Room: Culture News ANDROID

Toni Morrison, who has died aged 88, was the most influential and studied American author of her generation. Born as Chloe Wofford in Ohio in 1931, she graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English from Howard University, a historically black college located in Washington DC. She then completed an M.A. at Cornell on the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, before beginning an academic teaching career.

She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, in 1958, but after their divorce in 1964 Morrison started working as an editor for Random House in New York. It was here that she began writing fiction, publishing her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. It was her third novel published in 1977, Song of Solomon, that was her breakthrough work, winning the National Critics’ Book Circle Award.

Her most famous novel, Beloved followed in 1987. It was a fictionalised account of the 19th-century slave Margaret Garner, who killed her own daughter to save her from slavery.

Morrison became a well-known figure within the worlds of American academia, publishing and cultural life. In 1990, she gave the Massey lectures at Harvard dealing with the invisibility of the African American presence in American literature. These influential essays were later published as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

The following year Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She also held a Chair in the Humanities at Princeton from 1989 until her retirement in 2006 and continued to publish important novels during the latter part of her career.

In her Massey lectures, Morrison spoke of her ambition

to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open up as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World.

Both her creative and her critical work are designed to remap the contours of American literature and culture. She aims to highlight what was omitted in the conventional forms of liberalism that governed institutional life in America during the second half of the 20th century.

Her 1993 novel Jazz, for example, involves a self-conscious revision of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mythological “Jazz Age.” For Fitzgerald himself, this Jazz Age was centred almost exclusively around white culture. By setting her work in Harlem during the same era, Morrison executes in fictional form the remapping project that she outlined in her Harvard lectures.

‘The national amnesia’

Arguing that “the time for undiscriminating racial unity has passed,” Morrison sought, in both her fiction and non-fiction, to expose the “national amnesia” underlying often unconscious forms of racism.

Given such a remarkable career trajectory, it would seem Morrison’s literary reputation at the time of her death could hardly have been higher. Nevertheless, there is a significant gap between Morrison’s status as an Establishment figure and the radical ambiguities of her fiction. The latter, more elusive quality might well sustain her literary reputation more compellingly over time.

In Beloved, Morrison develops a conception of “rememory” (the character Sethe explains in the book this is the act of remembering a memory). Many of her fictions feature ways in which old ghosts haunt contemporary scenes.

The rhetorical reversals that are a common feature of Beloved reflect a condition where past and present, slavery and freedom, are all mixed up together. Indeed, the best of Morrison’s fiction is powerful precisely because it flirts with a pathological quality that avoids one-dimensional, political formulations.

In Tar Baby (1981), the reader is told how the black heroine’s “legs burned with the memory of tar,” despite her degree in art history from the Sorbonne. In Jazz, the heroine finds herself compelled to go back to a department store and “slap the face of a white salesgirl” who had snubbed her, despite recognising this to be self-destructive gesture.

Fatalistic cycles

Morrison, who studied classical literature at university, was influenced intellectually by the fatalistic cycles that permeate ancient Greek theatre. Something of this darker mood enters into her own fiction.

This is why Morrison’s novels are more unsettling than was her public persona. Unlike many of her intellectual contemporaries, she retained a traditional faith in aesthetic quality and the literary canon, defending fiction as offering “a more intimate version of history”.

She endorsed Barack Obama as presidential candidate in 2008 by commending his “creative imagination, which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.”

Yet such polite terms as “creative imagination” find themselves contradicted by the cycles inherent in Morrison’s own imaginative universe. In Sula, for instance, the institution of a “National Suicide Day” epitomizes the kind of in-turned violence typical of her sombre fiction.

Morrison’s art resists classification. This quality of aesthetic elusiveness and ambiguity will make her more disconcerting representations of the psychology of power resonate with future generations of readers.

“There are bombardments constantly on the outskirts of Donetsk, while in central Donetsk they stage beauty pageants and literary parties, and the cafes work all night.” – Yehor Makiyivka, 2019

2019 marks the fifth year of the ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine. What began as a number of street protests against former President Yanukovych’s suspension of an EU-Ukraine agreement in 2013 soon became a fully blown war between Russian separatists the Ukrainian military: the Euromaidan protests and their bloody suppression; the sudden annexation of the Crimean peninsula; the subsequent declaration of independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions; the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17; the negotiations of several ceasefires and unsuccessful Minsk peace deals. Most of us will remember having heard about these events in recent years. But as time went by, the war, its over 10,000 civilian casualties and more than 1.5 million displaced people, have lost their newsworthiness. To break this silence means to stand up and speak for those unable to do so, trapped somewhere along the 280-miles-long frontline.

After the Vaults Festival’s showcase of Counting Sheep – Staging a Revolution earlier this year, the Cockpit Theatre hosted the world premiere of a new performance that puts the forgotten war into the spotlight. Interbeing – Stories from a Current War is an explosion of diverse performance styles from acrobatics to mime, dance and object animation. It creates a colorful canvas to the beats of an original score to express the multilayered battles that individuals fight when forced to adapt to drastic change.

The international ensemble around Ukrainian-Swedish Artistic Director Lana Biba presents a story of life, love, and loss based on the lived experience of soldiers, residents, and artists, pulled together over a period of almost two years. Archive photographs from the Donbas region serve as the visual frame. Together with real-life interviews, they build the foundation for the partly autobiographical script.

The audience follows the story of a handful of characters and watches them transform in the whirls of conflict. We’re introduced to a young man who spends his time spraying graffiti on city walls, a cheerful primary school English teacher and a photographer, carefully scouting the city for the perfect motif. They’re three people that go about their ordinary lives. But then everything changes. Military tanks appear; people assemble in the squares; the young graffiti artist is recruited into the army. Yet, some things stay the same: the teacher still goes to work in the morning and the children still come to school – until there’s a loud noise one morning. A missile hits the school. No more children. Now, everything has truly changed.

Having left the city with a group of people, the graffiti-kid-turned-soldier, the teacher and the photographer, now working for the press, find themselves somewhere in the woods. Scenes alternate between calm evenings pf storytelling stories, sudden skirmish, fallbacks, and parties around the fire. We observe how individuals are forced to adapt to their new surroundings. In a world where death is omnipresent, the teacher swaps the crayon for a machine-gun. People who didn’t know each other before are ready to die for each other and the cause they all stand for. The photographer steps onto a mine. There’s a clear and loud clicking noise, then the shock in his face. The graffiti kid swaps places with him. All he asks for is the last photograph with his gun.

We don’t know how long the group’s been fighting, how many people they lost and how they got back home. Once back in the city, the photographer’s celebrated for his work documenting life in armed conflict. The teacher’s back in school; the two of them are a couple and live together now. Their lives appear normal, they even have a dog. But behind the facades of work and a rich social life both have to bear the trauma of war. At times, their joint experience eases their suffering, but the journey of recovery from PTSD is different for each of them. They long for each other’s embrace but are unable to fill the void within themselves. The photographer has trouble to accept that people around him continue with their lives as if nothing had happened. They socialize and tell jokes, have parties, children – and are happy. All the while, he’s eaten up by guilt. Why did he survive? The protagonists have taken the fight off the battlefield into their home, against each other and within themselves. It’s a war they can’t win.

Interbeing highlights that throughout this continuous war, everything is connected. It underlines the absurdity of war, where love/hate, sadness/happiness, disbelief/hope all co-exist. As one of the people interviewed for the show states, “we never cried so much as during the war, but we never laughed that much either.”

Approach with care the book that offers up a tale of Ireland in the old days. Since Patrick Kavanagh published The Great Hunger in 1942, any book about the poetry of rural life and youth’s endless summer must of necessity be acknowledged as sentimental. The best rural writers demolished these cliches long ago, and built in their place a literature that chronicled with unflinching, sorrowful honesty the world we all came from before we moved into the cities.

One thinks of John McGahern, or RS Thomas’s dismissal of those who idealised Wales: “Too far for you to see / The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot”. Without great skill, the country chronicler’s work will fall into the category of tourist fodder – Scottish shortbread, English ale, Welsh rarebit and tales of green Ireland. Such books only kill the places they claim to love.

It takes time for Niall Williams to convince you that tourist fodder isn’t what he’s producing in This Is Happiness, the successor to his Booker-longlisted 2014 novel History of the Rain. The question Williams’s narrator, Noe (short for Noel), asks himself, “What does it matter what one old man was hoping one time?”, lingers with you as you read. Noe goes to stay with his grandparents in the village of Faha in Kerry at the same time as it is being connected up to the national grid, some time in the early 1970s. Throughout the spring that passes into summer in the course of his story, it also stops raining in this normally sodden parish. In the wake of personal grief, Noe has experienced a crisis of faith, and is taking time away from the seminary where he is studying for the priesthood. He ends up sharing a room with a man named Christy, who is laying cables into the village; Noe’s grandparents had agreed to take him in as a lodger before they knew Noe was coming to stay.

Bringing electricity turns out only to be Christy’s means of coming to Faha, though; his real reason for doing so is a woman named Annie Mooney, whom the locals know as Mrs Gaffney the chemist’s widow. Half a century after he last saw her, Christy woke up one day in a boarding house in Boston and decided that he needed to see her again. All a little baroque, but Noe acknowledges that people in Faha prefer complexity over plain speaking, which has been corrupted by the politicians. So let’s forgive him that.

But the plot is really a vehicle for Noe, half a century after the events he recalls, to write down his memories of Faha. The real heart of the book is a man remembering a summer when grief gave way to romantic love: the beginning of his adult life. This is how the novel finally earns its setting and sentimentality – it is among these familiar tropes of Irish writing that Noe’s youth happened, so it is here he must inevitably return in old age, “because, at the end, we all go back to the beginning”.

As his story develops into one of boyish, sexless infatuation, what becomes clear is that the book is sentimental because the love it recalls – the romantic, abstracted love of a young man – is deeply sentimental, and Williams is being faithful to his subject. The first time Noe is struck by the thunderbolt, what he records is that “she is gentle, all simplicity and kindness … she is small and light and all business … her eyebrows … have an attraction which can’t be measured”, which is the most chaste rendering of love at first sight I think I’ve ever read, but by no means an unfamiliar kind of bloodless, youthful longing.

The pleasure of this novel lies in its eye for detail. The plot, having been established, then takes a long time to do not very much more. What happens instead is a kind of tectonic movement from spring into summer, marked by the rhythms of village life. Williams is excellent on churchgoing, amateur dramatics, parking, the cinema. He lavishes close attention on his parishioners, and finds rich material there. He has a humorist’s eye, and his own fond amusement at the people he writes about shines out through the writing.

The fields of Ireland are very crowded, but by the conclusion of This Is Happiness, you feel Williams has justified adding another book to the herd.

Miso, a fermented soy and rice paste, is found everywhere in Japanese cuisine. It is one of the most important ingredients in Japanese cooking- a delicate seasoning which brings out the best in many dishes. It is found as an accompaniment to almost every meal and is said to aid digestion.

Japan has more than a thousand miso producers. The Nagano mountains in the centre of the country are one of the regions famous for producing the soybean paste.

Kosuke Ishii comes from a long line of miso producers. His ancestors founded the Ishii Company in the nineteenth century. Since then, miso has been fermented at his company in cypress casks – a process which can take from one to three years.

The recipe is unchanged: rice, salt, soy, and patience. The powerfully aromatic dough is worked by hand following a centuries-old custom.

“Today, most producers favour quantity and speed,” explains Kosuke Ishii. “Our mission is to keep the traditional know-how, preserve the taste, the colour and the smell of the miso in the long-term, to transmit to future generations.”

The Nagano prefecture produces nearly half of all Japanese miso. And there are hundreds of varieties.

Sano Miso is said to be the biggest and best miso store in Tokyo. People come from miles around to find their favourite ingredient. The soy bean paste is used in soup, but also as a condiment.

Noriko Sano is a Miso ‘sommelier’. She says miso is a part of everyday life for people in Japan.

“For more than 700 years, the Japanese have been drinking miso soup every day,” she says. “For the Japanese, miso is also food for the soul.”

But why does this ingredient come in so many different colours?

“Japan is a rather long country. In general, miso is darker in the north and lighter in the south,” says Noriko Sano. “When the climate is cold, the miso is browner and more salty. While in the south, it is more white and softer.”

In Japan, there is a saying: “There is no set time for miso. It’s always time to eat.” And it’s true, miso is the basis of a typical Japanese meal.

“A bowl of rice, miso soup, and some condiments, like these pickled vegetables – called tsukemono. It’s really the basic meal,” concludes Noriko Sano.

One of Europe’s leading contemporary art events, the Lyon Biennale, moves into uncharted territory for its 15th edition – the former Fagor-Brandt factory, which closed in 2015.

The team at the prestigious Palais de Tokyo in Paris were this year’s guest curators, attracted by the immense possibilities of the 29,000 square-metre venue.

Modernist design, glam rock and humour come together in ‘Design Room’ a multilevel, multimedia installation by Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl.

“I like to use the formula trans-media, trans-genre, transgender, because I am also transgender, and in my paintings I try to always mix the different genres and media,” Scheirl says.

The duo also explore the dark side of gentrification and our value system, with Knebl putting the case for “a completely new order of society in future”.

Another installation, Prometheus Delivered, brings science and art together.

It’s a marble sculpture portraying the bound Prometheus being slowly devoured by stone-eating bacteria.

Artist Thomas Feuerstein explains how the rest of the myth plays out in his installation.

“The punishment was every day an eagle comes and eats the liver of Prometheus and the liver was the symbol for the future. I wanted the scientists of the medical university in Austria to produce, to create a new liver for my Prometheus and they succeeded and did a special 3D sculpture grown from human liver cells.”

As well as the giant former Fagor-Brandt factory, the Biennale takes place all over Lyon, in the city centre and in the Museum of Contemporary Art.

French artist Karim Kal exhibits a series of photographs from a young offenders’ institution in Meyzieu, on the outskirts of Lyon.

The images are stark but document tiny details of prison life.

“The idea is to adopt the point of view of the prisoner,” Kal says. “Here we have a portrait of one of the guards done by one of the prisoners in biro and also you have the glass that is broken because of the practice that is widespread in prison environments of slamming their windows to show their discontent.”

Adding to the starkness, the photographs were taken at night, with a powerful flash and a fast shutter speed which made the background absoutely black.

Works from more than 50 artists from around the globe are on show – most of them world premieres.