Mental borders and their complexities found words of concern at Kala Kunj last Friday, thanks to Jacqueline Rose and the first leg of the Prabhat Kumar Ghosh Memorial lecture organised by the Seagull Books. Titled ‘Partition, Proust and Palestine’ Rose’s lecture examined our mental lives in which we are ‘inhospitable to ourselves’. The discussion, which touched upon issues of emotional relationships with social and religious identities, drew upon French writer and critic Marcel Proust’s choices in life. The reference to Proust was significant as the discussion on ambivalence of physical borders, prejudices and emotional understandings of the same was enriched by his take on his identity. Proust was born to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother. The ambiguities of mental divisions were discussed in the context of the Palestine-Israel controversy and were defined evocatively towards the conclusion when Rose referred to a Jewish poet returning to Palestine and taking in the view of a place where once her father’s shop stood. The place had been claimed by an Arab, but the poet has very few uncomfortable or hostile thoughts while looking at a politically created enemy’s shop, but takes a nostalgia trip down memories of the similar shop her father had some time ago. The professor of English at Queen Mary University of London, UK unveiled her latest literary venture The Last Resistance where she tries finding if literature has a sway on political lives.
