A lecture given by Ilya Trojanow
Member of the ICORN Council of Writers and Experts
Every Saturday and Sunday, all over Europe, people from different walks of life come together to support their very own. They flock into the arenas, wearing the shirts of their heroes, eager to scream and shout for the better part of two hours. What do they sing in moments of joy and ecstasy? Which slogan unites them all, whether they are comfortably seated in the stadium of Anderlecht or quivering on their feet in Lüttich? Olé! Rhythmically repeated in a distinct, well-known cascade: olé ... olé olé olé. Probably most fans link this slogan with Spain. Maybe they associate it with toreros or with Don Juan. But how many of the fans that whip themselves into frenzy with unrelenting olés realize that they are actually repeating the Arab word for God. Time and again, every Saturday and Sunday, the soccer stadiums in Europe resonate with shouts of "Allah"!
In times of crisis the rhetoric of conflict blossoms. The ongoing, seemingly endless "War On Terror", powered by deliberately vague justifications, has metastasised into a clash of canons, cultures and civilizations. We are on the edge of disaster, we have to close ranks and defend our values and traditions. The foreign is an antagonistic force that has to be repelled. Thus we are asked, more often heatedly implored, to define our identity, to become aware of our own heritage, to defend our very own values.
But what if we are not defined by a homogenous, home-grown culture, because such a thing does not exist, has never existed? What if our identity is nothing but a snapshot of a dynamic process that we are caught up in, often without noticing? What if what we regard as alien is only the result of a momentary difference, a fleeting gesture of history? What if those that are claiming to defend the core of a certain nation, a certain tradition, a certain religion are fighting windmills while the reality of cultural dynamics is in the wind? For what if the values and cultural achievements of the so-called West were the result of awakenings and rebellions made possible by what we today regard as non-European sources, by movement and migration? What if core Western values, technologies and cultural expressions were decisively formed by confluences, by a intensive exchange between Islam, Christianity and Judaism, by a vibrant culture of debate amongst scholars working in Granada, Baghdad, Palermo, Damascus, Bologna, Paris, Venice and Cairo? What if all that we perceive as canonical and classical is a hybridity that we have forgotten? Or have been persuaded, encouraged, conditioned to forget?
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The greatest rivers bear the most misleading names. The canon of geography dictates that the source furthest away from the mouth is the river's point of origin, and the entire watercourse takes on a single name. But no great river would reach the ocean without being fed by tributaries: the brooks, streams and rivulets that join its flow, often bringing with them more water, alluvium, minerals or fish than the source stream. By the time the great river has reached the ocean, the source is no more than a faint memory; the flow has been defined by a series of confluences along the way. But the river's official name conceals the truth of its composition; while the nametag passes into legend and lexicon, the ancestry of confluences becomes invisible. To understand the true identity of the river, we would have to pinpoint the occasions of confluence, examine the dynamics of addition and innovation played out at the merging of the waters.
Our history, regulated by concepts of singularity and pure origin, is as much of a cartographer's invention as the great river. By taking a certain tableau of it to represent culture‘s form and essence, it mistakes a snapshot of the river for its whole course. By the time cultural achievements become sufficiently established in public consciousness as to be taught in school, the turmoil of their evolution has been forgotten. The confluences of every culture are concealed, and homogenising foundational myths are installed in their place. Instead of the many pasts that have produced our present, we put on the dark glasses of amnesia and see a singular past. The timeless stability of our culture guarantees the security of our identity. Therefore, we have to preserve the purity of our culture against contamination by the Other. By a circular argument in which the contemporary political purpose shapes its own background, this singular Past is established as testament to the uniqueness and superiority of a particular culture or nation. Although globalisation is currently depicted as a celebration of diversity, the dominant elites of every tribe continue to define cultures in opposition to one other. After all, the hybrid threatens the stability of society and State, subverts the gospel truth of ‘one people, one nation, one culture'.
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The exile, the migrant is another threat, or a blessing in disguise. Take Petrus Alfonsi. Born a Jew in al-Andalus in 1066, he received the education customary for a member of the cultivated Muslim-Jewish elite. At the age of forty, he was baptised in a highly public ceremony presided over by his patron, King Alfonso I of Aragon. In the process, he seems to have alienated himself from family and community. He left his Spanish homeland to journey north, going first to Normandy and then to England. There, he must have felt like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. The education he had received back home placed him in a position of great advantage in a society that was, in scientific as well as in literary matters, decidedly primitive. Petrus made the most of the situation. He became a physician at the court of Henry I, and also its leading resident man of wisdom. Publishing on a variety of learned subjects, he soon achieved literary fame. His books were widely read in England and translated throughout Christian Europe; they were the ‘bestsellers' of their times. His writings are forgotten, with the exception of his single work of fiction, published in 1115. Titled Disciplina Clericalis (Tales of the Priest), this was an anthology of 34 stories, translated from the Arabic into Latin: a small and representative selection from the vast reservoir of stories to which he was heir, but impressive enough to excite generations of readers and listeners in Christian Europe. For this was the first story-collection of Latin literature in the Middle Ages.
These stories were drawn from an ocean of fables, parables, allegories and adventures. Most famous of all is the Arabic Alf Laila wa Laila, the Thousand and One Nights. But there are precedents: the Sanskrit Vetala-pancavimsati, the ‘Twenty-five Tales of the Vampire', the Katha-sarit-sagar, the ‘Ocean of the Rivers of Stories', and above all the Sanskrit Panchatantra, which had travelled westward in numerous disguises, appearing in Persian and Arabic as the Dastan Kalilah wa Dimnah. This 8th-century translation made in Baghdad was then conveyed into Syriac, Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and eventually - through the efforts of Petrus - infused even the Welsh and French repertories of narrative. La Fontaine paid it explicit homage in the introduction to the second volume of his Fables (1678).
Petrus' narratives were bursting with tall tales and curiosities, audacious exaggerations and caveats pressed home, figures from the daily life of castle, cottage and field, as well as alchemists and sorcerers from beyond the horizons of the known. But how were these stories to be held together, Petrus Alfonsi must have asked himself. The solution was near at hand. He had grown up in the tradition of the frame story, where one narrative was nested inside another, each ivory box opening to reveal yet another, smaller and more exquisite. All the great story collections mentioned above operate on this principle. That is also how Petrus Alfonsi intertwined his stories with the conversation between a father and a son serving as a frame. That is how the stories are introduced in the Panchatantra - a sage named Vishnu Sharman is asked to counsel five young princes, to instruct them in the manners of the world and about how to survive in this tricky world. That is exactly how the very first West European fiction writers organised their imaginary material: Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the two most influential prose works of the Renaissance, fountainheads of a vast literary sea. Nothing like this had previously existed in Latin literature. Christian texts were pretty much all the Latin literature that anyone had read or studied ... for a very long time. But Arabic brought with it treasures that had little to do with religion ...". All the central aspects of these two epochal works are familiar to a literary traveller: the story in a story in a story; the idea of a story-telling contest, whether to pass time, as in Chaucer, or to survive a deadly threat, as in Boccaccio. As raconteurs, the pilgrims journeying to Canterbury and the Florentine jeunesse dorée are descendants of Vishnu Sharman and Scheherazade.
But the close similarities do not end with the structure. The stories themselves are retellings of a narrative heritage that goes all the way back to ancient India. Boccaccio reads like a DJ who is remixing evergreens: the second tale of the second day, the loss and recovery of Rinaldo's property, is from the Panchatantra, as is the second tale of the third day, in which the tactful King Agilulf matches wits with the groom who has seduced his Queen, a charming story from the Panchatantra that is beloved throughout India even today. The fifth tale of the third day about a young man infatuated with a married lady, who offers her husband his beautiful horse in exchange for a few words with her, is from the Hitopadesha (Sanskrit: ‘The Instruction in Well-Being'), a parallel to the Panchatantra that was translated into Arabic and Persian, from where it entered a collection titled The Fables of Sinbad, widely circulated in Latin at the time of the Florentine master. The ninth tale of the third day, telling of the vexed love between Gilette and Bertrand, is based on one of the greatest of the Sanskrit plays, Kalidasa's The Recognition of Shakuntala, available at the time in an 11th-century French version. On the fourth day, Boccaccio breaks the pattern, offering a defence of his work by telling a story himself, of the hermit Filipo Balducci and his son. At the age of eighteen, the son leaves the retreat and enters the city, where he is fascinated with the female. This story originates in a legend nested within the great Indian epic Ramayana, where the lad is called Rishyashringa, which means ‘the young sage with the single horn'. Incidentally, this is the origin of the topos of ‘The Virgin and the Unicorn', well known in Christian legend and iconography; it also fed into the Andalusian Ibn Tufayl's philosophical allegory, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (‘Alive, Son of Awake').
The first tale of the fifth day leads us back in time into Buddhist lore. The story of the two young Cypriots, who brave adversity to win their brides, appears in Barlaam and Josaphat, an 8th century Greek Christianisation of the life of the Buddha and the stories of his previous births. The translator was none other than St John of Damascus, a leading figure in Umayyad Christianity. These stories circulated so widely and became so popular - they were also current in an Arabic version, Bilawar and Buddhasaf - that Josaphat (a well-attested corruption of Bodhisattva) was "canonised by the 14th century, and worshipped as a saint in the Catholic Church", as was Barlaam. It is a comforting thought that a Catholic praying to Saint Josaphat on his feast day of November 27 is also invoking the grace of the Buddha.
Both in their exotic content and the novel manner of their telling, Boccaccio and Chaucer revolutionised literature in Christian Europe. Petrus Alfonsi's little stories would be told and retold, adapted and embellished. Caxton's version of Aesop's fables contained many Alfonsi stories, as did the Gesta Romanorum, which was to inspire generations of European writers, even contributing plot elements to the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe. At the end of the day, the convert had converted those who converted him, to the culture that he had deliberately left behind.
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However, confluence is not necessarily a peaceful process of embracing the Other and assimilating heterogeneous impulses. We are certainly not imagining a naïve pacifist ideal. Confluence is not without conflict; rather, cultural transformation has been effected just as much by peaceful encounter as by the tumults of war, invasion, slavery, inquisition, pogrom and exile. Periods of deep confluence were not utopias of serenity and understanding among diverse groups brought together into a single polity. Take for example the Musica Negra of Blues, Jazz, Rock, Reggae and all that Hip Hop. From the periphery of society, from the plantations and the ghettos, this music has come to dominate White American culture. Out of slavery and apartheid, the expressive music of the oppressed has become North America's greatest contribution to culture, and ironically a commodity, perfectly packaged and marketed by the transnational entertainment corporations.
Also, confluence does not imply complete understanding and coherent exchange. Marvellous cultural accomplishments have sprung from misconceptions and misunderstandings between individuals and societies. Actually, if one were to propagate a bill of basic rights for Culture, the right to misinterpretation would have to rank very high. Especially in the history of art, the artistic imagination has often been excited by forms from elsewhere excited, taking them out of their context and giving them new purpose. The West European painters and sculptors in the late 19th and early 20th century who discovered an ancient Egyptian bas relief sculpture, a Far Eastern print, or a West African figurine, were enthused by their expressive power, their stylisations of figure and space. They did not always have an understanding of the ritual or aesthetic significance of the artefacts. Nonetheless, they incorporated the aesthetic essence and revolutionized their own cultures. Thus Picasso, Braque and Kirchner were dynamized by West African and Oceanic sculpture; Matisse, Klee and Macke found a new language of motif and colour in North Africa and Turkey, and Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich were replenished by Asian spirituality, including yoga and Sufism. Modern European art is inconceivable without the deep immersion of its masters in the cultures from beyond the West.
In a previous generation, the radical young artists of Paris during the late 1880s, willing to rebel against the bourgeois salons of their time, embraced with profound curiosity a culture from the other side of the planet - a movement called Japonisme. Painters like Gauguin and Van Gogh admired the prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. They internalised the compact, stylised figures, positioned asymmetrically in a shallow picture space, strong diagonals, and flat colouring with accentuated outlines. Japanese woodcuts, especially those depicting the ukiyo-e or ‘floating world', the pleasure quarters of Tokyo and Kyoto, had become available with the opening up of trade between Japan and Europe. Interestingly, the Japanese prints had themselves been strongly influenced by Western techniques of perspective, foreshortening, Mannerist exaggeration, and the use of shading to suggest volume - techniques that filtered into Japan from West Europe via India and China. The great Hokusai (1760-1850), who studied these Western techniques carefully, was deeply interested in the mathematics of the visual, and kept himself au courant with the latest developments in European science; for instance, his colleague Ryutei Tanehiko notes in his diary of 1810 that he took lessons from Hokusai in the use of a Dutch mathematical instrument. When the works of Hokusai and Hiroshige found their way to Holland and France, they completed a loop and worked their way into the paintings of Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne.
Confluence does depend on a certain mobility of people, ideas, goods and services, as it relies on the presence of meeting places, junctions, nodes where everyday interaction with the Other is a fact of life, and you cannot ignore difference because you are surrounded by it, you live, eat and breathe it. It requires an interweave of mercantile complicity, where each side needs the other to complete itself economically. A third precondition is an element of freedom from complacent dogma, and a basic curiosity and intellectual generosity: an interest, over and above the motives of gain and advantage, in that which is not the same, shared, or identically conditioned. In one word, we are describing an open system; the typical example of which is a harbour-city, for example the ancient Alexandria.
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Today, with the crisscrossing of cultural impulses across the physical world and the Internet, every individual is a potential Alexandrian; an intercultural existence is the most productive form of existence. So that, when the custodians of national, civilisational or religious purity proclaim the end of the multicultural society, they are proclaiming the end of culture itself. The predicament of these custodians is most pathetic in Europe: for, by closing the gates of an open system, they are betraying the same great European traditions, advertised by Karl Popper in his influential writings, that they claim to represent.
The harbour-city is the archetypal image of confluence: it is the place where the river, the sum of numerous tributaries, meets the ocean. In our turbulent times, cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity are necessary conditions of existence - of being with others, of meeting the Other. Flowing with confluence, the individual realises gradually that the Other is not an enemy, not a stranger, not an alternative, and at times not even an Other, but just a mirror of the various possible faces, the multiple understandings of human existence, the varied definitions of belonging that can be arrived at. We must look into this mirror, not to lose ourselves in confusion, but to see ourselves and our options with greater clarity.
The Buddhist image of the world captures this vision beautifully in the ‘Net of Indra'. Every knot in this net, where strings cross, is an individual; and each of these individuals reflects all the others around him or her. Individuals come into an awareness of themselves through their relations with each other, and not in a limbo of exaggerated self-importance to the exclusion of the needs of strangers. When we look at ourselves in the Net of Indra, we are not only the selves who inhabit our own bodies, but also a series of reflections and possibilities¬ - all the minds we could savour, all the bodies we could transit through, all the imaginations that could enrich ours. The citadel is a safe place to be on occasion, but eventually it will suffocate you: it is the ghetto that you make for yourself, when you force others into ghettos. Far better to be on the routes of the pilgrims and traders, storytellers and troubadours, there to find humankind's true inheritance of wisdom: which is the realisation that cultures do not engage in conflict but flow together, which is why we must reject those who whip up our passions in the name of difference and conscript us into the global machine of war.
To embrace confluence is to renounce conflict; to renounce conflict is to embrace confluence.
Based on the manuscript CONFLUENCE by Ranjit Hoskoté and Ilija Trojanow
