The Place, Origin and End of My Teaching

 

Jacques Lacan

So far as my place is concerned, things go back to the year 1953. At that time, in psychoanalysis in France, we were in what might be called a moment of crisis. There was talk of setting up an institutional mechanism to settle the future status of psychoanalysts. All accompanied by big election promises. If you go along with Mr So-and-so, we were told, the status of psychoanalysts will quickly be granted all sorts of official sanctions and blessings — especially medical sanctions and blessings,

As is the rule with promises of this kind, nothing came of them. And yet something was set up as a result. It so happened that this change did not suit everyone, for extremely contingent reasons. So long as things had not been settled, there could be — were — frictions, what we call conflicts.

In the midst of this commotion, I found myself, along with a number of others, on a raft. For ten years, we lived on, well, on whatever came to hand. We weren’t completely without resources, weren’t completely down and out. And in the midst of all that, it so happened that what I had to say about psychoanalysis began to have a certain import.

These are not things that happen all by themselves. You can talk about psychoanalysis just like that, bah!, and it is very easy to verify that people do talk about it like that. It is not quite so easy to talk about it every week, making it a rule never to say the same thing twice, and not to say what is already familiar, even though you know that what is already familiar is not exactly unessential. But when what is already familiar seems to you to leave a lot to be desired, seems to you to be based on a false premise, then it has very different repercussions.

Everyone thinks they have an adequate idea of what psychoanalysis is. The unconscious . . . well. . . it’s the unconscious.’ Nowadays, everyone knows there is such a thing as an unconscious. There are no more problems, no more objections, no more obstacles. But what is this unconscious? We’ve always known about the unconscious. Of course there are lots of things that are unconscious, and of course everyone has been talking about them for a long time in philosophy. But in psychoanalysis, the unconscious is an unconscious that thinks hard. It’s crazy, what can be dreamed up in that unconscious. Thoughts, they say, Just a minute, just a minute. ‘If they are thoughts, it can’t be unconscious. The moment the unconscious begins to think, it thinks that it’s thinking. Thought is transparent to itself; you can’t think without knowing you are thinking.’

Of course, that objection no longer carries any weight at all. Not that anyone has any real idea of what is refutable about it. It seems refutable, but it is irrefutable. And that is precisely what the unconscious is. It’s a fact, a new fact. We have to begin to think up something that can explain it, can explain why there are such things as unconscious thoughts. It’s not self-evident.

No one has in fact got down to doing that, and yet it is an eminently philosophical question.

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I will tell you from the outset that that is not how I set about it. It so happens that the way I did set about it easily refutes that objection, but it is no longer really an objection because everyone now is absolutely convinced on that point.

Well then, the unconscious has been accepted, but there again we think that a lot of other things have been accepted – pre-packaged and just as they come — and the outcome is that everyone thinks they know what psychoanalysis is, apart from psychoanalysts, and that really is worrying. They are the only ones not to know. It’s not only that they do not know; up to a point, that is quite reassuring. If they thought they knew straightaway, just like that, matters would be serious and there would be no more psychoanalysis at all. Ultimately, everyone is in agreement. Psychoanalysis? The matter is closed. But it can’t be for psychoanalysts. And this is where things begin to get interesting. There are two ways of proceeding in such cases.

The first is to try to be as with it as possible, and to call it into question. An operation, an experience, a technique about which the technicians are forced to admit that they have nothing to say when it comes to what is most central, most essential — now, that would be something to see, wouldn’t it! That might stir up a lot of sympathy because there are, after all, a lot of things to do with our common fate that are like that, and they are precisely the things psychoanalysis is interested in. The only problem is that, well, psychoanalysts have, as fate would have it, always adopted the opposite attitude.

They do not say that they know in so many words, but they imply that they do. cWe know a bit about it, but let’s keep quiet about that. Let’s keep it between ourselves.’ We enter this field of knowledge by way of a unique experience that consists, quite simply, in being psychoanalysed. After that, you can talk. Being able to talk does not mean that you do talk. You could. You could if you wanted to, and you would want to if you were talking to people like us, people who are in the know, but what’s the point? And so we remain silent with those who do know and with those who don’t know, because those who don’t know can’t know. After all, it is a tenable position. They adopt it, so that proves it’s tenable. Even so, it’s not to everyone’s liking. And that means that, somewhere, the psychoanalyst has a weak spot, you know. A very big weak spot.

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What I have said so far may seem comical to you, but these are not weaknesses. It is coherent. Only, there is something that makes the analyst change his attitude, and that is where it begins to become incoherent. The psychoanalyst knows perfectly well that he has to be careful not to surrender to his temptation, to his penchant, and in his day-to-day practice he does watch his step. Psychoanalysis in the collective sense, on the other hand, or psychoanalysts, when there’s a crowd of them, a host of them, want it to be known that they are there for the good of all. They arc very careful, however, not to move straight from this ‘good of all’ to the good [bien] of the individual, of a particular patient, because experience has taught them that wishing people well [bien] all too often brings about the opposite effect. It is rather in their dealings with the outside world that psychoanalysts become close to being real propagandists.

No, insofar as they are represented as a profession, psychoanalysts absolutely want to be on the right side, on the winning side. And so, in order to prove that they are, they have to demonstrate that what they do, what they say, has already been found somewhere, that it has already been said, that it is something you come across. When you come to the same crossroads in other sciences, you say something similar: namely, that it’s not all that new, that you’d already thought of it.

And so we relate this unconscious to old rumours, and erase the line that would allow us to see that the Freudian unconscious has absolutely nothing to do with what was called the ‘unconscious’ before Freud. The word had been used, but it is not the fact that the unconscious is unconscious that is characteristic of it. The unconscious is not a negative characteristic. There are lots of thing in my body of which I am not conscious, and that are absolutely not part of the Freudian unconscious. That the body takes an interest in it from time to time is not why the unconscious workings of the body are at stake in the Freudian unconscious.

I give you this example because 1 do not want to go too far. Let me simply add that they even go so far as to say that the sexuality they talk about is the same thing that biologists talk about. Absolutely not. That’s sales patter [boniment]. Ever since Freud, the psychoanalytic crew have been propagandizing in a style that the word boniment captures very well. You have the good [1e bon] and then you have the wishing them well [le bien] that I was telling you about just now. This really has become second nature for psychoanalysts. When they arc amongst themselves, the issues that are really at stake, that really bother them and that can even lead to serious conflicts between them, are issues for those who know. But when they are talking to people who do not know, they tell them things that are intended to be a way in, an easy way in. It’s standard practice, part of the psychoanalytic style.
It’s a tenable position. It is not at all within the field of what we can call the coherent, but, after all, we know a lot of things in the world that survive on that basis. It is part of what has always been done in a certain register, and it is not for nothing that I have described it as ‘propaganda’. This term has very specific origins in history and in the sociological structure. It is Propaganda fidei. It’s the name of a building somewhere in Rome where anyone can come and go. So, that’s what they do, and that’s what they have always done. The question is whether or not it is tenable where psychoanalysis is concerned.

Is psychoanalysis purely and simply a therapy, a drug, a plaster, a magical cure or indeed something that can ever be described as a cure? At first sight, why not? The only problem is that is certainly not what psychoanalysis is. We first have to admit that, if that is what it was, we would really have to ask why we force ourselves to put it on, because, of all plasters, this is one of the most fastidious to have to put up with. Despite that, if people do commit themselves to this hellish business of coming to see a guy three times a week for years, it must be because it is of some interest in itself. Using words you do not understand, such as ‘transference’, does not explain why it lasts.

We are just outside the door. So 1 really do have to begin at the beginning if I’m not to talk more sales patter or pretend I thought you knew something about psychoanalysis. Nothing 1 am saying here is new. Not only is it not new, it’s staring you in the face. Everyone quickly notices that everything that is said about psychoanalysis by way of explanation ad usum publicum is sales patter. No one can be in any doubt about that because, after a while, you can recognize sales patter when you hear it.

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I’m not a Hollywood Star

Henri Alleg

from: The Algerian Memoirs

And , since our house was one of the few with a working telephone—the other lines had been cut for lack of payment—people would drop by often to make a call. Children rang the doorbell to bring us plates of festival cakes from their parents. We noticed that some only came after nightfall, as if they wanted to make sure that no one thought they were becoming too close to us…

A minor incident ruffled this calm. Jean had returned from Ivanovo and was living with us after a stay with his grandmother in Avignon. Andre had stayed in the Soviet Union and was waiting to start university.  Jean was going on eleven and was used playing with the children in the neighbourhood until one day he came home disgusted: “Do you know what Mohamed said to me? He said he spits on Europeans, Jews and Communists! So what the hell am I doing here.”

We explained to him that Mohamed was only repeating things he had picked up here and there but that the majority of Algerians did not think like that and that all this would disappear in the new Algeria.

But I was surprised. Never in all the years of my militant activity or during my stay in prison among Algerians had I been witness to a racist insult or attack and even less had I been the target of it. The abusive language of the child was a reminder that the old prejudices, fed and aggravated by the colonial system, had not disappeared. Such an attitude would develop like weeds, favoured by strained circumstances, and it needed to be checked.

From Tunis, the GPRA had proclaimed that the ‘revolution’—this term was increasingly taking the place of the more apt ‘national liberation war’—was intended to be very deeply democratic and that all those who chose Algeria as their country would find a place in it, regardless of origin or beliefs. Once the country had been liberated, measures would be taken to fulfil these promises.

The new policy was confirmed in the resolutions adopted in Tripoli by the highest FLN authority and, after Independence, by the measures legalizing the appropriation of the land of wealthy landowners and of vacant property, the organization of self-managed farming and industrial concerns, the display of sympathy for all liberation movements throughout the world, along with the hospitality extended to militants from Africa, Europe or Latin America, forced to flee their countries and relations of friendship and cooperation established with Socialist states. Rallies of hundreds of thousands of people celebrating the anniversary of the insurrection of November 1954, on May Day, or on the occasion of visits by Fidel Castro, Gamal Abdul Nasser and Zhou Enlai, demonstrated popular support for a political agenda that elevated Algiers to the rank of the capital of the progressive, revolutionary Third Front.

I was continually bombarded by visitors from round the world—journalists asking for interviews and representatives of liberation movements and parties, curious to know our point of view on the current situation and the country’s future prospects. Many were from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria—countries that had cooperation agreements with Algeria. I noticed that, by and large, they focussed on the positive aspects that substantiated their confidence in the Socialist future of Algeria.

I received guests who, as I knew, were travelling with fake Algerian passports—it was an open secret—and came to ask help from independent Algeria for their own struggles for liberation. This was how I came to know, among others, Alvaro Cunhal, secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party, who escaped from Antonio de Oliviera Salazar’s prisons; Manolis Glezos, hero of the Greek resistance who, at the height of the Nazi terror, raised a Greek flag over Parthenon; Santiago Carillo, secretary of the Spanish Communist Party; Enrique Lister, former general of Spanish Republican Army who had to flee Franco’s Spain; and Michael Harmel and Dr. Yusuf M. Daddoo, members of the African National Congress and of the South African Communist Party.

I met Che Guevara who stayed in Algiers for several weeks. One evening, he came to see us at the paper and lingered very late into night, talking to the spellbound young editorial staff. They listened to him with emotion and extreme attention as if he embodied the Cuban Revolution itself and was going to divulge the secrets behind his victory. But he was neither a prophet nor a lesson giver. He answered our questions simply and mostly asked a lot of questions himself. From time to time, he would take a small inhaler out of his pocket and spray a dose into his mouth to relieve his asthma. When he was about to leave us, one of the staff asked him to sign his photograph. He pushed him aside curtly: “I’m not a Hollywood star. I don’t give autographs.”I often think of this reply when I see tens of millions of young people round the world avid for a different future displaying his image on posters and t-shirts. I wonder what he would have thought, knowing how adamantly opposed he was to personality cult.

We all wondered what he was doing in Algiers and what he expected from the FLN. But the question was taboo and we did not ask him, knowing he would not answer. We learnt, but only much later, that Algiers was but a stop on his way to the heart of Africa, in search of a region where the conditions were favourable for him to carry out his protest of creating a revolutionary guerrilla centre in the continent.

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Henri Alleg is a French-Algerian journalist and Director of Alger republicain newspaper. His work The Question (1958) turned public opinion in France against the war in Algeria.

Professor Morrie and Revolutionary Literature

Ashim ‘Kaka’ Chatterjee

Tuesdays with Morrie disturbed me. This book disturbed me a lot. The story of Professor Morrie Schwartz is distinctive. There is not much of action here. Not too much description of life’s experiences. Colourful characters do not clash with each other in order to create a dramatic situation.  What one encounters instead is death—in its full glory—and life arising out of death. Tuesdays with Morrie is a story of an old professor and his not-so-old student.

What kind of a man is Professor Morrie?  He teaches sociology at Brandies University. Not merely chhatra-dardi or chhatra vatsal—to brand him thus will be saying a lot less about his relationship to his pupils. Students are his life. Naturally his home, the restaurants near his university, the lawns  and nooks—all are sites for nurturing a peripatetic world of examined life with his students. His love of books and ideas is infectious. Love of life, even more.

He arrives at a class. A hall full of anxious young minds—waiting. But Morrie is silent. For 15 long minutes. First the students are bemused, mild jokes hover around, notes get exchanged, a certain uneasy restlessness pervades. Then there comes a moment of pin-drop silence. Hush. The professor begins. His subject of the day: the influence of silence in human relationships. Why do we get bothered by silence? Wherefore peace in utterance?  This is the way the man wins over his students, commands respect and love. He is not as dexterous as his more famous fictional rival in To Sir With Love nor as historically vexed as Coetzee’s Professor Lurie. But Morrie is not against life. Though he cannot manage his steps, he would dance. Not a good singer, he would be immersed in music.  Not a particularly skilful swimmer, he would love to go for a dip.

His student, who is narrating Morrie’s life, is bringing this world, a cosmos really, into being with utmost care and craft. The university life being over and done with, his students bring Morrie a brief-case, embossed with his name. They embrace—the teacher and his pupils.  And part silently.

In such a lively man’s life there arrives a terrible tempest. All in a flash. Morrie gets infected with Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS)—a motor neurone predicament. We all are familiar with Stephen Hawking and his encounters with this disease. Not much has been discovered yet about this condition and not much preventive or curative stuff is available yet. But death is imminent. Maximum duration of possible survival is 5 years. In Morrie’s case, it is 2. As Morrie comes out of the diagnostic centre, he notices the busy world going on with its daily activities. As the world refreshes, he withers.

Gradual, little, incremental changes are making him give up the small pleasures of life. He discovers in the morning that he can’t fix his car’s brakes—driving as an option is gone. Begins to trip as he walks and therefore requires a walking stick—end of independent walking days. In the locker room, in order to change his outfit, he needs manual help—end of privacy. Appears before his students one morning and announces that he might not finish his quota of coursework that particular semester and so they can opt for other courses or may drop out—end of his secret pride.

ALS, the writer tells us, in an evocative phrase, is like a burning candle. It will burn out and melt your nerves  into a waxen residue. The process starts from your legs and usually travels up. After a while, you cannot stand on your feet. And then sitting too becomes impossible. Finally, if you are still alive, a rubber tube will facilitate your breathing. And all this, when you are fully conscious of the rapid changes taking place in your body.

The professor takes a profound decision: that he will utilize fully the rest of his living days. There is no need to feel embarrassed about the inevitable.  Why not make his death a case for research? Is it not worth it to travel the boundaries of life and death and think afresh?  With this thought in mind, Morrie begins to disseminate himself to others, to everyone.  He gives a clarion call for meetings in his apartment in order to discuss the many variations on death threadbare. Not empathy or sentimentality he needs—but interviews, new connections, telephonic conversations— with an urge to examine life through death is what he would rather like to indulge in during the remaining period of his existence. He walks into TV studios. His student and now a well known newspaper columnist Mitch Albom had promised to keep in touch after they parted upon Mitch’s graduation from the university.  He could not fulfil his promise. The rat race got him. Mitch responds now—after 16 long years and they start a new research agenda, like the old times: meeting his professor every Tuesday and thrashing out issues of life in their many hues—Society, Rights, Guilt, Death, Fear, Aging, Greed, Marriage, Family, Forgiveness and so forth.  By that time Morrie is unable to conduct his everyday activities. Every Tuesday is downhill. But he is unfazed. He requests in a matter of fact fashion to a guest, “Can you please hold on to this bowl—need to take a piss?” Since he has no other option but to rely on others, he has no qualms or feelings of guilt.  When asked in a television show about what bothers him about this dependency, pat comes his reply: “Soon someone has to wipe off my arse.” The final Tuesday was reserved for ‘Adieu’—as a subject of discussion. Only a few words. Morrie breathes his last the Saturday next.

Discussion on death and human preoccupation with death is timeless really. Yet it is also historicised in specific circumstances. The sons and daughters of Amrita have not been able to transcend death fully.  The idea actually is not to transcend death but to encounter it, as part of our material living. The cells die. So do our bodies. Eventually. Those who think of decay and effacement in negative ways, will think of transcending death. They do not love life.

I remember my days in the 70s. I am not trying to personalize here, but actually trying to think through some moments. I remember Brihannal’s mother.  She was an illiterate mother whose son, Brihannal was absconding, underground, farar owing to state surveillance and atrocities. His mother came to ask me to get back her son. Her son was not into any unethical work—why was she so troubled then? “Baba, my son will die,” she said. I replied, “Yes, your son may die in this warfare. Take him back. But promise me that he will never die. Until the sun and moon and stars remain in the firmament, your son shall live.” I gave her three books to read that day—about those some other day. I do not yet know what that mother understood. Nor was I trying to act the teacher. It was an exchange. She left on her own, without her son. Was she demoralised? Was she proud?

Morrie’s book is a best-seller  So, it may be considered a popular read. Not deep enough. But I don’t know, I really don’t—why it reminded me of The Old Man and the Sea. Does a revolutionary have the right to feel good about such books?

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Ashim Chatterjee was a student leader of (CPI(ML). Chatterjee broke ranks with Charu Majumdar in 1971 after the failure of the attempts to build an armed movement in the Debra-Gopiballavbur area iand due to the opposition of CPI(ML) towards the liberation struggle of Bangladesh. He was imprisoned during 1972-78. Chatterjee formed the Bengal-Bihar-Orissa Border Regional Committee, CPI(ML)as a separate faction. . Later Chatterjee formed the Communist Revolutionary League of India.

The Pathan

A.K. Hangal, from Karachi Central Jail

He was unusually thin and frail for a Pathan. Perhaps he mistook me for a fellow Pathan because of my attire and he stopped near my cell to speak to me. I was in solitary confinement then because of some ‘crime’ committed by me according to jail rules.

“What have you been charged with?”

“Murder,” he replied.

“Whose murder?”

“Have you heard about the murders in Preedy Street, inside a gurdwara?”

Preedy Street was a neighbouring locality, near my home at Karachi. Was he the man who had…? I composed myself.

“Yes, yes, I know about the murders. So?” I asked.

“I committed those.”

It was shocking indeed to come to face to face with the man responsible for those murders in my locality. Yet I was aware of the other side of the whole situation. He must have been hired by the unscrupulous businessmen who wanted to occupy the shops who wanted to occupy the streets, after making the owners flee in panic during the tense communal atmosphere prevailing at that time. I wanted to make him see his position clearly.

“If that is the case, then I think you should not be in jail.”

“What do you mean?” he responded incredulously.

“First they incite you to murder people of the community,” I went on, “for the sake of their business, while they themselves sit and drink with members of the same community in their gymkhanas and clubs. You are a victim of their plot. But don’t worry, you will be released soon.”

“What makes you say that? I have killed innocent people. I will definitely be punished.”

“This is politics, my dear man. You are a tool in a bigger game.”

“But I have not understood you.” He looked genuinely puzzled.

I went on to explain to him in simple language the politics of the Congress, the League, the British and the Princely rulers.

He had never heard these things before.  But he seemed to understand and it made an impression on him. He became curious about my identity. “Who are you?” he asked. “What’s your name?”

“A K Hangal. I am a prisoner too, but a political prisoner.”

“What is your full name?”

“A K Hangal,” I repeated.

“What is A K? What does it mean?”

I was being evasive. “I don’t know what it means. My parents kept it that way.” To reveal my Hindu identity, I thought, would not be wise.

“You won’t mind if I tell you?” But then I said it anyway.

“Well, the fact is, I am a Hindu.”

“A Hindu? I don’t believe it.”

“I am a Hindu. My full name is Avtar Kishen Hangal.”

“But I have never met a Hindu like you.”

“I am a Hindu, but I am also a Communist.”

“What is a Commu-neest?”

“Have you seen processions of workers, with red flags, shouting slogans, demanding higher wages? They are Communists, and I am one of them. The Party we belong to is the Communist Party of Pakistan.”

“Oo…”, he exclaimed in his Pathani way, “now I get it.”

I gave him the address of the Party and trade union office in Karachi and asked him to go there after his release. They should explain more to him, I told him.

As he finished talking, the dreaded warder appeared in the passage, and we parted.

This happened on the second day of our imprisonment, when we were beaten by the same warder, and kept in solitary confinement.

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Anger, Us & HumanitiesUnderground

Prasanta Chakravarty

To the HUG blog, WordPress says: ‘you have reached the goal of 75 posts’. A year ago, one didn’t begin with any goal. It was an angry morning, I recall, needless perhaps, when this FB page was made in 10 minutes flat. Angry because of specific events at the place where I work, an anger also directed towards myself for being unable to really do anything, not being able to tell and get people together, for failing to think absurdly and yet strategically. Most of all, for opting out sometimes in difficult situations. That anger throbs in the ‘about’ section on the FB page still. There is also a hint of a purported ‘we’ there—a rather self-conscious ‘we’: those who care about and love art, literature and life in general. And a not-so-veiled reference to others those who do not care, and those who actually seek to demolish that zeal in conscious ways too.

A year later I wonder both about the anger and us. As I look closely and more empirically into the various categories under which individual essays have been slotted (and that slotting no doubt has a subjective bias) – I see 27 pieces under Political and 21 under Aesthetics. These are the largest ones, followed by Popular (17), Literature (15), History (13), Records (12) and Ethics (11). One can see that HUG, in a manner, wonders about the processes, inspirations and reception of literature and art. It is thoroughly invested in questions of form and symbols, no doubt. And yet, it will not let pass so easily and so liberally what goes by the name of such bunkum as world literature, local kitsch, communicative safe havens and so forth.

And yet I wonder about the robustness of the anger. The element of anger – so important for any oppositional position – how can that be without fanfare and yet be deeply involved, in order to gauge a problem or help come out of a predicament?  Or conversely: what about mitigating, whispering takes and positions that hark so sharply and so nonchalantly to positions of power and channels of prejudice that they are often taken aback simply by the hard hitting, expansive love of the writers for their subject matter? Authority is often most bewildered by largeness of heart; for it is precisely that which its worldview lacks and wishes to suppress. Such love channelizes anger, gives it a shape—does not seek to manage it or impart it with a meaningless woozy empathy. I notice that quite a few of our contributors have given rage such steely edges in their pieces and have actually spoken out against our antagonists despite never naming them explicitly. What I am trying to emphasize is the Underground element in our forum and its contours—for there is also an obverse problem: suppose (and I often feel that in the FB space at least) this becomes one more space for woolly liberal intervention?  It is a problem of being able to share a democratic space and yet mark its boundaries. One thing is certain among various uncertainties (a room for HUG, anyone?):  HUG  wishes to steer clear of such meaningless ‘rethinkings’ and ‘interferences.’ This is a place to relax and carouse too—not for busybodies to cast their nets. So, I am mildly alarmed when I see a surfeit of announcements about this music festival or that series on our education policy on FB . This salad-bowl approach compromises the Underground aspect of HUG, and tends to co-opt it into the so-called great synergy of humanities studies.

And this leads me to the other point about ‘we’ and ‘us’ here—the sharing members of this community. The FB blurb again evokes, I notice, an electronic cooperative group of sorts, that might—by its sheer sharedness of purpose and conviction in/about the humanities—be able to hold the antagonist at bay. Keep at tenterhooks at least. HUG, as a platform, a year or so ago, invoked the motley nature and the we-ness of art practitioners and critics alike, in a way that they come together in opposing the crassness of apolitical and the un-aesthetic being.  That motto I think still holds good – antagonistic politics and art cannot be exchanged for agonistic and humane worldviews. HUG baulks at such a prospect. But we had also talked about a reverse craftiness and insidiousness in the face of the marauding dogmatists of all hues – chiefly utilitarians and other rational sentimentalists now.  But perhaps this we-ness needs also to be self-reflexive, so as to steer clear of the easy hubris of righteousness. Do-gooding and instruction, this Horatian grammar school premise of ‘doing’ art – HUG shuns with all its might. So, while we mark and celebrate our collective platform, may we also not come into easy and premature consensus about our objectives. I wish that our we-ness remains forever unstable. May HUG retain a certain quirkiness and not get institutionalized into a purpose.

Prasanta Chakravarty  teaches English Literature at the University of Delhi.

Slightly Autobiographical: the 1960s on the Lower East Side

Rashidah Ismaili-Abu-Bakr

The Lower East Side of New York has little relation to the mid-upper (but not too far) East Side. In the early ’60s, when I was living there, it had a distinct “otherness” from the West Side. Most people refused to think in terms of geographic opposites: east-west. Therefore, one said “The Village” and knew it meant west of 5th Avenue not above 14th Street and not below Houston. This was/ is where the “artists” lived.

The Lower East Side of the ’60s was surrounded by a world of turmoil: rebellions, the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs, Kent State, assassinations, and a host of human rights violations in the United States and abroad. Sandwiched between the racial and class barriers of the West and South, Africans in America walked the streets of the Lower East Side with ease. Bouyed by a historically more progressive and diverse zone, Black men ventured freer with their white female partners, arm in arm along the cluttered streets with fruit and vegetable sellers from Eastern Europe (although few would be so bold as to stroll after dark along Hudson Street or go too far south, into Little Italy).

The rich ethnic mixture of the Lower East Side was built up by waves of immigrants from war-torn Europe who found themselves in limited confines of five-story tenements: walk-ups with hall toilets, bathtubs in the kitchen. Densely populated streets offered little space for their children or for merchants. A functional co-existence did, however, develop. Bakers were indoors all year round; rag collectors traveled the streets; and vendors and brave pedestrians shared the sidewalks. Although these immigrants constituted a lower class of marginal socio-economic status, they were for the most part in control of their profits. Those Africans who were living nearby (Harlem contained the bulk of the Black populace in the early 1900s) were the buyers. Even in this non-affluent area, class alignment with color was in full practice.

But in the ’60s there was war and chaos and, simultaneously, hope. Here, in cramped apartments and cold-water studios, the essence of life and the role of art and artists were discussed, fought over by Black and White artists with an air of seriousness. Poets read their works in bars, cafes, parks, and studios. They carried heavy bookbags of manuscripts. Dog-eared books lined their shelves. Perhaps encouraged by the questioning and revolt, believing change (for the better) was immanent, African American artists came together on the Lower East Side to begin the job of articulating the stories of their people.

The corner of East 10th Street and Avenue C is about a fifteen-minute walk from where, a century ago, the first African Theater stood. It is about the same distance from where the old city limits were drawn. Here the bodies of Africans, slave and freed workers, were dumped. But for me in the ’60s it was less than five minutes from the homes of my friends. In one building lived Joe Johnson (and Steve Cannon, I think–at least that’s where I met him) and Askia Muhammad Toure. My son used to play with Ishmael Reed’s daughter.

Not too far away, on East 5th or 7th, lived Archie Shepp. Our sons were around the same age, and Garth, his wife, and I bartered sittings. I would watch Pavel and Accra while she worked to augment the earnings of the budding giant of modern music. When Archie was on the road, we would cook big pots of food and let the boys play as we kept each other company with stories of our childhood and other experiences. In fact I read my earliest works to her, and Garth always seemed to recognize them as poetic.

On Friday nights Tom Dent would hold meetings of Umbra at his tiny apartment. There would always be a gallon of communal wine, ashtrays filled with cigarettes, and loud voices demanding to be heard over others. After a few hours of discussion of the latest poems and the contents of so-and-so’s novel, the girlfriends would start to arrive. I had to leave early because of my son, and I remember having the feeling of being left out. Somehow, it was after I got out on the street that I would notice that all of the women were White.

For me this was a painful time. I was separating from my husband for the first time. Alone, with a small boy, trying to complete graduate school and write, I felt very estranged at times from my ebon scribes and painters. They made it clear they were not interested in me because I was Black, African, and too ethnic; i.e., |not beautiful.’ Besides, I did not do drugs or drink. In fact, cigarette smoke made my eyes tear and my throat choke. To add fat to the fire, I had strong opinions and was extremely independent. These were the ’60s, and Black men were coming into their own. Black women had to understand their manly needs, walk ten paces behind, submit to male authority. We were not to question a man’s work, even if it were incorrect. We were to dress “African,” assume the persona of “The Motherland,” and raise little revolutionaries. Most of all, we were to remain unconditionally loyal to the Black man and never, under any circumstance, be seen in intimate association with a White man. This, of course, was in stark contrast to the behavior of almost all of the men I knew–excuse me, brothers–who had not a single “significant other” but several White women as lovers and wives. Calvin Hernton was to chronicle this dilemma in Sex and Race in America, and he was willing to tackle this sensitive issue in serious dialogue.

African-descended women tried to balance their creative urges with home and the personal demands of their men and families. A few found relative, and some permanent, happiness in the arms of White men. But these sisters paid the price. Some were denounced, others ignored. The pain we inflicted on each other as a negative continuation of racial pathology cost us all dearly.

Yet our art flourished.

Our children went to the movies on Saturday mornings, with “the other” children. They saw Danny Kaye in his many films, The Red Balloon, and the other safe, non-violent features of the time. Seldom, if ever, did they see a film in which they could see them-selves positively. In the sandboxes of Thompkins Square Park, the great sculptor Valerie Maynard ran a day progam of arts and crafts. My son was her pupil. She used to keep Daoud while I went to class; in exchange, we posed for her. She helped me see color by giving language to the many tones of brown of his skin.

We grown-ups had our playgrounds, too. Stanley’s Bar for the vanguard of the “new” arts movement. Slugs and Five Spot for the best in musical expression. I must say I didn’t understand the undercurrents, the subterranean movements to the men’s room or “outside.” My eyes and throat reacted too violently to smoke. My clothes and hair would soak up so much “atmosphere” they would take several days of airing and shampooing to cleanse. This further alienated me from “them.” I was still married–waiting waiting ….

When I tell younger artists who step over dog dung, garbage, and street laundry that things used to be different, they shake their heads. Sometimes memory can make things better (or worse) than they were. Surely it was dangerous. My apartment was frequently robbed. The fire escape provided easy access; doors, mere minor obstacles. But the fruits, were real as was their smell.

I’ll try to give a sense of my long, intense conversations with the renowned artist Tom Feelings, about what and where Black art should be, what it should do, about how those conversations helped shape and reinforce my work. Tom had made a conscious decision in the ’60s about what his art would look like and, most of all, for whom he intended it. Tom proved to me to be the most important trustee of “Black Art” since Langston Hughes. He taught me to have faith in the integrity of my inner voices, the characters who danced before my eyes, the integration of performance and cognition.

Tom was my best friend, my soul brother. (We used terms like that then.) I told him of my feelings of rejection and isolation in the midst of parties and other social events. He always understood and helped me understand the fear and difficulty Black men had when asked for something they had historically been denied–fraternity with sisters. (I might add that sisters had difficulties among themselves, too. We often cast a “cut-eye” at one another when “possibility” was in our midst.) But Tom always encouraged me. In fact, he was responsible for my coming to my first Umbra meeting and for my first publication in the now-defunct Liberator. He said that, in the final analysis, all that mattered was The Work. We have remained friends, sister/brother, for more than twenty-five years.

When I moved to The Village, Tom introduced me to Virginia Cox, a great artist to whom I also remain a faithful friend. So I say to young artists of African descent: Hold on to each other, and demand of yourselves the best. That is what has sustained the friendships I have with these artists.

As I have returned the Lower East Side–or Harlem–over the years, I am always saddened. To go there is to evoke the demise of my favorite bakery, Rattner’s, and of the movie house. The fruit stands are gone, as is the Essex Street market where I bought food stuffs and little delicacies, yams to knit. The shops are either gone or so greatly diminished that their impact is obliterated. I no longer hear the various Eastern European languages being spoken.

The “flower children” of the “counter-culture” took over certain streets. And the documentation of the privileged (i.e., privileged to) revolt has obfuscated much of “our” involvement in the events of the ’60s. Accounts of the impromptu be-ins of St. Mark’s Place abound. But where are we to read of the old building of rickety stairs and high ceilings that housed the Negro Ensemble Company and served as a home to Black playwrights, actors, directors, and arts administrators for years. People we take for granted now–Frances Foster, (the late) Adolph Caesar and Geoffrey Cambridge, Cicely Tyson, Esther Roue, and Rosaline Cash, along with director/producers Douglas Turner Ward and Robert Hooks–created the space and maintained it for over a decade. When the arts on the Lower East Side are reviewed, this most important institution is usually missing, or captured in a one- or two-sentence statement.

The New Federal Theater of A-B-C country mounted the works of Ed Bullins, LeRoi Jones, and Ron Milner. Just before its final curtain call, there was a retrospective of 20th-century Black theater in America with stellar casts and performances. Would that we had such now, for we have so many well-trained actors, playwrights, and directors, and theatergoers hungry for Black productions.

LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, my brother and “mentor,” created a genre of poetic performance that continued and updated the tradition of Langston Hughes. As a performer, he was/is as dynamic as his work. Baraka’s poetic discourse is often contextualized by the Beat movement. Yet while many of his peers–”progressive” White men and a few White women–sought to create new artistic paradigms, Baraka’s contributions remain centered in his African and American experience. The erasing or obscuring of African American input in the arts movement of the Lower East Side is historically inaccurate and ultimately dangerous.

Few people can say they created a theater of “alternative” perspective and sustained it for more than two decades. And of these few, Ellen Stewart remains alone on the throne. After starting her dynastic theater in her Lower East Side apartment in the 1960s, she moved La MaMa to the 4th Street complex we see today. There she has produced works by a list of Black and White playwrights that would form a virtual who’s who of American (and international) theater. From Dutchman and The Slave to Hair, this woman of incredible imagination, determination, strength, and fortitude has changed the face and structure of off-Broadway theater in America—indeed.

[Next & Final Instalment to Follow]

Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr is a writer of short stories, plays and poetry. She is widely anthologized and has four collections of poems. Her plays have been performed internationally as well as national. Ms. Ismaili has read her poetry solo and with musical instrumentation. She has been a writer in residence at many colleges and art centers in the country. Originally from West Africa, Dr. AbuBakr has taught French and English Speaking African Writers, Literature of the African Diaspora and has taught the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude literary movements. She was a part of the Black Arts Movement of the 60’s in New York where she resides.