Raqib Shaw at The Whitworth

Recent exhibition review first posted on Reading Race, Collecting Cultures. Raqib Shaw’s fantastic show at The Whitworth, Manchester.

Jo Manby

The Whitworth, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6ER
On view until 19 November 2017

As promised, my next review of The Whitworth’s summer exhibitions explores the art of London-based artist Raqib Shaw. His gloriously opulent exhibition is part of the South Asia art and culture programme that marks the 70th anniversary of Partition. The programme is part of the work of the New North & South network which involves ten North of England organisations.

The exhibition is co-curated by Dr Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate, Diana Campbell Betancourt, Director of Dhaka Art Summit and the artist himself.

Some key facts about Raqib Shaw:

• Shaw was born in Calcutta and grew up in Kashmir, which he describes as a very beautiful place etched on his memory.
• His family are involved in textiles.
• Originally he wanted to be a teacher of English literature.
• He is totally…

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Book review – The Secret Box

Book – The Secret Box: Stories by Daina Tabūna. First published by Mansards in Riga, Latvia, 2014. The Emma Press, Birmingham, UK: 2017

This review was first posted on the Mslexia Max Forum https://mslexia.co.uk/

Author Daina Tabūna (born in Riga, Latvia in 1985) has an innate skill in communicating voice to the reader. All three stories in The Secret Box seem to spring from some truth or experience in the author’s life, from which she spins out a narrative with a viewpoint that is seamlessly consistent and vibrantly alive.

The first story, Deals with God, is from the perspective of a young girl on the cusp of her teens who gradually becomes besotted with the idea of Jesus. However, she is confounded when, travelling on the tram back from school, she comes across a man with one arm. He turns the air blue with his profanities, and all her altruistic plans to convert those around her come to nothing as she hurries to alight at the next stop. Then, the girl spots a Coca-Cola advert which exhorts ‘Enjoy’, and decides to take up this advice in place of her late Baba’s instruction that inspired her original religious zeal.

In the second story, The Secret Box, a game of cut-out and colour paper dolls, with tabs to permit changes of outfit and accessory, generates a secret, hidden bond between a brother and sister. Again the point of view is personal, tight, close, as we follow the siblings to the brink of adulthood, through experiences of intense emotion, humiliation, and realisation.

Finally, in The Spleen, My Favourite Organ, a disorientated, strung-out young woman meets a taciturn young office worker. They begin a doomed relationship of sorts, but, like her, he is ‘trapped in some sort of room of his past, from which he couldn’t break out’.

First published in Latvia as part of the prize-winning Pirmā reize (Mansards, 2014), this collection is translated by Jayde Will, illustrated with striking woodblock prints by Mark Andrew Webber, and edited by Emma Wright, who founded the Emma Press in 2012. The Emma Press is ‘dedicated to producing beautiful, thought-provoking books’. This collection certainly fulfils that brief, and the Emma Press is well worth checking out. https://theemmapress.com/about/submissions/

Book review – Under the Almond Tree

Book – Under the Almond Tree by Laura McVeigh. Two Roads, an imprint of John Murray Press, London: 2017

This review was first posted on the Mslexia Max Forum https://mslexia.co.uk/

Fifteen-year-old Afghani refugee Samar flees back and forth across Russia during the 1990s, accompanied by her family and a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, seized by the desire to write: ‘I have started to write our journey each day, to capture our conversations, our arguments. I write down what happens with the other travellers we share this train with…’

Her tale is being told by Laura McVeigh, whose author’s note acknowledges the influence of her work as previous director of PEN International, the NGO promoting literature and freedom of expression. A disjuncture could arise in that the book is not a testimony of first-hand experience. However, McVeigh stresses that reading and writing about ‘others’ engenders empathy. A multitude of unheard voices are transformed by her own writing into a single, fluent, breath-taking narrative.

Life is cheap in the book’s conflicted zones – people’s stories more so. It’s a powerful trope: the girl sitting on the train constantly travelling the Trans-Siberian Express from east to west, west to east, using writing as a way of staying mentally intact in the face of extreme trauma. Her compulsion, providing narrative expediency, is desperately to make sense of her cataclysmic experiences. The ticket collector on the train, Napoleon (perhaps a figment of her lively imagination, we ask ourselves?) anchors her to the present, supplying notebooks, pens, and exhortations to ‘”Write it down, write it all down.”’

Samar is the archetypically unreliable narrator: ‘I forget what is real – here and now – and what is imagined, what has gone and is no more, because in my mind it is still happening over and over and I cannot shake it from me.’ In the disorder of events, her experiences are constantly on the brink of slipping, becoming dislodged. Her writing project is a process that staves off, in essence, the symptoms of PTSD.

McVeigh has pulled off a feat of storytelling, setting up a complex structure with numerous characters, then proceeding to undermine it layer by layer. There are several watershed moments throughout the narrative. We see rebel fighters, the Taliban, earthquake, disease and maltreatment, but also profound tenderness. What we are left with at the end is a sense of the circularity of the book. Tantalisingly, Samar only actually begins to unburden herself of her story in the very last line.

Floralia – words and images

Recent writing, drawing and painting including book reviews and exhibition reviews, with some fiction writing.