The Venice Biennale 2011. Making Work: 4

Spring has arrived in Venice. I feel it brushing against me as I step off the train.

I am here to look at Palazzo Zenobio and the space in which we will be showing The Swimmer. Our curator, Agnes Kohlmeyer, has arranged to meet us for dinner and has also set up a series of meetings for tomorrow morning. But there is no sign of Paul Whitty the sound artist and composer.

'Get the number two vaporetto to the Rialto and follow signs to Santa Maria Formosa,' I text.
There is a longish pause during which I wonder if he has missed the plane. Then comes the reply.
'Splendid-have set off down an alley...where a shouts are you?'

Dinner with Agnes is as usual an elegant affair and begins with Aldo greeting us at the front door.

'Aldo is not a cat,' Agnes tells Paul who had not met him before. 'He is human. Now tonight we have some fish soup, which Aldo loves, and then, we have octopus. What's the matter Roma, you don't look happy. You don't like octopus? Is it the shape of the animal you don't like? Shall I cut it up on your plate? Although he would look magnificent on the table, no? I see you are not happy. Why don't you have a drink, instead. And some cheese? And then, we talk?'

Agnes does not pause for breath. She has the energy of sixty curators, we tell her. In the morning, after we had seen the space we tell each other, we'll make a list of all the things left to do.

'But tonight,' declares Agnes, 'we relax!'
Not easy with an octopus on the table and Aldo pawing me for attention.

The following morning we set off, walking, at a great pace to the meeting with the organizers at Palazzo Zenobio. Agnes wears her orchid earrings, and Paul and I, our hangovers.

'Come along,' Agnes said, briskly, 'we only have ten minutes.'
The sun had flung jewels of light across the lagoon and the air sparkles with a blueness that confirms, yes, winter is finally over. Ahead, in the distance, clear and beautiful, are the Alps.

I have been working on my new novel for weeks and weeks, glued to my desk, ignoring the grey skies. Now the manuscript is with my editor and suddenly, I feel free.

'First we need to sit quietly in the space,' says Agnes. 'We need to think how the work will look in it. Then we talk about the party. Are we joining with the other pavilions? Can our budget stretch to food, do we also want a banner?'

'Yes,' I say faintly, hurrying behind her. 'We need to discuss the catalogue, too …'
Paul seems to have vanished again. Perhaps he's having a sleep on a pavement somewhere. Above us in the narrow calle washing hang like flocks of white birds. A seagull is crying.

At the palazzo we are met by Mauro who will be our man-on-the-ground, before, and during the exhibition. Then, we go in, and as often happen, the space itself begins to reveal other possibilities. Excited we are all talking together. We open windows, make decisions; which room is best for showing the film, which should have the installation. How will the sound be played. Paul is busy taking photos, I am looking at the marks on the walls. We must paint it a dirty white, we decide.
'I will surpervise the painting,' Agnes says, 'so that it is precisly what we want.
The rooms have a lost feel to them; abandonment and memory lie everywhere.
When the Sri Lankan army take people away they come at night, dragging their victims from their beds, bundling them into white vans, removing them to places that are the stuff of nightmares. Only when daylight comes is it possible to see the scuff marks on the floor, signs of a struggle to escape, evidence of the brutality of what happened. No, I think, we will not paint the rooms too much. We will leave the marks on the floors, we will honour memory.

Time stands still as we sit, half in sunlight, and consider these things. A picture emerges, slowly. This is why it is so important to see the space, Agnes reminds us. The work that has been planned for so long is beginning to become a reality.

It is time to sign the contract and Paul asks about plug sockets and security for the equipment he plans to drive over from Britain. Samuel, the organiser is charming. Agnes asks him if he still has the copy of The Swimmer I gave him last year, when I first visited.
'Of course,' he says, smiling gently. 'I will never give it away.'
There is a feeling of great generosity amongst all these people working on this Biennale. We meet some of the other curators. In total there will be five exhibitions in this building. Iceland, Armenia, Switzerland, another British group and us. The Lebanon seems to have withdrawn which is a pity. It would have been nice to have had them opposite this work about Sri Lanka.
'See you in May!' we say, smiling and shaking hands as we leave.
It is time for lunch.
'Let's move away from the sun towards the shadow,' says Agnes, making the literal translation sound poetic.
I notice a text message from my editor in London. She likes my new book. Phew! I think, and suddenly the day pivots on an axis of airiness and pleasure and other possibilities. In a few hours I have to be at a broadcasting studio by the railway station for the recording of a conversation for Front Row. We will be talking about the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka.
'No wine for lunch, then!' laughs Agnes.

And, two hours after that, we will be flying north, towards home, leaving this beautiful gilded city behind. The only place in the world where pigeons walk and lions fly.

Ci vedemio presto, Venezia!

The Venice Biennale 2011. Making Work: 3

Used as I am to the solitary business of writing, making this film for the Biennale with a team is a much slower, more enjoyable thing. Last night I had a phone call from the Jaffna Tamil dancer we have been using.  She just wanted to talk.We cannot use her real name for fear of problems in Sri Lanka.
‘My husband would like us to come to Venice for the opening,’ she said.
It turns out they had been looking at the prices of flights to Marco Polo and have found a cheap one. You can’t afford it, I tell her but she insists she wants to show support. I am touched and don’t know what to say. My budget for this project is so small as to be almost invisible. We are all having to pay for our own flights and hotel. The catalogue is being done by the skin of our teeth. As someone who probably earns less than the national average I feel the aria from Tosca should be my signature tune. Vissi d’arte, Vissi d’amore, I lived for art, I lived for love, but nothing much else. So, sadly I can’t offer to pay for her flight.
‘I loved dancing in the film,’ the girl says. ‘It all happened so quickly and I was so cold and concentrating on the dance. I wish it had lasted longer.’
You were good, I tell her. Very, very good. And I swallow because I know it will now be all down to the editing and the editor is in the middle of a plumbing crisis and doesn’t want to think of my film. I mustn't panic, I think.
My dancer continues to talk. I have a feeling she hasn’t talked in this way for a long time. Perhaps, never. She tells me a little about her life, her family, her passionate involvement with her own people in the north of the island-the forgotten people of Sri Lanka.
‘Even if all I earn is £40 in a day I would like to send some money to help them,’ she says.
This girl is not a terrorist, not a Tamil Tiger. She is a gentle, artistic young woman. She does not want to harm anyone, yet, she tells me, Sri Lankan Tamils everywhere are branded as troublemakers. Sometimes it is difficult to get a visa to travel abroad. All visa applications have to go via the Sri Lankan government and this can be tricky. Meanwhile she longs to see her home again. That longing does not go away but only gets bigger with each year that passes. We live in different worlds, she and I, but I understand how she feels. It is many years since I have seen my home, too.
Yesterday, while watching the horrific images of the tsunami in Japan, I heard a reporter mention Colombo and just for a moment I waited, hoping I would catch a glimpse of the beach where I once played, and the rocks where I carved my name before I left it, forever. The sense of home is like that, powerful and present, always. Unerasable.
‘I don’t belong anywhere,’ the girl tells me sadly, but I tell her she is wrong.
For had she forgotten how she danced at he edge of the north sea? In the biting cold? Had she forgotten how everyone clapped and cheered? You have roots here, too, I tell her. Small ones, it is true, but still you are adding to the cultural mix along the Suffolk coastline. Like the migrating birds who grace the marshes each year so too did your dance change the landscape if only for a moment.
‘My son wants to talk to me in English at home,’ she says. ‘But I tell him, you are a Tamil boy, you must speak to your mother in Tamil.’
She laughs, embarrassed that she is telling someone she hardly knows a secret anxiety. How else, she asks me, can she keep the place where she and her mother and father were born, alive for the boy?
Language is the obvious way. Love and grief and longing are expressed best in your mother tongue. But her son has been born into two different worlds and  he will need to make sense of them both before he can fuse them successfully together. As a writer I don't have any answers. We talk for a moment longer. Then she asks me about the film. I tell her she is on the front of the invitation. We have printed a thousand copies. Again she laughs. She has never been to Aldeburgh before that day and had no idea it was a shingle beach. I tell her about the salt marshes and the birds. I tell her that I hope she will go back there when the sun shines. Already I can see that she is curious about this bleak and beautiful landscape, so different from her homeland, so different from Ipswich where she lives, now. A part of Britain as fragile and as lovely as she is.

The Endless Capacity of Good Prose

I have started to read Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir. There is a little space in my head having finished the edit of my new novel. Soon I will need to begin the difficult task of editing my film for the Venice Biennale. Then, there is the catalogue to prepare and another trip to Venice. But during this week I’m going to take a proper break. And catch up on some reading. Memoir is not something I normally read but this one was sent to me by my publisher, at my request. The book is large, divided into many sections and I sigh. It looks daunting and  is called A Widow’s Tale. The title makes me think of Chaucer even though I know the subject can only be unpleasant. Section one is called ‘The Message’. After having delivered her husband to the hospital (he has caught pneumonia) Oates returns to her car to find a message stuck on the windscreen. 
LEARN TO PARK BITCH she reads.
It is just the start of her tale.
I stop reading for a memory has been triggered. Twenty-two years ago, when a close friend was killed in a car accident, I too received a message, this time through the post.
GO HOME PAKI BITCH was what I received, and although we gave the letter to the police the writer remained one of life’s mysteries. Oates puts such events in their proper place. 
‘In this way as in that parable of Franz Kafka in which the most profound and devastating truth of the individual’s life is revealed to him by a passer-by in the street, as if accidently, casually, so…her situation however unhappy, despairing or fraught with anxiety, doesn’t give her the right to overstep the boundaries of others, especially strangers who know nothing of her…’  
 I read on. It is a Saturday afternoon, I need to go shopping, there are some books I want to pick up at the second-hand bookshop, but I am mesmerised by Oates’s prose. Time passes; the cats jump on me demanding food as I read about Oates husband, Ray Smith, the gardener and editor. I have been thinking of my own editor a lot this week. Her scribbled notes on my manuscript have been hard to decipher. 
‘You should have been a doctor,” I told her, laughing. ‘You’d write a great prescription!’
But, as an editor, she is very clever; never condescending, always honest, steering me with a light hand through those patches that are still a little opaque. Because of this and because of my own notes I have made discoveries I might not have otherwise made. This is the beauty of the process, I think.
In her book Joyce Carol Oates has something to say about editing and gardening.   
‘Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.’
And a little later on,
‘The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his effort, he believes in the future.’
I had begun reading this book with one hand ready to close it, the subject matter frightens me so much, but now I take it with me into the kitchen to read while making lunch. The sunlight outside makes me want to believe winter is almost over.  I read what Oates has to say about creativity,
‘There are those –a blessed lot-who can experience life without the slightest glimmer of a need to add anything to it-and sort of ‘creative’ effort; and there are those-an accursed lot?- for whom the activities of their own brain and imaginations are paramount. The world for these individuals may be infinitely rich, rewarding and seductive-but it is not paramount. The world may be interpreted as a gift, earned only if one has created something over and above the world.’
But when she said this to her husband he had given her a bemused look. Doing what all good husbands do; bringing her back to earth, telling her not to take herself so seriously.
 I am hooked. The book, painful though it is in the details of widowhood, nevertheless works on many other levels; as one would expect with Oates. 
‘You do not see a self without a body to contain it, yet you do not see a body without a self to activate it,’ she writes.  
She writes about the way in which people shy away from the thought of too much emotion. Most particularly death. A woman invites her to a dinner but instead of it being a small intimate gathering the woman wants a large number of guests. The numbers go up and up. 
‘C-is erecting obstacles to our dinner as in an equestrian trial in which each jump must be higher than its predecessor…I envision a thirty-foot dining room table and at the far end the widow placed like a leper…’writes Oates.
In the end, the dinner party does not happen and the woman herself disappears for a while. Easier perhaps than tackling a conversation with Oates on her new state. 
Outside, as I read, the day turns on its axis. It really is spring, there are small bulbs peeping up through the ground. A bird sings long and piercingly and reminds me of other days, in other springs. The prose I am reading is as beautiful as the day outside. The writer is using words as though they are engraver’s tools, probing the surface of the soft wood block, considering the chiaroscuro of the whole, building a strong, dark picture; layer by layer. What comes out is a controlled image; cleanly pressed, preserved forever. 
In the news the stories of Libya go on and on. Civil war hovers in the air. There are only so many stories, I think. It is the telling of the tale that matters.

The Venice Biennale 2011. Making Work: 2.

So now we must begin. The headache of funding is almost resolved. Someone, she will remain nameless, has come to our rescue and is helping us with the money. Our fairy godmother. The list of people who want to write in the catalogue is growing even though the designer warns me that space is tight. We have a great design team at http://www.importedletters.com/ sensitive to materials and clients alike. But a budget is a budget, they tell me. 
    ‘Don’t get carried away, Roma.’
    ‘OK,’ I promise. ‘I won’t.’

I am juggling a large number of things at the moment. With the finance almost taken care of there is the guest list. We have invited some important people to the event on June 4th but will they come? Both Paul Whitty and I want as many people as possible on the night. The invitation is almost designed. All we are waiting for is the postcode for the palazzo in Venice. Without a proper address, in the heaving crowds and confusion, how will people find us? Perhaps we need a little map on the back of the invitation? I will phone the designer who is in Paris, with the question. No doubt I will be told, 
‘Don’t over do it. Less is more!’
But I am worried nonetheless. Will our budget stretch to a banner? Iceland and Switzerland share the palazzo with us. Undoubtedly they will have a huge budget. 

Some things are falling into place though. Paul comes on Friday and we will spend time looking at the clips and listening to his sound track. Calmly. Carolyn our actress was incredible last week. The recording of her voice is near perfect, just a few changes in the text, but she will take that in her stride. 

Late last night someone sent me a piece of film footage that I desperately need. It is a piece of reportage of a real event and I have been given permission to use it. Watching it late at night leaves me close to tears. And angry. This project must work. I go to bed to dream of the nightmare of editing! Everything hinges on the edit. Everything. Less is more, Roma. I have a very good editor.
I owe it to the story to get it right.

   

The Temple of the Tooth.

This is a true story. Yesterday I had a tooth out. And while this can be of no possible interest to anyone other than myself, what I felt when anticipating the event, might be.  It isn’t everyone who needs to lose a tooth in their lifetime, dentistry being a marvellous though expensive thing these days. So why write about it? 


Well, for a start I had been going about my daily business for some weeks now, grieving over the very idea of losing something that was mine by right. Rotten though it had become the tooth was my own; one that had grown and been part of my face, forever. The smile I used at every important moment of my life; when I won the school prize or got the grades I wanted after an important exam. On my wedding day, when each of my children were born, when I got the contract for my first novel, and so on. 


And now I was going to lose that part of me that had first started life with calcium from my mother, from all those distant aeons ago. My mother, like me, had been born in the tropics. We had lived in a third world paradise where fresh milk and calcium were in short supply for people as poor as us. She was a small woman, my mother, but physically and mentally courageous in the hostile and narrow-minded world of 1950’s Sri Lanka. I am proud of her. My body and her memory are strangely tied up together. So losing this tooth was nothing short of an amputation, or so I declared to my family.
‘No it’s not,’ said my youngest. ‘You’re being over-dramatic, again.’
True. Probably I was. And yet, as Tooth Day drew closer I could not shake off the feeling of sadness, that something which had taken so long to make, should vanish in a moment. Like life. Like the violence being done in places around the world, to people, and to their bodies. Suddenly, losing what is theirs, and changing them forever.


The thought conjured up a gruesome image, one that I have written repeatedly about in my books. In Brixton Beach, for instance, the character of Kunal has his leg amputated to prevent gangrene. There is no other option available to him. But, for one small moment, when he is told the news, Kunal is unable to hide his anguish. And later on, after the deed is done, he wakes up and feels the absence of the phantom limb. Only then does he remember with sorrow, all that he once took for granted, things connected with the leg he has just lost. Things he will never do again.
‘Hang on a minute,’ said the youngest in our house, watching me intently, ‘are you comparing your tooth extraction to a leg being amputated?’
She was looking at me with interest. Clearly madness had set in via the tooth and she was on hand to witness it.
‘No,’ I told her. ‘I’m not. Losing a tooth is nothing by comparison. And in any case there are anaesthetics and antibiotics and a sterile situation to deal with my tooth. There will be kindly consultations and pain killers and very soon, all being well, an implant.’ 
‘So?’ she asked, hoping for a battle of wills, a chance to deal with her mother’s irrationality, to win at family argument time. 
It is insignificant, of course it is. But nevertheless the feeling of impending loss makes me empathise with those who are less fortunate. You know, people are losing bits of themselves all over the world, every single day. And not because they need to, either. Think of the land mines in places like the north of Sri Lanka. So just for a moment it’s necessary to stop and think…..
       ‘Hmm,’ pronounced the young one, narrowing her eyes. ‘You’re just scared. And with too large an imagination.’
 Possibly, I agreed.