Kimberley's ISU: November 2009

Monday, November 23, 2009

Personal Reflection

By reading 'The Song of Kahunsha' and using it for my independant study novel. It has helped me further my insights in Human Condition because the ways in which Irani writes about Anand. I can not believe that there are people out in this world who are so cold hearted they also do similar things. “You think he was born like this? Dabba was a normal man. He was a waiter in an Irani restaurant. One day a taxiwala rammed into him. Dabba lost both his legs. Till today he says the menu out loud to pass the time” “ Chamdi is about to ask how Dabba lost his arms too, but realizes he has some idea of how that happened” (175) Dabba disobeyed so Anand showed him that he would never get stolen from again but cutting off his arms. Just the thought of having someone be able to even think of doing that to someone sickens me. It made me realize that in this world, if you are poorer than someone and lower ranking they will probably not help you when you need it or are asking for it.
I have grown as a reader with this novel by reading the content and then rereading it over at a later date so i can understand things that perhaps i missed the first time reading, incorporating what i have read again adding it to my responses. The Song of Kahunsha made me make connections with the world around me as well as to myself and other books which i have read with similar plots. You begin to realize after reading a novel such as this one that the world can be a scary place. Beautiful most of the time, but when things take an unexpected change and you are unsure of the outcome and perhaps circumstances you become terrified.
This Independant Study has made me realize with myself and my learning abilities that when i find a novel or essay that is of to my interest i will research it, even if not necessary and i wonder to find out my rhetorical questions which i come up with throughout the novel that take extra research and study to understand.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Reading Response #2

For a 10 year old boy Chamdi is very connected with the world that he has within the orphanage. He knows what he wants and what belongs with him. The handkerchief which Mrs. Sadiq gives to Chamdi he wears with pride and knows the importance of it. When leaving the Orphanage he already understands that he can not go back no matter what happens. He has run away, wanting to start a fresh new life with hopefully his parents. Most 10 year old boys in Canada probably dont really realize that there are people out there that have a home and still decide to run away like Chamdi. Today's children are too connected with technology to go out in the world and survive. They are dependant on others doing things for them. If a 10 year old was to run away from home, they would probably leave for a couple hours and then return when they are hungry. Not fending for themselves but always relying on other people to be there for them. Children without technology and in Chamdi's case before technology was even inventd would be more in touch with the world and know how to survive. The Song of Kahunsha made me realize that everyone in todays society is to electronically connected and people dont enjoy the things the pioneers and early settlers did. Chamdi has begun teaching himself everything that he needs to know in order to survive. Ten year olds in our generation relay on other people to teach even common knowledge to them.

Reading Response # 3

"This would never happen in Kahunsha" (Irani, Kahunsha) Chamdi continually talks about this town called Kahunsha. Whenever he is in some kind of trouble or is scared he thinks about this lovely place. Kahunsha is peaceful and carefree. Chamdi enjoys it. He blocks out of everything else when he goes here. This reminded me of the novel Lucas by Kevin Brooks. When Maggie goes down to the beach and isn't worried about what trouble Lucas is up to. Chamdi is the same, when he is in his place of zen he is at peace. Not wanting to think about anything else but the happiness that this town brings to him. He first imagined the town of Kahunsha back when he was at the orphanage. When Mrs. Sadiq would not answer his questions about his parents he would send his head to this town imagining that they were there with him living in an adequate home. Big enough for their enitire FAMILY.

g. Influences in The Song of Kahunsha

It is within a good writer’s power to bring to life what everyone has seen but no one has observed, and Anosh Irani is good. Extremes of social inquality and poverty are a sad and visible fact of urban life, and more so in the megapolis of Bombay. The Song of Kahunsha is a painful experience, and one that is guaranteed to refresh the conscience which has become inured to the plight of children forced to live and beg on the street.
UNICEF estimates that India has 11 million street children, the largest in the world. They are part of organized gangs, they beg and perform, clean trains, pick pockets, steal, or peddle drugs. They sell flowers or other small goods, work as ragpickers, at tea stalls, as porters, hawkers, for as long as 10 to 12 hours daily. There are ways to help them.

http://anocturne.wordpress.com/2007/02/02/the-song-of-kahunsha/

f. characteristics, themes, motifs in Canadian Literature

Motifs and Patterns

Some commentators have interpreted literary indirectness politically and psychologically, finding in it a sign of national insecurity and a group feeling of inferiority. Others argue that indirectness is a healthy demonstration of the culture's ability to adapt an inherited tongue to its own purposes. Although the national character is not always the subject of literature, the culture's social attitudes and values can be seen in the language and forms it uses.

Several specific narrative patterns recur in Canadian writing (1) a community walls itself off from the wilderness (the "garrison mentality"); (2) a person leaves the homeland, adjusts to the new world, then finds the "homeland" to be "alien"; (3) a person born in Canada feels like a permanent stranger in his or her own home; (4) people arrive in the new home only to find that they are excluded from power; (5) a person attempts to recover from the past the secret or suppressed life of a previous generation; (6) a woman struggles to come to terms with her own creativity and the inhibitions of her cultural upbringing (often told as conflict between colony and empire); (7) an apparently passive observer, surrounded by articulate tricksters and raconteurs, turns out to be able to tell both their story and his own, often ironically; (8) an adventurer turns failure into a form of grace; (9) a child grows up to inherit a world of promise, or a world of loss, or usually both at once; (10) a subjective historian meditates on place and memory; (11) a character celebrates space and wilderness, usually after a struggle to learn to accept that the wilderness provides spiritual therapy only on its own terms.

To epitomize the character of their society, many writers have portrayed historical figures, such as Samuel HEARNE, Louis RIEL, Susanna Moodie, Sir John A. MACDONALD, Emily CARR and William Lyon MACKENZIE, each possessing a vision, but still an ordinary, less than heroic, frail human being.

Settings often possess a symbolic dimension. Catholic Québec recurrently figures as a land of mystery, attractive but enthralling and morally dangerous; Ontario as an enigmatic blend of moral uprightness and moral evasiveness; Atlantic Canada as a repository of old values; the North as a land of vision; the Prairies as a land of isolation and acquisition; and the West Coast as a dream of the future in which people often mistakenly believe. Europe often appears as the home of refinement and discrimination, the US as a land of crass achievement and tangible success, and Africa as the embodiment of all that seems "other" to Protestant rationalism. The land itself is recurrently associated with power, whether as property, region, a hostile force, the site of communication, a godly gift, the contested territory of competing cultural claims, the border, or the ecological medium in which human life integrates with all other living beings in Nature.

Although most Canadians live in cities, until recently writers used rural and small-town settings more frequently than urban ones, and they often ignored problems of class, race and poverty. From early on, however, writers such as Frances BROOKE, Susanna MOODIE, Sara Jeannette DUNCAN and Nellie MCCLUNG have been important analysts of Canadian political life. Often they sharply pointed out social divisions within Canada that male adventure writers ignored or underplayed.

"Regional" writing also conveyed political stances, for by rejecting a single definition of "Canada," it asserted the viability of a nation with a plural character (see REGIONALISM IN LITERATURE). Increasingly, moreover, native writers and writers who draw on ethnic backgrounds other than western European ones have examined the social limitations and political opportunities of Canadian pluralism. Among such writers are Beatrice Culleton, Tomson HIGHWAY, Rohinton MISTRY, Neil BISSOONDATH, Smaro Kamboureli, Joy KOGAWA and Paul Yee (see ETHNIC LITERATURE).

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0004709

e. cultural, historical, geological context of the text

EG Did you go to school in Bombay? Did you experience the kind of disdain the narrator did in The Cripple and his Talismans and the kind of inability to fit in? Could you tell us about your background?

AI Yes, I was schooled in Bombay. The restaurant Lucky Moon, I think it's mentioned in the book, was where we'd hang out all the time, and I did have a group of friends who were the class "toughies." They had a wonderful sense of humor, and they had mastered sarcasm and had a great sense of timing. What I brought to it was a sense of the absurd. From a very young age, I learned how to laugh at the darkest of human experiences. I have no idea why, but it came very naturally to me.

It's not that I didn't fit in, but I carried a certain amount of cynicism with me all through my education. Even though I did really well in school, I didn't get the point. I had no desire to amount to anything--no doctor, no engineer, nothing. Instead, I made sure I did well in my exams just so that I could say it was meaningless. I'm not saying education is meaningless. I'm saying that from a very early age I was searching for something. When I look back now, I guess it was to find my purpose--to write. But my schooling did not teach me how to write. The streets of Bombay did.

http://www.eclectica.org/v10n3/glixman_irani.html

d. interviews with the Anosh Irani

Living in Canada, do the objects you see there hold your past from India? What is it like to live and become a well-known writer in a country so different than that of your birth?

AI I don't know if objects have that effect on me, but the landscape of a place certainly does. When I see coconut trees, or railway tracks, or bougainvillea, or brothels (run-down ones), I think of Bombay. And I rarely see any of the above in Canada, except for the railway tracks. I'm sure there are brothels, but I haven't visited any.

When I first moved here, it was the absence of things that made it unbearable for me. The absence of heat, of crowds, of spicy food, of car horns, Hindi music, and so on. Absence can cut through you much harder than objects can.

I feel very lucky that my novels and plays have been so well received in Canada. I'm grateful that audiences have a hunger for my stories even though they are set in a landscape that is alien to most Canadians. Perhaps that's been an advantage.

EG Have you considered writing stories that take place in Canada?

AI I've considered it, but that's as far as I've gone.

http://www.eclectica.org/v10n3/glixman_irani.html

c. essays about the novel

Anosh Irani’s Book Notes essay for his novel, The Song of Kahunsha:

In his novel Ignorance, Milan Kundera writes, “If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time ‘regardless whether we want to hear it.’” Kundera quotes the German composer Schoenberg here, who states that “Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless.” Schoenberg is resigned to the fact that radio forces music down our throats irrespective of whether we have the ability to digest it, understand it.

There is no need to elaborate on the musical garbage that reaches our ears in elevators, cafes, dentists’ chairs, and so on. When music is fed to us, it tastes like hospital food, and all of us have our sick bowls nearby in case we need to retch. But in spite of all this, there is something to be said about that chance encounter, that moment when one is not looking for music, when one is not looking for anything at all.

I was in a taxi in North Vancouver, on a dreary rainy night about eight years ago. Being a recent immigrant, my mind was an attic for the mundane: phone bills, health insurance, student loans, social insurance number. Through the speakers, a voice came on. It grabbed me like Death itself, but a life-giving death, a death unsure of its own function. When the song got over, I asked the Persian taxi driver who the singer was. “Leo-nard Co-hen,” came the answer. His words and music ripped apart my phone bills and made me care even less about health insurance. I was not expecting Cohen, but he came anyway, unannounced, and took charge with his haunting, inspiring work.

That’s what the city of Bombay does to me as well. It haunts, it inspires, it takes charge. I have always thought of Bombay as a cross between a nightingale and a vulture: Beauty and Death. And the songs that I have chosen, in some way, have that same quality. Most of these songs are in a language that you might not understand, but it does not matter because they will make your soul soar, they will make you feel like you are the last man or woman on earth.

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/Lamhe

b. book reviews of the selected novel

The novel shocks and educates us about the degraded life of children on the streets of Bombay, and the fantasy of Kahunsha demonstrates the power of imagination in the face of adversity. [A] compelling work recalling Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner…"
— LIBRARY JOURNAL

"Anosh Irani… reveal[s] the tender heart of human need in his devastating yet surprisingly gentle novel…"
— MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

"Irani is a gifted storyteller, and [The Song of Kahunsha], Dickensian in its plot and its vivid prose, is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking."
— BOOKLIST

"[Irani's] melodies in The Song of Kahunsha are at once bright and melancholic, his characters and senses as sharp as tusks and his plot as lithe as children running."
— THE NATIONAL POST

"[Irani] rewrites Dickens’ Oliver Twist with his native Bombay replacing nineteenth-century London…. Pure storytelling."
— TORONTO STAR

“Evocative and colourful."
— THE LONDON FREE PRESS

"A gripping and compassionate novel that will resonate long after readers have completed it...calls to mind Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance."
— WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

“Beautiful.... [It] vindicates the fragile but triumphant scope of childhood imagination with touching grace."
— THE GLOBE AND MAIL

"[Chamdi’s] relentless struggle to survive makes him one of this year’s most unforgettable heroes."
— EDMONTON JOURNAL

"With understated skill, Anosh Irani tells such a darkly enchanting story of the abandoned children of Bombay that I felt swept away by their fate and entangled in the world's too believable cruelty towards the innocent. Irani's shocking tale unfolds with a macabre and terrifying beauty that is both heartbreaking and compelling."
— WAYSON CHOY, author of All That Matters and The Jade Peony

http://www.anoshirani.com/reviews_kahunsha.html

a. biographical information about author

Irani’s move here has led to literary success; hIrani’s move here has led to literary success; he is arguably one of Vancouver’s hottest young writers. At twenty-nine, he has already had one play produced professionally, has another one in the works, and his first novel, The Cripple and His Talismans (Raincoast Books, $29.95) has just been published. This impressive debut, a beautifully written modern-day fable about a man who loses an arm and goes on a quest to find it, is a book that is sure to garner Irani plenty of attention.He is arguably one of Vancouver’s hottest young writers. At twenty-nine, he has already had one play produced professionally, has another one in the works, and his first novel, The Cripple and His Talismans (Raincoast Books, $29.95) has just been published.

Growing up, he never considered himself a writer, though he says, “I come from a long line of storytellers, none of whom are writers, but it’s just that we used to get drunk on family occasions and spread vicious lies about the people who weren’t there. That’s the purest form of storytelling; you can’t get any better than that.”

He was more interested in soccer and cricket than literature and writing in high school, but after graduating, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life.

He studied Creative Writing and Literature at Capilano College in North Vancouver for a year, and then enrolled in UBC’s Creative Writing department, a prestigious writing workshop programme that has helped produced many notable writers over the past several years, including Nancy Lee, Steven Galloway, and Zsuzsi Gartner.

He also landed a job at the Arts Club Theatre as Artistic Director Bill Millerd’s assistant. When Irani showed Millerd one of his short stories, “Bullet Number One,” Millerd told Irani to adapt it into a play. That play, The Matka King, premiered at the Arts Club last fall.

“I’ve been fortunate to meet people who have believed in my writing and have supported me, because there is no way you can do it alone. You can write a great play but if no one believes in your writing or no one is interested in taking a risk… My work is a bit risky in the sense that they are stories that really have not been told. They’re set in Bombay, and there’s not too many plays that are set in Bombay.”

http://www.joewiebe.com/books/anosh_irani.htm


						Anosh Irani was born and brought up in Bombay, India. He moved to Vancouver in 1998. His first novel, The Cripple and His Talismans, was published by Raincoast Books in 2004, in the U.S and Germany in 2005, and China in 2007. His second novel, The Song of Kahunsha, was published in 2006 by Doubleday Canada. It was chosen for CBC Radio’s “Canada Reads” in 2007. Rights have been sold to the US, Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Israel, Brazil, and Portugal. His first play, The Matka King, premiered at the Arts Club Theatre Company, Vancouver, in October 2003. His next play, Bombay Black, was produced in January 2006 by Cahoots Theatre Projects and was the winner of 4 Dora Mavor Moore Awards including for Outstanding New Play. He is working on a new play, My Granny the Goldfish, for Canadian Stage http://www.anoshirani.com/author.html

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Welcome Posting

Welcome to my Blog

The purpose of this blog is to educate the reader on how Canadian Literatue is important in todays society. You will learn about the Canadian Author Anosh Irani and how he has contributed to literature with his publishing of many great novels, such as The Song of Kahunsha which was on the Canada Reads list in 2007 and The Cripple and His Talismans.