Letter From Karachi
This Summer in London: Damien Hirst, WH Auden and Tahmima Anam
July in London was freezing cold. My instinct was to stay indoors and vegetate, but of course London has far too many interesting events. First I headed off to the Damien Hirst's exhibition 'Beyond Belief': its highlight was a spectacular diamond skull. Cast in platinum from a real skull, it was embedded with 8,601 flawless diamonds but retained the original (terribly white) teeth. On the forehead sat a diamond of some 56 carats. The skull glimmered and shimmered, mounted in a spotlit glass case, the solitary exhibit in a small dark room. Hirst's aim was to explore themes of human existence, particularly life and death. A row of paintings portrayed the birth of Hirst's child while another, dramatic series was developed from biopsy images of fearful cancers: they had an extraordinary beauty and were scattered with crushed glass and scalpel blades. And yes, I saw saw Hirst's dissected animals - a cow divided vertically and shark longitudinally, each half contained in glasses cases filled with formaldehyde. They were not gory or shocking but a celebration of nature, as was Hirst's array of fish skeletons of astonishing diversity, shape and curve. The first London Literature Festival also opened at the South Bank. There was a multi-media commemoration of WH Auden's centenary 'With Immortal Fire' against a backdrop of black-and-white photographs. There was a recording of Auden giving a reading. Poets Simon Armitage, James Fenton, Jo Shapcott and actor Kwame Kwei-Armah read out some of Auden's most famous works. While tenor John Mark Ainsley sang Auden's verses set to music by Benjamin Britten; and a short film visually interpreted Auden's 'Night Mail'. I also went to hear Pat Barker talk about her new novel Life Class set in World War I. I loved her 'Regeneration trilogy' and its seamless welding of fact and fiction to throw insights into historical characters such as pioneering World War I psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers and his patients Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Barker said her interest in that period dates back to her childhood, because her grandfather carried a visible bayonet wound but would not talk about it. Her novels aim to break that silence. In Life Class she explores the wartime role of the artist and the representation of war through art through a group of fictitious students who are at the Slade School of Art when war breaks out. Their art professor Henry Tonk, is a historical character, a trained surgeon who pioneered wartime reconstructive plastic surgery through his drawings (which he never exhibited) of pre- and post-operative patients. Closer to home the Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam has received much critical acclaim for her debut novel The Golden Age about the 1971 war. She is immensely articulate too. At the festival she was interviewed by Kamila whose novel Kartography deals with period too -- and so we trooped off en famille to hear them. Tahmima spoke of the challenges of creating a character with the emotional complexities and conflicts of her main protagonist Rehana Haque as a woman, a mother and an Urdu-speaking Bengali. She also read extracts from her book and said that it began as a doctoral thesis, because she had spent many years abroad, heard stories about 1971 and had felt a great need to rediscover her roots and her history for herself. That thesis became a vehicle for her fiction. The novel now sits on my bookshelf and I shall read it very soon. Meanwhile at the South Bank's Hayward Gallery, the title work 'Blind Light' in Anthony Gormley's exhibition, was a glowing installation, a large space with a wet floor, contained by transparent white glass and filled with thick white vapour. Groups of excited children had come to see it. They charged into thick cloud, groped around in the fog and clearly enjoyed the sense of disorientation, though I felt claustrophobic and dashed out. The exhibition has some wonderful sculptures of the human form including a series cast in solid metal; each figure placed on the rooftops of the South Bank and high up on diverse buildings along the Thames silhouetted against the changing sky. I grew up on The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan which I considered a great adventure story always. The stage play of that I saw in London, with a cast of four playing numerous roles, turned out to be a brilliantly clever comedy as the brainless hero Richard Hannay muddles his way through sinister plots, spies and murders. The play which won a 2007 Olivier award is now headed for Broadway. The National Theatre's production of Saint Joan was dominated by an inspired performance by Anne Marie Duff. The innovative modern production with stage effects by actors using chairs for different purposes including the sound effects of battle and to create Joan's funeral pyre, also gave a new life to Shaw's 1935 original. Certainly there are fascinating resonances across the ages as Joan is manipulated by powerful men and cynically used as potent symbol against the enemy until she acquires a presence and a voice as an individual that poses a threat to the established order; that makes her a subversive - and an aberrant woman. Postscript: Damien's 'Skull' sold for a record 50 million pounds to an unnamed buyer. Muniza Shamsie has edited three anthologies of Pakistani English writing. She is a regular contributor to Dawn newspaper, Newsline and She, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and www. LitEncyc.com.
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