5 Questions with Subhash Jaireth
Born in Punjab, India, Subhash Jaireth spent nine years studying geology and literature in Russia before migrating to Australia in 1986.
He has published poetry in Hindi, English and Russian. His published works include four books of poems and five books of prose fiction and non-fiction.
Jaireth’s most recent books include a collection of essays, Spinoza’s Overcoat: Travels with Writers and Poets (Transit Lounge, 2020), which won the 2021 ACT Book of the Year, a book of translation from Hindi, Rain Clouds: Love Songs of Meerabai (Recent Work Press, 2020), and Aflame (Gazebo Books, 2021).
No.1
George Orwell’s Elephant and Other Essays is your most recent essay collection after Spinoza’s Overcoat: Travels With Writers and Poets (2020). You’ve been publishing books since the 90s, with poetry books such as Rain Clouds: Love Songs of Meerabai (2020) and Aflame (2021), as well as the story collection Moments (2014), plus the novels After Love (2012) and To Silence (2015), amongst many others. How was George Orwell’s Elephant conceived, and how do you think the essays within speak to your current body of work, if at all?
Let me start with one of my earlier books, To Silence. It consists of three monologues which I intend to be read as fictional autobiographies of real figures: Kabir, a mystic Indian poet influenced by Hinduism, Tantric Yoga and Sufism; Maria Chekhova, the younger sister of famous Russian writer Anton Chekhov; and Tomasso Campanella, a Calabrian (Italian) philosopher, theologian, and poet. In writing them I have combined historically verifiable facts with imagined events and characters. My research shows that these events could have happened and that such characters possibly existed—their presence can’t be established but their existence is narratively believable. It doesn’t require a huge effort on the part of readers to suspend their disbelief and accept the overall intent of the story. The voice in each monologue is unique, reflecting the cultural and social settings of the society the person lived in, but what unites them is their resolve to invoke silence as a strategy to endure, resist, and denounce the brutality of their times.
Eleven short stories in book Moments plays with a similar narrative device to fashion fictionalised biographies and autobiographies of real writers, poets, painters, dancers, philosophers and composers. Some stories focus on one critical moment that changed the course of their lives. In others I speculate about the significance of one moment that could have inspired them to create their most exciting work. For example, the story of Bach (Pau) in ‘Love’ is told in the first-person voice of the renowned Catalan composer and cellist Pablo Casals who is keen to grasp the artistic impulse that drove J. S. Bach to compose his wonderful sonatas for solo cello that Casals loved, played, and recorded several times.
Twelve essays in the book Spinoza’s Overcoat can also be read as biographies of poems and books which have played an important role in my life. Each essay moves between the so-called ‘small time/place’ (the book or the poem) and the ‘great time/place’ (the social and cultural context) of the poem or the book. This is quite similar to the technique used by photographers and cinematographers when they combine close shots with mid- and long-range shots. Most of the essays are based on my travels to the places where a writer or poet was born and lived. For example, the titular essay is written in the voice of the Jewish, Romanian, German poet Paul Celan (1920–1970) who had travelled to Amsterdam to visit the houses in which Baruch Spinoza and the Dutch painter Rembrandt lived. Celan was eager to find out if the two had met, and if the young Spinoza had sat for Rembrandt as a model for any of his paintings. During and after his trip to Amsterdam, Celan composed two poems about Spinoza and one about Rembrandt.
As an interesting experiment, I decided to write an essay-story, titled ‘My Name is Hamlet’, in the voice of a poem as if the poem itself or herself was writing about the moment of its conception, birth, and life. Boris Pasternak, the Russian poet and novelist, wrote the Hamlet as a poem in a fictional book of poetry by his hero Doctor Zhivago. Working on the essays in the book revealed to me that each creative work is profoundly associated with the place where it is conceived and produced. Space isn’t merely a container where we and other living and non-living beings exist, but turns into a place by the very act of our living, and that such places have their own deep-time history of which we are a minor but inseparable event.
The above idea has become the central motif of George Orwell’s Elephant. Each essays takes me and my readers to different places which include cities and towns, and landscape features such as rocks, rivers, and lakes. On my physical and imagined traverses I muse about the role they could have played in the life of a writer or a poet, and how their writing added layers of new meaning to them. The place changes them and they change the idea of the place itself. For example, when we travel to Uluru we come face to face with stories that have accreted in, around, and under the majestic agglomeration of sandstones formed millions of years ago.
No.2
Apart from writing in English, you also write in Hindi and Russian. It is often said that we inhabit different mindsets and/or personalities when writing and speaking in different languages. Have you noticed this in yourself, and if so, would you like to tell us how they differ for you—particularly in the context of monolingual and parochial Australia?
If language is the house of our being and becoming, the metaphorical house I dwell in has many rooms. I call one of them Hindi. This room accommodates other Indian languages including Punjabi, my mother tongue. The second is labelled Russian which also hosts other Slavic and European languages. The third is Australian where English cohabits with many other voices some of which are of Indigenous languages, most of which were lost during colonisation.
The walls of the rooms in the metaphoric house are porous and doors between them wide and always open, making it easy for me to walk in and out. This is how I seem to live surrounded by a sonorous polyphony of voices.
I believe that my situation isn’t unique. There are many in Australia and elsewhere who enjoy the same privilege. In the essay, ‘Carson’s Work of Remembrance and Mourning’ in Spinoza’s Overcoat, written as a letter to Ann Carson, the Canadian, poet, writer, and translator, I discuss the feeling of linguistic and cultural homelessness that I experienced after spending more than nine years in Soviet Russia. I lost touch with my mother tongue and English. The process continued after I migrated to Australia. I rediscovered English but it took me years to reconnect with Hindi. I believe this is the reason why translation has become an integral facet of my being and becoming. It establishes a sense of togetherness with other languages and voices.
Many years ago, I published a poem titled ‘You, Your Violin and Me Talking to a Dying Horse and Mayakovskii’ in the book, Unfinished Poems for Your Violin (1996). I began writing the poem in Hindi but finished it in English. Later, the Hindi lines of the poem were translated into English, and the English ones into Hindi, making two versions of the same poem. Whenever I read the two, the so-called unidentical twins, together, I hear Hindi intonations in the English version and English inflections and in the Hindi poem. The two sit together like siblings greeting and teasing each other.
No.3
The essays in George Orwell’s Elephant are fictionalised biographies of real places, landscapes and cities, which is to say they blend the real and the imagined. What was your research and development process like, especially considering that some of your essays in the book were written a decade ago?
Although I have written novels, novellas, short stories, poems and prose poems, it is the narrative essay that I find most suitable for my current mode of expression. The word ‘essay’ is derived from the Latin ’exigere’ and ‘exagium’ which mean to ascertain and to weigh. The Latin roots of the word define my project well; I write essays to ascertain and weigh ideas, concepts and emotions about this or the other aspect of the world that excites, inspires, and troubles me. However, the distinction between me and the object of my enquiry is provisional and flexible, because in this endeavour I too become an object of my investigation. The essay in its more malleable form provides me an opportunity to establish a dialogue between the two; as if the object itself is alive and responding to my questions and interrogating me in return.
I usually write about things and ideas of which I have little prior knowledge; as such research and writing for me proceed hand-in-hand, egging each other along. But the aim is not to achieve a neat conclusion or closure but to underscore how each solution is provisional, temporary, and speculative. Therefore, instead of straight answers I often end up with new questions.
This could be one of the reasons why some of my essays evolve with time; their shape and focus changes as I change. For example, in the late 1990s I wrote an essay titled ‘Face to Face: The Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the National Portrait Gallery’, published in the December 1999 – January 2000 issue of the Australian Book Review. Five or six years ago I discovered that the site on which the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra occupies was most probably an old camping site of the Indigenous peoples living in the area. This became a trigger to explore the history of Indigenous peoples in Canberra and adjoining areas. For them lakes, creeks, and rivers, including the Molonglo, were vital sites for sustenance, survival, and ceremonies. This is why I decided to rewrite the essay, shifting focus on the lake and the river—I called it ‘Not So Quiet Flows the Molonglo’ [and it features in George Orwell’s Elephant]. Something similar occurred with a couple of other essays. However, even in their current state the essays remain open to further exploration and accretion. The process of weighing and questioning continues.
No.4
In an interview with your publisher, Gazebo Books, you say that “The places we inhabit make and remake us and although we try to mould them according to our needs, in the end it’s nature that has the final say.” You have lived in India and Russia as well as Australia. Can you speak more to the above statement in relation to your transnational trajectory?
I was born in India, studied in a Moscow university and have been living in Australia for close to forty years. As a geologist (academic and researcher) I have travelled widely in Australia, USSR/Russia, Australia, and many other countries. My filing cabinet is packed with maps of different places. I love collecting maps not as curiosities but as tools to explore the deep-time history of places. On many maps, I have scribbled notes about my tracks which trace routes of my walks. However, there are tracks and points which I haven’t as yet visited. If I am lucky, I might get an opportunity to go to these places, but one never knows. For me walking and writing are complementary, mimicking each other; words and lines similar to my footprints on the ground. For places unvisited, I rely on books, and my bookshelf has many which tell the histories of different cities and places, especially landscape features. Most of them are illustrated with maps where I can let my pen or fingers walk. Maps make histories spatial and grounded.
As a geologist and a writer interested in natural and cultural landscapes, I am aware that the binary opposition between nature and culture isn’t essential or necessary; it is an invention of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European enlightenment. For many thousands of years, humans saw ourselves as an inalienable element of nature. Once we began to speak, hear and listen, we started assigning names to living and the non-living entities with whom we share the world. I gesture towards this idea in the essay ‘The Old Banksia in Our Garden’ in which I traverse the deep time-place-history of the Banksia that takes me to Gamay, also known as the Botany Bay in Sydney. Before colonisation in 1770/1778, it was the country of D’harawal and Dharuk-speaking peoples. At that time, they and other different clans of the Indigenous peoples in the Sydney region constituted a population of approximately eight thousand people.
In the essay I mention stories the ancestors of D’harawal people had told each other about the Last Glacial Maximum (~30, 000 years ago) and the global warming and the rise of sea levels (close to 70 meters) that followed it. The ancestors would have witnessed the sea rise leading to the formation of the bay and drowning rivers, creeks, and bush land in and with which they had lived; the ecological footprint they left was soft, cautious, and largely reversible. Colonisation introduced people keen to mould and tame the nature to satisfy their needs, desires, and aspirations. In less than two hundred and fifty years the population in the region grew to over five million creating ecological footprints which are hard, aggressive, and largely irreversible.
At the time of the global warming witnessed by the Indigenous peoples, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 260 parts per million. Today it is 427 parts per million. We have supressed and subdued nature but it is responding back with intensive bushfires, floods and draughts, and diseases spread by virus pandemics. As James Lovelock has often said, we have to learn to hear and listen to what Gaia is saying.
No.5
What draws you to writing as an art form? What does it mean for you to bring a poetic sensibility to prose?
I started writing when I was around fourteen but it has taken me many years to learn the power of spoken, written, and performed words. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am not good at anything other than making words and to create through them real and imagined worlds.
Written and spoken words are different from the words we find in dictionaries because they are infused with the intonations of speakers and writers expressing their intentions and emotions, and they always seek a response because they are always addressed to someone. We often call them utterances instead of sentences or phrases.
In literary works that I like, I can hear many voices, which include the voice of the author, its narrator, and other protagonists, but most importantly I also hear the voice of the language. Language for me isn’t a mere tool of communication, like a hammer for driving a nail, but it is the poem or the book itself. One can’t separate brush strokes from a painting. The orality of words enchants me. I like how words of different languages fill our mouth and come out moist with our breath. Maybe this is the reason I read aloud as I write; it doesn’t matter if it is a poem or a piece of prose.
My book Incantations (2016) contains poetic prose pieces composed in response to portraits in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. They are chants to summon the quintessence of portrayed subject or object so that it comes to life and speaks. In 2016–2017 I read some of the pieces in the gallery standing next to the portraits, accompanied by David Pereira on cello.
In his new collection of essays Subhash Jaireth traverses the globe in an exploration of the personal and collective memory held within natural and built landscapes.
His roving curiosity takes us from his early life in Delhi to his years as a student in Soviet-era Moscow. We travel to Burma with George Orwell and battle windmills in Spain with Don Quixote. Jaireth walks us through the landscapes around Uluru, Canberra and Sydney with the sharp gaze of a geologist and the imagination of a poet. We follow the roots of an old banksia tree in his garden, the traces left by ancient rivers and seas, and stories passed down from time immemorial.
In George Orwell’s Elephant & Other Essays, Jaireth draws his life’s emotional map right on the soil under his feet, and in the process unearths narratives, characters and places that leave us aware of the layers of memory and meaning that shimmer all around us.
Get it from Gazebo Press here.