Notes after Nasir – II

(Drawing on a few pointers from a lecture I heard earlier this year.)

Using either of these terms- the “aestheticization of politics” or the “politicization of aesthetics” appears to impose a hierarchy upon the two, where the favoured latter phrase assumes that art is subordinate to politics. How can this be, when aesthetics has never been bereft of politics from its inception? Aesthetic innovation is not a product of a sudden revelation or radical genius but that which is born out of observed and lived social scenarios. It took until 1976 for Elen Moers to recognize Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as more than mere science fiction, and then a few more years for Gilbert and Gubar to read it as a feminist treatise on the anxieties of being a female writer.
Aesthetics cannot stand disjoint from politics. Kant, whose views on aesthetics has defined much of its reception in western epistemology, asserts that pleasure is occasioned by a sensuous perception of a thing’s representation. The judgement of taste demands universality, and I think that this adds an important activist dimension to art when it demands universality in the aesthetic representations it makes of the political everyday, without resorting to a reductive statement such as “my art, my politics”. Democracy emerges by transforming the image into a medium for a public sphere. Kant’s ideas of beauty are much influenced by the idea of democracy and that of land belonging to its citizens that arose after the French revolution. Nasir asserts his right to be one such Free Man in his nation state.
One is glad we live in times when universities with a keenness for indulging in political discourse are emerging, but Nasir does not live in that sphere. He is a man who likes to write poetry, see his nephew’s colouring, listen to a ghazal and smoke a beedi in the afternoon, because as a man of this world, he has the right to these pleasures that offer comfort, stability and respite. Nasir asserts these rights until they are forcefully taken away from him by erasing his existence, and that is the political reality that Nasir represents. One must remember that even dreariness or monotony as aesthetic qualities in daily life have been subjects of Marxist discourse around workers’ lives. The violence of extremist hate speech that jars with the sounds of the everyday is an example of the negative aesthetics of Nasir’s everyday life, and gives us important access to the political tone of the film.
Nasir reinstates the scope of aesthetics by integrating within itself (a work of art) the politics of the everyday. The aesthetics of Nasir asks of us to stand under it and listen to it, acknowledging the discourse, listening to its conscious or unconscious presences and absences and finally, integrating this understanding in our worldviews. Nasir lets us reflect upon our political opinion – this is true of any art that does not double as propaganda – and if it does this through the language of aesthetics, then we will remember what Keats has said: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”.

Notes after Nasir

Things.

In a scene set to the emotion-suffused voice of Begum Akhtar that plays out of a radio in the boxy home that makes Nasir’s world, our man lies on a mat.  He picks up his son’s colouring book and leafs through images of fish that are marked yellow but have been roughly filled in with another colour, the soft crayons transgressing perfectly drawn boundaries. We seamlessly glide to an artificial fish tank and look at plastic colours refracted through water and lens come alive and allow the rhythm to shift to stills of walls (but then, this is a movie of images) that acquire an incomprehensible beauty in their mundaneness before we dwell on the graffiti of a clock, a motif through the film.

In a book I’ve been poring over called Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett evokes Spinoza as she writes about the vitality of matter, of how all bodies are made of the same substance, of the power that nonhuman things possess to evoke action in humans, about how we are quick to associate things, as they come into being, with human mood, action, emotion, agenda.

What makes up Nasir’s world when he has a moment to himself, when he is truly a man of loneliness and solitude, as he writes in a poem later? The coloured fish become precious moments in his son’s day that he has missed while away, and as if to encourage this line of thought about the inorganic evoking life, we see the fish and the walls looking comfortably beautiful, sights that we pay attention to only in our subconscious held down in a gentle stronghold by the camera, time paused with an image of time.

In this film very much about one man, Nasir shows us the everyday is composed not only of man but things and that time is not one but an assemblage of timescapes. Where do I look for you? asks Begum Akhtar and we are shown how man seeks solace in the aesthetics of the everyday.

I have been thinking a lot about Nasir, the quiet but sonorous chronicle of a man’s day that seems so much about everyman until it is not. In an interesting revelation the director makes in one of his interviews (and there is a plethora of reviews, all positive, doing the rounds since a couple of months about the movie), some of the team behind Nasir discuss an omniscient, omnipresent “angel” in the movie.  Is the camera the angel? Are we? Are we Nasir and is he the angel? Or are we the cat that quietly observes Nasir and his wife make their way through the streets, detached but observant, inhuman in the other’s suffering, seeing but passive? Levinas springs to mind as I think of all those faces in the movie, as I think of Iqbal’s lashes and the wrinkles on the face of Nasir’s mother, as I think of his wife’s face as she cooks, dresses, sits on a bus travelling away from her love, as I think of Nasir himself, praying, sleeping, contemplating, listening passively to a co-worker berate Muslims.. this face-to-face encounter leaves his vulnerability naked for me to see, and when the end comes I know why we saw those faces, the recognition of imminent death as Levinas writes in Ethics as First Philosophy, “call[ing] me into question, as if, by my possible future indifference, I had become the accomplice of the death to which the other, who cannot see it, is exposed”. If anything, Nasir is a lesson in empathy.

Lines blur between being spectator and being the man in the spotlight until I realize that the movie is about how I am not Nasir – an ostensibly unassuming and mute victim to hatred that resides easily with the everyday in the guise of dog-whistle politics, until the everyday avalanches into a grotesque, extreme and violent climax.

I have been thinking of things and faces, so far. Maybe I will write more in the days to come, about soundscapes and timescapes and Nasir, as I unravel these threads in my head.

 

(PS: This was not really a review, but I really like this and this, if you want to read reviews/ interviews).

Wary of Verse

I read some verse of beauty rare
In dainty thread of words ensnared
Wrapped in hues of golden thought
The poet to weave a web had sought.

Caught- readily, and waited I-
To drown in misery – but nay-
The web – souse in stilborn rue-
Was frail and could not carry through

Peals of broken heart- they weigh
More than well wrought words can say
(But less than what is in need
To be the blissful amnesic)

They fall through and hang by verse
Over the abyss of hope- midway-