Creative in Kathmandu: A Report with Photos!
From Samrat Upadhyay, Director, Creative Writing Program:
Last spring, the College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) awarded me a grant to take with me two MFA students to Nepal, my home country, for a 15-day cultural/literary trip.
Click here to view PHOTOS of the trip.
Titled, “The Writer in the World: Cultural Space and Displacement,” the project’s aim was to enable a shift in cultural location that would trigger perceptual changes, which would in turn stimulate creativity. The two-week displacement, I hoped, would transform my students’ writing by forcing it to engage with a broader social and political sphere, and that it would deepen their sense of being writers of the world.
The two students, Magda Sokolowski and Andres Sanabria, were chosen through a competitive process. They arrived in Kathmandu on July 1 to a jam-packed itinerary that included, among other things, cultural tours of Kathmandu Valley’s three ancient cities—Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur; journey to the resort town of Pokhara, with a side-trek to the Annapurna area with its glorious mountains; dinner at my mother Shanta Sharma’s home in the outskirts of Kathmandu; and observation of and participation in religious ceremonies performed by my mother-in-law Jayanti Lamsal at Kathmandu Ganesh temple and at her home.
Magda and Andres also participated in a variety of literary activities. They conducted individual workshops for 8th-10th grade students at Malpi International School, offering critiques to the students on their poems and stories. Most of these students had never experienced a workshop before, and they expressed their deep appreciation for this opportunity. Magda and Andres spent one night at Malpi International, staying in its dorm rooms and interacting with the students. A few days later, they also participated in an award ceremony at Malpi, where they handed out certificates to students of all grade level. The two MFAers also didn’t hesitate to provide their autographs to the students—on books that I had authored! On another day, we visited an impoverished city school, Kanya Mandir, the first all-girls school of the country. We interacted with the students, and Magda and Andres (and my daughter Shahzadi) gave the students a good sense of student life in America.
The three of us also participated on a panel on Creative Writing moderated by a celebrated Nepali writer in English, Sushma Joshi. The event, organized by Fine Print Book Club, was well-attended, with several reporters in the audience—and the conversation was stimulating. The day before they left Nepal, Magda and Andres gave a reading, along with me, at Quixote’s Cove bookstore in Kathmandu, an event that was covered by the national daily, The Himalayan Times.
What was the experience like for Magda and Andres? Please read their reports below (Magda’s report is an excerpt from a travel essay, “Congratulations on Your Golden Life,” forthcoming in READ literary magazine based in Kathmandu).
Andres Sanabria:
Among the many beautiful experiences I had in Nepal—walking through the traffic choked streets of the capital; shopping for crafts in Thamel; observing a Hindu puja with a local family; trekking to an isolated village in the Annapurna conservation area; visiting ancient durbar squares in Patan, Kathmandu and Bhaktapur—the most rewarding for me was the opportunity to work with the young writers at the Malpi International School. At the school, I led six individual workshops with some very eager writers whose own work and cultural perspectives were remarkable for their differences from my own but more so for their unexpected similarities. I left the students keenly aware of the universality of the writer’s experiences, the urgent desire to make sense of our environment whatever it may be. I feel rejuvenated by the whole experience and am now thinking about my work in terms of its universalities.
Magda Sokolowski
As much as I wanted to go to Nepal under the guise of mental hygiene, stripping my brain of all desires, expectations and certainties, I knew I had to go with at least one or two questions in order to be true to the purpose of the fellowship, which was to explore the nature of the “writer in exile.” Or how one’s writing changes when uprooted and dislocated to another culture, another geographic place. How, I wondered, would poetic and linguistic meaning change as a result of being in Nepal? How would being culturally integrated in Nepal impact the experience of language and the experiences that language affords? Or would I even think about language while there—the very thing that my mind had been most consumed by for the last two years?
The opportunity to balance precariously between the two cultures of Nepal and the US, even if for a brief moment, to stand at the intersection of two different ways of perceiving the world from two unique vantage points, truly excited me. I recalled what Salman Rushdie said in his essay “Imaginary Homelands.” “The possibilities” he writes “that exist for new perspectives as a result of the vantage point at intersections of culture, identity and place are infinite.” Infinite possibilities, infinite perspectives? I was totally psyched. I’d always believed that art in general, and especially poetry, tend to free us from the automatism of perception and when joined with the experience of negotiating new spaces, the possibilities for language become truly astounding. And this is precisely what I went looking for as I headed for Nepal—freedom from the autonomy of perception. What would such an experience look and feel like? And more interestingly, how would it impact my poetic expression?
It wasn’t difficult to be immediately consumed by Nepal. From the moment Samrat, Andres and I left the airport and whizzed through the streets of Kathmandu during the morning rush of cars, buses, motorbikes, pedestrians and stray dogs, all of my senses amalgamated into a synaesthetic kaleidoscope and remained that way for the entire trip.
“Perception is possibility” writes the ecologist and philosopher David Abram. Meaning that perception is the possibility of true, direct participation and this type of direct sensory participation allows for a new understanding of the world. Echoing what Abram writes about in his excellent book “The Spell of the Sensuous” (which I’d brought along on the trip), being in Nepal for me was a phenomenological experience. In Nepal, I felt like I was returning to the things themselves. When I was able to shed my expectations, perceived ideas and notions, I entered Abram’s world of “the flesh of language” or as phenomenology suggests—the fundamental experience of living. In this type of experience, even language seems to subside while the body’s senses open up to a full range of perceptual opportunities, like those I experienced in Nepal.
There, I found the air to be a thick and textured presence filled with both visible and invisible tactile, olfactory, and audible influences. Whether in Kathmandu where burning incense combines with the aromas of roasting meats, honey-glazed pastries and citrus fruits for trade in the open markets, the stench of organic refuse rotting in the ravines punctuated by the black exhaust of too many cars on narrow dirt roadways, the hot-sour smell of fresh blood from the sacrificial cremation of a small black goat swirling with the warm monsoon rain, and the waxy-smoke odor of a million candles burning during the ceremonial puja for the Hindu god Ganesh; or in the small high mountain towns, where the wind carries the whiffs of countless wildflowers alongside the ripe pungency of millet and corn, and of the newly turned earth outside the villages where the fragrant dung of yaks dries in round patties to be used later as household fuel. From the beginning, I was taken by the smells of Nepal and the sounds too: the cacophonous honking and braking of cars on a jam-packed street, the tantric orchestra of chanting monks, singing bowls and prayer bells alongside the flapping of prayer flags as the high-mountain winds poured over the passes, the rivers that gushed, and the meals that sizzled in the open-market air.
It’s become a cliché by now, how developing countries surpass developed ones in terms of the sensory-overload they provide, but that’s precisely what I experienced in Nepal, sensory overload in the fullest sense of the word. And how strange that my impulse during the trip was to actually limit thinking as well as limit thinking about language. I knew that the time for creating work and writing poetry would come, but what was important while in Nepal, was to simply be, and “to take it as it comes,” which was exactly the advice we’d gotten from Samrat before leaving.
So I surrendered to experience and all it afforded: witnessing the sacrifice of a small black goat at a temple high on a hillside outside of Kathmandu; alerting to the sudden squawk of a monkey as it chewed on the remainder of an empty juice container along the Bagmati River; partaking in an ancient ceremony performed at one of Kathmandu's oldest Ganesh Temples and stirred the offering candle with the tip of sugar cane; eating with my hand a delicious plateful of Nepali food on a rooftop overlooking the entire valley and threw rice into a fire as an offering to the Hindu Gods; bartering bartered with a shopkeeper over an antique Ceremonial mask; and dodging cars, bikes, rickshaws as the sun set over the city, turning it into dark alleyways punctuated with the intermittent lights of braking cars. “It's like a dance,” I said to Andres, “the way the cars and bikes and people navigate these ancient alleyways ... a beautifully orchestrated dance.”
All of this reminded me of something that one of my favorite poets William Stafford quotes Robert Frost as having said. “A conscientious interest in poetry,” Stafford and Frost both claim, “is worse than no interest at all,” meaning, of course, that writing is not about intention, but rather about possibility and the primacy of feeling. Indeed, “intention endangers creation,” Stafford wrote. In other words, a writer can’t plan to elicit creative results, but most find them by willingly entering “an area of possible encounter.” Stafford believed that to have in mind patterns other than those dictated by immediate experience is to violate the process that a writer must depend on. And that’s exactly what it was like, what it became for me—the experience in Nepal with all of its amazing sites, sounds and smells was like entering Stafford’s “area of possible encounter.” While in Nepal, as a temporarily “exiled writer,” I simply needed to listen while there in order to measure the pulse of one of the most beautiful places in the world. Language, and poetry, I realized, would come later—after the lived experience itself.
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