The Limits Of Tolerance

 (c) Devika Brendon 2016 

It is the season when the skies and the seas conspire to encourage us to tell sagas: as it is too stormy for us to venture out, like those old Icelandic sailors, we mend our nets and build the fires, and take the time to piece together the events that the hardships of life have scattered. 

Two years ago, Marina had gone to stay with an old school friend, in the Northernmost island of New Zealand. The Perseids were streaming in the skies above, and as the house was really a summer home there were sun lounger chairs on the deck, and, at 3am a year before, she and Marigold had sat outside  and seen the lights going out in the houses around the small bay. It was a cold, poetic, Tolkienesque winter. 

The small plane from Auckland had been tossed about in some sharp bouts of wind, on the flight up. The pilot said cheerfully, 'That was a close call! A bit touch and go!', as the passengers filed past him, slightly askew, into the cold air. It felt like the edge of the known world. Innocent, pure, and still being formed. 

This year, something was misaligned. Thinking back, on the bus trip afterwards, Marina thought it was set up by the unavoidably repetitive cycle of events. School and work routines imposed a mechanistic structure on her friend's life. Her smile was slightly forced. And it was clear there was unspoken dissonance fraying the weave of their long acquaintance. 

A year before, there had been a children's birthday party, hosted by a local personage, who lived in a spacious home with extensive views of a rain-swept valley. The children romped and roared, and the adult guests congregated around the custom built bar. 

The host asked Marina what she would like to drink. She asked what was available to choose from. The list was long, and various. He wanted to show off his knowledge of wines. She requested an apple juice. He asked if she wanted ice. Of course she did. And did she want it in small pieces or large chunks? Straight from the ice cube tray, she said, thanks. She moved away. 

Later in the afternoon, she heard him recounting anecdotes to a group of women, mothers of the children who went to school with his kids at the local primary school. Several of them had husbands who were employed by him. These ladies were anxious to please: yummy mummies all in a row, with glistening eyes and gleaming hair. One of them had complimented him on his beautiful home, so perfect as the venue for a party. 

'Yeah,' he said, 'It's great. I love having the house full of people. Love having parties. I did draw the line once though, a few years ago, when I walked into my own room and found two people having sex in my bed'.

The mummies squawked nervously. Marina glittered her unspoken contempt. 

'I wouldn't even have minded that', he said, 'But the bloke still had his boots on!' 

Marina suggested that it might have been because teenagers are notoriously quick to finish, and anxious to make a fast getaway. This response to her host was described as 'unnecessarily provocative' by Marigold, in the car on the way home. 

Marina had had a sense she was being spoken to in forms of code, by both the host and his wife. At one point, avoiding her host's attempt to speak to her by moving rooms, she had gone to sit on an isolated Queen Anne style brocaded chair overlooking the view out to the valley. The host's wife came and said to her, 'That was the chair on which I nursed my children'. 

It was subsequent discussion of this party, with Marigold's husband, who had been drinking too much, that led to an opening up of greater rifts which Marina had been sensing. The man said she was reading too much into the host's behaviour. He had been merely trying to make her welcome, and she had misunderstood him. 

Marigold's husband was a man who looked rather like Tony Blair did, when he first came into office, in the early 90s. His sons boasted that their daddy imported their breakfast cereal from England, and he was indeed very possessive of his English condiments. Branston Pickle was apparently very hard to find in Auckland, and clover honey was so expensive. Clearly Marina was expected to ration her servings of it, at every meal. 

The ungenerosity, the stinginess, the minginess, the blinkeredness of the man became evident to her over many minor skirmishes. Her friend seemed impervious to these. And the children were (as much as possible) shielded from them: the unpleasantness created by their father, for example, over the sticky fingermarks on the glass doors after they had had fish and chips from the elder boy's favourite local fish shop. Marina had taken some kitchen serviettes and wiped the marks away, to save pointless argument and passive aggressive hints peppering and salting the subsequent conversation. 

Tony Blair was famous for making speeches with sound bites made for TV transmission. 'The people's princess' was a phrase he coined, cashing in on the death of Princess Diana. And Marina remembered him publicly criticising some massed protestors during the May Day demonstrations, seeking to hypocritically diminish the social inequities their challenges showcased. 'The limits of tolerance are passed', he had said, 'when misguided protestors in the name of some spurious cause seek to inflict fear, terror, violence and criminal damage on the lives and property of the peaceful citizens of this realm'. 

The guest room overlooked a tiny lower deck and part of a hill which was so steep the grass could never be mown on it. And below it was the coarse volcanic sand, striated in layers from dark to light, and the water, in streamlined banners of shades of blue, gleaming and glinting, sparks from the sunlight scattering and shimmering in intermittent sweeps and cascades. The cries of the gulls, the clouds which drifted above and through the misty hills: sometimes when she woke, she felt as Lucy Pevensie did, waking up on The Dawn Treader. 

One afternoon, Marigold asked her to come upstairs and meet someone.There was a young man in the living room, sitting familiarly on the sofa. He was the local handyman, who had become great friends with the family since they had come to stay in the area. He was a genial individual, and Marina could see he knew where everything was kept, in the kitchen. 

After he left, Marigold asked her how she thought she had been, around him. 'Kittenish', she said. 'Be careful. I don't know what the state of the world is these days, when it comes to morality, but it is probably not appropriate, even in the most liberated societies, for a man to frequently visit a woman when her husband is not at home'. 

Her husband worked during the week in Auckland, and drove up for the weekends. He rang her every night at a certain set time. 

Glimpses of a rigid pattern of preferences set by him were shown when his wife  forgot to put the bread machine on for his morning hot bread, or one dreadful night when he came up and ordered her off the computer, because she had duties to do close to home that were clearly more important. 

She tried to explain that she was on email to her old teacher, whose son had just been found killed in Arizona, after weeks of being missing, but her husband didn't care. She was supposed to get her focus right. 

Later, in an awkward attempt to smooth things over in front of the guest, he said that he would really not know what he would do without his wife. He was so lucky that she had chosen him, and had the patience to put up with the challenges of living with him. 

Marina's bus left early in the morning. No way the boys would get up to say goodbye, their father had said, but both of them were up and dressed, and in the car coming to see her off, one with a small handshake, the other casting himself like a garland over her, telling her how much he loved her, over and over again, like a delighted self-discovery, like being in love with love.

Afterwards, when she was back home, Marigold wrote to her. 'Everything I sacrifice for my family I do willingly,' she said. 'I love them more than life itself. I have never been happier than I am here. This is my place.'

   
    Marina read that letter several times. She saw how the writer sought to portray her far from untroubled life as a dream within a dream, residing within a series of circles, the deep happiness at its core invisible to the outsider. She had learned to overlook the displays of stubbornness, the stiff-necked strutting and predictable petulance of her husband, and move on from each incident without bitterness or recrimination. 

    It was like dodging bullets: awkward at first, but, through practice, becoming as fluid in motion as a dance routine, many times rehearsed. After a while, living in a war zone, it must become instinctive, and the ambient awareness you developed would shield you from every attempt of the enemy to pierce or penetrate. By negotiating, by acquiescing, by doing what was required, and absenting her attention at points of unwanted impact, Marigold had created spaces and interstices in which she was  - intermittently - left in peace. 

    Marina remembered her friend: honey gold fierce, fiery, glorious tresses shielding her face against the sun on the deck, feeding the little fat brown birds the leftover crumbs from the morning breakfast bread. 

She remembered how they fluffed themselves up, against the cold winter air, and she trusted to the sea and the high, bright stars and the atmosphere at the end of the earth to clear away the human residue of unexpressed despair, rage, outrage and disillusion that did not belong in the picture

Harry Potter And The End Of An Era

Published in Ceylon Today

'Finite Incantatem' is what people in the world created by J.K. Rowling say when a spell has run its course, or has ended its usefulness and is now causing damage. 

I want to say these words, as a requiem for Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, because it has been 19 years since he was created, and the latest work about him, the play 'Harry Potter and The Cursed Child' that was co-written by Rowling, and published last week, marks the end of an era. Not because the readership is not interested in what happens next, but because what we are told in this play happens next is a bewildering let-down of our legitimate expectations. 

As a great fan of the series, I find myself in the equivalent of a Body Bind Curse when it comes to putting into words what I want to say about the latest instalment. Please bear with me, because I wanted so much to find that the magic never ends, that the cupboard door in the spare room which led to the magical world was still partly open, that there was still a possibility that that wonderful childhood pleasure of discovering interesting characters in a world parallel to my own, was not outgrown. 

I have heard many people with children praise the series for their story-telling, the exciting adventures, for getting kids interested in reading again, for their wit and their humour. Social commentators have praised the inclusion of characters whose situations raise even young readers' awareness of socio-political issues in our contemporary world: of injustice and inequity, of bigotry and of race, class and gender prejudice, in accessible ways. 

The 7 books portrayed a battle between Good and Evil that was only thinly rendered in metaphor, and in which the hero and his friends grow and evolve in moral awareness, and in insight into the complexities of human nature, including their own. This in itself in my view was a great literary achievement, although the story-telling itself is uneven at times in its quality, and the best sequences show up in stark contrast the labouredness of the weaker sections. 

It was a stroke of brilliance on the part of Rowling to fix the personal development of her protagonist onto the natural and familiar organisational structure of every child's Senior School curriculum and syllabus, so that his emergence into adulthood at the age of 17 was also the point at which he would meet his (un) Maker, his arch-enemy, and battle him for the last time, avenging his parents' murder and saving his generation and the wizarding world from impending doom. 

The world which was created in that parallel universe portrayed diverse ethnicities, girls known for their intellectual ability, and ways people could literally learn to successfully deal with their demons. This fantasy world was an original one, product of an interesting perspective, which, despite its stifling Anglo-centrism, its tokenism and its formulaic tendencies, brought many blessings to child readers in the form of ideas which formed the basis for their beliefs about friends, enemies, and what side to choose when life presented them with dilemmas which tested their evolving character and aspirations. 

So this play which is presented as portraying the world in which Harry and his friends are in their early middle age, and have married each other and had children, should have been interesting, even fascinating - as it is interesting and fascinating to meet a person you last saw in their teens now 'all grown up' and in the midst of their destined life. 

It is acutely disappointing to see potential in real people, in real life, unrealised. And when writers create characters who impact our imagination, we have hopes and fears for them as we do for real people. So I must say that Rowling's creation of Hermione Granger, easily the most interesting character of the original central trio, is a travesty in this play: the idealistic, sceptical, insightful girl, whose combination of despised 'Mudblood' status and brilliant intuitive talent challenges all the prejudices of her world, has become the mother of a daughter whose snobbery and sense of entitlement are qualities the young Hermione would have seen through and mocked into proportion 'at once'. 

Even alternative outcomes clumsily and confusingly accessed by Time-Turners do not outline any better alternatives. Of all the infinite possibilities available, generated by the better parts of her own imagination, Rowling in the end ultimately endorsed THIS? This shop-worn and self-limiting, parochial vision? 

It does not make sense. And the tortured central story of the second generation resolving their parents' differences ought to be interesting and morally instructive, but is not. And middle-aged, navel-gazing Harry with doubts about his ability to parent, the contrived passion and faux chemistry of the two ill-assorted married couples, the weirdly self-defining children, the lifeless dialogue, make the experience of reading the script increasingly worse. What ought to have been a longed-for pleasure has become an ordeal.

We are presented with easy answers to difficult questions. Rowling over the years created an audience who became accustomed to a far higher standard of creative characterisation and thematic presentation. Whereas great writers generally create the audience by which they are appreciated, in this case the inverse seems to have occurred. The story's worth is only in its value as a commodity by booksellers at point of sale, and tickets for performances of the play sold out two years in advance. The franchise and its dictates have engulfed the central narrative, and a light has been put out which had made the world in the late 1990s and the 2000s a much better place. 

The wishing well is dry, and the coins at the bottom of it have lost their value and their currency. 

A terrible end to the telling of a wonderful story. 

Vale, Harry Potter

Harry Potter Resurrection: The Continuing Story Of The Boy Who Lived

This article originally appeared in Roar.lk

The latest instalment of the story of The Boy Who Lived is now out, in bookstores of all kinds, simultaneously, throughout the world. In 2007, early in the morning on a cold winter’s day in the Southern Hemisphere, my friend and I stood in line to buy our pre-booked copies from the local bookstore, while normally stolid and respectable citizens of our suburb joined the queue dressed in cloaks and magical outfits, and a large man hired by the bookstore manager drove up and down the high street on a noisy motorbike with a sidecar.

We came home and started reading, from morning throughout the wintry day, updating each other as we went, on the big revelations. This was, after all, supposed to be the last tale in the saga. All the keys to all the mysteries lay therein.

I can hardly believe it was 9 years ago! And now the latest story is a play, and in London there is an outcry because the author has endorsed the casting of a black actor to play Hermione on the stage.

This is not how many readers of the books have envisioned her, apparently.

Noma Dumezweni, who plays Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Image credit: Charlie Gray

Many people over the last 19 years have said that this story has encouraged children to read again. The adventures of Harry Potter and his friends and frenemies and arch-enemies have been a great vehicle for social commentary and political satire. Rowling has dealt with some big issues, in ways that children will never forget. Foremost among these are issues of social justice, equity and human rights.

The Mudblood/Pureblood debate, the movement to assert the supremacy of wizards over other magical creatures, the rising pro-marginalisation of minorities in the form of elves and giants and centaurs were all profound in their impact on the way children who read the stories in their formative years saw the implications of race hatred and bigotry. The bullying in the school room and the rivalries in the sports fields reflected the skewed stances of the grownups: the personal vendettas of Malfoy’s goons illustrated the race and class prejudices of the adult Death-Eaters. The divided wizarding world reflected the dangers in our own. And Rowling placed her faith in the children, to outgrow the hostilities of their damaged adult guides and mentors.

The poem she cited at the beginning of ‘Deathly Hallows’ highlighted her serious intent, and her awareness of what the contemporary younger generation are facing, which she portrays metaphorically, but which is real:

Oh, the torment bred in the race,

the grinding scream of death

and the stroke that hits the vein,

the haemorrhage none can stanch, the grief,

the curse that no man can bear.

But there is a cure in the house

and not outside it, no,

not from others but from them,

their bloody strife. We sing to you,

dark gods beneath the earth.

Now hear, you blissful powers underground –

answer the call, send help.

Bless the children, give them triumph now.

From Aeschylus, ‘The Libation Bearers‘

War, conflict, suffering, betrayal, loss of family, loss of home, threats to security, threats to personal safety, corrupt and indifferent governments, evil disguised as banality, exploitation and abuse of the innocent and the vulnerable… children all over the world see these at an earlier age than previous generations ever did. The books are in a real sense a course in Defence Against The Dark Arts. How to tell our friends from our enemies. How to find out what truly matters to us amidst all the chaos, and fight for its protection and its continuance.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is a two-part West End stage play written by Jack Thorne based on an original new story by Thorne, J.K. Rowling and John Tiffany. Image credit: Rob Stothard/Getty Images

I loved the story, not because it was beautifully written, because there are some major patches of unevenness in the telling of the tale, but because of the irreverence of its postmodern anti-authoritarianism. Dolores Umbridge, evil in shades of pink and self-justifying sadism, thinly disguised by doilies and wallpaper awash with kittens, Cornelius Fudge, fearful enabler of Dementors, Mafalda Hopkirk, the lady who writes Harry all those scary letters on behalf of the Ministry of Magic, ruining his life and always ending by wishing him a nice day, the appalling Voldemort and the group of bullies, cowards and thugs who cohere around him, the flawed and eccentric father and mother substitutes, the recognisable English stock stereotypes (‘Anything from the trolley, dears?’), the privileged boarding school with its tower rooms and four poster beds, the dining hall with its loaded tables and sumptuous feasts, the individuated common rooms, the fantasy of being educated away from home, the eccentricities and the familiar traits of our school lives all woven into a medley of magic and postmodern myth-making.

It is a classic Hero’s Journey, with mentors, foes, confrontations with oracles, and soul-searing struggles in every sequence, brilliantly set against the counterpoint of an ordinary senior school progression from Year 7 to Year 12. There are some character sketches which are Hogarthian in their satiric brilliance, and Dickensian in their portrayal of moral depravity. And the humour at its best is joyful in its ironic exuberance.

I loved the strong messages of positive ethnic tolerance and colour blindness: that Harry’s first crush was Cho Chang, yet she is never overtly identified as Chinese. Two of the prettiest girls in the school are Padma Patil and her twin, with their dark plaits, but they are never identified as Indian. Ginny dates Dean Thomas, the irreverent Quidditch announcer Lee Jordan has rasta braids, one of the Quidditch team leaders, Angelina, is black, Kingsley with his rich, dark-toned voice is universally favoured, Ron’s werewolf-savaged elder brother falls in love with the fabulous French Fleur (‘I am good-looking enough for both of us!’) and Hermione is briefly romanced by the wonderful Bulgarian Viktor Krum, who has difficulty pronouncing her name. It is a veritable United Colours of Benetton, at Hogwarts!

The series introduces a number of characters of different racial origins – although the main characters seem never to be anything other than Anglo-Celtic. Image courtesy thereadingroom.com

But none of the main characters in the books or the films seemed to be anything other than Anglo-Celtic. And there never seemed to be curry night or yum cha or biriyani on the menu in the dining hall. It is wall to wall treacle tarts, ham and chicken pies, and Irish stew. Nothing even as exotic as a sun-dried tomato. It is a predominantly Anglo-centric story, and it seems as if it was always intended to be so. Rowling insisted that no non-British actors would be cast in the movies. It is the Englishness of the story, its similarities to the Chronicles of Narnia (except without the religion), to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, the evocation of familiar tropes with slight tweaks and twists of whimsy that comfort and reassure the Anglophiles amongst us ‒ and within us. The ethnic and cultural diversity portrayed here is supremely managed. The non-Anglo-Celtic characters, (with the notable exception of Kingsley Shacklebolt, who becomes an important progressive figure in the latter part of the stories), are all in minority roles, not central to the narrative, and their being praised for their exotic qualities of voice or their beautiful smiles disturbingly suggests tokenism, which we absorb along with the other organising rules of the world Rowling creates.

Perhaps this tokenism is a reflection of real contemporary Britain, which, after centuries of colonisation fuelled by Anglo-centrism, may be developing the ability to look outside its own parameters and see equivalent centres of self in other countries and cultures as valuable and meaningful. Kingsley is the only adult ethnic minority figure represented who is praised for his political effectiveness and his leadership abilities. Even the Dursleys appreciate him ‒ by default! At school level, Angelina is very good at Quidditch. And everyone seems to interact as equals on a literally equal playing field.

Rowling’s wizarding world appeared to be a place where people were judged not on the colour of their skin but on the content of their character. So it is easy to see it as a moral and poetic saga: the end of each book sees our hero tussling ever more successfully with the inimical Dark Lord, and having a story-so-far summit meeting with Dumbledore, either in person or in his mind, where the take-home messages and mottos are underlined in Socratic dialogue, mentor to mentee. Its structure is reassuringly formulaic.

Dementors: one of the finest portraits of the struggle with depression seen in contemporary literature. Image courtesy harrypotterwikia.com

The sequence with the Dementors is one of the finest portraits of the struggle with depression seen in contemporary literature, and the protection against them, which must be learned, is a resonant one. Think of what makes you happy. Focus on that. It is your defence against the sadness which we all experience when we are at a low ebb. Lupin’s lessons are forms of cognitive reasoning therapy which can be understood by even young children. And I love that the remedy for a Dementor attack is chocolate.

The moral universe of the stories is drawn and shaped by a generous hand: it allows for us, along with the protagonists, to review and reassess our judgments of the characters we meet. The hard oppositional lines demarcating good and evil are blurred in this world ‒ we gain insights via magic into the circumstances which formed Voldemort and Snape, and Harry is confronted by unpleasant sides of his father which he must accept. We are shown the vulnerability and self-awareness of the great Albus Dumbledore, and the ‘superb’ courage of Minerva McGonagall. We see Harry’s unprejudiced openness to learning from the dispossessed: from the insights offered by the zany Luna Lovegood, from the bumbling loyalty of the huge and large-hearted Hagrid, and in his love for Dobby, the liberated self which transcends all barriers. In Hermione’s activism, we see compassion which eventually influences Ron and Harry to understand the plight of even the twisted house-elf Kreacher.

We see in Ron’s family’s poverty and Malfoy’s family’s scorn of it, and in the Malfoy family’s ill-treatment of others, their condescension and their competitiveness, how unpleasant and offensive a sense of entitlement based on inherited socio-economic status can be. Yet we see also the love and concern the Malfoys have for their son. My favourite moments are when the children rise above their histories and do their best to save each other, even from the Fiendfyre. That compassion and capacity for empathy under stress, to forgive in an instant, and deal with a complex reality as it is, changes the outcome for many people. There are echoes here of Frodo and Bilbo’s compassion for the pitiful Gollum in LOTR, and their ability to see what they have in common, even with someone who seems to be unambiguously against them.

Harry Potter created a revolution in reading for children the world over. Image courtesy bbc.co.uk

The kids who grew up reading Harry Potter must have all voted against Brexit: they surely voted to embrace difference and the life-enhancing opportunities it brings. It is such a pity that the older generation, with their memories of war and regional introversions and petty self-protective demarcations, outvoted them. Yet in some ways Ron’s insularity reflects an ignorance that Rowling presumably does not share, but which also represents a reality she is aware of. Neither he nor Harry even know what bouillabaisse is! We can excuse Harry, who (after all) was brought up in a small room under the stairs in Privet Drive, and Ron, whose family circumstances do not stretch to overseas travel ‒ even to France. But I personally welcome portrayals of an ever more diverse dining experience at the feasting tables of the world, both fictional and real. And I question whether a boy who finds bouillabaisse too much for him to handle at a meal would marry a black Hermione.

I am also dismayed to find that Rowling apparently married everyone in the core group of friends off to each other, and at such young ages ‒ did NONE of them do further study, except Neville? ‒ and how middle-aged, conservative, faded and weary they all looked as parents on Platform 9 and 3/4, seeing their kids off on the train to Hogwarts, to start another cycle. Did Rowling’s imagination fail, at that point? Will her spirited and original protagonists be limited by her own limits of experience, and her conception of them? They are only in their late 30s, at the end of Book 7!

Cast members of the play. Image courtesy: spinoff.comicbookresources.com

If Rowling can cast a black Hermione in the stage play, what else can she now do? Can a black Hermione separate from Ron on the grounds of intellectual boredom and boldly choose a different, less constrained life? Will she and Harry become entrepreneurs instead of merely working forever for The Ministry of Magic? Will some of their children go to Australia, not as an escape from bloodthirsty Death Eaters, but merely for a gap year?

I know in some ways that this outcome was the whole point. The best continuity hoped for by the citizens of this alternative universe would have been destroyed by the evil that was raging through their world, where the Dark Lord was trying to get at the kids from a young age and divide them into ideology-infused camps. Challenging that was what they had fought for in those epic struggles and battles of the will, and this was their prize: normalcy, ordinary family life, an existence which was not so intense, all the time. For people whose childhood was riven by war and trauma and dislocation, this was and is very heaven. We can surely relate to this.

But it may not be all that could be hoped for. It may be only the end of the beginning! The best may yet be still to come, for all of us, in that world, and in this.