Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Category: Miscellany

  • 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Abdulrazak Gurnah

    The great writers are capable of metamorphosis and travel across a gulf of time and a hiatus of cultures and continents because their narratives speak to the sentiments and reason common to all humankind. Enter Abdulrazak Gurnah, this year’s Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, in this celestial constellation of great writers. The following is what I think about Gurnah based on reading his interview with today’s Reuter.

    Gurnah, born in Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) in 1948, went to England in the 1960s as a refugee fleeing from the political turmoil and social unrest of his native country. Then began his migrant’s song composed of multiple strands of his experience, thoughts, and feelings that became polyphonic acapella in variant notes and rhythms. Unlike many other laureates of prestigious literary awards or esteemed recognition, Gurnah is a champion of underdogs who were not expensively educated in private institutions and, above all, who were not born into the surroundings of English as mother tongue. Working at the places where his privileged literary peers would not think of, Gurnah wrote in English as Second Language as his Lingua Franca literary tool. The result is his enchantment of readers to a fantastic maze of his inner world. His narratives become Ariadne’s thread that guides his readers to the world that seems so unfamiliar yet oddly universal.

    Gurnah seems to be the kind of writer I sincerely respect and dare to emulate who have lived among ordinary people like a sun in evening declination with the soft but radiant scarlet hues covering the earth, reflecting its magnificent face in shining waters. I am delighted to confirm that you don’t have to be born into a culture that speaks English if you want to become a good English writer. It is not about the Perfect mastery of language but about articulating thoughts to become a great writer. Although the media emphasizes Gurnah’s being the second black African author to have won the award since Nigerian Wole Soyinka in 1986, I don’t think it’s about his race that draws attention to his books. His being a writer supersedes his race because writers are different kinds of the race with a unique eye to look at the world and show it to readers, standing together in the collegiality of human spirits.

  • blah, blah, blah and lord of the flies

    Greta Thunberg is an 18-year-old environmental activist who has risen to a child crusader against the corruption of the world, not for incorrigibly persistent unequal distribution of wealth within society and among nations, but for the blahs of the world leaders who irk her nerves for not listening to her pleas to save the earth. In all fairness and recognition of her endeavor to raise red herrings on environmental issues, I applaud her to the very echo. But why is it that I see in the face of Greta talking “Blah, Blah” the faces of the boys chanting “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies? Or is it that I am a seriously near-sighted adult whom Greta forthwith denounces as politically and culturally blinded conventionalist speaking the Blah only?

    It was interesting to read and watch Greta’s speech at Italy’s Youth4 Change, growing more prominent and bolder with a singular air of superiority. It bestowed upon her a right to mock the world leaders, including President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson, in their conference for environmental issues. Her English was flawlessly articulate, with accents that denote her fierceness of character and feistiness of personality. Indeed, such a high level of confidence is highly remarkable and undeniably recommendable. Still, there is a distinction between arrogance and confidence regarding the speaker’s manner of speech and demeanor. The subject brings me back to the wild Boys of the Lord of the Rings, in which the gentle-mannered protagonist Ralph is soon abdicated by the rebellious Jack, who provokes ids in the followers of Ralph to subvert the order and to rule the tribe. Greta’s rhapsody about youth as not being “blinded by realpolitik and the assumption of compromise” sounds like a youth manifesto from Peter Pan. He never gets old to build a society of the young only. But does Greta know youth is wasted on the young?

    Also, I wonder what Greta thinks about those at her age and younger underprivileged, mistreated, and malnourished worldwide if she is so concerned about the earth’s well-being, for we are the earthlings. Does her activist profession disavow acknowledging and addressing the humanitarian crisis because it is trivial compared to the lofty environmental ideal? Come to think of it; I have seen fewer youths making substantial movements toward eradicating hunger or preventing child abuse, including but not limited to sexual nature systematically worldwide. It comes to mind that people who use children for their political and social ideologies don’t regard such concerns as being worthy of being mobilized with the child drummer in the front. What is the difference between a child soldier recruited elsewhere in the world and a child activist under a supervision of a master adult activist?

    What I feel about Greta and her famous Blah address is probably no different from what Shakespeare must have supposed in Elizabethan England: “Woe to that land that’s governed by a child, tis much when scepters are in children’s hands, there comes the ruin, there begins confusion.” Maybe that is what William Golding envisions in his fictional island where children’s mutiny proved to be as catastrophic as those on the Bounty or even more. So that is my undiluted sentiment toward Greta, smiling, chanting “Blah, blah.”

  • Letter from the West

    Eight hundreds of suns and moons have passed since I was uprooted to Southern California from Northern New Jersey, and I have to say every day is still a new day on the frontier home in the Wild West. Cowboys, gunslingers, and drifters looking for chances and time for winning the Wheel of Fortune in life may have gone with the dust of wind. Still, I feel like a hardscrabble but resiliently brave and adventurous frontier woman I have seen in western TV dramas and movies with the central theme of Little House on the Prairie surrounding as a leitmotif for the story of My Life So Far in the Wild West.

    The great French writer and humanist George Sand once said that every place has place memories that influence the spirits of the site and people without them knowing it. Given this, the place memories of Southern California fill the domes of the spirits and palaces of the souls living in it with the characters endemic to the nature and shaped by the events artificers made based upon my empirical observations. People I have come across here are a curious mixture of friendliness and brusqueness added with a dose of saloon bravado and air of southern plantation riches under a high Californian sun.

    The charade of Californian Rhapsody continues thus: people reading in public, such as public transportation or coffeeshop, is as rare as finding Nemo in a vast ocean. In such an environment, I feel awkwardly vain to read in such places as if I were a showy blue-stocking, contrary to New York City, where readers are part of the landscape under the Manhattan skyline. It brings me back to my reading of Horace Greely’s experience of an overland journey from New York City to California. Greely, the famous 19th-century journalist, the editor of the now-extinct the New York Tribune and the rival presidential candidate of Ulysses Grant, also noticed the lack of intellectual cultivation in many Californians and thus called the attention of young single, educated woman from the East Coast to go west in a proliferation of civilization from the cultured East Coast.

    Part of me still longs for the convenience of city life in New York City, where people of all walks of life ride on the same bus and subway and eat at the same place. Nevertheless, what holds me to this immigrant land is its gorgeously untamed wild nature that whispers to my ear, “Tarry with me,” like a beautiful paramour. The wildflowers in the fields over the ridges are sweetness to the weary soul seeking a place for visual pleasure after being exposed to a miasma of an unpleasant office environment, even though I am still unaccustomed to the sight of palm trees with long unruly hair. Still, I like to think of myself as a 21st-century frontier woman living with an elderly ailing mother and a young tomcat in my care, trying to keep my foot on the ground and my eyes on the stars, to claim my happiness on a new land against all odds in this Wild West, Still and Ever.

  • the real logan’s world

    Since Oscar Wilde said a woman who reveals her age reveals all about her, I will not tell how old I am, but I am still far away from the Shakespearean age of the Old Man. If interested, hark thus. That is about the culture and tendency of the post 9/11 generation omnipresent in everyday life spheres from social media platforms to workplaces. Equipped with computer savviness with a flair for chic insouciance and minimalistic sentiment, this new generation has dominated all. So what’s the rap?

    The cause for such generational distance came in the figures of two young lawyers fresh out of law schools in my workplace. They were both in their late twenties – the post 9/11 generation – didn’t have any practical work knowledge, which could be understandable. Yet their work ethic and attitude were disgraceful because a lack of enthusiasm and willingness to blend in the environment was a sign of defiance of conformity and cooperation, which people mistake for a display of subservience or acquiescence in the surrender of the will. But, of course, diligence is not synonymous with servitude. I am not even talking about Stakhanovism, in which workers spend more time at their work than at home. But the new generation is an entirely new breed, a new type of people aversive to warmth and friendliness on account of personal space because goodwill is suddenly turned malice, goodness weakness nowadays. How about calling them, Les Enfants Terrible? Would the ancient Roman scribbler who wrote on a tablet that the kids in his time were all spoiled have felt the same way as I do?

    My sentiment toward the post 9/11 generation is, I daresay, dystopian, which pitchforks me into a scene in the movie “Logan’s Run.” In the film, everyone on their 30th birthday is executed under the euphemistic pretext of Renewal. It’s a cult of Youth synonymous with Beauty, and the human race means the everlasting beautiful Youth. Agism and lookism are principles of such utopia, conquering Racism, Sexism, and Classism. Women of the utopia use their Beauty to exert their prowess on their targeted subjects. Only young and beautiful rule the world, and the faces of the post 9/11 generation dissolve into the spectators of the Renewal ceremony in “Logan’s Run.”

    Nevertheless, who cares about what I feel about this new type of humankind that will soon dominate the entire generations in our time? Indeed, time is ephemeral, so is culture. Yet, the universality of reason and sentiment common (I hope) in all human creatures has remained since time immemorial. Will the world now turn into the Real Logan’s World in the future? Or maybe am I too serious about it? Suddenly Madonna’s “Live to Tell” sings in my ears.

  • today’s world in my view – news from norway

    Politics comes in gray gravitas, and politicians look like seasoned actors with Tears for Fears singing in a mighty chorus of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Simply saying, a majority of elected officials are charmless. But at least not Norway’s winning Labor Party leader Jonas Gahr Stoere about whom I read from a newspaper this morning because his background and perspectives feel like, as it were, a fresh cool mint breath out of stuffy, dull air.

    In the last two decades, the world has turned conservative and jingoistic in many countries due to economic and social changes. The liberals seem to clamor for ideological agendas that do not gain universal support without a structural plan concerning livelihood from healthcare to job security and social security benefits. For example, in the States, it’s all about ideology politics, not constructive reformations that attempt to narrow a wide gap of class stratification. In addition, American liberals are not closer to European liberals any more than the fashionably favorable appellation for free-thinking politicians. That said, Stoere, despite his being mega-rich with old money, has a clear vision for the universal welfare of Norwegians without antagonizing people of different classes. Stoere saw the vast difference of living qualities between the rich and the poor in France during his study at Science Po in Paris in the 80s and vowed to prevent it from existing in Norway. He also reassures that only the top 20 percent of the high-income individuals will see their taxes increased. Contrary to the vehement subjective political agendas vilifying the other with scarlet letters as an enemy of people prevalent in the States and elsewhere in the world, Stoere includes all strata with an ideal vision to match his practical campaign to distribute wealth among people evenly.

    Stoere is indeed undeniably rich himself with the wealth that will support at least three generations of his family. It is also true that not many politicians pinpoint another country’s quirks and make an example out of it for the betterment of their countries. Social reformation of narrowing a wide wealth gap has been a duty of politicians since the age of reason. Still, it never comes to realize without determination and intention to make it happen. As a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, I vote for Store for being refreshingly innovative and nobly aspirational.

  • the world in my eyes

    On one fine day, a tiny Bushman in Southern Africa comes upon an empty coke bottle thrown from the cockpit of an airplane to desert sand. Thinking it is a gift from the gods, the man sets out a journey to return it to them. Along the journey, the Bushman encounters a pastiche of humanity in a kaleidoscope of the events he comes upon till he reaches an edge of a high cliff mysteriously enveloped by the rings of clouds and throws the bottle into the deep, exclaiming, “The Gods Must Be Crazy!” As I see now, I am in the chorus with him on the top of the cliff overlooking the world.

    Nevermore than now have I witnessed the epic moments of history that appear to be atavistic in terms of nature, motive, and consequence. A convenient way of relating the human tragedies to the scourge of gods and God will only put me on a par with Pangloss, the ever-positive pious philosopher who thinks all is God’s will for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The Taliban chanting the name of Allah in their will, Christians taking pride in being a new chosen people, and other zealots of any religion all have had recourse to their deities and used their belief systems as weapons of dominance over others. From the Coronavirus pandemic that forever changed our ways of life to the collapse of democratic Afghanistan by the Taliban and the devastating effects of Hurricane Ida in Louisiana, I see a phantasmagorical display of people’s faces in sorrow and distress in my mind’s theater.

    Following the news about the current situations of Afghanistan and its people links me to the Trojan War, which lasted about ten years with the Greek allied powers destroying Troy in the end. From the burning city of Troy comes Aeneas, a royal warrior who escapes the mayhem with his family, carrying his elderly father on his back, holding his little son’s hand besides. That image is always particularly heartfelt because of the Trojan hero’s humanness, unlike his more glamorous Greek victors. What happened in the past happens now and will always, such as the images of parents passing babies to soldiers across the sharp razor wire two young, Afghans falling from a plane climbing high in the sky, and the lifeless bodies of the young and the old, women and men strewn over the dusty ground outside the airport in the aftermath of suicide bombing.

    Back in the States, Hurricane Ida ravaged Louisiana, leaving thousands of people stranded, homeless without power (for about a month from now), and sufficient supplies of sanitation, clothing, and food. They lost everything, and nothing is what they have now. I cannot erase the image of a woman from a news interview who said the hurricane took everything from her family, then breaking into tears. Then there is news about an elderly man viciously attacked by an alligator in a flood presumed dead while his wife took a little boat to get help outside their flooded isolated community. Would the man have been swept away by the rapid stream of the flood? Would the alligator that had attacked the man have returned to him for more? Or would the man knowing or believing that was his end have let himself dissipated into the murky waters?

    Is this the same kind of significant feeling of epic moments I am experiencing as what George Orwell should have felt when witnessing the death of a Burmese condemned man on his way to the gallows, the carnage of WWII, and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War? Orwell posited that one of the reasons he wrote was to record historical moments he was living with his own perspectives and feelings, not necessarily popular or compromising. My intention to write this essay is similar to Orwell’s but more with sheer egotism of getting the heartfelt sorrow off my chest and tears away from my eyes. But I am not so sure if that proves effective with the images still vivid in my mind.