It's really a rare pleasure and a privilege
when a student has the opportunity
to thank in public--
excuse me, writers for whom I have such respect
and gratitude, because of the service
that they have done me over these many years.
So I'm really grateful to the College of Humanities
for providing me the opportunity to do that.
I first met Clark Blaise at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where
I was a student in the early 1980s.
And Bharati came in, I believe, once that semester,
just to say hello.
So I can claim to have known Bharati as long as well.
And over the years, I've been astonished by the commitment
that they have been able to maintain simultaneously--
they're part of that rare breed of writers,
who are able to maintain simultaneously
a commitment to their own work and a, completely
selfless commitment to their students,
both past and present.
And I'm enormously grateful for that.
I'll tell you a little bit about their qualifications.
I'll summarize them.
There's no way I could go through the whole list.
And then I'll say a bit about my impressions of their work.
Beginning with A North American Education,
Clark Blaise has published collections
of short stories, novels, and works of nonfiction.
Culminating in my personal works of nonfiction,
I Had a Father, a postmodern autobiography recently reissued
by the University of Iowa press, and one of my favorite memoirs,
and Time Lord--
Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time,
published in 2001, and recipient of Canada's prestigious Pearson
award.
Porcupines Quill press in Canada has
undertaken to publish three volumes
of his new and selected stories, of which I
had the honor of introducing the first volume--
Southern Stories.
He is currently on the creative writing faculty of Long Island
University at Southampton,
Bharati Mukherjee is a distinguished professor
of English at the University of California, at Berkeley,
and has published six novels and two collections
of short stories, of which The Middle Man and Other
Stories received the National Book Critics Circle Award,
possibly our most distinguished literary prize.
Both Clark and Bharati have distinguished teaching records,
having served on the faculties of the nation's leading
creative writing programs.
They write of the paradoxes and contradictions
that accompany all borders--
external or internal-- a subject that arises from their personal
histories.
Clark was born in Fargo, North Dakota,
of a French-Canadian father, who anglicized his name
to become a US citizen and moved to Florida.
Bharati was born and raised in Bengal, immigrated to Canada
and then to the United States.
The great religious historian, Mircea Eliade,
describes how Judeo-Christian civilization
invented linear time.
Earlier cultures envisioned time as a circle, or a spiral,
or a sphere, in which history endlessly repeated itself.
Then the late Jewish prophets initiated the conception
of a linear, chronological progress toward apocalypse--
the end of time, after which the saved and the damned
would dwell in some eternal place, a place outside of time.
Probably because of his status as an outsider,
Clark Blaise seems always to have resided in, and written
from, non-linear time.
His round seamless narratives share more with the southerner
Eudora Welty, or the Canadian Alice Munro, than
with the ideal of rising action, climax, denouement.
His fictions circle back on themselves.
They dwell not in chronological, but in circular time.
The time not of the railroad engineer,
but of the priest and the poet.
Clark's writing was postmodern well
before the term came into vogue--
so postmodern its pre-modern, evoking
the roots of western fiction in Smollett, Richardson,
and Stern.
To read his work is to journey into the synapses of memory,
to understand how its flawed and warped mirror is reality,
how we construct identities that are not
so much whole and distinct, as shifting images
in an ongoing ever-changing collage.
Time and its machinations forms a subtheme
of the Bharati Mukherjee's most recent book, Desirable
Daughters, which is just out in paperback.
By the way, the books will be available,
and are available in the lobby.
And both authors will be happy to sign copies afterwards.
The novel's narrator writes, "Time
moves in cycles when it belongs to the gods,
and in straight lines when it belongs to the mortals."
In all her works, Bharati explores the dramatic tension
between these two very different ways of seeing and being
in the world--
circular and linear.
In Desirable Daughters, the protagonists gay son becomes
one of the heroes, exactly because his status as a double
outsider-- both immigrant to America and sexual outlaw--
gives him a peculiarly rich place
from which to perceive history, as well as to shape the future.
His heroism, however, has its foundation
in an ancient non-western understanding of the world,
as his wise grandmother makes clear at the books end.
"You don't have to go outside yourself to find God,
you must first value yourself," she
says, "we all embrace the goddess gaily,
gay is the secret word."
Bharati has drawn on her experience
as an outsider to become one of the few non-gay American
authors to create a successful integrated gay character,
an achievement that speaks volumes
about her breadth of vision and largeness of heart.
The New York Times Book Review called Bharati Mukherjee
"the literary mother of young Indian writers
now flourishing in the west."
It's no exaggeration to say that Bharati blazed the publishing
trail for those writers of the subcontinent.
Now we find them in every literary magazine and forum,
but it's important to remember, that when Bharati attended
the Iowa workshop, in the early 1960s,
the notion of a Bengali woman becoming a force in world
publishing was inconceivable.
Like all leaps forward, this one required someone
to have the courage to live it out, and in doing so,
to demonstrate that it was not only possible, but essential.
I want to say a word about the remarkable collaboration
that Clark and Bharati have sustained across the decades,
since their meeting at the Iowa Writers' Workshop
in the early 1960s.
Writing in all forms of fiction and non-fiction,
they have co-authored books and numerous articles,
along with raising two sons.
As citizens of the west, they write from a place
where spirit and flesh are separate and distinct.
As citizens of India, they write from a place
where spirit and flesh are seamless.
"Geography is destiny," Clark writes.
And in their East West existence,
they are the living embodiment of our national geography,
from which so much creative endeavor has arisen.
Our east coast faces across the Atlantic,
toward our European roots in the old world, while our west coast
faces across the Pacific, toward Asia and the older world.
For more than 20 years, I have turned
to the writings of Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee,
as I might hire an interpreter in a foreign land--
someone to help me understand my own borderlands,
the rich and scary places where I am brought up
against the shifting construction of identities
I call myself.
Clark and Bharati are both of my America, and apart from it.
Clark is it once Canadian and US citizen, Yankee and southerner.
Bharati is at once Bengali and US citizen,
of the Commonwealth, an interloper in it.
They are one and the same time natives and exiles.
They were global citizens before we invented a phrase
to describe the condition.
In their different ways, they write of our entry into,
and resistance to, globalization,
from the most peculiar and fascinating perspective--
the outsiders timeless time, the immigrants placeless place.
So it's with a great deal of pleasure
that I introduce my friends and mentors, Clark Blaise
and Bharati Mukherjee.