not feel anything of a soul inside him.

He was happy and sad at the same time. Awareness is better, better than being in a labyrinth, he thought. At the same time he was concerned, where would he go, looking for his poor soul, in this big bad world. He went and talked of this to his friends, relatives, acquaintances and who ever showed interest in listening to him, explained to them about, how he felt –soul less. Some found it funny, the way he put it, and many neglected him. His friend Ram told him – “dude, you don’t look at it that way, it’s a spiritual concept; you couldn’t loose it. May be you are pissed about something, why don’t you take a break? Go traveling or trekking or something”. Abhi found it hard to explain his situation. He was seeing that, people somehow are finding him too unconventional. Random things work some times, so, went traveling; went to many places; went looking for the footsteps of the mightiest, tried to feel the deepest of the devotions. Tried to be one with the nature, went to forests, the hills, vast beaches and the roaring rivers. He came back empty handed.

Subhadra saw Abhi veering away from the world of natural existence and would go to any extent to bring him back, this was her initial thoughts. Her thoughts remained not constant –she comes to thinking about letting him go his way, for the sake of her love for him. “This wretch of a man does not know the value of a woman’s love, he would be dying soulless if not for me, why doesn’t he realize that I am the vehicle to find his soul” she thinks finally.

Abhi had tried the saints and the Sadhus who looked like empathizing with him and told him about their thoughts, on where he could find his soul, some said, he should look in to himself, some said he should look in to his past, while the others thought that he should be looking outside. Some were even so specific as to saying; he should look in to others through ‘service’. Nobody ever said that it could have lost it once and for all. Nobody ever warned him that he might never get it back. All tried and done, he had stopped looking. He came to decide that he should not go on looking for it; he thought he was mad to have searched for it so hard, so long and in so many places: inside; outside; inside out. But he never doubted its existence, so he remained with a hope, of discovering it someday.

Subhadra married Abhi and had a child. Their marriage had all the good things, security, prosperity beauty, and why would they not have any of that when Subhadra is the one who ran it, only thing missing was Abhi’s soul. She consoled him, she said, she would help him find his soul, but she intended to support him through his loss, after all he was the love of her life. She would work hard to keep things together and not let them break in to pieces and become more things rather than be one family.

Abhi would try to forget his loss, through his work, ‘service’ he thought is going to recreate soul, create a new soul for him. But, he was constantly in doubt about whether what he does is ‘service’. He was not serving the cause of the under privileged children, nor the old aged orphans, nor even the clean-city green-city thing and he had forgotten the Indo-Pak thing, the nuclear non proliferation thing, and poverty in general, and he had forgotten the definition of the word utopia.

When Abhi partied and found he drunk and was smoked out with cigarettes, his mind used to go berserk and created psychedelic imagery of his non existent soul. He visualized his soul being green with blue eyes and was shaped like Casper the devil; he visualized it floating away in the intergalactic space. “May be souls are not just for earthlings, and may be these greenie Caspers are in short supply; everybody wants to have a soul, what if some being from some other galaxy is going to get my soul, let that being be happy with my soul” He thought. “But it is floating aimlessly in the intergalactic space; there aren’t many floating like this; only this one”, he felt bad, on being influenced to think this. Soon he would come to his senses and write off all these as the under-the-influence-blabber.

Subhadra never asked him why she shouldn’t philander like him. Not that the romantic love she had once, felt for Abhi, was still alive and kicking in her. Not even that she did not look forward for some thing interesting in life in whatever form, even if in the form of a fling with another man. But she thought she was strongly rooted in reality. Even when she felt an urge, to question the blatant philandering ways of Abhi, she would stop herself from doing so. If she did question him, Abhi would so eloquently start explaining as to how he saw glimpses of his lost soul, when he was with the other woman, in the depth of her eyes and in the rhythm of her breath. That was the last thing she wanted to, talk about, with him. Subhadra’s reality roots did not let her think too much about the green monsters.

Sonu was the product of a conflict between a soulless father and a mother with philandering thoughts. His soul was hermaphroditic; it never left him, he would color part of his hair gray and the rest of it blue, the bald portion was silvered. She was neither gay nor lesbian, loved her father and mother alike, and hated them alike. Later in life he would grow up to assert his individuality, live alone and change his name to Cool-Cock as a hybrid of cool –for his attitude, and cock –short for peacock representing his love of colors. He had made the name rhyme better by removing the Pea from the Peacock. He wouldn’t hold a funeral service at the death of his soulless father, because he did not care if his father was actually soulless or if he lied about it, but because he had spent his father’s entire money on drug-rehab and before that on Cocaine. Sonu had buried the old canvas shoes, without a sole, found in his father’s treasure of a cask, along with his father (his dead body – that is). Rooted in reality Subhadra would never have wanted to see it.

*Haiku*

Rain
The world comes alive
as the rains kiss the earth ....

...............just a trail on my pane

***

Night
In the gentleness of night
She smiles ....
A dream
Of the world she can't see
***

Life is ...
To kill, to die
and be born again
in the syllable of her smile

[Poetry] To Mom

The curtains fall for one last time
before anew begins the year
the Ledger's closed, the wishlist made
and the world brews hope in deep slumber

A lone lamp glows in the kitchen shelf
and lives again in her drop of sweat
And as she fills another pickle jar
stains the earth and kisses death

And in the night's stillness we lay to rest
a entire year of memories
The arguments, the unknown fear
the spoken word and a lone tear

She smiles at me dozing away
as I guard her from midnight's ghosts
When the jars are packed, the prayer said
she kisses my head and tucks me in bed

I curl up again into her cozy womb
proud as man as me ought to be
For when the curtains fell this one night
she was the damsel and I, the knight

And in my dreams, she whispers my name
closes my eyes and takes me by hand
And as we share the heavenly glow
I open my eyes and am born again

Years have passed, distances crept
age drawn lines in each other's hands
But when the curtains faill one last time
I still guard her from midnight's ghosts

P.s: My attempt at 'Poetry' as part of the first poetry session.

Welcome aboard

Hello all,

Green casper is a blog that's been created to host all our assignments on the web so that

1. All of us can peruse each other's works and comment on it too (which is a pleasant addition to the feedback we receive in class)
2. We have a written account (a diary, if I may say) of what we have learnt in these 10 classes.
3. We have a platform to share not only what we have written but also our efforts/thoughts in the future.
4. Fortunately or unfortunately, we will have the whole world wide web reading our 'masterpieces' and telling us what they think :)

Let's dip our quills in ink, and paint the web in shades of green - like caspers in the milky way :)

regards
Rathish