Gandhi's Burden-and Ours: Thoughts after Satyagraha at the Metropolitan Opera
Cohen, Mitchell
Gandhi's Burden and Ours Thoughts after Satyagraha at the Metropolitan Opera Mitchell Cohen pRELIMINARY THEME: YOU Could feel the frost as soon as I posed the question. The week before I went...
...There is a disconnect somewhere...
...Further gains ought to be put back into your enterprise or put to good social purposes, all while "involving . . . workers in decision making," providing "healthy working conditions and welfare schemes...
...They couldn't be worse off...
...They used to be "developed" and "underdeveloped," but Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, and I am sure that some folks would consider it to have true third world status only if it its authoritarian rulers spoke, say, like Iran's president...
...DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 7 5 GANDHI'S BURDEN Minimalism, in contrast, uses harmony, pulsation, and slow alterations in musical material...
...Gandhi's moral and political vision was compelling in India...
...Similarly, King would transCOURTESY: METROPOLITAN OPERA...
...It was about, well, you know who...
...In the meantime, we wait to see if a French social democrat, Dominque Strauss-Kahn, who became head of the International Monetary Fund by nomination of his country's right-wing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, will reform this institution in any basic way that can serve as a model of how international institutions should function, in their values no less than their structures...
...Also see, in the same volume, "A Letter to Gandhi" and "Gandhi...
...It must be the fault of those suffering, we think...
...1958), p. 233...
...In the meantime, the head of the UN's World Food Program announced this past spring that the planet faces a "silent tsunami" because of dramatic inflation in the cost of food staples...
...The week before I went to see Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha, which is subtitled M.K...
...The tactics are familiar to American civil rights and antiwar activists of the 1950s and 1960s...
...Jimmy Carter 74 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 will explain it to you...
...His "opera in three images," Ainadamar (Arabic for "Fountain of Tears"), which premiered at Tanglewood and Santa Fe in 2003, was a short, powerful work about Federico Garcia Lorca's murder by Spanish fascists in 1936...
...The libretto of Satyagraha was fashioned by novelist Constance DeJong, with Glass, out of parts of the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu epic that meant a great deal to Gandhi...
...Posing questions like these to first worlders can be a little like posing questions about Cuban political prisoners to third worldists...
...I would refuse to be expelled or submit to discriminating treatment...
...Glass's opera is one such civilizing idea...
...As he does so, another figure, elevated against the stage's backdrop, gives a speech—soundlessly...
...Its aim, one scholar summarizes, was "to socialize property without nationalizing it...
...This third way (not Gandhi's term) aimed to integrate the problem of socioeconomic suffering into India's independence agenda...
...Still, he proposed that were he a German Jew he "would claim Germany as my home" and "challenge" Germans "to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon...
...Some twenty-six thousand people saw seven sold-out performances of Satyagraha, a work that is almost four hours long, composed by an American minimalist composer, sung in Sanskrit, set in South Africa, and that has as its protagonist one of the grandest heroes of the third world...
...It's true enough that Fulgencio Batista was a rat and that Cuba was America's whorehouse before Castro overthrew him...
...Yes, opera—that particularly high Western art form that seems to most people very distant from worldly concerns...
...It is said that when a British reporter once asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization, he responded, "I think it would be a good idea...
...Of course they don'twouldn't— say this, and some caveat, here a sense of tragedy, is needed within any intelligent work, artistic or political, that projects hope...
...The poor—there were so many—were to be uplifted, Hindu-Muslim conflict was to be transcended (Gandhi, who grew up with a mix of religious beliefs, worked in a Muslim law firm in South Africa), "untouchability" was to end...
...Make that political and you side with the Soviet bloc in the early 1950s, even while Stalin still presides...
...Can you imagine a silent Fidel on stage, save in a spoof...
...Satyagraha," a combined political-spiritual notion, emerged after the turn of the century as he worked on behalf of South Africa's Indian immigrants...
...244-245...
...Perhaps they are looking for social networks to support them, like those of the Muslim Brotherhood...
...At other times, it seems to take shape as the hope against hope of aging militants that postcolonialism plus the Internet, will prove—finally!—Trotsky's theory of combined and uneven development...
...Gandhi arrived in South Africa in 1893 and soon experienced "civilization" in a way familiar to Americans...
...These houses are packed despite high ticket prices for decent seats...
...Exposition and Developments In the last act, we see Gandhi organizing the "New Castle March" of 1913, a protest by Indian mine workers and their families against a round of discriminatory laws...
...At the end of the opera, Gandhi sings of how rebirths promote virtue against evil...
...True enough, but there might have been some query—just a little—about his utter failure in both places to rally peasants to the revolution...
...In it, a cigar is never anything but a cigar...
...Presiding over Act II is Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengal-born poet and religious and social reformer who was, like his friend Gandhi, educated partly in England...
...Gandhi in South Africa, I attended a screening of a documentary entitled Fidel, subtitled The Untold Story...
...After all, if Nazi persecution had no parallel, perhaps the response could not have been what Gandhi prescribed for other circumstances...
...A Fresh Theme In yet another meantime, I went to the opera...
...In the meantime, I am not really sure where these worlds are anymore...
...But 40 percent of Egyptians survive on the equivalent of $2 a day, and the price of their bread doubled in recent months...
...It has often been pointed out that minimalism was an avantgarde that challenged the twentieth century's established (classical) avant-garde: atonality...
...Yes, I know Sartre changed after the invasion of Hungary, but it should not have taken that to figure out that something was wrong, just as today's post-colonialist reinventors of third worldism ought not need decades of dictatorships to see that selfserving strongmen, albeit with red plumes, do not incarnate "liberation"—even by the lights and darks of postmodern perspectives...
...in Iraq (both sides of it...
...The embargo is foolish, but while Americans really do need to think afresh about how we relate to those south of us, indeed to all poor countries, it is hard to imagine that this film by Estela Bravo, which won awards when it came out in 2001, could foster anything of the sort...
...A twentieth-century scientist was the center of the first (Einstein on the Beach, 1974, a famous collaboration with Robert Wilson...
...Sometimes this shapes up as variants on the Michael Hardt/ Antonio Negri delirium: the global "multitude" plus the Internet will connect us to utopia—a postmodern update, or rather download, of Lenin's description of liberation as Soviet power plus electricity...
...It was sponsored by the Havana Film Festival, something of a New York cultural transgression of the U.S...
...In the first, we see Leo Tolstoy...
...elsewhere it could be blind...
...This was about Fidel...
...Had she wanted to make a movie about political prisoners she would have done so...
...If Americans need to reconsider what used to be called the "third world," its artistic and intellectual proponents must ask some questions too...
...Did Stalin swim too...
...After the triumph in 1989 of the first world, which was somehow a "Free World" that included apartheid South Africa and Pinochet's Chile, and then with the disappearance of the second, that is, communist world (excluding China, with its increasingly capitalist economy), third worldism of the 1950s and 1960s became "post-colonialism...
...Instead, Fidel allows no caveats...
...Over a hundred million people could end up in the "urgent hunger category...
...You can bracket Muqtada al-Sadr's political-religious fanaticism because so many of his followers are poor...
...After all, he went to Memphis in April 1968 to support striking sanitation workers...
...How did an ex-political prisoner get into the picture...
...The answers tend to bifurcation...
...embargo of Cuba...
...It was just a year after Homer Plessy, one-eighth black and seven-eighths white, had been arrested in a Louisiana railway car reserved for "whites only" that young Mohandas K. Gandhi was ejected from a train to Pretoria for sitting in its first-class section...
...Unaware of these deficiencies, I wondered if they made up the "untold" story of the subtitle...
...BY THE TIME of his return to India in 1914, Gandhi had worked out the vision of resistance and freedom that would animate the struggle against the Raj...
...After all, we are for liberty...
...These prescriptions were offered two weeks after Kristallnacht...
...At question time, I asked the director, "Could you tell me about two or three of the more interesting political prisoners in Cuba today and what makes them interesting...
...There was, however, one expression of grievance...
...It also made no concessions to "English only" cultural laziness...
...Is U.S...
...And then there is King, his back to the audience as if it—we—are behind him as he declared, "I Have a Dream" that August day in 1963...
...indeed, there are nine of them together with a huge chorus...
...Of course, I knew Cuba's oft-told history...
...Capitalist "managerial skills" would achieve "socialist purposes...
...Still, we are increasingly and rightly nervous about the accumulated impact of Reagan Revolution/Bush Era economics...
...This atemporal temporality suggests Hindu beliefs in reincarnation...
...A leftthatstill-doesn't-learn lurks within segments of today's anti/alter-globalization movements, mucking up urgent questions...
...1 (New York: Jewish Frontier...
...2. I take many details from Bhikhu Parekh's Gandhi (Oxford University Press, 2001) and paraphrase his summary of Gandhi's economics on p. 95...
...This music can be intensely beautiful or extraordinarily boring, and Dante Anzolini, who conducted the Met orchestra, achieved the former with finesse and intelligence for Satyagraha...
...It affords us Ramsey Clark and Angela Davis gushing praise of Castro...
...Since then, Washington's policies toward Havana have tended too often to the hysterical, egged on by Florida-based exiles...
...If you owned a firm, factory, or lands, you were to join your workers in their labors, "make profit by just means, pay decent wages," and take no more than what you need for "a moderately comfortable life...
...But then we are also still disfigured by the cold war...
...Gandhi eventually forbade followers from calling him "Mahatma," Great One...
...These victims of discrimination lived in misery, particularly exploited on large estates...
...Hayim Greenberg, a Labor Zionist essayist and a great admirer of Gandhi, pointed out that Gandhi had grasped the situation of only some of the world's untouchables...
...Surely, then, Saddam Hussein was just one of many rotten apples on the bottom of the world's barrel, and Iraq's violence today is a "resistance" comparable to that of the French maquis...
...He loves baseball and—did you know?—The Leader swims...
...Indeed, "Jews of Germany can offer satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa...
...That something is not quite right about one man's being in power for a half century didn't seem to occur to the largely doting audience...
...He isn't the opera's only soloist (Richard Croft, a lyric tenor, was outstanding as Gandhi...
...The well-to-do would be expected to hold their wealth and talents "in trust and to use them for the service of society...
...Still, Glass's opera gives us a noble man and gallant struggles, even if one feature of it—the beautifully imagined insistence that Gandhi's teachings and tactics are universal and timeless rather than compelling for particular times and places—makes Gandhi's own mistake...
...PHOTO BY KEN HOWARD late civil rights into broad questions about socioeconomic inequality in American society...
...Some prisoners have been released since RatIl Castro replaced his ailing brother as president...
...He thought it urgent to address them too, and he made astute political use of indigenous cultural symbols to do so, all while trying to live up to ideals he preached...
...The opera's artistry also masks some difficult questions that might be posed about mixing spiritual and political pursuits...
...But then inferences go, well, berserk...
...He relinquished knighthood to protest British imperialism...
...It forces you to listen differently...
...Could apartheid in South Africa have been a particular problem, apart from the world-historical contest...
...The deity Krishna steps between them, and then Gandhi's appearance suggests commonality between legend and events of his day...
...National independence was urgent, but so too was the character of the future, independent society...
...I am not the first to note that had Gandhi faced Stalinism or Nazism rather than British imperialism, however arrogant and brutal it was, things might well have been different...
...Its largely foreign-language repertoire was long deemed a barrier, even if the music might often enough overcome it...
...Gandhi would have been dispatched with speed and a chuckle by Stalin...
...DissonancelRecapitulation Gandhi had a great advantage: his foes...
...True, we saw some unusual personal and political footage, or so it seemed to me, a nonexpert in Fidography...
...Even though I had just heard Gandhi sing onstage, I could imagine him silent there in order to make a political point, DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 77 GANDHI 'S BURDEN say, that political leaders shouldn't mistake their individual voices for those voices they want to rise up...
...Next year, Improbable returns to coproduce Doctor Atomic, John Adams's latest opera, which is about Robert Oppenheimer and the bomb...
...How many loaves or full tanks will a ticket buy...
...Che Guevera, we were told, took an excursion to the Congo before moving on to Bolivia, where he fell victim to the CIA...
...A Jewish Gandhi in Germany," wrote Greenberg in 1939, could function "for about five minutes...
...It will then collaborate on a new Met commission for the talented and innovative Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov...
...But does he do it as well as Mao...
...Opera has never been deep in the cultural fabric of America in a way comparable to Europe...
...It also analyzed the movement's failings frankly, even though this openness gave succor and ammunition to enemies...
...The great French philosopher was never able to think but in philosophical bifurcations...
...Arnold Schoenberg spoke of "the emancipation of dissonance" and abandoned the traditional tonal structure of Western music, that is, its means of order...
...The filmmaker was there to answer questions after we watched the Bearded Dynamo bound across decades—a contrast, we were told, to nine hostile American presidents who went by his historical wayside...
...Were there really issues other than the contest between Washington and Moscow...
...One scene in the opera is devoted to how Gandhi's GANDHI'S BURDEN movement published Indian Opinion, a weekly newspaper that articulated its aims and showed that Indians did indeed have opinions about what was done to them...
...The trilogy also eludes historical sequencing, as each part seeks out different aspects of human existence...
...For don't the shoeless of the earth need freedom to speak out as much if not more than the well-heeled...
...Gandhi denounced the Nazis, of course, and declared in November 1938 that the Nazi "persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history...
...If you are not for us, you are against us...
...I didn't know names, although I was aware that Fidel criminalized independent-trade-union organizing and I had heard that a self-declared disciple of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., was among the human rights advocates in Cuba's jails...
...Yet in this year, the sixtieth anniversary of Gandhi's murder and the fortieth of Martin Luther King's assassination, it chose—and chose well—to mount this work in partnership with the English National Opera and with remarkable puppetry and staging by "Improbable"—an appropriate name for an imaginative British theater team...
...The idea was to transform your enemy all while regenerating your self—the self being the Indian people writ large...
...The opera begins with two royal armies preparing for battle on the mythological "Kuru Field of Justice...
...The third was about the pharaoh who fostered sun worship as a monotheistic alternative to idols in fourteenth century B.C.E...
...I kept thinking after the opera: here is the difference between them, Gandhi and King and Fidel, no less than between the politics of this opera and the film I had seen the previous week...
...Gandhi's reading of his The Kingdom of God Is Within You and, earlier, John Ruskin's Unto the Last was decisive for the formulation of "Satyagraha" ("TruthForce," in Sanskrit), his idea of confrontational but nonviolent resistance to oppression...
...Akhnaten, 1983...
...Nobody asked...
...Fluid repetition and rippling music are key dimensions that, riverlike, create a dialectic of temporality and apparent atemporality...
...The implication is that his politics transcend his own individual form and times...
...You must choose, take sides, even if you don't want to do so...
...He helped to create and lived for a while in austerity on a cooperative "Tolstoy Farm" near Johannesburg...
...Passages translated from the Sanskrit were projected on the semicircular backdrop on the Met's stage...
...Americans— qualify that as "most Americans"—remain pretty well off compared to the vast majority of the world's population...
...Gabriel Garcia Marquez shows up by the side of his old friend, blurring the line between magical realism and political hocus-pocus...
...If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than they are now...
...The Metropolitan Opera, which has a new general manager in Peter Gelb, has long been chastised for conservative stage tastes (reinforced by conservative patrons...
...Perhaps those Western experts who advise postcolonial governments that "fiscal restraint" should be the chief state priority in lands that blister in poverty should think again—both about the impact of this priority on poor, vulnerable people and perhaps also about political consequences...
...This question implies a vulgar utilitarian calculation of the place of culture in society and it should be sloughed aside— although after it's sloughed, it might still be useful for it to nag a bit, just so those of us who are music-loving first worlders hear the growl of empty stomachs on occasion after listening to great music...
...A few too many of the exiles sound as if they hanker to be post-communist brothel-keepers, if not executioners...
...policy bad...
...Each act of Satyagraha has a silent presiding spirit...
...This work, which premiered in 1980 in Rotterdam, uses more conventional operatic forms than Glass did before, and presents a six-part nonchronological narrative about Gandhi's two decades in South Africa (a rarely told story, at least in the United States...
...This identity was reinforced, at least in public debate, by an academic industry of "Theory" that might better be called "Judgment"—judgment of almost everything in terms of "Imperialism versus AntiImperialism," rather the way that first worldists spoke of "Totalitarianism versus Democracy" This split thinking—the use of bifurcating master-thoughts, if you prefer—has returned of late to govern too much debate about the U.S...
...Only with the masses, I suppose...
...The subtitle of his autobiography—"The Story of My Experiments with Truth"—doesn't seem to allow that experience (and experiments) may undo what had in a time and place appeared true...
...At one point in Act III of Satyagraha, singing Gandhi and silent King, both destined for assassin's bullets, turn briefly toward each other as if to say that "this history is my burden, and I make it mine...
...Such were his hopes...
...Some of them are rightly furious at a bombastic dictator, but justice and smart policies don't simply (or always) coincide...
...Il faut choisir, as John Foster Dulles might have said...
...Nelson Mandela may cajole Castro amiably in Fidel, but his presidency of postapartheid South Africa, with its combination truth commissions, amnesty, and even forgiveness, was more in the spirit of Gandhi and King than that of the Cuban (now ex-) caudillo...
...DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 73 GANDHI'S BURDEN Bridge Sometimes I think that Americans have difficulty addressing the third world for the same reasons it is hard for us to address social suffering at home...
...it was sung in Akkadian...
...The price of bread rose 15 perGANDHI'S BURDEN cent in the last year...
...Dislike of capitalism and communism led Gandhi to advocate a system of "trusteeship" for a future independent India...
...1. See Arved Ashby, "Minimalist Opera," in M. Cooke, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Opera (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp...
...Nonetheless, Satyagraha talks intelligently in sung Sanskrit to Westerners about a bigger world around them...
...The terminology is itself an endless obstruction to intelligent discussion...
...Or will his tenure be as unexceptional as social democratic rule has been in advanced countries in the last decades...
...I suspect they are not Googling or Yahooing or blogging in response...
...There would be "capitalists but not capitalism, socialism but not state ownership...
...Its targets must be angels (if you really know them) or at least not really that bad...
...An "equality" of notes came instead...
...Was Rumsfeld a wretch...
...Point out that George Bush is embedded in the Christian right...
...Live and recorded opera performances are being shown in cinemas across the United States...
...3. Hayim Greenberg, "An Answer to Gandhi" (1939), in The Inner Eye: Selected Essays Vol...
...Nonetheless, there has been a surge of operas by Americans, and subtitled translations of Verdi, Wagner, Bizet, and others now accompany performances in most major opera houses (you often need subtitles even when the work is in English...
...Opera and documentary are different media— operatic "realism" can take shape only in content—but whatever artistic questions may arise, it is appropriate to ask of any work with political purpose or significant political content whether it enriches your political sensibilities or not, if it makes you more perceptive politically or not...
...The irritated moderator called quickly on someone else, so I had no chance to ask about a scene—the camera dwells on it—in which Nelson Mandela coaxes Castro to visit South Africa...
...Gandhi refused to use British imperialism to excuse his own people's problems or flaws...
...I won't remind anyone of "shock therapy," that egg-breaking that gave Russia (and us) the Putin omelet...
...Perhaps parochialism was at play, too, since foreign-language films have limited attraction in this country and, anyway, movies are cheaper and more accessible...
...So the music rolls while the dates of stage events jump to and fro...
...Satyagraha is the second part of a trilogy by Glass...
...MITCHELL COHEN co-edits Dissent and is professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York...
...The success of pacifism always depends on them...
...And would Saddam have invaded Iran if not for the occupation of Palestine...
...Glass's "minimalism" was partly a product of New York's avant-garde stage world of the 1950s and 1960s, and he once described it as music that challenges a listener's usual expectations of sound in time) This, of course, has political echoes, and so we can think of it as particularly suitable to an opera about a challenge to a political order...
...Bravo retorted quickly...
...Il faut choisir, as Jean-Paul Sartre did say...
...78 n DISSENT / Summer 2008...
...When laws were designed to control Indians through a system of registration and demeaned their cultural traditions, protesters burned registration cards, picketed registration offices, and accepted arrest nonviolently...
...It is Martin Luther King, Jr...
...The size of the chorus couldn't be minimal because, after all, the opera concerns the mobilization of protest 76 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 movements, of masses of people finding a voice together...
...Alice Walker complains that Fidel, well, he just can't dance or sing...
...While Gandhi and King never held power, and while they went to prison for their ideals, as did Castro, it is impossible to imagine either of them filling jails with their own political foes in the name of—as the only path to—social and economic justice...
Vol. 55 • July 2008 • No. 3
