I have asked friends to write guest posts here on the black sun. These can consist of stand-alone passages from books, or favourite poems accompanied (if the so wish) by comments on why the chosen text is important to them. The first one (below) is by my friend, Sheheryar Sheikh (thanks!)
When the swami was a child she collected autographs (she had Fatima Jinnah's) and favourite poems written by her friends, so this is somewhat similar in spirit. Anyways...
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Early
on, the marine routine and military mood of the novel is established. Then the
revelations begin. Here’s a passage, a black soldier opening up to his white
buddy:
“Well,
let me tell you what I think the
story be about. It be about this little duck can’t grow up. Can’t grow up to be
a big duck ’cause he ain’t a duck. But he don’t know what he’s ’sposed to grow
up to.” Cortell looked carefully to
be sure he wasn’t losing Williams. “I mean, you don’t know what you supposed to
grow up to, that makes it pretty hard
to grow up.” He waited a moment. “So we ain’t congregating, we just hangin’ out with people best we can to figure
out where to is. You with me here? To ain’t with white folk ’cause we be
black folk and tryin’ to find to hangin’
out with you chucks just a dead end for us. When I hang out with you chucks,
I’m a black man first and who I really am come next. When I hang out with the
splibs, I’m me first and there ain’t
no black man at all. It got nothin’ to do with white folk. It’s just the way it
is. Ain’t no voodoo conspiracy. We just hangin’ out and movin’ on best we can.”
---Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
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Hanging
with crowds, there is the possibility of loss of self, especially hanging with
a crowd too different or too similar. When alone, there is confrontation of—and
facing up to—one’s self. Oneself. Is it you, though, that self? Or is it a
cultivation of the different you’s you have been? That is what bothers me when
I look to the past and find a foolish boy troubling his mother over having to
sort his own laundry (pitiful little arse), or the one lying in bed on a sweaty
summer day in loadshed Lahore, dreaming about making it to the Booker Prize
podium and giving his “This is for my Mom” speech. Those were both me, but they
aren’t my self, are they? I’m afraid of them being part of my self.
Thank
God for the endless literary and religious texts to reference on the matter,
not to mention psychology books. Intuitively, these strike me as true:
Whitman’s
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
The
Biblical and Quranic “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire; whoever
ends one life ends the whole world.”
