Can the isolation necessary for a writer’s creativity coexist with the melee of literary events, asks Dhruba Hazarika
A literary festival is sometimes a blessing, especially in the sea of loneliness and isolation that is otherwise a creative writer’s destiny |
I have always held that creative writing is done best in isolation. Having gathered all that the writer wants to gather, either through experience or through reading or even through that toughest exercise of all, dreaming, imagining, the author must now look for a place, where, to paraphrase Barthes, she must die. Like elephants looking for their graveyard the writer finds an uncanny, timeless and immeasurable comfort in isolation. Not for her the hurly-burly world of petty fights over property, payment of telephone bills or the legitimacy or otherwise of the local gossip wagging her salacious tongue. All that the writer now craves, during her period of gestation, is to be alone with her baby, as she struggles for a safe and proper delivery. And yet before she embarked on this lonely journey that a mother alone can ever know she had been inextricably involved in the daily grist of life, gathering her fodder through all the joy and the bitterness that would go to create her baby, her child, her book.
Given this surreal background of two worlds straddling each other, those of the writers’ isolation, and, at the same time, a dependence on the sheer rough- and- tumble that life offers, are we comfortable with the role that literary festivals seek to establish?
Literary festivals, by the very virtue of their definition, are just that: festivals. And do festivals generate thoughts, experiences that will produce a short story or a novel or a poem? Given the fact that any experience is experience, certainly, then, such festivals can lead to creative bouts; but not in the fashion that isolation would allow a writer to garner her thoughts. For as long as I can remember Axom Xahitya Xabha has encouraged such festivals during their annual meets where the turn-out, at times, has been almost a lakh. The love for the written word spills over to a celebration that centres on reading and meet-the-author sessions, seminars, workshops and competitions. In my long association with writers from Bengal I have found their literary gatherings as effusive and interesting as a football match at The Maidan. On the one hand, we have a game that deals with ideas, thoughts and the craft of wriggling out words on plain paper; and on the other, 22 players working out their own intricate pattern on hard turf. The passions are the same. Only the vehicles differ: with poets it is the hand, with footballers it has to do with legs. In both situations it is a festival of sorts.
I would like to think that there have always been literary festivals, ever since the first man held his own little audience inside a cave as he narrated his first hunt. It is only of late that, sponsored by large corporate houses or by hefty government grants to those who have the aptitude to garner these, literary festivals have found a certain glamour that was otherwise absent in previous such gatherings. The Jaipur Literature Festival or the Hay Festival command much more attention and space in our local and national tabloids than even the Nobel Academy in its annual prize-giving ceremony at Stockholm on 10 December. It is almost as if authorship has been given a commercial-star value akin to our film personalities. In a way, this is as it should be, for, those who sweat hard with their thoughts, paper and ink ought to be given their due. The only trouble that I see is 
that the author often becomes susceptible enough to believe that her identity as an accepted and recognised writer depends mostly on an invitation to such festivals. Most writers, given their immense naivety, would not stop from succumbing to such superficial adulation. But what kind of twisted naivety is it when we come across a class of writers grovelling to receive an invitation, about as sickening as a writer who prostrates herself in front of a well-known book reviewer? Time, thus, stops being the final arbiter of quality: all that is required is to be on a panel in a literary festival.
I have been associated with the North East Writers’ Forum (NEWF) for more than 15 years now. Each year the Forum holds a seminar or a workshop in any one of the seven states. It is a low-profile organisation thriving on the interaction among the seventy-plus members who write in English and also translate our regional literature into English so as to reach a wider audience in the country or even abroad. In December 2010, NEWF organised the first-ever International Literary Festival in the Northeast. Writers from Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and several others from our country participated. We did not seek any government funds or any private sponsorship, save two minor ones that arrived voluntarily. Each member contributed his or her own bit. In the process we were personally and emotionally involved in the entire process. It was a festival that allowed one writer to seek out another in sheer fellow-feeling, in the belief that we write from (as Orhan Pamuk said in his Nobel Prize speech) “the secret wounds we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them....to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.” In such a situation a literary festival is sometimes a blessing, especially in the sea of loneliness and isolation that is otherwise a creative writer’s destiny.
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