Reading Slumdog Millionaire

The movie Slumdog Millionaire has already won numerous awards including Golden Globe’s best picture and best director, and it has been nominated for ten Academy awards. The movie is essentially a fairy-tale rags-to-riches story about Jamal and Latika, a poor boy and girl in Mumbai, India who are finally able to be together after he beats all odds to win the “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” show. The narrative trick of the movie is that he tells the story of his life to a police officer, who suspects him of cheating, in order to demonstrate how he knew the answers to the triva questions. Each question corresponds to a significant moment in his life. Hence, in the process of telling a story of an alternative to poverty, the movie also suggests an alternative epistemology — or way of knowing the world — that romantically evokes the fundamental equality of all humankind. Even a poor, ignorant “slumdog” can know things. What I think is stylistically interesting is how the movie in many ways resembles the kind of fairy-tale plot typical of the “Bollywood” Indian films (alluded to in the final scene), but it is shot in the hyperrealistic style now popular in London and Hollwyood cinema.

Though the movie has been almost unanimously praised by American and European reviewers, it has provoked angry protests in the country it purports to be about. NPR radio recently asked how people in India would receive a movie set in India, starring Indians, but made by an Irishman from England, Danny Boyle. Some of the Indians interviewed are glad that Indian cinema is finally receiving the attention it deserves, others are angry that western media always repeats stereotypes of Indian poverty, and still others assert that poverty is an issue that ought to be addressed in India as well as in the West. (No comparison is made to Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited, which came out the year before and is also set in India, but perhaps this is because Anderson’s movie has nothing “Indian” in it, and is so self-consciously absurd that it might as well have been set in any exotically foreign space – Brazil, Congo, Mars, whatever.)

The question NPR raises in turn raises some important questions about the relation between readers and a text — a relation that I have blogged about earlier here in a post about a Japanese comedy skit that was more popular outside of Japan than inside it, and also here in a post about the politics of rock and roll. Explicit in NPR’s question is the issue of representation, and how a single representation may mean different things to different people depending on the context, as the theorist Stanley Fish argues. Implicit in its question is the historical relation of power and how power can be exercized through media representations, as Michel Foucault suggests. India was once a colony of England and is now still greatly affected and perhaps even partially controlled (in a neocolonial way) by British and U.S. corporate agendas. In other words, to put it oversimply, it’s clearly not the same thing when an Indian movie represents poverty in India and when India’s former colonizer represents poverty in India, and the reason it’s not the same is precisely because of the disparity in power between the Anglo-American film industry and the various audiences. This disparity in power is not necessarily a problem for all movies made by a Brit about its former colony, but Slumdog Millionaire practically ignores this centuries-old relation. In it, we see how Mumbai has changed over the course of Jamal’s life presumably because of globalization – and we see that this change creates both wealth and poverty – but the movie in no way tries to understand why or how . . . or even what is going on.

However, none of this really explains why Americans and Europeans love this movie so much, why some in India hate it, and why some reviewers can so blatantly contradict themselves by claiming simultaneously that the movie is a fairy-tale and that it truly represents life in India without even noticing that they are contradicting themselves. How can it be both a fairy-tale fantasy and a realistic portrait of India at the same time? And for me, this contradiction is a far more interesting question than the question NPR raises about the different reactions in India. Instead of focusing on how they-over-there appreciate the movie, why doesn’t NPR follow Slate.com’s example here and analyze how we-over-here do?

To answer this question about the obvious contradictions manifest in how it has been appreciated, I suggest that the reason why the movie is so successful and so troubling at the same time is its style — its synthesis of gritty, hyperrealism with romantic fantasy. The result is an uncanny eroticization of poverty (as an article in The Guardian points out here) that is likely to be offensive to some precisely because they suspect that it is romantic and titilating to others.

So, returning to the question of the relation between readers and text — a relation we call interpretation — I want to emphasize that it would be wrong to claim that Indians see the movie one way and Americans another because of differences in Indian and American culture. This is clearly false, since people everywhere have read the movie in so many different ways, and this is not what Stanley Fish meant by “interpretive communities.” Rather, what is meant is the reading of the film is partially determined by the context of the act of reading, not the life or background of the reader.  What is involved in this particular act of reading is, of course, an intuition about what the movie means not only to oneself but also to others — an intuition informed not by singular cultural identities but by a history of political relations.

No “si, se puede” in Alexander’s inauguration poem

Last Wednesday, in class, we discussed Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of her poem “Praise Song for the Day” immediately after Barack Obama’s delivery of his inauguration speech. The poem has received quite a bit of criticism from the popular presses, not only conservative, right wing periodicles such as here, but also liberal ones such as here, and left wing such as here. Her poem is what literary historians call an “occasional poem,” and as Salon.com points out, in the eighteenth century, most poetry was “occassional poetry” such as this, dedicated to public events or public concerns. Not until the nineteenth century, at the beginning of what we call the “romantic period,” did people begin to think of poetry as the individual expression of original genius or of a private emotion. With this historical framework in mind, the question for this blog post is what the event of this poem has to teach us about the nature of authors and readers. I think this poem, the reactions to it, and its relation to several different cultural traditions raise some useful questions not only about how we read, but also about who we are and what we could be.

Here is a YouTube clip of her reading.

How should we begin analyzing this poem? Do we begin with the author’s biography? Do we begin with the form (somewhat prosaic, with awkward meter)? Do we begin with its metaphors and  imagery? Or do we begin with the occasion or historical moment? It is, perhaps, important to ask where we begin, because our choice of where to begin suggests much about how we understand and determine the poem’s meaning and significance. In the case of Alexander’s poem, it seems somewhat obvious that we should begin neither with the author nor with the long literary tradition of “occasional poetry” (as T.S. Eliot might suggest we must in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”), but with the circumstances of the particular event itself. Indeed, it seems almost unavoidable; how else could we begin in this case? Her series of metaphors and images almost resembles a politician’s speech in the way it addresses the everyday lives of different kinds of Americans: farmers, teachers, etc. Just as a politician wants to be as inclusive as possible of all of his or her constituencies in a way that recognizes their daily struggles and gives them hope, so too with Alexander’s poem. One could suggest that the American literary tradition is also important here, because, in a way, the poem kind of resembles Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and “I Hear America Singing” which also seem sometimes to be nothing more than long lists of all the different kinds of people in the country (the constituencies, or demos, of our democracy.) Ultimately, though, the content of Alexander’s poem seems to have been somewhat pre-determined by the political circumstances of January 20, 2009 more than it seems to be an expression of Alexander’s personality or of a literary tradition.

Unfortunately, her poem almost seems superfluous, giving the audience nothing that they didn’t already get from Obama’s speech, and it seems somewhat thin, shallow, and clichéd, perhaps because Alexander wanted so much to please everyone in the audience. Is this the fault of the occasion, or the fault of Alexander? What might a better inauguration poem have sounded like?

But before I answer the question of whose fault it is, I want to take a detour through another question. What about poems that aren’t performed at political events? Is our starting point different for them? Another way to ask this question is this: what governs this poem? It’s funny to think of a poem as subject to some form of government, but when you think about it, everything we say is somehow “governed” by something. There are all sorts of conventions that limit what we can say in the classroom, in a church, in the theater, etc. Most of what we write and say repeats things that others have written or said. We immitate; we quote; we repeat. Even when one writes a poem in a private diary, that writing is governed both by what the writer consciously knows about the world and by the writer’s unconscious. So, as I discussed last year in a blog post here about the nature of authors, not only “occasional poems” like Alexander’s, but all poetry and writing are governed in various ways. The goal of theory and criticism is to begin to raise questions about what is controlling or limiting the content and style of a poem, and by raising such questions, we can perhaps begin to free ourselves from those controls and limits, which may have been unnoticed before. Through such questioning, an author can realize what has limited his writing and then overcome those limits and write even better.

This is what I think is part of the point of Roland Barthe’s “Death of an Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” Foucault emphasizes how authors (the published ones, we’re talking about) are part of a legal system (i.e., copyright), an institutional system of schools, etc., and historical circumstances that are both cultural and economic. In doing so, he is challenging the rather naïve belief that authors are somehow transcendental geniuses who float above the world graciously dropping their brilliance upon us, a brilliance whose singularly universal meaning is apparant in the same way to everyone and to all time. Foucault returns us to the author’s real context. And when Barthes celebrates the everyday, worldly reader-who-writes over the mystical, mythical author (i.e., a mystification of the legal apparatus of copyright law), he is basically agreeing with the slogan “si, se puede” or “yes, we can” that Obama borrowed from the immigrant rights movement for his own political campaign.

I think this leads us to a conclusion that good poetry, just like good politics, begins not so simply with a famous author’s mind or the president’s will to power, but with the people raising questions and seeking answers. As Orwell suggests in “Why I Write,” good literature (not all literature), just like a good politician, responds to the anxieties, desires, questions, and spirit of the people (i.e., to the reader.) Good literature begins with us and our questioning of what limits us. As Mos Def explains in his brilliant song “Fear Not of Man,” hip hop is not some giant living up in the hills; rather, “we are hip hop.”

To return to my question about where the fault lies for Alexander’s poem, perhaps we are disappointed because it seemed to lack the courage to question those limits. She was content to follow Obama rather than lead him. We might contrast her poem to Langston Hughes’s poem, “I, too, Sing America,” which is a great poem precisely because it did not follow Whitman’s somewhat tedious (it seems to us now) ”I Hear America Singing” (not his best work.) Rather, Hughes challenged the limits of Whitman’s vision and strongly asserted his own version of ”si se puede.”