Episode 4 - Beyond the Western Canon: A Conversation with Faisal Javid and Eliza Kaminska-Benadat

How is it that lines from Omar Khayyam's poetry wind up in the pockets of World War I soldiers? And how far can literary and historical theories help us explain this extraordinary moment of cross-cultural contact? 

In this episode, I am joined by Faisal Javid (an Ertegun Scholar studying a Masters in Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford) and Eliza Kaminska-Benadat (a second-year History undergraduate at Oxford) to unravel the nuances of such questions. We consider the ways in which literary and historical frameworks can both invite new interpretations of narratives and risk simplifying stories to fit theoretical categories. Our various interests in comparative literature, medieval literature and Middle Eastern history brings an interdisciplinary approach towards studying non-Western narratives. We explore the value of comparative, global perspectives in historical and literary study as we pose the question of how far categories like 'postcolonial' actually work to decentre colonial pasts. As the very definition of literature constantly changes in today's digital age, even Bad Bunny's music offers an interesting insight into how we can reshape the boundaries created by such terminology. 

A range of writers and historical figures are placed into dialogue as we discuss Tayeb Salih's response to Joseph Conrad, Zora Neale Hurston's rejection of DuBois' theory of double consciousness and Fadhma Amrouche's memoir. Our exploration segues into an examination of how literature is taught and framed in education systems more broadly. We ultimately turn to the problematic stigmatisation of studying the humanities in many educational and cultural settings, including South Asian contexts. 

No prior knowledge of any of the topics we discuss is needed! All texts and theories are explained throughout our conversation in an accessible manner. 

Content warning: Brief reference to self-harm in relation to the content of the book, 'Heart Lamp.' 

If you enjoyed this episode and want to stick around for the next one, do hit follow and review the show! 

Music credits go to Isobel (Issi) Marklew. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:35

Hi everyone, welcome back to Interwoven. I'm your host, Oscar Rahman, and today we're going to be discussing comparative literature and history and how the humanities can be seen beyond Western standards and canons of narratives. I'm joined by Elisa Kaminska-Benadat, who's a second-year undergraduate studying history at Oxford. And I'm also joined by an Ertugan scholar here at Oxford, Fais Hill Jalfit, who's studying a master's in comparative literature. I'm really happy to have you guys here. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Very happy to be here. Glad. Thank you. Thank you so much for this. Yeah, it's great. Good to be here.

SPEAKER_04 1:16

Oh, I'm glad. But yeah, I guess we'll just dive right into why it is that we even decided to, you know, come here together today to talk about studying the humanities beyond sort of Western standards, beyond Western categories. And yeah, so why do you think that there is value in that?

SPEAKER_02 1:34

I mean, this term I'm looking at empire in like the Middle East, and I think the very first lecture kind of started saying how the Middle East is a made-up category and it does fluctuate over time and it's not like a static way of um analysing the region, and I think that kind of shows how moving beyond the Western canon shit allows like complexities of different areas outside of like the Western sphere to be truly analysed and looked at in terms of um things that came from within rather than looking from the outside perspective. Um I think the Western canon sort of sets out ideas of how, for example, nationalism or imperialism looked like. But when you start looking from, for example, like Egypt or Algeria in terms of colonialism, you see that it wasn't as straightforward. Um, and I think that's the valuable part to kind of understand these regions as their own value rather than just adding into the imperial and like Western canon.

SPEAKER_04 2:34

Yeah, from a literary perspective, I think what you said about looking from within a certain area is is valuable because I think that that's what topics surrounding post-colonial literature aim to do. It's to look at voices that have remained um written about instead of written from almost.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Yeah, I definitely totally agree with you guys. Um I think it's completely necessary to look at literature other than what what what the Western literature looks like or what the Western world looks at. Even if you deep dive into these categories, these categories themselves are very problematic. Even if you talk about like post-colonial literature, Western literature, eastern literature, or like Orientalism, or anything like that, these terms themselves contest various ideas, and then it also lets us understand why do we need these terms in the very first place? And how these how does how did these terms come into and why do people use them, which is very important to look at just to understand how the world works or how literature in the world works. And I think that is where the idea of world literature came into, and even though he was like Gotha, he was like, hey, uh the the the like the mark uh the connection and the disconnection of the national literature is over. It is now about more about world literature, like literature beyond nationalities, it is about the people who write outside their original identities. So that's where the world literature began, where where we look at different kinds of authors, writers who write beyond their own nationalities. And it has something to do with the literature which moves beyond a national boundary in a sense. For example, if something was written back in India, it's not now just there, it has traveled across different countries, nations where different people look at the same things. And the empire definitely has been there for in the world, like if even if you look at the history, there is a there's a long colonial history of the empire, especially the British Empire. And the thing with these empires is they just do not leave their marks on the psyche of people or what you call collective unconscious or something else. It also leaves something with their language, for example, if if a British Empire was somewhere, so it also left their own language in it. And that's where writers also decide why don't we use the language that was given to us by these colonial masters at some point? We can even use these tools against them in a way where we reflect upon our own identities or whatever happened with all of us. But at the same time, it also leaves the burden of language and burden of translation on the people who were colonized. Like if even if you look at Latin America, there are so many different uh nations who were colonized by like Spaniards, and they were like, you have to you have to learn the language of us, not the other way around. So there are these so many burdens which come with with the languages, with the empire, or with the literature that comes around, and it's definitely uh necessary to look at a comparative angle where you try to understand these things from various angles so that you have a nuanced understanding of the understanding itself is distant and close. So yeah.

SPEAKER_04 6:02

Um I really liked what you said about how categories themselves are problematic and how that then interplays with the burden of language, because even something like Orientalism has received certain sort of levels of backlash. Um and comparative literature, at least the little bit that I'm interested in, is also looking at how that divide across time and space is being handled, and I think that that's one of the ways through which those categories can sometimes become really slippery. So I've been interested in like looking at the influence of 14th century Sufi Persian poets on American writers in the 18th century, and what's taking place there is almost more of a conversation where one culture or tradition speaks back to another, and that idea of conversation of um both reception but then also the past speaking to you is something that's really valuable, and when it comes to categories like you know, post-colonial literature, you only see one side of it, it feels like less of a conversation and more of a process of boxing um sort of views or people into things that can be handled academically, like we need certain phrases or terminology to actually handle discussions about new genres and new new approaches that are being formed. But I guess a historical perspective would be interesting to consider.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

I mean, I think I definitely agree with the idea of like the problem of having a post-colonial like label. But as well you mentioned like Latin America and like the Spaniards, I that kind of made me think of the fact that they had such a vibrant, not necessarily literature because they were like pre-literate societies in a way, but there was such a vibrant sort of like the Mexica, the Aztec, the Inca, they had their own ways of recording information and passing on stories, and sometimes a post-colonial label pushes away from that, and I think sometimes it has to be valued looked at how were these like societies before like these like imperialism came about, and I think um, especially like the Mexica that was so advanced like scientifically, and so were the Maya, and you have like pictographic, I think evidence that's the correct term, and you see how they were able to pass on like so many complex things and identities, and how uh like the categorization within the society and how they were structured without sort of like lit like literate methods. Um so yeah.

SPEAKER_04 8:39

Um yeah, I I think orality is really cool because that's something that isn't contained within written words, and I feel like from some of the literature I've read, uh some writers like Asheppe in Things Fall Apart, he looks back to folklore and folk traditions, and I guess it's that idea of trying to capture not only written works but voice, uh, which goes back to conversation. There's something almost more intangible about that kind of interaction.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Yeah, definitely. Um it made me remind of like the Chino Eshebe uh so it made me remind of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and how he represents the Congo people in there. And if you look at Shebe's writings as well, in in one of his critical essays, which talks about Heart of Darkness, he mentioned something around that. So on the other side of the River Congo, there was these categories of people who were called Fang people, and they made such beautiful pottery that so many great uh artists in that particular time praised their artistry. But he says something like that: Conrad was too blind to see all of these things where he tried to portray an image of that how if how as a as a colonizer when they go into that place, that he makes them see seem like that these are the people who make you degraded and downgraded when you live with those, which which is a very problematic way of seeing things. It's almost being blind to the other side of things. And even if you start questioning that, we try to assume what was why did they even go there in the first place? That is the question itself. And other than that, I personally believe that that is where this literature comes along, especially literature written in English. Like Shabi decided to appropriate English language, even though one of his contemporaries back in back in his own nation, Guhi Mantiongo, he talked about the abolition of English department, and he even stopped writing in English, where he started writing in Gikuyu language, and he was like, we need to write in our own language. So these parameters where we look at someone abrogating the language and someone appropriating the language, itself becomes a way of seeing things differently and contesting what happened in the history. And at the same time, I also feel like when we talk about post-colonial writers, it also sometimes takes the label to them and makes us look like as if the nation who have gone through imperialism, colonialism, they are still struggling with the colonialism as if they have nothing else to write about, and all their writings are all about this. But then there are some people who argue that we should actually just avoid the colonizers themselves. We don't need to focus on them. One way of anti-colonial struggle is just ignoring the colonizer, like maybe not writing more about them, not having your themes or writings cross across that.

SPEAKER_04 11:39

Yeah, I think that I see that sometimes when I'm reading books by someone like Jujumpa Lahiri and Interpreter of Maladies, you sometimes have like the category of the third culture kid who's bound to struggle because they're straddling these multiple cultures, and I feel like it's over time it's almost becoming a critical cliche. From my own experiences living in in the Middle East, where I've had friends from all over the world and from multiple different backgrounds, and mul many of them were third culture kids. We all kind of once had this conversation about it sometimes being almost overdone in certain books, and especially in scholarship, that's then interested in it. So the debate also comes down to whether scholarship and structures are then imposed to make the sort of idea of post-colonialness almost more explicit than it needs to be. And yeah, in terms of Heart of Darkness, I read Um Tayyib Saleh's uh season of migration to the north last year, which was a rewriting of Heart of Darkness, and it was really interesting because he kind of inverts all of the structures that you see in Heart of Darkness. So it's about this man in Sudan who goes to Britain and pursues further education, but then you kind of see him psychologically and emotionally going downhill. Um, but I think it's interesting because there's this moment in the book that I really liked, and it was this description of his library as being full of um white authors and white ideas, and it was described as like a graveyard or a mausoleum, which I thought was really interesting in terms of how it's sort of a sign of the slow creeping away of his roots in in Sudan. But then he also complexifies that idea of like, oh, I've moved away from my home ca homeland, and so I'm bound to be disconnected from it. Because I feel like even in Heart of Darkness, you have this entire debate about whether Kurtz was actually endorsing colonial views or not, because he also ends up going mad, and his reason for madness, it's not it's not clear whether it was caused by his time spent there or whether it was caused by the colonial mission itself, and Daypsale like inverts that too. Is it like movement away from the your homeland that's causing this or not, or is there something deeper? Um, so yeah, and and that was also written in English, which I find interesting as well. But then you also have writers um like Derek Walcott who says that he enjoys writing in English, and I feel like that then again evades that sort of expectation of uh recovering pasts through writing in in your own language. But yeah, that's that's my thoughts and what you said.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

I mean, I'm nowhere near as well read as either of you guys, but the idea of using English or like the language or the colonizer, because it could not not necessarily could have been English, could have been like French, which is like obviously a very big um enterprise. I think in a way it gives the writers agency. I mean, most of my reading of like colonial and post-colonial is kind of rooted in memoirs and um like non-fiction rather than fiction. And I think sometimes the way the language is used obviously is a way of going against the sort of norm and the standards and how they use a like a foreign language to describe their experiences. And I think in a way to kind of link what was said previously about like orientalism, I think we were looking as at this text for my course, and it's written one by an Egyptian who goes to Paris to learn about like the French infrastructure and to bring it back into Egypt to implement it, like modernise the state, and then one from a Moroccan consul that goes as like part of a bigger party to kind of um for diplomatic uh reasons to Paris to meet the king at a time when Morocco kind of solidified its uh relationship with France in kind of a positive way, at a time when Algiers was being like Algeria was being basically colonised by the French. So I think those two texts show kind of the reversal of Orientalism where you have Muslim men and how they perceive like French society, and it's quite interesting to see how they have this inner conflict and how they phrase it in terms of um I'm a Muslim and I know that like Islam is the final revelation of God, and how we like should follow this because this is like the right way, and how they can't come in conflict with Western ideals, and how that kind of not makes them struggle with our identity, but it's more the way they just understand it because they try to kind of phrase in a way that's compatible to their own schemas and the way they use words and language. And for example, in Aktawi, he's like the Egyptian and he focuses a lot on the actual infrastructure and how the governments and like the constitution of France, and there's a lot of sections where he he equates French positions to Egyptian ones with disclaimers, saying it's like this position but slightly different, and I think that's really interesting to see how it's almost like Orientalism in reverse. We have an insight of what the colonized or a sort of inferior group of people, as perceived by the colonial enterprise, not necessarily actually inferior, grapple with meeting new ideas. And I thought that it's like this funny like way of orientalism because if you actually read there's so many ways where these two like people say how they couldn't understand this or they can't believe this is this, and also far, like the Moroccan that goes to Paris, he says, I listened to this music and I felt it was so bland that I didn't even want to clap, and it's just it's one of those nuances of culture and how they understand all these sort of non-political structures that are really interesting, I think.

SPEAKER_04 17:37

I found that last bit funny. I think it reminded me of one of the medieval travel accounts I read by um one of the Arab travellers, I've forgotten his name, but he uh goes to like Scandinavia, and like the first sentence of one of his paragraphs is just like this land is so dirty, I don't know how they live in it. And I just thought that was like it's just a flat rejection of Western ideals to the point where it's actually really funny how blunt it sometimes can be. On this same track, Zora Neil Hurston, um, I read her autobiography last year, Dust Tracks on a Road. She was writing during the same time as Du Bois, who wrote about double consciousness, which was this idea that um when as as he based it off of his own experiences. So as a black man, when he he sees himself as both possessing a consciousness that he can perceive from within, but then he also sees the sort of things that are imputed to him and what's enforced upon him. But then Zora Neil Hurston writing at the same time, in her book, she begins by saying, I I'm not joining the sobbing school of oh, I'm I've got a split identity, I'm I'm just not doing that. She writes that in one of her other essays too, how it feels to be coloured me. And I mean her autobiography at times is humorous too because she continuously says, I know what you're thinking, you're probably thinking that I'm going to reach and start talking about like one of the racist experiences, experiences I've faced in Columbia University. But guess what? I haven't had any and I'm not going to talk about them regardless of whether they happen. And I guess that that like um confidence is also interesting because she then says that this idea of a of a split identity, of a split consciousness, is something that that critics um almost bring into existence themselves, and it's not always sort of reflective of what's happening. That's like similar to how the Moroccan traveler is inverting Orientalism, she's inverting double consciousness.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Yeah, I mean, if if any talk about Du Bois uh double consciousness and how his own experience is reflected in his own writings, uh it was definitely very hard for back then for them, even though there was an American revolution, but still the idea and the and the problems that were caused by that racism were still inherent in the people. And the the thing about these things is people are conditioned in such a way that the ideals that have been formed, even though conventionally or through constitutions, these things are banned, but the elements of them still remain because it's embedded in their own identities. And that is what's something Dubois himself struggled with, and he was like, How do I identify myself as an American as and as a black American at the same time? How do I distinguish these different identities? And how how so the thing is he always had to prove himself to be American at the same time and to have his African identity as well, which is very problematic for people to accept because you these are two different things that always tussle with each other, and then he thought about okay, we should probably combine them and emerge throughout those by learning different things. And I think that's also the same with different languages and different cultures when we see them. Today's world is so globalized that there isn't something one particular culture or one particular nation. These boundaries have been crossed, and that's where comparative literature also crossed these boundaries, crossed these borders. And even though it has crossed the borders, but it is probably still yet to erase them. And it also made me think about the rewriting of The Tempest by Amy Cesare, where where she uh where he sees Caliban as a figure who was suppressed by Prospero in in the island and he asserts his own identity. So these rewritings are definitely necessary to look at how things could have been while they are written in in a very particular way. And it also made me think about how we are very less known about. There is someone called Ibn Rusht, if you know. Uh his Latinized name is Averroos. He was he is considered to be one of the first persons who translated Aristotle in. Arabic. It is very less talked about because one of the writers called J. R. Malik in his essays talks about that how the translations of Ibn Rushd were actually responsible for the European Renaissance, where they talked about rebirth and of these works again, they started reading them again. And we know about these critical writers or these philosophers because there have been translations. So these things are very less talked about. And while you were talking about Middle East, it also made me think about Middle East to whom?

SPEAKER_02 22:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

So these categories are really difficult to traverse and to think about them because they pose all of these questions. And I think in a way comparative literature helps us in understanding all these things because it just it makes you some sort of a global critic where you look at all of those things. Well, I well, at the same time, the problem with the comparative literature is you do not have a canon of theories or texts which you're like, this these are the things that I'm looking at, and I'm going to look at everything through these categories. So sometimes it also makes you makes you like a nomad where you struggle with you you don't have these categories, that's good, but at the same time it also makes it difficult. Maybe you would be totally avoided in in a way because you do not belong to any any particular thing. So yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:24

What you said about inheriting a tradition and then undoing it, I feel like from my own reading, that idea of uncovering influences that were not considered before is really powerful because it again comes back to the art of literary criticism as a sort of unveiling of what's been forgotten, and I think history functions in a really similar way. Someone like Hafiz is often forgotten about. Um he influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is a transcendentalist, and transcendentalism was basically like the American equivalent of romanticism, and he influenced a lot of Emerson's ideas about self-reliance, about how sometimes it's best to break away from orthodox or institutionalized forms of religious authority and to look from within yourself. And I mean Hafiz is mentioned as many times as Wordsworth and Aristotle in all of Emerson's corpus of works, which I think is pretty significant and yet it's been overlooked for a really long time. Even a text like the Rabayat of Umar Khayam, I feel like that's one of the ones that has received a lot more critical attention more recently. But I one of my favorite facts about it is the fact that fragments of his poetry were found in the pockets of World War One soldiers, um, which I thought was so powerful. It's I just found that so like interesting because you'd expect them to almost have a I guess more nationalistic poet poem with them. And yet they've got the poetry with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've got Durabayatavomarchayam with them instead, which is really interesting. And again, I feel like those voices, those moments of connection across time and cultures is what makes comparative literature and retracing the past really, really powerful.

SPEAKER_02 25:18

I mean, I think bringing up the idea of like looking for what's kind of not there in a way, and retracing the past, there's there's like a movement in history, all tagsgeschichte or everyday history in English. And there's the idea of questioning why some material things or just like things in textual sources are there when you'd think they shouldn't be there. So it's kind of retracing like kind of the poetry in the um soldiers' pocket is like why was it there, and you kind of spearhead into like a bigger like inquiry kind of investigation. But also it's the the idea of like reading against the grain. So I think now that I sort of look um like at these sort of like memoirs and like non-fictional writing about experiences during like the colonial times, that the focus was um on women, but actually there's like this body of work talking about how the works on women have as much to say about like women and femininity as they do about masculinity, and I think that's kind of in history at least seems to be a really recurring theme in terms of Imperium post-colonial history where gender is such a defining axis of like relations, um, especially like on a smaller scale like household, but also how it transplants into the bigger scale. And I think a lot of the time people think that gender history is kind of equivalent to women's history, but actually the second wave of like feminists of in historians were trying to under get people to understand that you have to look at how men and women, like masculines and feminists interacted and how one defined the other, and how, for example, in the context of like Egypt in late 19th century, early 20th century, like there was a movement for national like nationalist movements against the British, and how a lot of the writing will say if we mod if we improve the status of women, we're modernising as a nation. Um, and these like historians go into question what does it mean, what does it say that if we only have to improve the status of women to modernise, what does that say about men? Sometimes that dimension is lost, and I think like secondary work in history tries to get you to in a way compare these two things where you're not just looking at one but like more broader, obviously it's not in the same nature as like comparative literature, we have like kind of like two texts or two authors and looking at themes, but it's I think a similar idea that kind of feeds into that.

SPEAKER_04 27:41

Yeah, I feel like um so far we've been discussing retracing threads um in the past and seeing them in a new new light. But I was wondering what you guys think about silence that's almost purposeful. Is there something that in literature, comparative literature history, where silence is meant to be something that is almost given space where you sometimes appreciate the fact that maybe there is this blank space and it isn't meant to be filled?

SPEAKER_02 28:14

I recently read like this memoir of this Algerian woman called Fatima Amrush and she lives in a village and she is born to she's born illegitimate because her father does not recognise her, and she's essentially moved from first like a French-run convent to then a French-run school for orphans because her mum thinks that she's so much of a pariah in society because of her legitimacy that maybe being in these environments is better for her. And the first chapter of her memoir is basically her kind of adolescence until marriage, because she gets married at 16, and in there you see she describes her life kind of like chronic chronologically. She goes, My mother was from here, she gave birth to me, like and stuff like that. And this was happening at the end of the 19th century, where the French were present in Al in Algeria like quite strongly, and they were um their empire was expanding. However, she kind of apart from the fact that she went to a French convent and a French orphanage, she doesn't actually sort of talk about the French Empire, and it's kind of a like you said, like a way, like quiet, like quiet, because you'd think that she would like situate herself within the imperial enterprise, but actually she just talks of her experience as sort of the fact that she kind of feels like she doesn't belong to any religion, like she's neither Christian nor Muslim because she calls Islam her mother's religion, but then she also doesn't attend church. So she's like looking into society because of the religion and her legitimacy and as a woman as well. But it was a time when women's positions were changing, but the transformation stage meant it was kind of a bit of a in-between, and I think the lack of mention of empire, like direct mention of empire and how it affected her allows you to kind of take her life more seriously, because I think maybe it would be a big temptation to just look at how this French imperial um law affected her and this and that, but she situates herself sort of as a like as a person, not even as a as a per as a woman foremost, I'd say, but like the other um axis of her identity are sort of secondary.

SPEAKER_04 30:20

Yeah, that kind of reminds me of Zora Neil Hurston as well, then the the idea of you purposefully and consciously blocking off certain expectations that other audiences may find. But from my personal experiences of reading, um Bob Kaufman is an African-American poet whose works have largely been lost and a lot of his works have gone out of publishing, which is really sad. But he he took a 10-year-long vow of silence, which he didn't break until 1960 n 1963 or 1973, one uh somewhere there. Um, and he stopped writing completely and even like verbally communicating with his wife, and that was really intense, and he broke it with a T. S. Elliott poem, I believe, which was kind of crazy, but that silence I think is so powerful. And uh from the reading I've done, a lot of critics say that that silence is like political act because he was a lot of his poetry was about jazz and was about music, and then he takes this 10-year-long vow of silence, and so many people, and I agree with this view, I feel like it is um this idea of refusing to write in certain conditions as an African-American man, and a lot of critics have linked his silence to the beat movement that was thriving at the time in America, and how jazz specifically was being romanticized and exoticized by a lot of white male writers, and so his silence is not erasure, it's like a political act of refusal and even preservation, um, which I thought think is really interesting, and I feel like in those certain moments um silence is is powerful, it's meant to be given space, and I feel like those moments kind of it kind of reminded me of how as a literary student or critic you're almost meant to sort of respect moments where even the writer or the subject of study is almost resisting, and I feel like that in itself is is a beautiful moment where you let silence speak for itself, and yeah, facility.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Yeah, it it's such a very great way of seeing and looking at silence and trying to understand it. Uh, it made me remind and think about how sometimes writers and poets talk about silence. Even the silence is something meant to be like a void, there's nothing, but it is as if the silence itself is speaking. And even in a way of writing, and maybe writing poetry or fiction, you could sometimes see the silence coming through in in a way, and it's where it takes different forms and different shapes. It made me remind of one of the writers, one of the poets of Kashmir, Rahman Rahi. When you look at his poetry or read his poetry, it is filled with so many allusions, so many metaphors, and and sometimes he tries to talk about certain things which probably would not be easy for him to talk about. But by using these different techniques, literary techniques, he is able to fill that silence where it's necessary to talk about all of those things. But maybe sometimes for some authors, some poets, because of like political repression or maybe some other reasons, they cannot openly talk about some things or write explicitly about those things. And that is where the silence itself speaks. You could feel the repression, you could feel the way these writers write, uh, as if they are writing from a point of view where as if they are half choked, while at the same time they are trying to portray their messages out there that this is something you need to look at. And I think with the silences themselves or itself, we need to understand if we think about different cultures and different nations, the silence could mean something different for all these different people. Look, uh it I just it just reminded me of I was reading the story, uh Heartlamp. It's it's from the book which recently.

SPEAKER_04 34:25

I've heard of it, I've heard a lot about it, but I haven't had the chance to read it yet.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

Yeah, it received a literary award really recently. I mean, I think last year, right? Uh there's this one story which is titled as Heartlamp where where there's this lady who is going through the problems of the marriage back in India. And while we would probably think about the world has moved on and there's so much technological advancement, but there are still cultures, there are still people who are actually going through the same things that maybe in a culture people in like 10 centuries before or like a hundred years before people were having these problems. But there are people who go through go through these problems. Uh, this woman in in the short story, she tries to like burn herself alive because she is married to this person who is invested in some other woman who is a nurse, she has all these three, four kids while she wanted to continue her education and do this examination, but her family is like, no, you have to marry. And why when she's married, her examination is just like three or four months away, and she begs her parents to let her study, but she's not. And when she's married and she has these kids and she goes back to her family and tells them about her problems that this is what I'm facing, I told you that I needed to be independent to do something for myself, but you did not agree. But while I'm trying to actively seek support from you, you are avoiding me and you are you're telling me that I am I am ruining your family image. This idea of family image or the idea of the joint families themselves is a problem in certain cultures where if you are a person who try who wants to achieve something or do something, it's not just about you, it's not just about your immediate family. Your family is this whole, so many people, relatives, and everything. So these silences that we see within these cultures, within the nations, reflected by certain authors, certain writers. It doesn't have to be like that the world has moved on. These silences could be still the same, which where people, where women in particular are still struggling with the same things that maybe women in in Western world have already crossed. So it's a very interesting way of seeing that at these things.

SPEAKER_04 36:35

What you said about joint family systems, I feel like even from a sort of more, I guess, meta way, one of the things I wanted to discuss was how the humanities are sometimes perceived in a negative light, especially in places like South Asia. I think just more generally as well, it's sometimes seen as something that is often shunned and as rejected. And I mean Elisa and I were discussing this earlier about how school systems are also sometimes complicit in this, and how math and science were are taught as as skills, but literature is never taught as a skill. Every year you're just given a text and you're meant to analyze it in the same way. It's not seen or it's not taught as a skill that's valuable, it's just taught as like something you have to do to get through the education systems. And um, I think that interplays with ideas of how public appearance of the humanities and of literature is both then seeping into stories that we see today, like the one you mentioned. And yeah, Lisa, do you wanna add on that?

SPEAKER_02 37:51

I mean um talking about the idea of the education system having a role in how humanities are perceived is like very important because I think like you said, the idea of humanities being like content, whereas um like STEM being like a skill, I think it's like a really important thing to highlight because I think if you ask people from like our schools, like respective schools, they would say when you ask them like what is English literature, they'd start naming like Shakespeare plays or like Jacqueline Hart, Christmas Carol. Whereas if you have like maths, they'll start saying like oh you need like multiplication and like problem solving, and like that's how I think maths is like highlighted as is like problem solving. Whereas the progression, like like from my perspective of history has been because I kind of like been in the journey for so long, but it's like so many people cut it short um when like they don't have to do it anymore. I've seen it progress from sort of being fed content to being made to think a little bit about it and how maybe like would have gone different to kind of being shown more and more individuals and like schools of thought, and now as a like doing a degree at Oxford, so it's so much is as much about content as about learning about what people wrote about it and how you have to deconstruct what they said, and like that analysis skill is so applicable elsewhere, and even though I'm I don't study like literature, I think now as I'm reading for sort of as a like for fun, looking at the way some authors like like like world build or like present certain things, and I'm just like honestly like breaking down saying like this is just so unbelievable because the way like they've just got like a gap here or a gap there, and I think that's a really important way that humanities prime you to think, um they make you question the information you're being told, and I think that's also being reflected in like the current um state of society now. There's so many like news out there, and so many people don't know that you can like fact-check this so easy on the internet, but which has never been there before, but they don't do that, and I think that's a reflection of the lack of skills in um humanities and how uh it's seen as content, so it's like less valuable because it's less applicable. Whereas if this if this deconstruct of the skills you're using, it's essentially equivalent to STEM because you do have the idea of like problem solving where you're given like a perspective, like this critic might be saying this, and you're supposed to be like, Well, they're using this evidence, but what about this other evidence or this other theory? And you kind of solve the issue of this being the right answer in a way.

SPEAKER_00 40:25

It made me remember about uh the Dead Voice Society movie. It's a really good movie. Yeah, it's a very, really good movie where one of the dialogues is something like we don't read or write poetry because it's cute.

SPEAKER_01 40:38

And it's funny to think about like um all of these people who navigate around these ideas of who look at humanities, especially literature, in in a very different way when they look at the STEM subjects. Because all of us as children, we heard stories from our parents, or some people have like bedtime stories. So, in a way, the stories, the literature is actually doing the process and making informing the minds of the children from the very first place. So we we we don't think about literature in terms of that way. I I like the idea of you said literature as skill. So you start with reading, you start with listening, all of these stories which form the canvas of the whole literature. It doesn't have to be like you have to read Shakespeare or you have to read all these big writers just to call yourself someone, a student of literature. It doesn't have to be like that. Even in even if you like when you're looking at history, there are historical incidents captured in literature itself, whether it's memoirs or whether it's different novels. So the idea of seeing a difference between STEM subjects and humanity subjects is problematic and it shouldn't be even there. We shouldn't even be thinking about it. Because as important as the STEM subjects are, it is humanity subjects are equally important as well. They just help you, like the stories help you navigate through your life circumstances, or they help you critically think about things. You don't take everything at face value. Like when you read when you read George Orwell or when you read all these different people who talked about certain things and then your perspective changes. And it helps you understand deeper and what why are being things castigated in a very particular way, which is important for making a healthy society. So yeah, it's I think we should be moving ahead of all of these distinctions and divisions.

SPEAKER_04 42:36

Yeah, um, I agree because uh I feel like literature also teaches empathy from like day one basically. And um from my own experiences, I read Martyr by Karva Akbar last year and it was one of it was such a good book and it kind of has changed my view of a lot of a lot of things because it shows you how um martyrdom is not something that's done on the battlefield, it's some it's done it's something that's done at all stages of life. I I think it extrapolated that idea away from a specific context and it allowed me to see see it everywhere and it that's when it became really powerful. And I feel like in in STEM where uh a lot of things rest on objectivity and on um sort of reaching one objective conclusion about something, I think literature then creates the space for you to see the world, but then to also see yourself through a different lens or through a different perspective. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Yeah, if even different scientific methods or scientific experiments are usually based on imagination because these these scientists have to think about things and then try to search around solutions. And even if you look at literature, there have been so many writers and authors who who wrote about things. And because because they wrote that fictional thing, scientists just worked on that. Let's see if this is possible. So, in a way, there is not a divide between literature and science as much as we see. So maybe we need to take a look at look at the history and take a look at the incidents, how certain discoveries were done.

SPEAKER_04 44:25

I I just wrote an essay on um perceptions of conversion, uh religious conversion from Islam to Christianity during the later Middle Ages, and how that's represented. And in current scholarship, there's a lot more interest in sort of physiology and how um the convert's sort of physical like body is being represented in different ways, and they're now more interested in the medical humanities as a framework through which that can be approached. So science is yeah, I agree. I feel like science is as valuable a framework as literature can be to science.

SPEAKER_02 45:07

Um what you both just said kind of made me think of like the person of Ib Ibn Sina, because he was so many things at once, like he was like writing philosophy, he was writing medical books that were so influential until I think like the 15 or 16 or maybe even 1700s, which were then replaced by more updated versions, and he was also um writing about like legal issues, and he was also uh into like of like fictional, like prose writing, and I think those kind of individuals of a similar time to him, like the circa 1000s, I want to say, um they were just uh they didn't see as like a divide between humanities and science, it was just all these things that once they were involved in everything and they saw how they connected across and how obviously um also how religion overlapped across all these things about like like laws and medicine and writing and like philosophy, and I think that's something that we should not aspire to necessarily replicate, but sort of have the same spirit where we look beyond um like the barriers we have, like these like artificial barriers we have. Um kind of makes me think that sometimes literature is very isolated these days, where I kind of see a sort of like an academic field where you have like or like the the way you look at it, um, especially because I'm like surrounded by English students, um and then I think so many people have mistaked in her as being an English student.

SPEAKER_04 46:35

Um it's actually really funny at this point.

SPEAKER_02 46:38

And when I hear you guys like talk about like your essays and everything, I feel like it's so contained in terms of what's in a book, what's in a poem. But I think my personal experience now, like based in like 2020, like in the 2020s, is the idea that literature should go along with like media, so sort of like ideas of like music and film and how actually they're so similar and so like piggyback on each other that you can't just isolate and like talk about these people without looking at for example, like music artists, which also draw inspiration from literature as well as like historical movements. For example, one of like one of these people's like recently like Bud Bunny. I don't know how much you guys know, but he released an album last year which is kind of I think an example of like post-colonial history in a or like post-colonial identity in a way. It's it uses Spanish, which is obviously brought by the Imperial, by the like pre-imperialising Spaniards, but he integrates a lot of like local dialect and he kind of takes power back by using words that most people that speak Spanish wouldn't understand, but this is saying, Oh, I'm from Puerto Rico, this is what we use, and I think that's such an important way, and I think the lyrics in this album is like really beautiful, and he alludes to historical events like in 1948. I believe in Puerto Rico, people are not allowed to have the Puerto Rican flag out, like they were essentially killed for having it, and he says, to paraphrase it English, um, now I'm gonna like wave around my flag as much as I want because back in the day people were killed for it, transgresses all these lines between literature, history, and like media, and it's all put into this sort of like a music album. But the album to me is so much more than like a music album, it's like almost like a story or like a book in itself, like it's an equivalent of that where you have a build-up of sort of things and he traces a colonial identity and how his identity now is rooted in what happened, but also it's more than that. Like he's Puerto Rican, he's not a result of Spanish and then like American imperialism. And I think trying to connect literature to other ways of like like media is so important now, and like I don't think it should be as isolated as it is, especially in like the academic field.

SPEAKER_01 48:51

Um as you said, we need to maybe look beyond all of these and maybe integrate integrate all of these. Uh, it is actually happening in a way where we especially look at the media, yeah, look at the movies. What are they doing? Most of most or maybe I think all of the movies are based on some sort of a script, right? And most of the times it's probably like a novel or something on which a film is based. So the the boundary between something that is written and something that is performed is is being erased in in different ways and is being recreated, whether that is movies, whether that is music. I was recently going through this example of I think that's Dominique Republic. That is probably what what its name is. It is like such a short performance on YouTube, you can see it. It's just around like probably 10 minutes of performance where this main character she starts speaking in English in different dialects and she uses different syntax and at the same time tries to talk talk in different languages. And it it's it's a very broken form of performance where you see all of these things integrating, and even there's a script for for that, but it doesn't feel you you don't get much out of it, you don't understand much of it. There's like body language, there is body movements, and at the same time, these performances that is integrated in it, and it makes you think about all of these boundaries and how how problematic these boundaries can be, and at the same time, how you can overlook all of these. And I am pretty sure there are so many songs as well which are being made based on different poems, different literature, because all of these things take inspiration from each other. Even the history itself, we all take inspiration from from the historical events where we think about if if something has happened in a good way, we would probably maybe incorporate in our own lives. And if there is something, a historical incident which was very problematic for people, in which let's say people died. So it makes you think about all of that, and then people make music out of it at times. So I think the boundaries themselves are being probably crossed and maybe redrawn at the same time.

SPEAKER_04 50:55

Yeah, I feel like um that's seen in the digital humanities, just more generally. I think it's a burgeoning field in scholarship now. I've I never really heard about it until more recently, so it could just be me, but the idea of of the digital humanities is what both of what you've said has touched upon. Something like AI is now once again creating a new boundary that needs to be redrawn and has invited a lot of um discussion in relation to to the humanities, and I think that that's really interesting to see as well. And I don't think AI should be writing literature, it's not great, it's like really not, and I don't think no matter how hard an AI model could try, it it has it at the end of the day is a series of of code, and I think the power of of musicians, of artists, of writers and performers comes down to the fact that you you have a human history in front of you, human lives that have actually been been lived and experienced, and I don't think AI could ever sort of just chuck all of that into algorithms and reproduce um reproduce that kind of element that that essential core humanity humanity and I think that that then also returns to comparative literature and what we've been discussing so far, and that again is is shared human experience that lasts the test of time and of of cultural difference. But yeah, that's that's all from me. Does anyone have any parting words, any parting ideas they'd want to share?

SPEAKER_02 52:43

I do think so. I think everything kind of has been said. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:47

Yeah, it it was really great conversation too. How and look at all of these things from different perspectives, and yeah, definitely AI is growing, but it's not gonna be a human.

SPEAKER_04 52:56

Yeah, exactly. I agree. It I think it's um where a lot of the future is headed, but I just don't think it could ever yeah, become human. That that's the one thing it can't be.

SPEAKER_01 53:06

I think in a way as well, as humans, we always sort out or seek for a human connection. Um when we know something is being experienced by a human or written by a human, it it just clicks something in you. And when you know it's something digital or artificial, and it just makes you like, uh, it's do you think it in the same way? Probably not.

SPEAKER_04 53:27

Yeah, I I agree. I think um, yeah, I think that it it can never actually reach the core of human experience. Uh ever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:36

And it's humans who made AI, so yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 53:39

I think it's it's actually quite ironic. Um I guess we'll just have to wait and see what where AI takes us. It's looking a bit uncertain, but yeah, I think I think if literature has lasted this long, it will last the test of AI and artificial intelligence, because I just don't think it could ever ever reach reach that core human experience. That would be my final statement. Thank you so much for joining me. It was a wonderful conversation, and hopefully our listeners enjoyed it too. And yeah, thanks, thanks so much. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 54:14

Thank you. Thank you for everything.