<\/p>\n
A Samurai\u2019s Pink House<\/em>, The Samurai is often associated with honour, courage, aristocracy\u2014and violence too. Being the military high men in feudal Japan, Samurais were bound to a strict code of conduct, the Bushido, literally meaning \u2018the way of the warrior\u2019. Their idealized behaviour demanded from them a bravery and a perfection where the softness of the emotions, those intelligences that want to exit the body-politic and its calcified duty, to break the cords that insist on keeping us tied down, could not be fully exposed, only occasionally allowed in acts of kindness and compassion expressed toward the \u2018weak\u2019 of society. Restraint and measure were the ways. Perhaps A Samurai\u2019s Pink House<\/em> is about restraint and the measured ways too, albeit in a different fashion.<\/p>\n In this collection of connected poems Sonia Saikaley navigates through the ancient traditions of Japan, still present in modern day, either via memory or expressed in all kinds of living materialities. Ancient and modern Japan appears intertwined with memories of Canada and also the world\u2014and all that extends beyond the world, the vast cosmos. Everything is bound together, tied up in an intimate and gentle oneness, where the part, feeling the laceration of separation, cries for the whole, like a child does for the mother. As we read through these poems, we have a full sense that we are not alone, we are not, cannot be separate entities, and if sometimes it appears that we are, we feel a void, a yearning and we act quickly to fill it, to repair that broken beautiful egg that we know we are and were meant to be. Like in any good poetry, the local and the here and now are used to feel, apprehend and comment on the universal, the cosmic, the transcendental. The personal surfaces as a letter of intimate loneliness written to a lover that we are trying to call, recover, or just reconnect with via the power of words and the memories that they carry and are capable of conjuring. We move through these poems and ponder upon what it means to be alive, what it means to be a man or a woman, what if feels to be in love or experience the profound longing for what one has lost or anticipates losing when we leave a place, a friend, a lover and go back to our old life, as if this voyage through Japan, was but a brief ephemeral moment\u2014to be remembered in these trenchant and soft words later on, when we are absent from the place that brought them to life. Because to write is to seize moments, make them forever recapturable through the magic of a poetic alphabet that constantly reinvents itself.<\/p>\n As the title may anticipate, this collection is also about women trying to escape from the trappings of patriarchal entrenched networks of Japanese society (or any society) to reach a place, real or imaginary, where they are and can be warriors: the Samurais of a new world order where the colour \u201cpink\u201d has the same value as the colour blue. \u201cA Samurai\u2019s Pink House\u201d is that incubating sanctuary for a new and necessary order that calls for genders to be equalized, in their difference. Is it that envisaged sphere where men and women can grow out of each other<\/em>, where the other is the Same and the Same is the other, where we discover ourselves in the difference of the other, naturally, gradually, suspending thought and judgement, the \u2018grammar\u2019 that has insisted on defining us and which equates violence, a violence to our being, our beingness.<\/p>\n The clear, smooth and crystal-like language of Sonia Saikaley falls on us like gentle kissing cherry blossom petals, calling us to enter what Luce Irigaray calls a \u201csilence\u201d, an \u201copenness that nothing or no one occupies, or preoccupies\u2014no language, no world, no God\u201d (17) in I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History<\/em>\u2014so that we can BE, experience being without a restrictive a priori. In this space of silence and openness we are called to the responsibility of finding the self in the non-self, the other in the self and the self in the other, all in a delicate beautiful dance that erases and suspends hierarchies, allowing us to be like the Great Buddha, enter and call upon us the great nothingness that is a very rich everythingness: \u201cIn simple robes,\/no frills, no boa-feathered scarves\/Waiting for a long-lost lover\u2019s embrace,\/Waiting, waiting, waiting.\u201d The collection is filled with images that conjure up love, expectation, yearning\u2014that eternal and patient waiting of the Great Buddha who knows that the Way can and will arrive. We just have to be resolute and work toward it: it is our responsibility to do so by getting out of ourselves and entering a wholeness that fills and fulfils, a wholeness that is kind to each part that makes it.<\/p>\n The world that the poet takes us into is filled with indigo blue skies, cherry tree blossoms, soft breezes, snowflakes gently kissing our skin, ancient temples and shrines, poets singing to the frogs and frogs singing to the poets, women\u2019s rebellious or passive agency disguised as acquiescence, the live scents of warm tea, its vapours perfuming our souls in an act that merges matter and spirit annihilating our partition, the stunning colour of saffron skies, bodies in daring forbidden acts of love\u2026 All of this, offered to us in a gentle bath of words, singing with persistence into our ear, into our soul, calling us to a higher order. We are invited to feel and feel and feel: the sorrow, the beauty and deep pain that life is, the great longing for what it could be. Immersed in the body, with its calling carnal desires and the weight and pain of the material, we yearn to take off in flight, becoming, becoming, entering the Great Buddha state and exiting the body material. A Samurai\u2019s Pink House<\/em> speaks of a love\u2014a beautiful love that demands. A love that knows we are beings of the universe and possess a spirit that calls. <\/p>\n Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. <\/em>New York: Routledge, 1996. A Matter of Geography \u201cThere are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn\u2019t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.\u201d This quotation by the Danish existentialist philosopher S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard placed at the beginning of chapter two of Jasmine d\u2019Costa’s novel A Matter of Geography<\/em> captures very well the overall nature of this fascinating work of fiction. A Matter of Geography <\/em>is a novel about many things since the writer\u2019s mind, naturally, is called up to use words in order to make sense of the world and the self and thus cannot draw a neat line to artificially restrain its subject matter. Good novels, works that make us think and rethink life, our position in this world and the greater universe, need expansion. They need a \u201cgeography\u201d that crosses boundaries so that we can see where and how our neighbours live and how we ourselves live\u2014or perhaps ought to live.<\/p>\n This book is a call for us to walk in our neighbours\u2019 streets, sit at their table, pray their prayers, put on their clothes, see how they, like us, also love, and love deeply. It is also a call to see existence beyond the socio-political realities that we have become accustomed to\u2014enslaved by. This unbound \u201cgeography\u201d is presented in the novel as the necessary step, the needed empathy or openness to forge community among people who may otherwise be labeled as our enemies. And it is also the necessary step to realize our humanity and eschew oppressive boundaries that have constituted us\u2014erecting us into \u201cbuildings\u201d of one type or another. The novel calls us out of ourselves, inviting us to see the \u201cother\u201d as a part of our world even if at times that \u201cother\u201d seems alien and our instinctual first reaction\u2014which is really a fear born out of non-reflection\u2014would be to shut our door on his\/her face and retreat into the self. But are we not all others? Are we not the other who is the other of an other in a sort of ad infinitum ontological conundrum? Do we not need the other to see our own selfhood and find our very own humanity? These very important existential ontological questions are all addressed by Jasmine d\u2019Costa in her novel.<\/p>\n Set in India and spanning from the late 60\u2019s to 2010, A Matter of Geography <\/em>centers around the personal lives of the inhabitants of the Billimoria Building and its surrounding neighborhood in Bombay, which is mostly Catholic. Being mostly Catholic, the inhabitants of this quarter live closed off from the larger realities of India\u2014that complex, throbbing, multi-ethnic and multi-religious India with the heavy marks of the British colonial past (or other previous colonialisms), until one day in 1992 the Muslim bakery across the street is set on fire. As Peter, our narrator tells us, that day was \u201cthe end of our lives as we knew it\u201d (17). The novel uses the inhabitants of Billimoria to delve into questions of identity, belonging, nationalism and religious riots that came to be a common staple in India. Both the Prologue and the Epilogue function as allegories for what the novel reveals through a close look into the lives of the people of Billimoria and its neighborhood.<\/p>\n In the Prologue a young panther cub escapes from the Borivali National Park and roams free among the bustling streets of Bombay, amidst scared, frantic people. The animal is oblivious of his own strength and does not know why people around him are running as if they had just seen a lion. As a result of \u201cnot understanding [its own] strength, [the panther cub] knocked dead a child in its path\u201d (7) before it is captured and put into an enclosure in the Borivali National Park. The Prologue sets the stage for what the novel is going to discuss: the various ways in which each of us constructs a world within us that is not reflective of the vast reality of our surroundings, making us live enclosed in a narrow \u201cgeography\u201d, in house that is quite small. It is a house of our own making. Our mind, our memory, our perceptions, our experiences become the framers of our reality\u2014the cognitions that create our views, our \u201ccountry\u201d. But as the novel also reveals, it is the responsibility of each of us to expand that \u201ccountry\u201d of ours in order to fulfill our humanity, our ontological call, which always cries out for more. It all depends on how we use our consciousness. Do we put all our cognitions to use becoming fully conscious (or as conscious as possible) or do we use selective epistemological mechanisms to arrive at a fuller truth? The consequences of a narrow personal \u201cgeography\u201d can be devastating for the self and for the communities we live in and with\u2014for the personal is personal but it is also political since humans do not live in an island even if they wish to.<\/p>\n The Epilogue reiterates the importance of our cognitive \u201cgeography\u201d: the panther has now disappeared from its enclosure and in its place we find a mound of excrement on top of which lives a mole rat. The mole rat is a species not native to India but to parts of East Africa. How did it get there? Is it really there? Can we suggest that it was brought there through colonial encounters, encounters which are in fact responsible for the India(s) and the Africa(s) that exist today? This reading makes sense since the novels deals heavily with the socio-political reality of India\u2014a country that was once part of the mighty British Empire. Such reading leads us into many other kinds of problematics related to the constructed reality of national boundaries and the violence that that entails as conquerors come and go and claim ownership of a place oppressing those who are already there, who themselves may not be auctothons.<\/p>\n Between the Prologue and the Epilogue and told in thirty seven chapters, through a style that invites us to expand our prism of vision, open the window of our mind, a window that has been narrowed by our religion or caste or gender or the neighborhood we are accustomed to, we enter the lives of the people of Billimoria Building and its neighborhood. The style alternates between deep philosophical reflections and allegories of immense beauty that tie the human with the immediate socio-political and also the larger cosmos, making us question our assumptions about all aspects of life: about the body-politic and its relative and ephemeral nature and that which lies beyond all that, a spiritual or energy realm where all divisions are suspended and \u201cGod\u201d is found in the diffused yet all related cosmic molecules. We are those molecules: all of us. Told mainly through the voice of Peter, the novel also allows us to read the personal diaries of the young Anna Fernandes, who describes, with her innocent eyes, the adventures of the Billimoria Building before she left for Canada. D\u2019costa uses the personal lives on the Billimoria dwellers to make political matters personal matters and show us how extremist behaviors related to religion or belief system can have the most nefarious consequences. At the same time, and through the coming together of people of different religions and ideological stands to counteract the violence that is spreading, we get to see how people find ways to forego (suspend) their differences (expand their \u201cgeography\u201d, that is) and rescue one another when atrocities of the worst kind are about to be committed. And so we have the different families of Billimoria coming together to save the Muslim family from being killed by Hindu extremists: The Fernandes, the Souzas, the Marchons (all Catholic) arrange for a sanctuary in the house of Mrs. Ezequiel, the Jewish woman who appears to have sought refuge in India herself due to the persecution of Jews in Europe during the World War II. These neighbours of different creeds, morals and ethical inclinations also bind together to hide a crime.<\/p>\n Moreover, the novel tells us about the dangers of being trapped in our false memories or to believe in things that are not real. Peter, our narrator, who is love with Anna (or thinks he is), who left for Canada at the age of 16 after a horrible incident is a man also imprisoned by his memory. His mind, his cognitive geography lacks the necessary elasticity or adaptation. A teacher of mathematics, he is fond of reason and has trouble understanding emotions and love. But he too is pushed to exit his narrow cognition by Mr. Apte, the deeply reflective and philosophical Hindu and by Anna herself, when she returns from Canada many years later for a visit. Confronted with the fact that Anna has changed and cannot be the person Peter has kept in his mind during all the years of separation, he is forced to rethink his notion of love. In the end, he takes his mother\u2019s advice by \u201cembrac[ing] what [is] in front of [him]\u201d (236), and seeing, for the very first time, Sheila\u2019s eyes which \u201cwere, surprisingly, a blue shade [he] had never seen before\u201d (245). This opening toward the living being(s) and the reality that are in front of us appears as a highly liberating act, conducive to growth, acceptance and happiness. And these three precepts are presented in this enlightening novel as fundamental human responsibilities\u2014responsibilities toward the other and the self.<\/p>\n One of the most powerful aspects of A Matter of Geography<\/em> is that we get to see how the \u201ccountry\u201d that we have built in our own mind is problematic because it is not the real country living all around us: it is rooted in a reality of our own making. But we are not helpless victims of this \u201cgeography\u201d of confinement. The country we live in can either open up and expand our personhood and humanity, or it can shrink, imprisoning us in a cell of our own making. It is all up to us. It is all \u201ca matter of geography\u201d\u2014the geography of our mind, our awareness, our consciousness. We can see a lion, a panther, a mole rat\u2026 We can see a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew\u2014or we can see a person before the religious code\u2014a person like us in his\/her own difference. We can see a woman or a man\u2014or a person before a body and a gender. Because \u201cAmidst this loud din out there in the cosmic heaven: Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Love and Hatred, Fear, Truth and Falsehood, Reality, Right and Wrong, Living and Dying\u2014all of it seem[s] insignificant, almost a comical exertion set in motion by a God who has ceased to watch this repetitive farce play over and over again under what [we] call History.\u201d (241)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction Reviews<\/strong>
\nby Sonia Saikaley
\nToronto: Innana Publications, 2017
\n120 pp<\/p>\n
\n
\n <\/p>\nA Matter of Cognition: The \u201cCountry\u201d We Live In<\/h3>\n
\n<\/em>by Jasmine d\u2019Costa
\nMosaic Press: 2017
\n246 pages<\/p>\n
\nA Samurai\u2019s Pink House<\/em>
\nThe Samurai is often associated with honour, courage, aristocracy\u2014and violence too. Being the military high men in feudal Japan, Samurais were bound to a strict code of conduct, the Bushido, literally meaning \u2018the way of the warrior\u2019. Their idealized behaviour demanded from them a bravery and a perfection where the softness of the emotions, those intelligences that want to exit the body-politic and its calcified duty, to break the cords that insist on keeping us tied down, could not be fully exposed, only occasionally allowed in acts of kindness and compassion expressed toward the \u2018weak\u2019 of society. Restraint and measure were the ways. Perhaps A Samurai\u2019s Pink House is about restraint and the measured ways too, albeit in a different fashion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3155,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions\/3155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}