TRIBUTE
Walking with Alice
BINA AGARWAL
|
Alice Thorner passed away on August 24. Remembering her is BINA AGARWAL
|
Wry Humour: Alice Thorner. Photo: V. Ramamurthy
I FIRST met Alice Thorner in the 1980s at a national women's studies conference. I last saw her this February. And in between, we met almost every winter when she came to Delhi. Usually we met over dinner, replete with good conversation and laughter, sitting at a corner table in the India International Centre dining room. Like her many friends, I will miss her greatly.
Poetic evocation
In this tribute, I seek to evoke the quieter moments, through poetry, whose nuances better capture my feelings than anything I could say. I have chosen pieces by women poets from across the continents she traversed, for the images they evoke to remind me of her — her love of nature, her indomitable spirit, her wry sense of humour, her outspokenness, the simplicity of her everyday needs, her intellectual curiosity, and her refusal to let an aging body keep her bounded in any way.
Alice spent her early childhood in Latvia. My first excerpt is from a poem by Latvia's best-known woman poet, Vizma Bel{scaron}evica, who, coincidently, also died this August, and, like Alice, stood up for human freedom and women's voice. Had Alice stayed on in Latvia she and Bel{scaron}evica might well have been friends. With Bel{scaron}evica we can imagine the beautiful Latvian countryside and unspoiled nature in which Alice spent her early childhood. The poem is called Madaras (meaning madder root flowers), translated by Astrida Stahnke:
There was a time, when the elm said: Do not cut!
And man did not and sat beneath the tree,
And they both talked a long long time
About their offspring and about their daily cares.
I, it seems, I was a poppy in those times,
So sweetly did I bend with every wind,
With grasses did I dance. I looked deep
into the gray-blue eyes of cornflowers.
From my juices and my seeds
Evaporated warm and heavy dreams
That, like full quiet warm heads of wheat,
Touched the hand.
My second selection evokes the 1950s McCarthy period when progressive intellectuals were being hounded in the U.S., and the Thorners, who were then in India, decided to stay on rather than return and testify before the infamous Senate committee. My excerpt is from the poem "Slander", by one of Russia's greatest modern poets, Anna Akhmatova, translated by Richard McKane:
Slander accompanied me everywhere
I heard its stealthy steps in my sleep,
and in the dead city under the merciless sky,
as I randomly searched for shelter and food.
Reflections of it burned in everyone's eyes,
either as betrayal, or as innocent terror.
I don't fear it. At every new challenge
I have a worthy and stern answer.
Like many others, my first intellectual introduction to the Thorners was with their classic Land and Labour in India. Later, these issues became central to my own intellectual trajectory. They were also the subject matter of the Daniel Thorner memorial lecture that Alice invited me to deliver in 1997.
To evoke those who labour, I excerpt from Amrita Pritam's poem, "Daily Wages", translated from the Punjabi by her and Charles Brasch:
I buy my soul's food
Cook and eat it
And set the empty pot in the corner.
I warm my hands at the dying fire
And lying down to rest
Give God thanks.
The mill of night whistles
And from the moon-chimney
Smoke rises, sign of hope.
I eat what I earn
Not yesterday's left-overs,
And leave no grain for tomorrow.
The next lines, evoking land and earth, are from my book, A Field of One's own. They are the words of a Rajasthani widow, Malli, whom I interviewed in 1987:
My bangles are broken
My days of shame are gone.
I have one small son, one calf, one field.
A calf to feed, a son to nurture
but the land, baiji, this half acre of earth
to feed me, to rest my head.
I always wanted to visit Alice in Paris, and had thought of stopping en route from Morocco in September. Regrettably, it was not to be. But here is how I imagine Alice in her Paris apartment, going about her day. The verses are by the American poet, Jane Kenyon, from her poems, "Otherwise" and "Three Small Oranges". First, from "Otherwise":
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
...
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
And then, from "Three small oranges":
Making supper, I listen to news
from the war, of torture where the air
is black at noon with burning oil,
and of a market in Baghdad, bombed
by accident, where yesterday an old man
carried in his basket a piece of fish
wrapped in paper and tied with string,
and three small hard green oranges.
Alice had a wonderful, wry sense of humour. And one can easily imagine her saying these one-liners by the poet Dorothy Parker:
I don't care what is written about me, so long as it isn't true.
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
(Alice, as we know, was incurably curious.)
Finally, I share two verses which evoke my last memory of Alice — walking her back to her IIC room after dinner, her arm resting lightly on mine for support. I am sure many other friends have done the same. The first is a verse (slightly modified) from my own poem "On the Passing of Age":
Just beneath the crook of her arm, [her] skin
feels like the velvet blouses in mother's dowry —
creased but perfectly preserved.
Or like wings of butterflies I caught as a child.
It leaves behind the same sad remembrance
of fragile colours.
And then, as we reach Alice's room, we find "A Light Left On", as described by the poet May Sarton:
In the evening we came back
Into [y]our yellow room,
For a moment taken aback
To find the light left on,
Falling on silent flowers
Table, book, empty chair
While we had gone elsewhere
Had been away for hours.
...
The deepest world we share
And do not talk about
But have to have, was there,
And by that light found out.
Walking alongside Alice, I can imagine all this and more. But I cannot imagine Alice gone. I can see her still in her room, reading, or nodding off over a book.
This tribute to her was paid at the meeting "Remembering Alice", held in Delhi on September 17.
Bina Agarwal is Professor of Economics, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
