“A Ramayana of One’s Own”
I’ve written about the Ramayana before here on the Margins. It’s a big enough topic to consider again whenever I stumble across a way for a new audience to come to it.
As I’ve said in a previous post, the Ramayana is a heroic epic, an important Hindu scripture, and a cultural touchstone for the peoples of South and Southeast Asia. Over the millennia, it has inspired poets, artists, dramatists, dancers, and more recently movie directors and video game designers. Its characters have been treated as archetypal figures, worshiped as gods, held up as role models and rejected as horrible examples. It’s a story that most people of South Asian descent know in some form. It’s a story that most North Americas barely know at all.
In its classic form the Ramayana as a sprawling epic that can be overwhelming for those of us who didn’t grow up on the central story. Friends reading for the first time often have the feeling that they need flash cards, or some other kind of cheat sheet. The phrase “you can’t tell the players without a program” comes to mind.
San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has a solution for those of you lost in the tangle of story. In The Rama Epic: Hero, Heroine, Ally, Foe, art historian and curators for an exhibit of the same name* explore the Ramayana as both story and social model, using art objects created over a period of fifteen-hundred years from many different countries.* Instead of allowing the audience to founder in the details, The Rama Epic focuses on the four characters who stand at its heart: Rama, his wife Sita, the monkey-god Hanuman, and the ten-headed demon-king Ravana. Each character is the subject of two thoughtful essays. One examines the changing nature of the character’s role as hero, heroine, ally or foe. The second examines the character’s basic iconography. The end result is a visual feast that allows readers to engage with and make the Ramayana their own.
My own favorite version of the Ramayana didn’t make it into The Rama Epic. A shame really. Sita Sings the Blues is a great example of a modern artist creating a Ramayana of her own.**
*I haven’t see the exhibit in person. Just the catalog, which is pretty dang spectacular. The exhibit runs through January 15. If you get a chance to see it, let me know what you think.
** Time for me to watch it again I think. Right after my annual viewing of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers. LINK
Eyewitness to Pearl Harbor
Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Commemorative posts have already begun to fill the parts of the internet where history buffs hang out. I suspect that you know the story. I’m sure you know the historical consequences. I’m not going to rehash the big picture. Instead I’d like to share a smaller story.
Cornelia Fort was a certified civilian flight instructor who worked for the Andrews Flying Service in Honolulu, a Nashville debutante who had kicked her way into the male dominated world of general aviation. * She was only 22 and already an experienced pilot with hundreds of flight hours to her credit.
On December 7, 1941, Fort was in the air with a student pilot, a defense worker named Suomala who was practicing landings prior to taking his first solo flight. As was typical at the time, they had no radio, so the only way to avoid other aircraft coming and going at Honolulu’s John Rodgers Airport was to scan the sky around them
Prior to what was scheduled to be Suomala’s final landing before soloing, Fort scanned the sky. She saw a military plane heading in from the ocean. She was so accustomed to military traffic from the nearby military bases that she nodded to Suomala to turn into the first leg of his landing pattern. She looked again and saw another military aircraft headed right for them. She grabbed the controls away from her student, jammed the throttle open, and pulled above the oncoming plane. The plane passed under them so close that their celluloid windows rattled in the plane.**
Fort glanced down to see what kind of plane it was. Instead of the star and bar of the US Army Air Corps, painted red balls on the wings shone in the morning sun: the “rising sun” emblem of the Japanese. With a chill tingling down her spine, she looked west to Pearl Harbor, where she saw billowing black smoke and formations of silver bombers headed toward the harbor. Something detached itself from one of the planes and she watched as a bomb fell and exploded.
She landed the plane at John Rodgers as quickly as she could, surrounded by machine gun fire. As they touched down, Suomola asked “When am I going to solo?” (Fort later said she wasn’t sure whether he didn’t understand what was happening or trying to lighten the situation with humor.) A contemporary newspaper account reported her answer as “Not today, brother.” A few seconds later, the shadow of a plane passed overhead and bullets spattered around them. Pilot and student sprinted for the cover of the hanger.
Once inside, Fort tried to warn her co-workers that the Japanese were attacking. She was met with disbelief and laughter. The men she worked with tried to pass it off as some sort of maneuvers that she had misunderstood. Fort was “damn good and mad.”*** She was about to tell them off when a mechanic from another hanger ran in and told them that strafing planes had just killed another pilot and his student as they ran for cover.
As scores of Zeros roared by, some of them no more than fifty feet off the ground, Fort and her companions took shelter in the hangar. When she examined her plane the next day, she found it riddled with bullets.
Newspapers soon picked up the story of Fort’s encounter with the Japanese–it would have been a good story no matter who was involved. But a pretty young female aviator gave it an additional human interest element. For a time, she was part of the speaking tour that sold war bonds. But she was determined to use her flying skills for the war effort. Lamenting the fact that she she couldn’t be a fighter pilot and face the Japanese in the air again, she was the second woman to volunteer for the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS).
For several months she delivered training planes**** up and down the east coast. In February, 1943, Fort and several other WAFS was assigned to Long Beach California to deliver the much larger BT-13s. They were thrilled with the “promotion” to larger planes, but some of them were frustrated by the fact that they were not allowed to become fighter pilots. Determined to acquire some of the skills needed, Fort and a few of her companions began to experiment with formation flying, an activity that was forbidden during delivery flights. On March 21, 1943, while participating in a forbidden stint of formation flying on a delivery, Fort’s plane was destroyed when she hit another plane mid-air, making her the first WAFS pilot to die while on duty.
What a waste.
*Her father made her brothers promise never to fly. He never thought to ask for the promise from his daughter. Her brothers were royally pissed off when they found out she had been taking flying lessons in secret.
** Fort’s written account of the incident claims that at this point she felt “a distinct feeling of annoyance that the Army plane had disrupted our traffic pattern and violated our safety zone.” My guess is that she swore like a fighter pilot–or at least gave vent to a string of the “dangs” and “sssssss–sugars” that passed for profanity among women of the Middle South at the time.
***And can you blame her?
****PT-19s, for the propeller heads among the Marginalia.
Game of Queens
Several years ago, historian Sarah Gristwood’s Blood Sisters held me enrapt. She described the well-known events of the Wars of the Roses and the rise of the Tudor dynasty through the lives of the Plantagenet women. It was women’s history at its best* in that it not only told the story of often forgotten or marginalized women** but enlarged the historical framework in the process.***
When Basic Books offered me a review copy of Gristwood’s newest book I said “yes, please.”****
Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth Century Europe considers the unprecedented explosion of powerful women in sixteenth century Europe that stretches from Isabella of Spain****** through Elizabeth I of England. Many of the women she discusses are not familiar to even well-read readers of the English-speaking world, because we tend to learn the history of Great Britain and its colonial descendants and not much else. The book would be interesting if all Gristwood did was tell the stories of women like Louise of Savoy, Marguerite of Navarre, Catherine de Medici, Margaret of Austria, et al.******* But in fact, she does more. She unravels the relationships that linked women across kingdoms and time. Mother and daughter, mentor and protégée, rival and ally, aunt and niece, sister and sister-in-law–linked by blood and marriage, separated by politics and the religious divides of the Reformation. An old girls’ network fueled, as such networks always are, by power.
The web of relationships she considers is complicated, made worse by the fact that several women were named Mary and various forms of Margaret. I tried to map them, first on the sheet of paper I was using as a book mark and later using mind mapping software. (Why yes, I am a nerd.) When my multi-family tree began to look more like a ball of yarn that a kitten had played with than an organizational chart, I abandoned it and decided to trust Griswold to keep me on top of who was who and where and when. I will admit that I confused Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) with Marguerite of Valois (1553-1615), who became the queen consort of Navarre and the earlier Marquerite’s granddaughter-in-law. But that was my fault, not Gristwood’s. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The resulting book, like Blood Sisters, enlarges our view of history. By looking at sixteenth century queens as a group, rather focusing on the individual stories of one or two powerful women, Gristwod is able to explore the nature of female power and the ways in which women were able to exercise power in a period in which that power was circumscribed by law and tradition. (The Habsburgs, in particular, relied on powerful women to serve as regents and local governors in the name of distant emperors.)
If you like historical tough broads, you’re going to love Game of Queens.
*A subject that I have more than a casual interest in these days.
**And you thought History in the Margins was just a clever title.
***It should go without saying that the picture gets bigger when you re-introduce half the population into the story. But it doesn’t always happen.
****It’s been a while since I’ve written a statement about the books I review. This seems as good a time as any. Shelf Awareness for Readers pays me to write reviews, which I occasionally re-post here–often in a modified form. I receive review copies from publishers for some of the books I write about. Other books I pull off my shelf or buy from my local independent bookstore. ***** No matter where the book comes from, I don’t review books I don’t like. (Just because I don’t review a book that I received a copy for doesn’t mean I don’t like it. It just means I receive more books in a given month than I can hope to read.–Have I mentioned how much I love this job?) In no case does a publisher pay me directly to write a review. Any questions?
*****A practice I strongly endorse.
******The book’s title is derived from a change in the rules of chess that occurred in Spain during Isabella’s reign. Prior to the fifteenth century, the queen could only move one diagonal square at a time. Under Spain’s warrior queen, the chess piece became the most powerful piece on the board. Coincidence? (Yes, Isabella was a warrior queen. It’s easy to underestimate her if the only thing you know about her is that she underwrote Christopher Columbus’s first voyage. Note to self: it’s time for a blog post on Isabella. And on chess.)
******* For example, I had never heard of the Ladies’ Peace, brokered in 1529 by Margaret of Austria, the Habsburg emperor’s aunt/regent and Louise of Savoy, mother to the King of France. Not my period and all that.