Letters to Memory by Karen Tei Yamashita

Author:Karen Tei Yamashita
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781566894982
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2017-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Vyasa, you would have preferred reference to the Ramayana, but like the Iliad, the Mahabharata is about war, and sadly it is war and its aftermath that here haunts my family. What can an ancient epic about war and, furthermore, civil war and fratricide, say about a modern war? Well, first of all, you will remind me that no killing war is civil and that all wars are between brothers. Like the Trojan War, in the end, the battlefield is strewn with the dead bodies of heroes and presumably everyone else who came to get a bit role in the epic, all one hundred Kaurava brothers plus one defecting Pandava brother and all the born and unborn progeny of the Pandavas. On the one side, no Kaurava is left to rule, and on the other, no future Pandava. In eighteen days, six million people die. It doesn’t matter if the Pandava brothers are all, like Achilles, the biological (if that’s possible) sons of gods, or if their grandfather is the poet telling the story. Excuse me just one moment while I stop the narrative to have sex with two of my beautiful female characters. Oh, that felt good. But during sex with the old poet, this sister cringes her eyes shut, and that sister, though wide-eyed, turns deathly pale. The resulting sons cannot be perfect: Dhritarashtra, father of the Kauravas, is born blind; Pandu, father of the Pandavas, is born white and—okay this is confusing—impotent. Let that be a lesson; never insult the author. Or perhaps it does matter that it is the poet’s story to tell, that it is the poet’s progeny whose great gifts and great faults sow this tale of greed, exile, and destruction, and therefore the poet’s responsibility is to offer wisdom in exchange.

Oh but what wisdom, you shake your head. What was the scribe Ganesha thinking, dipping his great tusk into ink and scribbling this tome. Parts of this read like the great original manual for martial arts instruction. If the warrior’s heart turns bitter or dry, the fight will be lost. But even the great martial art teachers, Drona and Bhishma, go down in action. Drona gets tricked by false news of the death of his son (who happens to have the same name as a dead elephant); thereafter his head is cut off. And Bhishma, confronted by a woman warrior, refuses to fight, is pierced by a thousand arrows, and lies like a porcupine for the next fifty days, giving his dying and sacred wisdom, such as women are the root of all evil but also righteousness and pleasure. You have to admit, there are some other great bloody moments: Jayadratha causing the death of Arjuna’s son, and, in retaliation and with the help of a solar eclipse, Arjuna severing Jayadratha’s head with one bold arrow and sending it like a cannonball into the lap of his meditating father. This is an example of how a curse can return to its owner. Then

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