INTRODUCTION TO DISCOVERING STEPHEN GILL

Daniel Bratton

On the surface, Stephen Gill seems a perfect candidate for postmodern status. A child of Sialkot, his imagination shaped in the shadows of the snow-covered peaks of Kashmir, he was transplanted to Karol Bagh, New Delhi, where as an adolescent he experienced the horrors unleashed by the partition of India, his family targeted as Christian. This nightmare led to exile, first to Ethiopia, then to England on the way to a new life in Canada. Memories of this past haunt his writing, ever-present yet at the same time on a long retreat. Cherished foods, clothing and places hold little interest for a people intently watching Hockey Night in Canada on their televisions or navigating standardized streetscapes of doughnut shops and commercial strip malls in their SUV’s--though here another snow-covered landscape lies always to the silent north.

In The Canadian Postmodern, Linda Hutcheon has identified marginality, or “ex-centrism,” as an essential element of postmodernity, noting that Canadians in general perceive themselves as marginalized. Within Canada, she argues, those who are not made to feel part of the dominant culture by reason of race and ethnicity feel even a further degree of marginalization. Although he has stated his belief that “home is where our feet are,” Stephen Gill’s position in his adopted land remains “ex-centric.” Professor R.K. Singh and Mitali De Sarkar have noted that he “seems to challenge Canadian poets who are skeptical about immigrant poets like him” (“A Search for Elysium,” The Mawaheb International (Canada), June 1998), while poems such as “A New Canadian in Toronto,” from Shrine, in which Gill writes of a city whose lips “smell like plastic flowers,” and where “the word friendship/you’ll hardly find in its book,” speak volumes about his sense of deracination. (He has noted in an interview with Dr. Agarwal, the editor of this collection, that diaspora in Hebrew means exile.)

Stephen Gill’s novel Immigrant provides further evidence of this sense of alienation. The protagonist, Reghu Nath, a doctoral student at the University of Ottawa, where Gill himself enrolled at the same level of study, finds himself a stranger in a strange land of coldness (both climatic and interpersonal), prejudice and provincialism. Certainly Canada of the 1960s, the historical setting of the novel, though forever congratulating itself on its cosmopolitanism and general atmosphere of tolerance, remained in many ways a bastion of Eurocentric privilege—especially in the publishing and academia worlds, where power was still concentrated in the hands of a WASP elite, primarily in Toronto. Having metamorphosed from a colony of England to what Canadian nationalists argued was a cultural and economic colony of the United States, Canada experienced a schizophrenic geo-political sense of marginality that must have been a perfect breeding ground for Stephen Gill’s personal feelings of diasporic estrangement.

Arriving in Canada in the late 1960s, an exile from the United States during the war in Vietnam, I experienced similar feelings. One of my graduate classes at the University of Toronto was conducted by the then-Master of Massey College in his private living quarters where, in an elegant room furnished with a grand piano and Turkish carpet, we sat at green felt-top tables under 18^th century prints. In our final class, we were served lunch, with sherry, by the staff, all visible minorities dressed in livery. On this occasion the class was joined by the Master’s wife, who discussed with a fellow graduate student, an Englishwoman whose husband was Canadian vice-president of a multinational corporation, their mutual friends in Rosedale and Forest Hill. One of their bridge partners was presently on safari in South Africa: “wasn’t that just like her?” I was white, of Anglo-Saxon extraction and Protestant upbringing. Even after fifteen years as a foreigner in South Korea and Japan, I have difficulty imagining the degree of alienation that Stephen Gill, with several more degrees of separation than myself, must have felt during his early days in Canada.

Nevertheless, Dr. Gill has always been quick to acknowledge his debt to—and admiration for—Canada and its pluralistic, democratic society. Yet his writing often attests to his personal sense of displacement as a foreigner in a land of foreigners. Professor Singh and Mitali De Sarkar have observed, “Reading Gill’s verses one finds he is his Indian self seeking a voice in a new land. His social norms, standards and values are neither fully Indian nor fully Western, but rather international. . . . With the blurring of boundaries in the mental landscape that once surrounded his entire being, Gill is subjected to a nomadic subjectivity concerning his status in a new land. In this new setting he is constantly territorialised, deterritorialised, and reterritorialised . . . .” Again, Stephen Gill seems a perfect embodiment of the postmodern condition.

However, where Stephen Gill decidedly parts company with the postmoderns, with their emphasis upon particularities and, in Linda Hutcheon’s words, “acknowledgment of self-situating limitations of address,” is in his pursuit, as a humanist, of the universal. (One might note here that Hutcheon has also observed of postmodern fiction that it “is not really any more democratic or accessible than earlier modernist fiction,” being equally contrived, manipulative and elitist.) If, as she argues, the postmodern exhibits an “urge to trouble, to question, to make problematic and provisional [the modernist] desire for order or truth,” Stephen Gill’s work, while acknowledging enormous obstacles to the quest for order and truth, nevertheless insists upon the absolute of universal peace.

Stephen Gill’s belief in universality is the cornerstone of his devotion to World Federalism. Rochelle L. Holt has noted that while most writers in the 1990s were struggling to stress the differences between many cultures, Stephen Gill was “professing the opposite, a more complex cognition which the masses have not yet learned in yearning for separate glorification of each race, each colour, each sex, each age . . . the poet tells us through his work that we are beyond brotherhood and sisterhood as we achieve the forgotten meaning of ‘neighbourhood,’ not isolated and separate but one large melting pot where we all appreciate our uniqueness while affirming our similarities” (The Pilot, January 20, 1992). In his own words, Stephen Gill, as a citizen of the world, told Professor Jaydeep Sarangi in an interview published in the Pakistan Christian Post, “My fellowship with people of diverse creeds has convinced me that people are people. This conviction is based on my visit[s] to different countries. I have discovered that people are people no matter what their beliefs and cultural values are. Underneath their skins they are the same—their hearts and thinking are the same. People everywhere have the same fears, the same hopes and the same instincts for survival.”

In an insightful essay that appears within this collection, Shweta Saxena has further pinpointed what essentially divides Stephen Gill from the postmoderns. In her essay, Saxena observes that the images of loneliness and despair that recur in the poems of Shrine remind one of Kierkegaard’s existential angst. If, rather than dismissing or suppressing such feelings, one ‘faces up” to this angst, the possibility for transformation exists. Stephen Gill’s poetry and prose never make light of, or avoid, his personal despair; indeed, it might be argued that the overall mood of much of his early verse is one of pessimism and despondency brought on by the stupidity of the human race. However, Gill draws a Kirkegaardian line in the sand, refusing to surrender to his despair. Whereas the postmodern sensibility frequently responds to this condition through the employment of irony and parody, with a concomitant rejection of universals and “master narratives,” Stephen Gill expresses what Saxena describes as “full faith in the notion of universal brotherhood.” It is this commitment to the absolutes of unconditional love and universal peace that keeps him from retreating into irony, cynicism and relativism.

Where, however, Gill is in accord with the postmoderns is in the desire to frustrate any resolution of differences that involves the absorption of the marginal by the centre, unless, for Gill, that centre be one of universal brotherhood where all differences are accepted and recognized. Gill’s poems do in fact have other characteristics that connect to the postmodern—Patricia Prime has written of his “gift of language, the immediacy of his wit and word-play.” However, Stephen Gill’s irony is essentially verbal and not deconstructive, nor is it designed to neutralize the possibility of universal truths.

Where, then, does the power of Stephen Gill’s verse lie? I recently read an article in a Japanese newspaper about the Free Hugs Campaign, a phenomenon that began in 2001 when an American, whose mother had died, decided to walk Miami Beach holding a sign reading “Free Hugs.” The subsequent offer of free hugs by an Australian in 2004 sparked a worldwide movement. A Stephen Gill poem might be likened to a “free hug,” not a sloppy or gratuitous gesture but the embrace of a fellow survivor following a cataclysm— along the lines of D. H. Lawrence’s “Look We Have Come Through.” Stephen Gill survived and transcended the atrocities that he witnessed in his teens through personal― and literary― acts of courage, drawing a line in the sand that refused despair. In his autobiographical account of this time, he has written:

It was a shock when I realized that the darkness I left behind had been chasing me continuously. The thought of cruelty of humans always remained in my mind like my own shadow. The more I thought of it, the more I became obsessed to write about it.

Stephen Gill has been able to come to grips with his own― and our collective― anxieties by venturing into the liminal territory of his extremely fertile imagination.

Rochelle Holt has further suggested that there are two types of poets, the “esoteric-academic who yearn for awards, grants and publications by university/commercial presses vs. the poets of the masses who write for the sheer joy of the personally/universally-healing process.” Stephen Gill clearly belongs to the latter category. The key to what constitutes the healing process in his work can be found in the love that pervades his art. It is what the American poet and editor Cid Corman would have called the intelligence of love. Corman wrote, “it is love that keeps us alive and keeps the works of love alive. Only to the extent that that love is openly and utterly entered into the work has it the capacity to evoke as much. Not IN return, but AS return.”

I think it would be fundamentally wrong to regard Stephen Gill’s literary quest for world peace as in any way the dream of a romantic— his vision is that of a realist who has witnessed first-hand the unbearable alternatives to universal brotherhood. One is here reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s observation that it is the dreamers, not the realists, who believe that the world can continue on its current path without ending in destruction. Whether his subjects be specific, as in the poems “Amputee” and “Mother of an AIDS-Ridden Son,” or more general, as in his many peace poems that employ imagery of the dove, Stephen Gill helps us understand that without love and compassion, our lives are essentially meaningless. His splendid haiku, which he calls trilliums, demonstrate his innate sense of love and reverence for all that is life, no matter how commonplace or insignificant the object(s) of his observation might be.

Stephen Gill has been internationally acclaimed for his contribution to global peace. He has been awarded three honorary doctorates, including Honour of Doctorate in Literature from World University in the United States and Doctorate in Literature from the World Academy of Arts and Culture in China. His many honours include Laureate Man of Letters from the United Poets Laureate International, the Pegasus International Poetry for Peace Award, the Global NRI Award from the India-European Union Friendship Society, and The Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal. Poet Laureate of Ansted University, Dr. Gill has been appointed Dean of Creative Writing and Peace Studies at Marquess College in London.

In this age of postmodernity, one senses a growing tendency, especially among the young, who represent our future, to regard life itself as a tired practical joke. Irony has become their front line of defense against dehumanizing technology and brutal irrationality, a means of reconciliation to a frightening world where the postmodern appears to be in danger of slipping into the “posthuman.” In these dark times of suicide bombers and holy wars, Yeats’s rough beast slouching ever closer to Bethlehem, Stephen Gill’s work stands as powerful testimony to the nobility and humanity that have always been found in man, yet are much less often found in men. May this book be a celebration of the life-giving, peace-loving values of a writer who is not merely a national― but properly a world-treasure.

Daniel Bratton

Kyoto, Japan

*This Introduction is part of Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal’s forthcoming book Discovering Stephen Gill: A Collection of Papers and Articles.