Oblivion: the sacred and the absurd

Monday 17 February 2025

Eskişehir, Türkiye

“Time is the father of truth.

Its mother is our mind.”

Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper (1584)

Reading the past I hope to glean truth that sustains me for the future. By considering the past, perhaps I can perceive the lessons that history can teach us.

In examining the history of this calendar date, I feel a great sadness.

Giordano Bruno, Isabelle Eberhardt, Jibanananda Das and Sadegh Hedayet all born on this day in history, all ended in tragedy.

Bruno, Hedayet, Eberhardt, and Das lived on the fringes of society, each in their own way.

They saw beyond the ordinary — whether it was Bruno’s infinite universe, Hedayet’s existential horror, Eberhardt’s borderless identity, or Das’s melancholic modernism.

Each paid a price for their vision.

Some were condemned by institutions, others by their own minds, and others by fate itself.

Their stories remind us that genius often walks hand in hand with alienation.

The lesson from their examples is the exploration of whether that genius had to be alienated.

17 February 1548

Nola, Napoli, Italia

Above: Girodano Bruno (17 February 1548 – 17 February 1600)

Born Filippo Bruno in Nola (a comune in the modern-day province of Naples, in the Southern Italian region of Campania, then part of the Kingdom of Naples) in 1548, he was the son of Giovanni Bruno (1517 – 1592), a soldier, and Fraulissa Savolino.

Above: Nola Duomo, Nola, Napoli, Italia

In his youth he was sent to Napoli to be educated.

He was tutored privately at the Augustinian monastery there, and attended public lectures at the Studium Generale. 

Above: Napoli (Naples), Italia (Italy)

At the age of 17, he entered the Dominican Order at the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in Napolı, taking the name Giordano, after Giordano Crispo, his metaphysics tutor.

He continued his studies there, completing his novitiate, and ordained a priest in 1572 at age 24.

Above: Chiesa San Domenico Maggiore, Napoli, Italia

During his time in Napoli, he became known for his skill with the art of memory and on one occasion travelled to Rome to demonstrate his mnemonic system before Pope Pius V (1504 – 1572) and Cardinal Rebiba (1504 – 1577).

Above: Italian Pope Pius V (né Antonio Ghislieri)(1504 – 1572)

Above: Italian Cardinal Scipione Rebiba (1504 – 1577)

In his later years, Bruno claimed that the Pope accepted his dedication to him of the lost work On The Ark of Noah at this time.

Above: Noah’s Ark, Edward Hicks (1846)

While Bruno was distinguished for outstanding ability, his taste for free thinking and forbidden books soon caused him difficulties.

Above: Giordano Bruno

Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought) is an unorthodox attitude or belief.

A freethinker holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and should instead be reached by other methods such as logic, reason, and empirical observation. 

Above: Tombstone detail of a freethinker, late 19th century (Cemetery of Cullera, Spain)

According to the Collins English Dictionary, a freethinker is:

“One who is mentally free from the conventional bonds of tradition or dogma, and thinks independently.”

In some contemporary thought in particular, free thought is strongly tied with rejection of traditional social or religious belief systems. 

The cognitive application of free thought is known as “freethinking“, and practitioners of free thought are known as “freethinkers“.

Modern freethinkers consider free thought to be a natural freedom from all negative and illusive thoughts acquired from society.

The term first came into use in the 17th century in order to refer to people who inquired into the basis of traditional beliefs which were often accepted unquestioningly.

Today, freethinking is most closely linked with:

• agnosticism (the belief that God is unknowable)
• deism (the belief in the existence of God should be solely based on rational thought without any reliance on revealed religions or religious authority, that God’s existence is revealed through nature)
• secularism (to interpret life based on principles derived solely from the material world, without recourse to religion) 
• humanism (a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry) 
• anti-clericalism (opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters)
• religious critique (criticism of the validity, concept, or ideas of religion)
  • Critics of religion in general may view religion as:
    • outdated
    • harmful to the individual
    • harmful to society
    • an impediment to the progress of science or humanity
    • a source of immoral acts or customs
    • a political tool for social control

The Oxford English Dictionary defines freethinking as:

“The free exercise of reason in matters of religious belief, unrestrained by deference to authority; the adoption of the principles of a free-thinker.”

Freethinkers hold that knowledge should be grounded in facts, scientific inquiry and logic.

The skeptical application of science implies freedom from the intellectually limiting effects of: 

• confirmation bias:  the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values 

People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes.

The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. 

• cognitive bias: Individuals create their own “subjective reality” from their perception of the input.

An individual’s construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world.

Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality. 

• conventional wisdom: the body of ideas or explanations generally accepted by the public and/or by experts in a field  

• popular culture: generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as popular art  or mass art, sometimes contrasted with fine art) and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time

Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects.

The primary driving forces behind popular culture, especially when speaking of Western popular cultures, are:

• the mass media
• mass appeal
• marketing 
• capitalism

It is produced by what philosopher Theodor Adorno refers to as the “culture industry“.

Above: German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903 – 1969)

Heavily influenced in modern times by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of people in a given society.

Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual’s attitudes towards certain topics.

However, there are various ways to define pop culture.

Because of this, popular culture is something that can be defined in a variety of conflicting ways by different people across different contexts. 

The common pop-culture categories are: 

• entertainment (such as film, music, television, literature and video games)
• sports
• news (as in people/places in the news)
• politics
• fashion
• technology
• slang.

• prejudice: an affective feeling towards a person based on their perceived social group membership 

The word is often used to refer to a preconceived (usually unfavorable) evaluation or classification of another person based on that person’s perceived personal characteristics, such as: 

• political affiliation
• sex
• gender
• gender identity
• beliefs
• values
• social class
• friendship
• age
• disability
• religion
• sexuality
• race
• ethnicity
• language
• nationality
• culture
• complexion
• beauty
• height
• body weight
• occupation
• wealth
• education
• criminality
• sport-team affiliation
• music tastes 
• other perceived characteristics

The word “prejudice” can also refer to unfounded or pigeonholed beliefs. 

It may apply to “any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence“. 

Gordon Allport defined prejudice as a:

“feeling, favorable or unfavorable, toward a person or thing, prior to, or not based on, actual experience“.

Above: American psychologist Gordon Allport (1897 – 1967)

Auestad defines prejudice as characterized by “symbolic transfer“:

• the transfer of a value-laden meaning content onto a socially-formed category and then on to individuals who are taken to belong to that category, resistance to change, and overgeneralization.

Above: Norwegian philosopher Lene Auestad

The United Nations Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility has highlighted research considering prejudice as:

• a global security threat due to its use in scapegoating some populations and inciting others to commit violent acts towards them and how this can endanger individuals, countries, and the international community.

Above: Flag of the United Nations

• sectarianism: the existence, within a locality, of two or more divided and actively competing communal identities, resulting in a strong sense of dualism which unremittingly transcends commonality, and is both culturally and physically manifest
  • pre-existing fixed communal categories in society
  • a set of social practices where daily life is organized on the basis of communal norms and rules that individuals strategically use and transcend

Given the controversy he caused in later life, it is surprising that Bruno was able to remain within the monastic system for 11 years.

In his testimony to Venetian inquisitors during his trial many years later, he says that proceedings were twice taken against him for having cast away images of the saints, retaining only a crucifix, and for having recommended controversial texts to a novice. 

Above: Giordano Bruno Monument, Campo dei Fiori, Roma, Italia

Such behavior could perhaps be overlooked, but Bruno’s situation became much more serious when:

• he was reported to have defended the Arian heresy
  • a Christological doctrine which rejects the traditional notion of the Trinity and considers Jesus to be a creation of God, and therefore distinct from God.
  • It is named after its major proponent, Arius (256–336).
  • It is considered heretical by most modern mainstream branches of Christianity.)

Above: Libyan Bishop Arius (260 – 336)

• a copy of the banned writings of Erasmus, annotated by him, was discovered hidden in the monastery latrine.

Above: Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466 – 1536), commonly known in English as Erasmus of Rotterdam or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch Christian humanist, Catholic priest and theologian, educationalist, satirist, and philosopher.

Through his vast number of translations, books, essays, prayers and letters, he is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the Northern Renaissance and one of the major figures of Dutch and Western culture.

Erasmus was an important figure in classical scholarship who wrote in a spontaneous, copious and natural Latin style.

As a Catholic priest developing humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared pioneering new Latin and Greek scholarly editions of the New Testament and of the Church Fathers, with annotations and commentary that were immediately and vitally influential in both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation.

He also wrote: 

• On Free Will
  • the ability of an individual to turn themselves to the things of God

• The Praise of Folly
  • a spiralling satirical attack on all aspects of human life, not ignoring superstitions and religious corruption, but with a pivot into an orthodox religious purpose

• The Complaint of Peace
  • a voluntary return from madness and unconsciousness

“At last!

Enough and more than enough blood has been spilled, human blood, and if that were little, even Christian blood.

Enough has been squandered in mutual destruction, enough already sacrificed to Orcus and the Furies and to nourish the eyes of the Turks.

The comedy is at an end.

Finally, after tolerating far too long the miseries of war, repent!“

• Handbook of a Christian Knight
  •  an appeal on Christians to act in accordance with the Christian faith rather than merely performing the necessary rites

• On Civility in Children
  • the first treatise in Western Europe on the moral and practical education of children, which gives instructions, in simple Latin, on how a boy should conduct himself in the company of adults

• Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style 
  • teaching how to rewrite pre-existing texts, and how to incorporate them in a new composition.
  • Erasmus systematically instructed on how to embellish, amplify, and give variety to speech and writing.

• and many other popular and pedagogical works

Erasmus lived against the backdrop of the growing European religious reformations.

He developed a biblical humanistic theology in which he advocated the religious and civil necessity both of peaceable concord and of pastoral tolerance on matters of indifference.

He remained a member of the Catholic Church all his life, remaining committed to reforming the church from within.

His influential middle-road approach disappointed, and even angered, partisans in both camps.

Above: Erasmus Monument, Rotterdam, Netherlands

“There was in me, whatever I was able to do, that which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own:

Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life.“

When Bruno learned that an indictment was being prepared against him in Napoli he fled, shedding his religious habit.

At least for a time.

Above: Greek depiction featuring Odysseus with the Sirens. Including Parthenope, a Siren and mythological founder of Naples. Attic red-figured stamnos (475 BC)

Bruno first went to the Genoese port of Noli, then to Savona, Torino and finally to Venezia, where he published his lost work On the Signs of the Times with the permission (so he claimed at his trial) of the Dominican Remigio Nannini Fiorentino (1518 – 1581).

Above: Noli, Liguria, Italia

Above: Savona, Italia

Above: Torino (Turin), Italia

Above: Venezia (Venice), Italia

From Venezia he went to Padova, where he met fellow Dominicans who convinced him to wear his religious habit again.

Above: Padova (Padua), Italia

From Padova he went to Bergamo and then across the Alps to Chambéry and Lyon.

Above: Bergamo, Italia

Above: Chambéry, France

His movements after this time are obscure.

Above: Lyon, France

In 1579, Bruno arrived in Genève.

During his Venetian trial, he told inquisitors that while in Genève he told the Marchese de Vico of Napoli, who was notable for helping Italian refugees in Genève:

“I did not intend to adopt the religion of the city.

I desired to stay there only that I might live at liberty and in security.” 

Bruno had a pair of breeches made for himself.

The Marchese and others apparently made Bruno a gift of a sword, hat, cape and other necessities for dressing himself.

In such clothing Bruno could no longer be recognized as a priest.

Above: Genève (Geneva), Suisse (Switzerland)

Things apparently went well for Bruno for a time, as he entered his name in the Rector’s Book of the University of Geneva in May 1579.

But in keeping with his personality he could not long remain silent.

In August, Bruno published an attack on the work of Antoine de La Faye, a distinguished professor.

Above: French theologian Antoine de La Faye

A zealous pastor and very ardent in defending the rights of the Company of Pastors, but ambitious, interested and intriguing, La Faye (1540 – 1615) acquired such great influence that after the death of Theodore Beza (1519 – 1605), he led the religious movement, perhaps proposing to succeed him, if not to supplant him, one day, and even dreaming of taking the place left vacant by Jean Calvin (1509 – 1564) in Geneva.

Above: French theologian Theodore de Beze

La Faye can perhaps be held responsible for some of the departures among the dozen professors out of the thirty who taught at the 
University of Geneva in the 16th century.

Above: French theologian Jean Calvin

It was to refute an anonymous pamphlet in his hand that 
François de Sales (1567 – 1622) wrote his Defense of the Standard of the Holy Cross. 

Above: French theologian François de Sales

La Faye died of the plague.

Bruno and the printer, Jean Bergeon, were promptly arrested.

Rather than apologizing, Bruno insisted on continuing to defend his publication.

He was refused the right to take sacrament. 

Though this right was soon restored, he left Genève.

Bruno went to France, arriving first in Lyon, and thereafter settling for a time (1580–1581) in Toulouse, where he took his doctorate in theology and was elected by students to lecture in philosophy.

He also attempted at this time to return to Catholicism, but was denied absolution by the Jesuit priest he approached. 

Above: Toulouse, France

When religious strife broke out in the summer of 1581, he moved to Paris. 

There he held a cycle of 30 lectures on theological topics and also began to gain fame for his prodigious memory.

Above: Paris, France

His talents attracted the benevolent attention of the French King Henry III (1551 – 1589).

Bruno subsequently reported:

“I got me such a name that King Henry III summoned me one day to discover from me if the memory which I possessed was natural or acquired by magic art.

I satisfied him that it did not come from sorcery but from organized knowledge.

Following this, I got a book on memory printed, entitled The Shadows of Ideas, which I dedicated to His Majesty.

Forthwith he gave me an Extraordinary Lectureship with a salary.”

Above: French King Henri III

In Paris, Bruno enjoyed the protection of his powerful French patrons.

During this period, he published several works on mnemonics, including De umbris idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas)(1582), Ars memoriae (The Art of Memory)(1582) and Cantus circaeus (Circe’s Song)(1582).

All of these were based on his mnemonic models of organized knowledge and experience, as opposed to the simplistic logic-based mnemonic techniques of Petrus Ramus (1515 – 1572) then becoming popular. 

Above: French reformer Petrus Ramus (né Pierre de La Ramée)

Bruno also published a comedy summarizing some of his philosophical positions, titled Il Candelaio (The Candlemaker)(1582).

In the 16th century dedications were, as a rule, approved beforehand, and hence were a way of placing a work under the protection of an individual.

Given that Bruno dedicated various works to the likes of King Henry III, English poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586), Michel de Castelnau (1520 – 1592)(French Ambassador to England) and possibly Pope Pius V, it is apparent that this wanderer had risen sharply in status and moved in powerful circles.

In April 1583, Bruno went to England with letters of recommendation from Henry III as a guest of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau.

Above: French diplomat Michel de Castelnau

Bruno lived at the French Embassy with the lexicographer John Florio (1552 – 1625).

Above: English lexicographer Giovanni Florio (aka John Florio)

There he became acquainted with the poet Philip Sidney (to whom he dedicated two books) and other members of the Hermetic circle around John Dee (1527 – 1609), though there is no evidence that Bruno ever met Dee himself.

Above: English poet Philip Sidney

Above: English philosopher John Dee

Bruno also lectured at Oxford and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there.

Above: Oxford, England

Above: Coat of arms of the University of Oxford

Bruno’s views were controversial, notably with John Underhill (1545 – 1592)(Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently Bishop of Oxford), and George Abbot (1562 – 1633)(later Archbishop of Canterbury).

Above: Lincoln College, Oxford University

Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting:

Above: English Bishop George Abbot

“the opinion of Copernicus that the Earth did go round, and the Heavens did stand still, whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round and his brains did not stand still.”

Above: Polish polymath Nikolaus Kopernikus (1473 – 1543)

He found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Marsilio Ficino’s work, leading Bruno to return to the Continent.

Above: Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino

Marsilio Ficino (1433 – 1499) was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance.

He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato’s (428 – 348 BC) complete extant works into Latin.

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher Plato

His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato’s Academy, influenced the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy.

Above: Firenze (Florence), Italia

Ficino proclaimed:

“This century, like a Golden Age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: 

Grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music.

This century appears to have perfected astrology.”

Marcilio Ficino, A letter to a friend (1492)

Ficino’s letters, extending from 1474 to 1494, survive and have been published. 

He wrote De amore (Of Love) in 1484. 

De vita libri tres (Book of Life), published in 1489, provides a great deal of medical and astrological advice for maintaining health and vigor, as well as espousing the Neoplatonist view of the world’s ensoulment and its integration with the human soul:

There will be some men or other, superstitious and blind, who see life plain in even the lowest animals and the meanest plants, but do not see life in the heavens or the world.

Now if those little men grant life to the smallest particles of the world – What folly! What envy! – neither to know that the Whole, in which ‘we live and move and have our being‘, is itself alive, nor to wish this to be so.”

One metaphor for this integrated “aliveness” is Ficino’s astrology.

In the Book of Life, he details the interlinks between behavior and consequence.

He talks about a list of things that hold sway over a man’s destiny.

His medical works exerted considerable influence on Renaissance physicians.

Those works, which were very popular at the time, dealt with astrological and alchemical concepts.

Thus Ficino came under the suspicion of heresy as The Book of Life contained specific instructions on healthful living in a world of demons and other spirits.

Notably, Ficino coined the term Platonic love, which first appeared in his letter to Alamanno Donati in 1476.

In 1492, Ficino published Epistulae (Epistles), which contained Platonic love letters, written in Latin, to his academic colleague and life-long friend, Giovanni Cavalcanti, concerning the nature of Platonic love.

Because of this, some have alleged Ficino was a homosexual, but this finds little basis in his letters or his general works and philosophy. 

In his commentary on the Republic, too, he specifically denies to his readers that the homosexual references made in Plato’s dialogue were anything more than to bemuse the audience, “spoken merely to relieve the feeling of heaviness“. 

Regardless, Ficino’s letters to Cavalcanti resulted in the popularization of the term Platonic love in Western Europe.

Nevertheless, Bruno’s stay in England was fruitful.

During that time Bruno completed and published some of his most important works:

• the six “Italian Dialogues” including:
  • De la causa, principio et uno (On Cause, Principle and Unity)(1584)

• De l’infinito, universo et mondi (On the Infinite, Universe and Worlds)(1584) 

• La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper)(1584)

• Lo spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast)(1584)

• De gli eroici furori (On the Heroic Frenzies, 1585).

Some of the works that Bruno published in London, notably The Ash Wednesday Supper, appear to have given offense.

Once again, Bruno’s controversial views and tactless language lost him the support of his friends. 

John Bossy has advanced the theory that, while staying in the French Embassy in London, Bruno was also spying on Catholic conspirators for Sir Francis Walsingham (1532 – 1590), Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State.

Above: English Secretary of State Francis Walsingham

Above: English Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603)

Bruno is sometimes cited as being the first to propose that the Universe is infinite, which he did during his time in England, but an English scientist, Thomas Digges (1546 – 1595), put forth this idea in a published work in 1576, some eight years earlier than Bruno.

Above: Thomas Digges

An infinite Universe and the possibility of alien life had also been earlier suggested by German Catholic Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1501 – 1564) in “On Learned Ignorance” (1440).

Bruno attributed his understanding of multiple worlds to this earlier scholar, who he called “the divine Cusanus“.

Above: Nicholas of Cusa

In October 1585, Castelnau was recalled to France, and Bruno went with him. 

In Paris, Bruno found a tense political situation.

Moreover, his 120 theses against Aristotelian natural science soon put him in ill favor.

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)

In 1586, following a violent quarrel over these theses, he left France for Germany.

In Germany he failed to obtain a teaching position at Marburg.

Above: Marburg, Hessen (Hesse), Deutschland (Germany)

But he was granted permission to teach at Wittenberg, where he lectured on Aristotle for two years.

Above: Wittenberg, Sachsen-Anhalt (Saxony-Anhalt), Deutschland

However, with a change of intellectual climate there, he was no longer welcome.

Above: Seal of the University of Wittenberg

He went in 1588 to Prague, where he obtained 300 taler from Rudolf II, but no teaching position. 

Above: Praha (Prague), Česká republika (Czech Republic)

Above: Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552 – 1612)

Bruno went on to serve briefly as a professor in Helmstedt, but had to flee again in 1590 when he was excommunicated by the Lutherans.

Above: Helmstedt, Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), Deutschland

During this period Bruno produced several Latin works, including: 

• De Magia (On Magic)

• De Vinculis in Genere (A General Account of Bonding)

He also published De Imaginum, Signorum, Et Idearum Compositione (On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas) (1591).

In 1591, Bruno was in Frankfurt, where he received an invitation from the Venetian patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, who wished to be instructed in the art of memory.

He also heard of a vacant chair in mathematics at the University of Padua.

At the time the Inquisition seemed to be losing some of its strictness, and because the Republic of Venice was the most liberal state in the Italian Peninsula, Bruno was lulled into making the fatal mistake of returning to Italy.

Above: Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Deutschland

He went first to Padova, where he taught briefly, and applied unsuccessfully for the chair of mathematics, which was given instead to Galileo Galilei one year later.

Above: Seal of the University of Padua

Above: Italian polymath Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642)

Bruno accepted Mocenigo’s invitation and moved to Venezia in March 1592. 

Above: Venezia, Italia

For about two months Bruno served as an in-house tutor to Mocenigo, to whom he let slip some of his heterodox ideas.

Mocenigo denounced him to the Venetian Inquisition, which had Bruno arrested on 22 May 1592. 

Among the numerous charges of blasphemy and heresy brought against him in Venice, based on Mocenigo’s denunciation, was his belief in the plurality of worlds, as well as accusations of personal misconduct. 

Above: Coat of arms of the House of Mocenigo (1090 – 1953)

Bruno defended himself skillfully, stressing the philosophical character of some of his positions, denying others and admitting that he had had doubts on some matters of dogma.

The Roman Inquisition, however, asked for his transfer to Roma. 

After several months of argument, the Venetian authorities reluctantly consented.

Bruno was sent to Roma in January 1593.

Above: Roma (Rome), Italia

During the seven years of his trial in Rome, Bruno was held in confinement, lastly in the Tower of Nona.

Some important documents about the trial are lost, but others have been preserved, among them a summary of the proceedings that was rediscovered in 1940. 

Above: Tor di Nona, Roma, Italia

The numerous charges against Bruno, based on some of his books as well as on witness accounts, included blasphemy, immoral conduct, and heresy in matters of dogmatic theology, and involved some of the basic doctrines of his philosophy and cosmology. 

Luigi Firpo speculates the charges made against Bruno by the Roman Inquisition were:

• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the Incarnation

The Trinity is the Christian doctrine concerning the nature of God, which defines one God existing in three, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons (hypostases) sharing one essence/substance/nature (homoousion).

The Incarnation is the belief that the pre-existent divine person of Jesus Christ, God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, and the Logos (Koine Greek: ‘word‘), was “made flesh” by being conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of a woman, the Virgin Mary, who is also known as the Theotokos (Greek: “Mother of God“).

Above: The Incarnation illustrated with scenes from the Old Testaments and the Gospels, with the Trinity in the central column, by Fridolin Leiber, 19th century

The doctrine of the Incarnation entails that Jesus was at the same time both fully God and fully human.

Above: Italian historian Luigi Firpo (1915 – 1989)

• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as the Christ
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and the Mass – in the Eucharistic offering, bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ
• claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity
• believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes – reincarnation
• dealing in magics and divination

Bruno defended himself as he had in Venice, insisting that he accepted the Church’s dogmatic teachings, but trying to preserve the basis of his cosmological views.

In particular, he held firm to his belief in the plurality of worlds, although he was admonished to abandon it.

Above: The trial of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition; bronze relief by Ettore Ferrari, Campo de’ Fiori, Roma

His trial was overseen by the Inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine, who demanded a full recantation, which Bruno eventually refused.

Above: Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542 – 1621)

On 20 January 1600, Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic, and the Inquisition issued a sentence of death.

Above: Italian Pope Clement VIII (né Ippolito Aldobrandini)(1536 – 1605)

According to the correspondence of Gaspar Schopp of Breslau, Bruno is said to have made a threatening gesture towards his judges and to have replied: 

Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam. 

(“Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”)

Above: German scholar Kaspar Schoppe (1576 – 1649)

Bruno was turned over to the secular authorities.

On 17 February 1600, in the Campo de’ Fiori (a central Roman market square), naked, with his “tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words“, he was burned alive at the stake. 

Above: Campo dei Fiori, Roma, Italia – The daily market with the statue of Giordano Bruno in the background

His ashes were thrown into the Tiber River.

Above: Ponte Sant Angelo, Roma, Italia

All of Bruno’s works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) in 1603.

The measures taken to prevent Bruno continuing to speak have resulted in his becoming a symbol for free thought and free speech in present-day Rome, where an annual memorial service takes place close to the spot where he was executed.

Above: Giardino Bruno, The Art of Communicating

Could Bruno averted his final fate?

Perhaps.

In my opinion, Bruno lacked the diplomacy and discretion of his role model Erasmus.

Above: Bust of Erasmus, Gouda, Netherlands

Bruno faced the challenges to success that we ourselves face in this modern world:

• working for a bad boss: Monastery of San Domenico Maggiore / Giovanni Mocenigo
• working with difficult colleagues: Antoine de La Faye / John Underhill / George Abbot
• regrettable disrespect for core values and culture

Erasmus may not have been universally beloved in his time, but he advocated for change within the system.

Bruno came across as overaggressive, failed to use his instincts and intuition in knowing whom to trust and failed to maintain hey relationships that he had formerly cultivated.

I am not saying that Bruno’s free thinking merited his death, but he might have acted more prudently in his espousing his opinions, regardless of how sound and just those opinions may have been.

Giordono Bruno: The fire that would not be extinguished

You burned, but your ideas did not.
They dragged you through the streets,
tore your tongue from your mouth,
but the stars you spoke of still shine.
The universe you imagined expands beyond their cages,
and the fire meant to silence you
only set your words ablaze.
O creator, O thinker—
they feared your mind because it could not be bound.
Had you lived, what other truths would have been unearthed?
We, who remain, must not let the fire die.

Above: Centennial Flame, Parliament Hill, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

17 February 1877

Geneva, Switzerland

“And that was his life, this calm contemplation, ever since he believed he understood that we carry our happiness within ourselves and that what we seek in the moving mirror of things is our own image.“

Isabelle Eberhardt, Writings on the Sand

Isabelle Wilhelmine Marie Eberhardt (17 February 1877 – 21 October 1904) was a Swiss explorer and author.

As a teenager, Eberhardt, educated in Switzerland by her father, published short stories under a male pseudonym.

Above: Flag of Switzerland

She became interested in North Africa, and was considered a proficient writer on the subject despite learning about the region only through correspondence.

Above: (in green) North Africa

After an invitation from photographer Louis David, Eberhardt moved to Algeria in May 1897.

Above: Flag of Algeria

She dressed as a man and converted to Islam, eventually adopting the name Si Mahmoud Saadi.

Eberhardt’s unorthodox behaviour made her an outcast among European settlers in Algeria and the French administration.

Above: Flag of France

Eberhardt’s acceptance by the Qadiriyya, an Islamic order, convinced the French administration that she was a spy or an agitator.

Above: The shrine of Abdul Qadir Gilani, Gilan, Iran

She survived an assassination attempt shortly thereafter.

In 1901, the French administration ordered her to leave Algeria, but she was allowed to return the following year after marrying her partner, the Algerian soldier Slimane Ehnni.

Following her return, Eberhardt wrote for a newspaper published by Victor Barrucand and worked for General Hubert Lyautey.

Above: French Marshal Hubert Lyautey (1854 – 1934)

In 1904, at the age of 27, she was killed by a flash flood in Aïn Séfra.

Above: Aïn Séfra, Naâma Province, Algérie (Algeria)

In 1906, Barrucand began publishing her remaining manuscripts, which received critical acclaim.

She was seen posthumously as an advocate of decolonization.

Streets were named after her in Béchar and Algiers.

Above: Place 1er Novembre, Béchar, Algérie

Above: Algiers, Algérie

Eberhardt’s life has been the subject of several works, including the 1991 film Isabelle Eberhardt and the 2012 opera Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt.

Eberhardt was born in Genève to Alexandre Trophimowsky and Nathalie Moerder (née Eberhardt).

Trophimowsky was an Armenian anarchist, tutor, and former Orthodox priest-turned-atheist. 

Nathalie was the illegitimate daughter of a middle-class Lutheran German and a Russian Jew.

Nathalie was considered to be part of the Russian aristocracy, meaning her illegitimacy was probably kept secret.

She married widower Pavel de Moerder, a Russian general 40 years her senior, who hired Trophimowsky to tutor their children Nicolas, Nathalie and Vladimir.

Above: Genève, Suisse

Around 1871, Nathalie took the children and left her husband for Trophimowsky, who had abandoned his own wife and family. 

They left Russia, staying in Turkey and then Italy before settling in Geneva. 

Around 1872, Nathalie gave birth to Augustin.

de Moerder, who came to Switzerland in a failed attempt to reconcile with Nathalie, accepted the son as his own and allowed him to have his surname, but the boy’s older siblings believed that Trophimowsky was the father.

General de Moerder died several months later, and despite their separation had arranged for his estate to pay Nathalie a considerable regular income. 

The family remained in Switzerland.

Four years later Eberhardt was born, and was registered as Nathalie’s illegitimate daughter.

Biographer Françoise d’Eaubonne speculated that Eberhardt’s biological father was the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who had been in Switzerland at the time.

Above: French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne (1920 – 2005)

Above: French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891)

Other historians consider this unlikely and find it more likely that Trophimowsky was the father, noting that Nathalie and Trophimowsky were rarely apart, that Eberhardt’s birth did not impact negatively on their partnership, and that Eberhardt was Trophimowsky’s favorite child. 

Biographer Cecily Mackworth (1911 – 2006) speculated that Eberhardt’s illegitimacy was due to Trophimowsky’s nihilist beliefs, which rejected traditional concepts of family.

Eberhardt was well educated.

Along with the other children in the family, she was home-schooled by Trophimowsky. 

She was fluent in French, spoke Russian, German and Italian, and was taught Latin, Greek, and classical Arabic.

She studied philosophy, metaphysics (the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality), chemistry, history and geography, though she was most passionate about literature, reading the works of authors including Pierre Loti, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, Voltaire and Émile Zola while she was a teenager. 

Above: French novelist Pierre Loti (1850 – 1923)

Above: Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778)

Above: Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

Above: French philosopher François-Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire) (1694 – 1778)

Above: French writer Émile Zola (1840 – 1902)

She was also an admirer of the poets Semyon Nadson and Charles Baudelaire.

Above: Russian poet Semyon Nadson (1862 – 1887)

Above: French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)

At an early age she began wearing male clothing, enjoying its freedom, and her nonconformist father did not discourage her.

The children of de Moerder resented their stepfather, who forbade them from obtaining professions or leaving the home, and effectively used them as slaves to tend to his extensive gardens. 

Eberhardt’s sister Nathalie married against Trophimowsky’s wishes in 1888, and was subsequently cut off from the rest of the household.

Nathalie’s departure had a profound effect on Eberhardt’s childhood, as she had been responsible for most of the home duties.

The household subsequently suffered from a lack of hygiene and regular meals.

Above: Isabelle Eberhardt

Sometime prior to 1894, Eberhardt began corresponding with Eugène Letord, a French officer stationed in the Sahara who had placed a newspaper advertisement for a pen pal.

Eberhardt asked him for every detail he could give her about life in the Sahara, also informing him of her dreams of escaping Genève alongside her favorite sibling, Augustin.

Above: (ın yellow) The Sahara Desert

Letord encouraged the two of them to relocate to Bône, Algeria, where he could assist them in establishing a new life. 

Above: Annaba (Bône), Algérie

In a series of circumstances that remain unclear though involving financial debts and ties to Russian revolutionist groups with which he was affiliated, Augustin fled Genève in 1894.

Eberhardt probably assisted him initially but was unable to keep track of his whereabouts despite making constant inquiries. 

In November 1894 Eberhardt was informed by a letter that Augustin had joined the French Foreign Legion and was assigned to Algeria.

Though she was at first furious with Augustin’s decision, Eberhardt’s anger did not last. 

She asked him to send her a detailed diary of what he saw in North Africa.

Above: Flag of the French Foreign Legion

“Perhaps you have already guessed that, for me, the ambition to “make a name for myself and a position” with my pen (something in which I have little confidence, moreover, and which I do not even hope to achieve), that this ambition is in the background.

I write, because I love the process of literary creation.

I write, as I love, because such is my destiny, probably.

And it is my only real consolation.

It is also the only thing, Ali, which, in my very dark past, has prevented me from sinking definitively.“

Isabelle Eberhardt, Intimate Writings: Letters to the Three Most Beloved Men

In 1895, Eberhardt published short stories in the journal La Nouvelle Revue Moderne under the pseudonym of Nicolas Podolinsky.

“Infernalia” (her first published work) is about a medical student’s physical attraction to a dead woman. 

Later that year she published “Vision du Moghreb” (Vision of the Maghreb), a story about North African religious life. 

Eberhardt had “remarkable insight and knowledge” of North Africa for someone acquainted with the region only through correspondence.

Above: (in green) The Maghreb / Northwest Africa

Her writing had a strong anti-colonial theme.

Louis David, an Algerian-French photographer touring Switzerland who was intrigued by her work, met with her.

After hearing of her desire to move to Algiers, he offered to help her establish herself in Bône if she relocated there. 

In 1895, he took a photograph of Eberhardt wearing a sailor’s uniform, which would become widely associated with her in later years.

Above: Isabelle Eberhardt

Eberhardt relocated to Bône with her mother in May 1897. 

They initially lived with David and his wife, who both disapproved of the amount of time Eberhardt and her mother spent with Arabs.

Eberhardt and her mother did not like the Davids’ attitude, which was typical of European settlers in the area, and later avoided the country’s French residents, renting an Arabic-style house far from the European quarter.

Above: Bône, Algérie

Eberhardt, aware that a Muslim woman could go out neither alone nor unveiled, dressed as a man in a burnous (a long cloak of coarse woolen fabric with a pointed hood, often white in color, traditionally worn by Arab and Berber men in North Africa. – Historically, the white burnous was worn during important events by men of high positions.) and turban.

Above: Urban Algerian man wearing a white/beige burnous, 19th century

She expanded on her previous studies of Arabic, and became fluent within a few months. 

She and her mother converted to Islam.

Mackworth writes that while Eberhardt was a “natural mystic“, her conversion appeared to be largely for practical reasons, as it gave her greater acceptance among the Arabs.

Eberhardt found it easy to accept Islam.

Trophimowsky had brought her up as a fatalist and Islam gave her fatalism a meaning.

(Fatalism is a belief and philosophical doctrine which considers the entire universe as a deterministic system and stresses the subjugation of all events, actions, and behaviors to fate or destiny, which is commonly associated with the consequent attitude of resignation in the face of future events which are thought to be inevitable and outside of human control.)

Above: Destiny, Thomas C. Gotch (1885)

She embraced the Islamic concept that everything is predestined and the will of God. 

Although Eberhardt largely devoted herself to the Muslim way of life, she frequently partook of marijuana and alcohol and had many lovers. 

Above: Kief / cannabis leaf

According to a friend, Eberhardt “drank more than a Legionnaire, smoked more kief than a hashish addict and made love for the love of making love“.

Above: Medical hashish (compressed marijuana)

She was heterosexual, but often treated sexual intercourse as impersonal. 

The reason for her Arabic companions’ tolerance of her lifestyle has been debated by biographers.

According to Mackworth, the “delicate courtesy of the Arabs” led them to treat Eberhardt as a man because she wished to live as one.

Eberhardt’s behavior made her an outcast with the French settlers and the colonial administration, who watched her closely. 

Seeing no reason why a woman would choose the company of impoverished Arabs over her fellow Europeans, they eventually concluded she must be an English agent, sent to stir up resentment towards the French.

Above: Isabelle Eberhardt

Eberhardt began to write stories, including the first draft of her novel Trimardeur (Vagabond).

Her story Yasmina, about a young Bedouin woman who falls in love with a French officer and the “tragedy this impossible love brings into her life“, was published in a local French newspaper. 

Above: Three Bedouin sheikhs (1867)

Her mother, who had been suffering from heart problems, died in November 1897 of a heart attack.

She was buried under the name of Fatma Mannoubia. 

Eberhardt was grief-stricken.

Trophimowsky, who had been summoned when his partner’s health had deteriorated but arrived after her death, showed no sympathy towards Eberhardt.

When she told him she desperately wanted to die and rejoin her mother, he responded by calmly offering her his revolver, which she declined.

Eberhardt spent her money recklessly in Algiers.

She quickly exhausted the funds left to her by her mother. 

She would often spend several days at a time in kief dens.

Above: Algiers, Algérie

 

Augustin, ejected from the Foreign Legion due to his health, returned to Genève alongside Eberhardt in early 1899.

They found Trophimowsky in poor health, suffering from throat cancer and traumatized by the loss of Eberhardt’s mother and Vladimir, who had committed suicide the previous year.

Eberhardt nursed her father, growing closer to him. 

She also commenced a relationship and became engaged to Riza Bey, an Armenian diplomat with whom she had been friends and possibly lovers when she was 17.

Above: Flag of Armenia

Though Trophimowsky approved of the engagement, the relationship soon ended. 

Historian Lesley Blanch attributes the relationship’s downfall to Bey being assigned to Stockholm. 

Above: Stockholm, Sweden

Trophimowsky died in May. 

Blanch attributes the death to a chloral overdose, with which Eberhardt may have intentionally euthanized him. 

Eberhardt intended to sell the villa, although Trophimowsky’s legitimate wife opposed the execution of the will.

Above: Genève, Suisse

After several weeks of legal contentions, Eberhardt mortgaged the property and returned to Africa on the first available ship. 

With both parents dead, she considered herself free of human attachments and able to live as a vagabond.

`A right that very few intellectuals care to claim is the right to wander, to vagrancy. And yet, vagrancy is emancipation, and life along the roads is freedom. To one day bravely break all the shackles with which modern life and the weakness of our heart, under the pretext of freedom, have burdened our gesture, to arm ourselves with the symbolic stick and bag, and to go away!`

Isabelle Eberhardt, Writings on the Sand

(Vagrancy is the condition of wandering homelessness without regular employment or income.

Vagrants usually live in poverty and support themselves by travelling while engaging in begging, scavenging or petty theft.

In Western countries, vagrancy was historically a crime punishable with forced labor, military service, imprisonment, or confinement to dedicated labor houses.

Both vagrant and vagabond ultimately derive from the Latin word vagari, meaning “to wander“.

The term vagabond and its archaic equivalent vagabone come from Latin vagabundus (“strolling about“).

In Middle English, vagabond originally denoted a person without a home or employment.)

Above: The Blind Girl, John Everett Millais (1856), depicting vagrant musicians

Eberhardt relinquished her mother’s name and called herself Si Mahmoud Saadi. 

She began wearing male clothing exclusively and developed a masculine personality, speaking and writing as a man. 

Eberhardt behaved like an Arab man, challenging gender and racial norms. 

Asked why she dressed as an Arab man, she invariably replied:

“It is impossible for me to do otherwise.” 

Above: Isabelle Eberhardt

A few months later, Eberhardt’s money ran low.

She returned to Genève to sell the villa.

Due to the legal troubles there was little to no money available.

Above: Genève, Suisse

Encouraged by a friend, she went to Paris to become a writer but had little success.

While in Paris Eberhardt met the widow of Marquis de Morès.

Above: US heiress Marquise Medora de Vallombrosa (1856 – 1921)

Although de Morès had been reportedly murdered by Tuareg tribesmen in the Sahara, no one had been arrested.

When his widow learned that Eberhardt was familiar with the area where de Morès died, she hired her to investigate his murder.

Above: Lieutenant Antoine Morès (1858 – 1896)

Morès began life as a soldier, graduating in 1879 from St. Cyr, the leading military academy of France.

Above: Logo de  l’École Spéciale Militaire St Cyr

Among his classmates was Philippe Pétain, famous French general of World War I and the ill-fated future leader of the Vichy France government in World War II.

Above: French Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856 – 1951)

After St. Cyr, he entered Saumur Cavalry School, France’s premier cavalry school, where he trained to be an officer.

Above: École de Cavalerie, Saumur, France

He was later sent to Algiers, helping to put down an uprising.

It was while in Algiers that he had his first duel, starting his career as a celebrated duelist of his day.

Above: Algiers, Algérie

He resigned from the cavalry in 1882 and married Medora von Hoffman (1856 – 1921), sometimes called the Marquise, the daughter of a New York banker. 

Soon thereafter, he would move to the North Dakota Badlands to begin ranching, purchasing 44,500 acres (180 km²) for that purpose.

He also opened a stagecoach business.

He named his simple vernacular house in Medora, North Dakota, the “Chateau de Mores“.

It is preserved as a historic house there.

Above: Chateau de Mores, Medora, North Dakota

He tried to revolutionize the ranching industry by shipping refrigerated meat to Chicago by railroad, thus bypassing the Chicago stockyards.

He built a meat-packing plant for this purpose in Medora, the town he founded in 1883 and named for his wife.

Above: Medora, North Carolina

The railroads, undoubtedly working hand in glove with the Chicago beef trust, refused to grant him the same rebates on freight rates they gave his competitors, adding to his costs.

And range-fed — on grass — beef turned out to be less popular with consumers than beef that had been fattened —on corn — in the stockyards of Chicago.

The Marquis’s father-in-law withdrew his financial backing and soon the packing plant closed.

Not long after, just as winter was settling in on the Bad Lands in 1886, de Mores and his wife left Medora for good.

The short-lived reign of the Emperor of the Bad Lands was over.

Footnote:

Back in France, the Marquis claimed the Chicago beef trust was dominated by Jews and announced himself the victim of “A Jewish Plot“.

Turning to politics, he organized a movement that mixed socialism with rabid anti-semitism that fed the French collective mania which led to the Dreyfus Affair.

Above: French soldier Alfred Dreyfus (1859 – 1935)

On 23 June 1892, he killed a Jewish captain, Armand Mayer, during a duel. 

Above: Duel of the Marquis de Morès against Captain Mayer, 
Petit Parisien Illustré (3 July 1892)

In 1896 (after ten years), he was killed by North African tribesmen while carrying out a wild scheme to unite the Muslims in a Holy War against the British and the Jews.

Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life

De Morès became famous in the West as a rancher and gunslinger, getting arrested for murder a few times.

He was always acquitted.

Known as an adventurer, he was quick to anger and was engaged in numerous duels throughout his life.

He notoriously sent Theodore Roosevelt what the latter interpreted as a challenge to a duel.

Roosevelt assured the Marquis by letter that he was “most emphatically” not his enemy.

Nothing came of the matter.

Above: US President Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919)

Outlaws were very numerous in the Badlands.

Cattle and horse rustling had become unbearably common.

Frontiersman Granville Stuart organized a vigilance committee to fight the rustlers.

De Morès told Roosevelt of the plan.

The two offered their services to be vigilantes.

Stuart declined, stating that de Morès and Roosevelt were both well known and their presence could ruin the element of surprise. 

Stuart’s vigilantes, called The Stranglers, struck viciously against the rustlers, greatly weakening their power in the Badlands.

By 1885 it became obvious that de Morès’ business was failing.

He was losing a business war against the beef trust.

The enterprise collapsed.

He would later sell the ranch and other assets in the Badlands.

Above: Marquis de Morès Monument, Medora, North Dakota, USA

Subsequently, he left Dakota Territory and returned to France.

He was commissioned by the French army to build a railroad in Vietnam, from the Chinese frontier to the Gulf of Tonkin.

He arrived in Asia to lead construction in the fall of 1888.

He observed the Vietnamese people, and cautioned the French to be kind to them.

He wrote:

“The colonization of Tonkin will not be accomplished with rifles, but with public works.“

Above: Flag of Vietnam

He believed a railroad was needed there and hoped to have one extending all the way to Yunnan Province in China.

This was partly a reaction to a British railroad being built from Burma to China.

Above: Flag of China

Political intrigue, being notorious in France in that day, impeded construction of the railroad.

A Prime Minister was deposed, which led to a new Undersecretary of the Navy, Jean Constans, who opposed de Morès’ plan from the start.

The Marquis was recalled to France in 1889.

The railroad project was ruined.

Upon his return, he would be embroiled in political controversies for the remainder of his life.

He started by attacking Constans, enlisting the aid of Georges Clemenceau, but failed to unseat him in the next election.

Above: French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (1841 – 1929)

His politics became overtly antisemitic.

He challenged Ferdinand-Camille Dreyfus, a Jewish member of the Chamber of Deputies, to a duel after Dreyfus wrote an article attacking him.

De Morès said he wanted Gaul for the Gauls.

Dreyfus replied by writing that de Morès had a Spanish title, a father with an Italian title, and an American wife who was neither Christian nor French.

At the duel Dreyfus fired first and missed.

The Marquis wounded his opponent in the arm.

Above: French politician Ferdinand-Camille Dreyfus (1851 – 1905)

In 1889, de Morès joined La Ligue antisémitique de France (Antisemitic League of France) founded by Edouard Drumont.

Above: Édouard Drumont (1844 – 1917) and his newspaper La Libre Parole (Free Speech), in 1899

After more verbal attacks on Jews, he went to Algeria to strengthen the French hold there and stop British advances into the interior of Africa.

He used antisemitic rhetoric to his advantage in Algeria, giving speeches claiming that French and African Jews and the British were conspiring to conquer the entire Sahara Desert.

Above: The Star of David, a symbol of Judaism

With the British in a difficult position in the Sudan after the death of General Charles George Gordon in the Siege of Khartoum, de Morès planned a trip there to meet with the Mahdi, a powerful Muslim leader who was intent on undermining British hegemony in the region.

Above: British General Charles George Gordon (1833 – 1885)

Above: Sudanese leader Muhammad Ahmad (1843 – 1885)

(In 1881, he claimed to be the Mahdi –  a figure in Islamic eschatology who is believed to appear at the End of Times to rid the world of evil and injustice.

He is said to be a descendant of Muhammad, who will appear shortly before Jesus. 

He led a war against Egyptian rule in Sudan, which culminated in a remarkable victory over them in the Siege of Khartoum (13 March 1884 to 26 January 1885).

Above: Gordon’s Last Stand, George W. Joy, 1893

Ahmad created a vast Islamic state extending from the Red Sea to Central Africa and founded a movement that remained influential in Sudan a century later.

From his announcement of the Mahdist State in June 1881 until its end in 1898, the Mahdi’s supporters, the Ansār, established many of its theological and political doctrines.

Above: Flag of the Mahdist State

After Muhammad Ahmad’s unexpected death from typhus on 22 June 1885, his chief deputy, Abdallahi ibn Muhammad took over the administration of the nascent Mahdist State.

Above: Sudanese Khalifa Abdallah ibn Muhammad (1846 – 1899)

The Mahdist State, weakened by his successor’s autocratic rule and inability to unify the populace to resist the British blockade and subsequent war, was dissolved following the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan, in 1899.

Above: Extent of the Mahdi rebellion in 1885 (green hatching)

Despite that, the Mahdi remains a respected figure in the history of Sudan.

In the late 20th century, one of his direct descendants, Sadiq al-Mahdi, twice served as Prime Minister of Sudan (1966–1967 and 1986–1989) and pursued pro-democracy policies.)

Above: Sudanese Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi (1935 – 2020)

Above: Flag of Sudan

de Morès traveled to North Africa, selected Arabic men in Tunis to escort him, and set out his caravan towards Kebili.

Above: Tunis, Tunisia

The French officer in charge of the post at Kebili, Lieutenant Leboeuf, received a telegram from the French Intelligence Officer and Military attaché in Tunis, advising him not to give de Morès’ expedition any assistance.

Furthermore, Leboeuf was told to ensure de Morès traveled by the way of the Berresof oasis.

Above: Entry to Kebili, Algérie

A marabout (Muslim religious leader) from Guemar dispatched a messenger to dissident Tuareg in Messine, southeast of Ghadames, telling them to come to Berresof at once to kill a Frenchman.

Above: Mosque, Ghamar, Algérie

(The Tuareg people are a large Berber ethnic group, traditionally nomadic pastoralists, who principally inhabit the Sahara in a vast area stretching from far southwestern Libya to southern Algeria, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and as far as northern Nigeria.)

Above: Tuareg man, Algiers, Algérie

The recipients of the message were told the man they were to kill would be carrying a great deal of money, would not have an official escort, and that whoever killed him would not be prosecuted. 

Above: Mosque, Ghadames, Algérie

While he was in Kebili, de Morès received a telegram from General de la Roque, Commander of the division at Constantine, Algeria, telling him that Tuareg guides would be waiting for him at Berresof.

Above: Constantine, Algérie

De Morès expressed surprise at this, as he had not asked de la Roque to find him any guides. 

De Morès departed Kebili on May 20.

The Tuareg “guides” joined his caravan on June 3.

On the morning of June 9 the Tuareg sprung their attack.

De Morès was able to kill several of his attackers before he was gunned down.

Above: Marquis de Morès

On 28 July 1902, after a trial in Sousse in Tunisia, two of the murderers were sentenced:

• El-Kheir ben Abd-el-Kader to the death penalty

• Hamma Ben Cheikh to 20 years of forced labor.

Above: Sousse, Tunisia

During the trial his widow, the Marquise, sought to expose the French government as responsible for the murder but the tribunal did not agree. 

She then even paid Isabelle Eberhardt to return to Africa to investigate his death.

No government official was ever convicted.

The Marquis de Morès is portrayed by the American actor Jeff DuJardin in the 2024 television series Elkhorn.

The job benefited Eberhardt, who was destitute and longed to return to the Sahara.

She returned to Algeria in July 1900, settling in El Oued.

According to Sahara expert R. V. C. Bodley, Eberhardt made little effort to investigate de Morès’ death.

Bodley considered this due to a combination of the unwillingness of the French to co-operate in an investigation and Eberhardt’s fatalism rather than deliberate dishonesty. 

Word eventually got back to the de Morès widow about Eberhardt’s lackluster investigation.

She subsequently cut off her funding.

Above: Inhabitants of El Oued at the start of the 20th century

Eberhardt made friends in the area and met Slimane Ehnni, a non-commissioned officer in the spahis.

They fell in love and eventually lived together openly.

Her writings, increasingly critical of the colonial system and her lifestyle – she drank, smoked kif , had a free love life and sex life – earned her the wrath of the authorities.

“Dressed as a man, travelling alone and confronting the immense colonial stupidity every day, she wandered through a 
Maghreb already destined for tragedy.”, wrote her biographer 
Edmonde Charles-Roux.

This alienated Eberhardt from the French authorities, who were already outraged by her lifestyle. 

Above: Slimane Ehnni

During her travels she made contact with the Qadiriyya, a Sufi order.

The order was led by Hussein ben Brahim, who was so impressed with Eberhardt’s knowledge of (and passion for) Islam that he initiated her into his zawiya without the usual formal examination.

This convinced the French authorities that she was a spy or an agitator.

They placed her on a widely circulated blacklist.

Above: Emblem of the Qadiriyya

The French transferred Ehnni to the spahi (French cavalry unit) regiment at Batna, possibly to punish Eberhardt (whom they could not harm directly). 

Above: Images of Batna, Algérie

Too poor to accompany him to Batna, Eberhardt travelled to a Qadiriyya meeting in Behima in late January 1901 where she hoped to ask Si Lachmi, a marabout, for financial assistance.

Above: Hassani Abdelkrim (formerly Behima), Algérie

While waiting for the meeting to begin she was attacked by a man with a sabre, receiving a superficial wound to her head and a deep cut to her left arm. 

Her attacker, Abdallah ben Mohammed, was overpowered by others and arrested.

When asked why he had tried to kill Eberhardt he only repeated:

“God wished it.

God still wishes it.“

Eberhardt suspected that he was an assassin hired by the French authorities. 

She was brought to the military hospital at El Oued the following day.

After Eberhardt recovered in late February, she joined Ehnni with funds from members of the Qadiriyya who regarded her survival as a miracle.

Above: El Oued, Algérie

After spending two months in Batna with Ehnni, the French ordered her to leave North Africa without explanation.

As an immigrant, she had no choice but to comply.

Ehnni requested permission from his military superiors to marry Eberhardt (which would have enabled her to stay), but his request was denied.

She travelled to France in early May 1901, staying with Augustin and his wife and daughter in Marseille.

Above: Marseille, France

In mid-June she was summoned back to Constantine to give evidence at the trial of her attacker, who maintained his statement that God had ordered him to kill Eberhardt, though expressed remorse towards her. 

Eberhardt said that she bore no grudge against Abdallah, forgave him, and hoped that he would not be punished.

Abdallah received life imprisonment although the prosecutor had asked for the death penalty.

When the trial ended, Eberhardt was again ordered to leave the country.

Above: Constantine, Algérie

She returned to live with Augustin, working with him (disguised as a man) as a dock laborer.

Eberhardt and Augustin’s family lived in appalling poverty.

Eberhardt’s health deteriorated.

She repeatedly suffered from fevers. 

She attempted suicide while in Marseille, one of several attempts she would make over the course of her life. 

Eberhardt continued to write during this time, working on several projects including her novel Trimardeur.

A friend of Eberhardt’s gave her a letter of introduction to playwright Eugène Brieux, who opposed French rule in North Africa and supported Arab emancipation.

He sent her a large advance and tried to have her stories published, but could not find anyone willing to publish pro-Arab writing.

Eberhardt, unfazed, continued writing.

Above: French dramatist Eugène Brieux (1858 – 1932)

Her morale lifted when Ehnni was transferred to a spahi regiment near Marseille in late August to complete his final months of service. 

He did not require permission from his military superiors to marry in France.

He and Eberhardt were married in October 1901.

Shortly before the wedding, Eberhardt and Augustin received the news that Trophimowsky’s estate had finally been sold, though due to the mounting legal costs there was no money left for them to inherit.

With this news, Eberhardt abandoned any hope of having a financially secure future. 

In February 1902 Ehnni was discharged.

The couple returned to Bône to live with his family.

Above: Annaba (formerly Bône), Algérie

After a short time living with Ehnni’s family, the couple relocated to Algiers.

Eberhardt became disappointed with Ehnni, whose only ambition after leaving the Army appeared to be finding an unskilled job that would allow him to live relatively comfortably. 

She increased her own efforts as a writer.

Several of her short stories were printed in the local press.

She accepted a job offer from Al-Akhbar (The News) newspaper publisher Victor Barrucand in March 1902.

Eberhardt became a regular contributor to the newspaper. 

Trimardeur began appearing as a serial in August 1903. 

French journalist Victor Barrucand and Eberhardt formed a friendship, though Barrucand was frequently frustrated with his new employee’s work ethic.

Since Barrucand’s arrival, this formerly conservative newspaper that had become radical republican had adopted an “Arabophile” editorial line, in favor of extending the rights of Muslim natives to the point of civic equality between them and the settlers. 

Eberhardt’s articles arrived irregularly, as she would only write when she felt like doing so.

Her job paid poorly, but had many benefits.

Above: French journalist Victor Barrucand (1864 – 1934)

Through Victor Barrucand’s contacts, Eberhardt was able to access the famous zawiya of Lalla Zaynab. 

Eberhardt spoke highly of her time with Zaynab, though never disclosed what the two discussed. 

Their meeting caused concern among the French authorities.

Above: Algerian Sufi spiritual leader Lalla Zaynab (1862 – 1904)

Eberhardt and Ehnni relocated to Ténès in July 1902 after Ehnni obtained employment there as a translator.

Eberhardt was incorrigibly bad with her money, spending anything she received immediately on tobacco, books, and gifts for friends, and pawning her meagre possessions or asking for loans when she realized there was no money left for food.

This behavior made her even more of a pariah among the other European residents of the town. 

Above: Ténès, Algérie

Eberhardt would frequently leave for weeks at a time, being either summoned to Algiers by Barrucand or sent on assignments.

She was given a regular column in his newspaper, where she wrote about the life and customs of Bedouin tribes.

Both Ehnni and Eberhardt’s health deteriorated, with Eberhardt regularly suffering from bouts of malaria. 

She was also probably affected by syphilis.

Barrucand dispatched Eberhardt to report on the aftereffects of the 2 September 1903 Battle of El-Moungar.

Above: Monument commemorating the soldiers of the French Foreign Legion killed on duty during the South-Oranais campaign (1897 – 1902), Bonifacio, Corsica, France

She stayed with French Foreign Legion soldiers and met Hubert Lyautey, the French General in charge of Oran, at their headquarters.

Above: Oran, Algérie

Eberhardt and Lyautey became friends and, due to her knowledge of Islam and Arabic, she became a liaison between him and the local Arab people. 

While Eberhardt never ceased protesting against any repressive actions undertaken by the French administration, she believed that Lyautey’s approach, which focused on diplomacy rather than military force, would bring peace to the region. 

Although details are unclear, it is generally accepted that Eberhardt also engaged in espionage for Lyautey. 

Concerned about a powerful marabout in the Atlas Mountains, Lyautey sent her to meet with him in 1904.

At the marabout’s zawiya, Eberhardt was weakened by fever.

Above: French General Hubert Lyautey

She returned to Aïn Séfra and was treated at the military hospital.

She left the hospital against medical advice and asked Ehnni, from whom she had been separated for several months, to join her.

Above: Aïn Séfra, Algérie

Reunited on 20 October 1904, they rented a small mud house.

The following day, a flash flood struck the area. 

As soon as the waters subsided, Lyautey launched a search for her.

Ehnni was discovered almost immediately, saying that Eberhardt had been swept away by the water.

Based on this information, Lyautey and his men searched the surrounding area for several days before deciding to explore the ruins of the house where the couple had stayed. 

Her body was crushed under one of the house’s supporting beams.

The exact circumstances of her death were never discovered.

While suspicions regarding Ehnni have been raised by later biographers, Eberhardt had always believed she would die young and may instead have accepted her fate.

Mackworth speculated that after initially trying to run from the floodwaters, Eberhardt instead turned back to face them. 

Blanch argued that due to Eberhardt’s history of suicidal tendencies, she probably would have still chosen to stay in the area even if she had known the flood was coming. 

Lyautey buried Eberhardt in Aïn Sefra and had a marble tombstone, engraved with her adopted name in Arabic and her birth name in French, placed on her grave.

Above: Oasis of Aïn Sefra, Algérie

At the time of her death, Eberhardt’s possessions included several of her unpublished manuscripts.

Lyautey instructed his soldiers to search for all of her papers in the aftermath of the flood, and posted those that could be found to Barrucand. 

After reconstructing them, substituting his own words where the originals were missing or too damaged to decipher, he began to publish her work.

Some of what he published is considered to be more his work than Eberhardt’s. 

Barrucand also received criticism for listing himself as the co-author of some of the publications, and for not clarifying which portions of text were his own. 

The first posthumous story, “Dans l’Ombre Chaude de l’Islam” (In the Warm Shadow of Islam) received critical acclaim when it was published in 1906. 

The book’s success drew great attention to Eberhardt’s writing and established her as among the best writers of literature inspired by Africa. 

A street was named after Eberhardt in Béchar and another in Algiers.

Above: Rue Isabelle Eberhardt, Béchar, Algérie

The street in Algiers is in the outskirts. 

One writer at the time commented there was a sad symbolism in the fact the street “begins in an inhabited quarter and peters out into a wasteland“. 

She was posthumously seen as an advocate of feminism and decolonization.

According to Hedi Abdel-Jaouad in Yale French Studies, her work may have begun the decolonization of North Africa.

Eberhardt’s relationship with Lyautey has triggered discussion by modern historians about her complicity in colonialism.

In 1954, author and explorer Cecily Mackworth published the biography The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt after following Eberhardt’s routes in Algeria and the Sahara.

The book inspired Paul Bowles to translate some of Eberhardt’s writings into English.

Above: American writer Paul Bowles (1910 – 1999)

Novelist William Bayer published Visions of Isabelle, a fictionalized 1976 account of her life. 

In 1981, Timberlake Wertenbaker premiered New Anatomies, a play about Eberhardt.

Above: British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker

Eberhardt has been portrayed in two films. 

Leslie Thornton directed a 1988 biography, There Was An Unseen Cloud Moving, with seven amateur actresses playing Eberhardt. 

Ian Pringle directed Isabelle Eberhardt, starring Mathilda May, in 1991. 

In 1994, the soundtrack for Pringle’s film was released by musician Paul Schütze, titled Isabelle Eberhardt: The Oblivion Seeker.

In 1998, John Berger and Nella Bielski published Isabelle: A Story in Shots, a screenplay based on Eberhardt’s life. 

Missy Mazzoli composed an opera, Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, in 2012.

Above: American composer Missy Mazzoli

Isabelle Eberhardt: The River That Carried You Away

You were the wanderer,
the storm-touched soul,
restless as the desert wind.
Dressed as a man,
writing as a poet,
living as a force that no law, no nation, no man could own.
You did not flee the flood,
perhaps because you had already surrendered to the tide.
But what if you had stayed?
What more might you have written, have seen?
We, who remain, must walk further,
must write deeper,
must roam beyond the edges of fear.

17 February 1899

Barisal, Bangladesh

Jibanananda Das (17 February 1899 – 22 October 1954) was a Bengali poet, writer, novelist and essayist in the Bengali language.

Above: “Bangla” in the Bengali language

Popularly called “Rupashi Banglar Kabi” (‘Poet of Beautiful Bengal‘), Das is the most read Bengali poet after Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam in Bangladesh and West Bengal. 

Above: Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)

Above: Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899 – 1976)

While not particularly well recognized during his lifetime, today Das is acknowledged as one of the greatest poets in the Bengali language.

He was born in Barisal to a Hindu family of Baidya caste.

Above: Barisal, Bangladesh

Das studied English literature at Presidency College, Kolkata.

He earned his MA from Calcutta University. 

He had a troubling career and suffered financial hardship throughout his life.

He taught at many colleges but was never granted tenure.

He settled in Kolkata after the partition of India.

Das died on 22 October 1954, eight days after being hit by a tramcar. 

Witnesses said that though the tramcar had blown its whistle, Das did not stop, and got struck.

Some deem the accident as an attempt at suicide.

Das was a rather unrecognized poet in his time:

He wrote profusely, but as he was a recluse and introvert.

He did not publish most of his writings during his lifetime.

Most of his work were hidden. 

Only seven volumes of his poems were published. 

After his death, it was discovered that apart from poems, Das wrote 21 novels and 108 short stories.

His notable works include: 

• Ruposhi Bangla

Ruposhi Bangla (Beautiful Bengal) is the most popular collection of poems by Jibanananda Das, the great modern Bengali poet. 

Written in 1934, the 62 sonnets – discovered in an exercise-book 20 years after Das wrote them – achieved instant popularity on their posthumous publication in 1957, becoming a totemic symbol of freedom in Bangladesh’s 1971 War of Independence.

In Ruposhi Bangla, Das seamlessly blends in both real and mythical historical figures, as well as mythical creatures such as the shuk bird, weaving a tapestry of a beautiful, dreamlike Bengal. 

The poems celebrate the beauty of Barishal. 

In these poems infused with a scent of unrequited love, Jibanananda Das captured his country’s soul through evocations of village life and natural beauty. 

Satyajit Ray designed the cover of 1957 edition.

Go where you will – I shall remain on Bengal’s shore

Shall see jackfruit leaves dropping in the dawn’s breeze;
Shall see the brown wings of shalik chill in the evening,
Its yellow leg under the white down goes on dancing
In the grass, darkness – once, twice – and then suddenly
The forest’s oak beckons it to its heart’s side,
Shall see sad feminine hands – white conch-bangles
Crying like conch shells in the ash-grey wind:
She stands on the pond’s side in the evening,

As if she will take the parched rice hued duck
To some land of legends –
As if the fragrance of the quiltcover clings to her body,
As if she is born out of watercress in the pond’s nest –
Washes her feet silently – then goes faraway, traceless
In the fog – yet I know I shall not lose her
In the crowd of the earth –

She is there on my Bengal’s shore.

 Jibanananda Das, Ruposhi Bangla

• Banalata Sen

Banalata Sen is a poetry volume containing 31 poems by the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das.

The volume reflects the contextual struggles experienced by the poet in terms of love (his partner, admiration of nature), liberty (World War I, patriotism in the form of admiring the land) and loss (death of loved ones and sense of direction after traumatic contortions) during the post-Tagore period. 

This book has been named Banalata Sen after Das’s most popular poem, which explored human fulfillment through the personification of a vaidya (Bengali Hindu) caste woman.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Banalata Sen

“Banalata Sen” is a Bengali poem written in 1942 by the poet Jibanananda Das that is one of the most read, recited and discussed poems of Bengali literature.

The title of this lyric poem is a female character referred to by name in the last line of each of its three stanzas.

A draft of the poem was also discovered that widely differs from the final version.

Poet Jibanananda Das was a quiet person, who preferred to live in obscurity.

Until the discovery of his diaries in the mid-1990s, it was considered unlikely that he could have been in love with a woman, with or without the name of Banalata Sen.

However, Banalata Sen of Natore, a tiny town in the Rajshahi area of what was then Bengal, has become an emblem of feminine mystery as well as beauty and love.

In the first stanza the traveller describes seeing her after having wandered upon the Earth over thousands of years.

The narrator says that it has been a thousand years since he started trekking the Earth.

He describes it as a long journey in night’s darkness from the Ceylonese waters to the Malayan seas.

From this geographical expanse he goes on to the extent of time, saying that, in the course of his wanderings he has traversed the fading world of Bimbisara and Ashoka.

Above: Indian Emperor Bimbisara (558 – 405 BC) with his royal cortege

Above: Indian Emperor Ashoka’s (304 – 232 BC) visit to the Ramagrama stupa

Das adds that he went further, to the forgotten city of Vidharbha.

Finally he speaks of himself as now being a weary soul although the ocean of life around continues to foam and adds that in the meanwhile he had a few soothing moments with Natore’s Banalata Sen.

Above: Vidarbha, India

In the second stanza the traveller describes Banalata Sen.

First he compares her hair with the dark night of long-lost Vidisha.

Then he compares her face with the fine sculpture of Sravasti.

Above: Ruins of ancient Sambhunath temple at Shravasti, India

Then the traveller-narrator recollects that when he saw her in the shadow it was like a mariner whose ship was wrecked in a faraway sea spotting verdant land among barren islands.

In the first encounter Banalata Sen, raising her comforting eyes, inquires of him:

“Where had you been lost all these days?”

In the third stanza the traveller returns from geography and history and recalls Banalata Sen with emotion.

He says that when, at the day’s end, evening crawls in like the sound of dews, and the kite shakes off the smell of sun from its wings, and, then, when all colours take leave from the world, except for the flicker of the hovering fireflies, as all birds come home and rivers retire, a time comes when all transactions of the day are done.

Above: Black kite

Then nothing remains but darkness when the traveller would like to sit face-to-face with Banalata Sen and share with her his ballad of stories.

The poet-narrator proceeds by alluding to different mythological and ancient persons, places and events.

He describes having wandered from the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) ocean to the seas of Malaya, having travelled in Ancient India in the times of Emperor Bimbisara, and centuries later, in the times of Ashoka the Great.

Above: Flag of Sri Lanka

Above: The Malay Peninsula

He describes having wandered in darkness in the ancient cities of Vidarbha and Vidisha, yet, for his tired soul, the only moment of peace in any age was with Banalata Sen of Natore.

Above: Pataria Jain Temple, Vidisha, India

The lyric Banalata Sen is the most representative of the essence of Jibanananda’s poetry and exemplifies his use of imagery. 

The weary traveller is an interactive motif in his poetry.

The poem itself uses four key images comprehensively, namely the darkness, flowing water, passage of time, and a woman.

Jibanananda progressively develops these same four images throughout the poem, metamorphosing these from remoteness to intimacy, dimness to distinction and from separation to union.

This pattern of progressively exploring human fulfillment through hyperbolizing a character is common within this volume.

Jibananda Das’s composition of Banalata Sen has been influenced by the quintessential poets Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul Islam as Das intertwines love and nature to explore the critical and complex aspects of life. 

Although these poets have had a significant influence on Banalata Sen, there is a unique modern style of poetry throughout the 31 poems as Das develops images by turning and molding the images. 

It is further explored how the elements of nature that are seen as rotten or revolting are incorporated when Das writes Banalata Sen as he can see the beauty that underlines every aspect of nature. 

As a result, context is understood as having a significant influence in Das’ poetry.

The poems contained in the later version of Banalata Sen (book) have been tied to Das’ return to his alma mater throughout 1932 to 1946 after being let go from the Calcutta City College.

During that period Das isolated himself as the controversy he dealt with after publishing Camp’e (At the Camp) in Sudhindranath Dutta’s Porichoy magazine influenced him to turn to secrecy.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Banalata Sen

• Mahaprithibi

Above: Jibanananda Das, Môhaprithibi (Great Universe)

• Shreshtha Kavita. 

Above: Jibanananda Das, Shreshtho Kobita (Best Poems)

Das’s early poems exhibit the influence of Kazi Nazrul Islam, but in the later half of the 20th century, Das’s influence became one of the major catalysts in the making of Bengali poetry.

Das received the Rabindra-Memorial Award for Banalata Sen in 1953 at the All Bengal Rabindra Literature Convention.

Das’s Shrestha Kavita won the Sahitya Academy Award in 1955. 

Above: Sahitya Akademi Award for contributions to Bengali literature

A film inspired by Das’ short story “Jamrultola“, named ‘Sunder Jibon‘ directed by Sandeep Chattopadhyay (Chatterjee), produced by the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute won the National Film Award for Best Short Fiction Film at the 50th National Film Awards with Shantanu Bose in the lead.

“Poetry and life are two different outpourings of the same thing.

Life as we usually conceive it contains what we normally accept as reality, but the spectacle of this incoherent and disorderly life can satisfy neither the poet’s talent nor the reader’s imagination.

Poetry does not contain a complete reconstruction of what we call reality.

We have entered a new world.“

Jibanananda Das

Above: Jibanananda Das

Jibanananda Das was born in 1899 in a Baidya family in the small district town of Barisal.

Above: Guthia Mosque, Barisal, Bangladesh

His ancestors came from the Mushiganj region of the Dhaka Division, from a now-extinct village called Gaupara in the Kumarvog area of the Louhajang Upazila on the banks of the River Padma. 

Above: Ancient ruins of Bikrampur (the city of courage), Dhaka, Bangladesh

Das’ grandfather Sarbānanda Dāśagupta was the first to settle permanently in Barisal.

He was an early exponent of the reformist Brahmo Samaj movement in Barisal and was highly regarded in town for his philanthropy.

(Brahmo Samaj – community of men who have knowledge of Brahman, the ultimate reality – began as a monotheistic reformist movement during the Bengal Renaissance (18th – 20th centuries).

It was one of the most influential religious movements in India and made a significant contribution to the making of modern India. 

Above: Flag of India

It was started at Calcutta on 20 August 1828 by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore as reformation of the prevailing customs of the time (specifically Kulin practices) and began the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th century pioneering all religious, social and educational advance of the Bengali community in the 19th century.

Above: Indian writer/reformer Raja Ram Mohun Roy (1772 – 1833)

Above: Indian industrialist Dwarkanath Tagore (1794 – 1846)

Its trust deed was made in 1830 formalizing its inception.

It was duly and publicly inaugurated in January 1830 by the consecration of the first house of prayer, now known as the Adi Brahmo Samaj.

From the Brahmo Samaj springs Brahmoism, the most recent of legally recognized religions in India and Bangladesh, reflecting its foundation on reformed spiritual Hinduism with vital elements of Judeo-Islamic faith and practice.)

Above: Hindo symbol Om signifies the essence of Brahman, the ultimate reality

Dāśagupta erased the -gupta suffix from the family name, regarding it as a symbol of Vedic Brahmin excess, thus rendering the surname to Das.

Jibanananda’s father Satyānanda Dāś (1863 – 1942) was a schoolmaster, essayist, magazine publisher, and founder-editor of Brôhmobadi, a journal of the Brahmo Samaj dedicated to the exploration of social issues.

Jibanananda’s mother Kusumakumārī Dāś (1875 – 1948) was a poet who wrote a famous poem called Adôrsho Chhēlē (“The Ideal Boy“) whose refrain is well known to Bengalis to this day: 

Āmādēr dēshey hobey shei chhēlē kobey

Kothae nā boṛo hoye kajey boro hobey. 

(The child who achieves not in words but in deeds, when will this land know such a one?)

Above: Bengali poet Kusumkumari Das (1875 – 1948)

Jibanananda was the eldest son of his parents, and was called by the nickname Milu.

A younger brother Aśōkānanda Dāś was born in 1901 and a sister called Sucharita in 1915.

Jibananda fell violently ill in his childhood, and his parents feared for his life.

Fervently desiring to restore his health, Kusumkumari took her ailing child on pilgrimage to Lucknow, Agra and Giridih.

They were accompanied on these journeys by their uncle Chandranāth.

Above: Lucknow, India

Above: Taj Mahal, Agra, India

Above: Khandoli Park, Giridih, India

In January 1908, Jibanananda, by now 8 years old, was admitted to the first grade in Brojomohon School.

The delay was due to his father’s opposition to admitting children into school at too early an age.

Jibanananda’s childhood education was therefore limited to his mother’s tutelage.

His school life passed by relatively uneventfully.

In 1915 he successfully completed his matriculation examination from Brajamohan College, obtaining a first division in the process.

He repeated the feat two years later when he passed the intermediate exams from Brajamohan College.

Above: Logo of Brojomohon School, Bangladesh

Young Jibanananda fell in love with Shovona, daughter of his uncle Atulananda Das, who lived in the neighbourhood.

He dedicated his first anthology of poems to Shovona without mentioning her name explicitly.

He did not try to marry her since marriage between cousins was not socially acceptable. 

She has been referred to as Y in his literary notes.

Evidently an accomplished student, he left his home at rural Barisal to join University of Calcutta.

Jibanananda enrolled in Presidency College, Kolkata.

He studied English literature and graduated with a BA (Honours) degree in 1919.

That same year, his first poem appeared in print in the Boishakh issue of Brahmobadi journal.

Fittingly, the poem was called Borsho-abahon (Arrival of the New Year).

This poem was published anonymously, with only the honorific Sri in the byline.

However, the annual index in the year-end issue of the magazine revealed his full name:

“Sri Jibanananda Das Gupta, BA“.

In 1921, Das completed the MA degree in English from University of Calcutta, obtaining a second class.

He was also studying law.

At this time, he lived in the Hardinge student quarters next to the university.

Just before his exams, he fell ill with bacillary dysentery, which affected his preparation for the examination.

The following year, he started his teaching career.

He joined the English department of City College, Calcutta as a tutor.

By this time, he had left Hardinge and was boarding at Harrison Road.

He gave up his law studies.

It is thought that he also lived in a house in Bechu Chatterjee Street for some time with his brother Ashokanananda, who had come there from Barisal for his MSc studies.

Above: City College, Kolkata, India

His literary career was starting to take off.

When Deshbondhu Chittaranjan Das died in June 1925, Jibanananda wrote a poem called ‘Deshbandhu’ Prayan’e‘ (“On the Death of the Friend of the nation“) which was published in Bangabani magazine.

This poem would later take its place in the collection called Jhara Palok (1927).

Above: Bengali activist Deshbondhu Chittaranjan Das (1870 – 1925)

On reading it, poet Kalidas Roy said that he had thought the poem was the work of a mature, accomplished poet hiding behind a pseudonym.  

Above: Bengali poet Kalidas Roy (1889 – 1975)

Jibanananda’s earliest printed prose work was also published in 1925.

This was an obituary entitled “Kalimohan Das’er Sraddha-bashorey” which appeared in serialized form in Brahmobadi magazine.

His poetry began to be widely published in various literary journals and little magazines in Calcutta, Dhaka and elsewhere.

These included Kallol, perhaps the most famous literary magazine of the era, Kalikalam (Pen and Ink), Progoti (Progress) (co-edited by Buddhadeb Bose) and others.

At this time, he occasionally used the surname Dasgupta as opposed to Das.

In 1927, he published Jhara Palok (Fallen Feathers), his first collection of poems.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Jhara Palok

A few months later, Jibanananda was fired from his job at the City College.

The college had been struck by student unrest surrounding a religious festival, and enrolment seriously suffered as a consequence.

Still in his late 20s, Jibanananda was the youngest member of the faculty and therefore regarded as the most dispensable.

Above: City College, Kolkata logo

In the literary circle of Calcutta, he also came under serial attack.

One of the most serious literary critics of that time, Sajanikanta Das, began to write aggressive critiques of his poetry in the review pages of Shanibarer Chithi (Saturday Letter) magazine.

Above: Bengali poet Sajanikanta Das (1900 – 1962)

With nothing to keep him in Calcutta, Jibanananda left for the small town of Bagerhat in the far south, there to resume his teaching career at Bagerhat P. C. College.

But after about three months he returned to the big city, now in dire financial straits.

Above: Shaheed Minar, Bagerhat, Bangladesh

To make ends meet, he gave private tuition to students while applying for full-time positions in academia.

In December 1929, he moved to Delhi to take up a teaching post at Ramjas College.

Above: Seal of Ramjas College, Delhi, India

Again this lasted no more than a few months.

Above: Red Fort, Delhı, India

Back in Barisal, his family had been making arrangements for his marriage.

Once Jibanananda went to Barisal, he failed to go back to Delhi – and, consequently, lost the job.

In May 1930, he married Labanyaprabha Sen, a girl whose ancestors came from Bagerhat.

Labanyaprabha was the daughter of Rohini Kumar Gupta and Sarojubala Gupta.

Her paternal uncle was Amritalal Gupta, a renowned Acharya of the Brahmo Samaj in Dhaka.

He was the author of “Cheleder Katha” and “Punyabati Nari“.

His marriage was solemnized at the Brahmo Samaj Mandir which was attended by leading literary lights of the day such as Ajit Kumar Dutta and Buddhadeb Bose.

A daughter called Manjusree was born to the couple in February of the following year.

Above: Indian writer Buddhadeva Bose (1908 – 1974)

Around this time, Das wrote one of his most controversial poems. “Camp’e” (At the Camp) was printed in Sudhindranath Dutta’s Parichay magazine and immediately caused a firestorm in the literary circle of Calcutta.

The poem’s ostensible subject is a deer hunt on a moonlit night.

Many accused Jibanananda of promoting indecency and incest through this poem. 

Most of controversies rose from Das’ use of the expression “ghai harini” which in English means “doe in heat”.

“Harini” is a Bengali word intelligible to everyone, but “ghai”, an etymologically Assamese word, is used in Bengali by professional hunters to refer to a live decoy used to lure game.

Das’ brother Ashokanananda Das suggested that Das who never hunted in his life might have learned the word in his youth from professional hunters who did expeditions into the mangrove forest Sundarbans, which was in the vicinity of Barisal, the hometown of Das.

Many, including Buddhadeb Bosu and Achintya Kumar Sengupta, thought Das was expelled from his teaching profession because of this poem, though later researchers refuted this view. 

Above: Indian writer Achintya Kumar Sengupta (1903 – 1976)

After the poet’s death, an explanatory note written by Das was found that intended to reduce the controversy.

However, he did not publish it as he thought that it is not possible for an author to fully control the meaning of a text.

In that note, Das wrote the melody that pervades “In Camp” is one “of life’s helplessness—for all life, that of man, of worm, of locust“.

More and more, he turned now, in secrecy, to fiction.

He wrote a number of short novels and short stories during this period of unemployment, strife and frustration.

In 1934, he wrote the series of sonnets that would form the basis of the collection called Rupasi Bangla.

These poems were not discovered during his lifetime, and were only published in 1957, three years after his death.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Rupasi Bangla

In 1935, Jibanananda, by now familiar with professional disappointment and poverty, returned to his alma mater Brajamohan College, which was then affiliated with the University of Calcutta.

He joined as a lecturer in the English department.

In Calcutta, Buddhadeb Bose, Premendra Mitra and Samar Sen were starting a brand new poetry magazine called Kobita.

Above: Indian writer Premendra Mitra (1904 – 1988) – His critique of humanity led him to believe that for it to survive, human beings had to “forget their differences and be united“.

Above: Indian writer Samar Sen (1916 – 1987)

Jibanananda’s work featured in the very first issue of the magazine, a poem called Mrittu’r Aagey (Before Death).

Upon reading the magazine, Tagore wrote a lengthy letter to Bose and especially commended the Das poem:

“Jibanananda Das’ vivid, colourful poem has given me great pleasure.”

Above: Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)

It was in the second issue of Kobita (1935) that Jibanananda published his now-legendary “Banalata Sen“.

Today, this 18-line poem is among the most famous poems in the language.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Banalata Sen

Jibanananda was by now well settled in Barisal.

A son Samarananda was born in November 1936.

His impact in the world of Bengali literature continued to increase.

In 1938, Tagore compiled a poetry anthology entitled Dhushar Pandulipi (Introduction to Bengali Poetry) and included an abridged version of Mrityu’r Aagey, the same poem that had moved him three years ago.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Dhushar Pandulipi (“grey manuscript“)

Another important anthology came out in 1939:

Jibanananda was represented with four poems: 

• Pakhira (The Birds)

Above: Jibanananda Das, Pakhira

• Shakun (The Vulture)

Above: Jibanananda Das, Shakun

• Banalata Sen
• Nagna Nirjan Haat (Naked Lonely Hand)

Above: Jibanananda Das, Nagna Nirjan Haat

In 1942, the same year that his father died, his third volume of poetry Banalata Sen was published under the aegis of Kobita Bhavan and Buddhadeb Bose.

A ground-breaking modernist poet in his own right, Bose was a steadfast champion of Jibanananda’s poetry, providing him with numerous platforms for publication.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Banalata Sen

1944 saw the publication of Maha Prithibi, Jibanananda’s 4th collection of poems.

The Second World War had a profound impact on Jibanananda’s poetic vision.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Maha Prithibi

The following year, Jibanananda provided his own translations of several of his poems for an English anthology to be published under the title Modern Bengali Poems.

Oddly enough, the editor Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya considered these translations to be sub-standard, and instead commissioned Martin Kirkman to translate four of Jibanananda’s poems for the book.

The aftermath of the War saw heightened demands for Indian independence.

Muslim politicians led by Jinnah wanted an independent homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent.

Above: Pakistani Governor-General Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876 – 1948)

Bengal was uniquely vulnerable to partition:

Its western half was majority-Hindu, its eastern half majority-Muslim.

Yet adherents of both religions spoke the same language, came from the same ethnic stock, and lived in close proximity to each other in town and village.

Jibanananda had emphasized the need for communal harmony at an early stage.

In his very first book Jhora Palok, he had included a poem called Hindu Musalman.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Jhara Palko

However, events in real life belied his beliefs.

In his poem he deplored the loss of life in communal riots.

In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Calcutta from Barisal on three months’ paid leave.

He stayed at his brother Ashokananda’s place through the bloody riots that swept the city.

Violence broke out in Noakhali and Tippera districts later in the autumn.

Just before Partition in August 1947, Jibanananda quit his job at Brajamohan College and said goodbye to his beloved Barisal.

He and his family were among the 10 million refugees who took part in the largest cross-border migration in history.

For a while he worked for a magazine called Swaraj as its Sunday magazine editor.

However, he was fired from the job after a few months.

In 1948, he completed two of his novels, Mallyaban and Shutirtho, neither of which were discovered during his life. 

Shaat’ti Tarar Timir (Darkness of Seven Stars), his 5th anthology of poems, was published in December 1948.

The same month, his mother Kusumkumari Das died in Calcutta.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Shaat’ti Tarar Timir

By now, he was well established in the Calcutta literary world.

He was appointed to the editorial board of yet another new literary magazine Dondo (Conflict).

However, in a reprise of his early career, he was sacked from his job at Kharagpur College in February 1951.

In 1952, Signet Press published an expanded edition of Banalata Sen.

The book received widespread acclaim and won the Book of the Year award from the All-Bengal Tagore Literary Conference.

Later that year, the poet found another job at Vivekananda College, Thakurpukur.

This job too he lost within a few months.

He applied afresh to Diamond Harbour Fakirchand College, but eventually declined it, owing to travel difficulties.

Instead he was obliged to take up a post at Bijoy Krishna Girls’ College, a constituent affiliated undergraduate college of the University of Calcutta.

As the head of the English department, he was entitled to a 50-taka monthly bonus on top of his salary.

Above: Bijoykrishna Girls’ College, Howrah, India

By the last year of his life, Jibanananda was acclaimed as one of the best poets of the post-Tagore era.

He was constantly in demand at literary conferences, poetry readings, radio recitals etc.

In May 1954, he was published a volume titled ‘Best Poems‘ (Sreshttho Kobita).

His Best Poems won the Indian Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Sreshttho Kobita

One poet now dead, killed near his 50th year,did introduce what for India would be “the modern spirit” – bitterness, self-doubt, sex, street diction, personal confession, frankness, Calcutta beggars – into Bengali letters.”

Allen Ginsberg

Above: American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997)

Jibanananda’s life came to a sudden end by way of a road accident when he was only 55.

On 14 October 1954, he was crossing a road near Calcutta’s Deshapriya Park when he was hit by a tram.

Jibanananda was returning home after his routine evening walk.

At that time, he used to reside in a rented apartment on the Lansdowne Road.

Seriously injured, he was taken to Shambhunath Pundit Hospital.

Poet-writer Sajanikanta Das who had been one of his fiercest critics was tireless in his efforts to secure the best treatment for the poet.

He even persuaded Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy (then chief minister of West Bengal) to visit him in hospital.

Above: Indian physician/politician Bidhan Chandra Roy (1882 – 1962)

Nonetheless, the injury was too severe to redress.

Jibanananda died in hospital on 22 October 1954 eight days later, at about midnight.

He was then 55 and left behind his wife, Labanyaprabha Das, a son and a daughter, and the ever-growing band of readers.

His body was cremated the following day at Keoratola Crematorium.

Following popular belief, it has been alleged in some biographical accounts that his accident was actually an attempt at suicide.

The literary circle deeply mourned his death.

Almost all the newspapers published obituaries which contained sincere appreciations of the poetry of Jibanananda.

Poet Sanjay Bhattacharya wrote the death news and sent to different newspapers.

On 1 November 1954, The Times of India wrote:

The premature death after an accident of Mr. Jibanananda Das removes from the field of Bengali literature a poet, who, though never in the limelight of publicity and prosperity, made a significant contribution to modern Bengali poetry by his prose-poems and free-verse.

A poet of nature with a serious awareness of the life around him Jibanananda Das was known not so much for the social content of his poetry as for his bold imagination and the concreteness of his image.

To a literary world dazzled by Tagore’s glory, Das showed how to remain true to the poet’s vocation without basking in its reflection.”

In his obituary in the Shanibarer Chithi, Sajanikanta Das quoted the poet:

When one day I’ll leave this body once for all −
Shall I never return to this world any more?
Let me come back
On a winter night
To the bedside of any dying acquaintance
With a cold pale lump of orange in hand.

Above: Logo of Shanibarer Chitbi (Saturday Letter)(1924 – 1962)

As of 2009, Bengali is the mother tongue of more than 300 million people living mainly in Bangladesh and India.

Above: Bengali dialects political map

Bengali poetry of the modern age flourished on the elaborate foundation laid by Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824 – 1873) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941).

Above: Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutta (1824 – 1873)

Tagore ruled over the domain of Bengali poetry and literature for almost half a century, inescapably influencing contemporary poets.

Above: Tagore family boat Padma

Bengali literature caught the attention of the international literary world when Tagore was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali, an anthology of poems rendered into English by the poet himself with the title Song Offering.

Since then Bengali poetry has travelled a long way.

It has evolved around its own tradition.

It has responded to the poetry movements around the world.

It has assumed various dimensions in different tones, colors and essence.

In Bengal, efforts to break out of the Tagorian worldview and stylistics started in the early days of the 20th century.

Poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899 – 1976) popularized himself on a wide scale with patriotic themes and musical tone and tenor.

Above: Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam

However, a number of new generation poets consciously attempted to align Bengali poetry with the essence of worldwide emergent modernism, starting towards the end of the 19th century and attributable to contemporary European and American trends.

Five poets who are particularly acclaimed for their contribution in creating a post-Tagorian poetic paradigm and infusing modernism in Bengali poetry are: 

• Sudhindranath Dutta (1901 – 1960)

Above: Indian poet Sudhindranath Dutta

• Buddhadeb Bose (1908 – 1974) 

Above: Bengali poet Buddhadeb Bose

• Amiya Chakravarty (1901 – 1986)

Above: Indian poet Amiya Chakravarty

• Jibanananda Das (1899 – 1954)

Above: Scanned image of a page from the manuscript of a poem by Jibanananda Das, (1939)

• Bishnu Dey (1909 – 1982).

Above: Indian poet Bishnu Dey

The contour of modernism in 20th-century Bengali poetry was drawn by these five pioneers and some of their contemporaries.

However, not all of them have survived the test of time.

Of them, poet Jibanananda Das was little understood during his lifetime.

In fact, he received scanty attention and some considered him incomprehensible.

Readers, including his contemporary literary critics, also alleged faults in his style and diction.

On occasions, he faced merciless criticism from leading literary personalities of his time.

Even Tagore made unkind remarks on his diction, although he praised his poetic capability.

Nevertheless, destiny reserved a crown for him.

Above: Jibanananda Das

During the later half of the 20th century, Jibanananda Das emerged as one of the most popular poets of modern Bengali literature.

Popularity apart, Jibanananda Das had distinguished himself as an extraordinary poet presenting a paradigm hitherto unknown.

Whilst his unfamiliar poetic diction, choice of words and thematic preferences took time to reach the hearts of readers, by the end of the 20th century the poetry of Jibanananda had become a defining essence of modernism in 20th-century Bengali poetry.

Whilst his early poems bear the undoubted influence of Kazi Nazrul Islam and other poets like Satyendranath Dutta, before long Jibananda had thoroughly overcame these influences and created a new poetic diction. 

Buddhadeb Bose was among the first to recognise his style and thematic novelty.

However, as his style and diction matured, his message appeared obscured.

Readers, including critics, started to complain about readability and question his sensibility.

Only after his accidental death in 1954 did a readership emerge that not only was comfortable with Jibanananda’s style and diction but also enjoyed his poetry.

Questions about the obscurity of his poetic message were no longer raised.

By the time his birth centenary was celebrated in 1999, Jibanananda Das was the most popular and well-read poet of Bengali literature.

Even when the last quarter of the 20th century ushered in the post-modern era, Jibanananda Das continued to be relevant to the new taste and fervor.

This was possible because his poetry underwent many cycles of change, and later poems contain post-modern elements.

Jibanananda Das started writing and publishing in his early 20s.

During his lifetime he published only 269 poems in different journals and magazines, of which 162 were collected in seven anthologies, from Jhara Palak to Bela Obela Kalbela.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Bela Obela Kalbela

Many of his poems have been published posthumously at the initiative of his brother Asokananda Das, sister Sucharita Das and nephew Amitananda Das, and the efforts of Dr. Bhumendra Guha, who over the decades copied them from scattered manuscripts.

By 2008, the total count of Jibananda’s known poems stood at almost 800.

In addition, numerous novels and short stories were discovered and published about the same time.

Above: Jibanananda Das, Alo Prithibi (The World of Light)

Jibanananda scholar Clinton B. Seely has termed Jibanananda Das as “Bengal’s most cherished poet since Rabindranath Tagore“.

On the other hand, to many, reading the poetry of Jibanananda Das is like stumbling upon a labyrinth of the mind similar to what one imagines Camus’s ‘absurd‘ man toiling through.

Above: French philosopher Albert Camus (1913 – 1960)

Indeed, Jibanananda Das’s poetry is sometimes an outcome of profound feeling painted in imagery of a type not readily understandable.

Sometimes the connection between the sequential lines is not obvious.

In fact, Jibanananda Das broke the traditional circular structure of poetry (introduction – middle – end) and the pattern of logical sequence of words, lines and stanzas.

Consequently, the thematic connotation is often hidden under a rhythmic narrative that requires careful reading between the lines.

The following excerpt will bear the point out:

Lepers open the hydrant and lap some water.
Or maybe that hydrant was already broken.
Now at midnight they descend upon the city in droves,
Scattering sloshing petrol. Though ever careful,
Someone seems to have taken a serious spill in the water.
Three rickshaws trot off, fading into the last gaslight.
I turn off, leave Phear Lane, defiantly
Walk for miles, stop beside a wall
On Bentinck Street, at Territti Bazar,
There in the air dry as roasted peanuts.

Night – a poem on night in Calcutta

Though Jibanananda Das was variously branded at times and was popularly known as a modernist of the Yeatsian-Poundian-Eliotesque school, Annadashankar Roy called him the truest poet. 

Above: Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)

Above: American poet Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

Above: American poet Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965)

Jibanananda Das conceived a poem and moulded it up in the way most natural for him.

When a theme occurred to him, he shaped it with words, metaphors and imagery that distinguished him from all others.

Jibanananda Das’s poetry is to be felt, rather than merely read or heard.

Writing about Jibanananda Das’ poetry, Joe Winter remarked:

It is a natural process, though perhaps the rarest one.

Jibanananda’s style reminds us of this, seeming to come unbidden.

It is full of sentences that scarcely pause for breath, of word-combinations that seem altogether unlikely but work, of switches in register, from a sophisticated usage to a village-dialect word, that jar and in the same instant settle in the mind.

Full of friction, in short, that almost becomes a part of the consciousness ticking.”

Above: Jibanananda Das, Krishna Dasami

A few lines are quoted below in support of Winter’s remarks:

Nevertheless, the owl stays wide awake;
The rotten, still frog begs two more moments
in the hope of another dawn in conceivable warmth.
We feel in the deep tracelessness of flocking darkness
the unforgiving enmity of the mosquito-net all around;
The mosquito loves the stream of life,
awake in its monastery of darkness.

One day eight years ago

Above: Jibanananda Das, One Day Eight Years Ago

Or elsewhere:

… how the wheel of justice is set in motion
        by a smidgen of wind –
or if someone dies and someone else gives him a bottle
of medicine, free – then who has the profit? –
over all of this the four have a mighty word-battle.
For the land they will go to now is called the soaring river
where a wretched bone-picker and his bone
        come and discover
their faces in water – till looking at faces is over.

Idle Moment

Also noteworthy are his sonnets, the most famous being seven untitled pieces collected in the publication Shaat-ti Tarar Timir (“The Blackness of Seven Stars“), where he describes, on one hand, his attachment to his motherland, and on the other, his views about life and death in general.

They are noteworthy not only because of the picturesque description of nature that was a regular feature of most of his work but also for the use of metaphors and allegories.

For example, a lone owl flying about in the night sky is taken as an omen of death, while the anklets on the feet of a swan symbolizes the vivacity of life.

Jibanananda successfully integrated Bengali poetry with the slightly older Eurocentric international modernist movement of the early 20th century.

In this regard he possibly owes as much to his exotic exposure as to his innate poetic talent.

Although hardly appreciated during his lifetime, many critics believe that his modernism, evoking almost all the suggested elements of the phenomenon, remains untranscended to date, despite the emergence of many notable poets during the last 50 years.

His success as a modern Bengali poet may be attributed to the facts that Jibanananda Das in his poetry not only discovered the tract of the slowly evolving 20th-century modern mind, sensitive and reactive, full of anxiety and tension, but that he invented his own diction, rhythm and vocabulary, with an unmistakably indigenous rooting, and that he maintained a self-styled lyricism and imagism mixed with an extraordinary existentialist sensuousness, perfectly suited to the modern temperament in the Indian context, whereby he also averted fatal dehumanization that could have alienated him from the people.

He was at once a classicist and a romantic and created an appealing world hitherto unknown:

For thousands of years I roamed the paths of this earth,
From waters round Ceylon in dead of night
        to Malayan seas.
Much have I wandered. I was there
in the grey world of Asoka
And Bimbisara, pressed on through darkness
        to the city of Vidarbha.
I am a weary heart surrounded by life’s frothy ocean.
To me she gave a moment’s peace –
        Banalata Sen from Natore.

Banalata Sen

While reading Jibanananda Das, one often encounters references to olden times and places, events and personalities.

A sense of time and history is an unmistakable element that has shaped Jibanananda Das’s poetic world to a great extent.

However, he lost sight of nothing surrounding him.

Unlike many of his peers who blindly imitated the renowned Western poets in a bid to create a new poetic domain and generated spurious poetry, Jibanananda Das remained anchored in his own soil and time, successfully assimilating experiences real and virtual and producing hundreds of unforgettable lines.

His intellectual vision was thoroughly embedded in Bengal’s nature and beauty:

Amidst a vast meadow the last time when I met her
I said: ‘Come again a time like this
if one day you so wish
twenty-five years later.’
This been said, I came back home.
After that, many a time, the moon and the stars
from field to field have died, the owls and the rats
searching grains in paddy fields on a moonlit night
fluttered and crept! – shut eyed
many times left and right
        have slept
several souls! – awake kept I
all alone – the stars on the sky
        travel fast
faster still, time speeds by.
        Yet it seems
Twenty-five years will forever last.

After Twenty-five Years

Thematically, Jibanananda Das is amazed by the continued existence of humankind in the backdrop of eternal flux of time, wherein individual presence is insignificant and meteoric albeit inescapable.

He feels that we are closed in, fouled by the numbness of this concentration cell (Meditations).

To him, the world is weird and olden, and as a race, mankind has been a persistent “wanderer of this world” (Banalata Sen) that, according to him, has existed too long to know anything more (Before death, Walking alone) or experience anything fresh.

The justification of further mechanical existence like Mahin’s horses (The Horses) is apparently absent:

“So he had slept by the Dhanshiri river on a cold December night, and had never thought of waking again“

Darkness

As an individual, tired of life and yearning for sleep (One day eight years ago), Jibanananda Das is certain that peace can be found nowhere and that it is useless to move to a distant land, since there is no way of freedom from sorrows fixed by life (Land, Time and Offspring).

Nevertheless, he suggests:

“O sailor, you press on, keep pace with the sun!”

Sailor

Why did Jibanananda task himself to forge a new poetic speech, while others in his time preferred to tread the usual path?

The answer is simple.

In his endeavors to shape a world of his own, he was gradual and steady.

He was an inward-looking person and was not in a hurry.

I do not want to go anywhere so fast.
Whatever my life wants I have time to reach
        there walking”

Of 1934 – a poem on the motor car

In the poet’s birth centenary, Bibhav published 40 of his poems that had been yet unpublished. 

Shamik Bose has translated a poem, untitled by the poet:

Under this sky, these stars beneath —
One day will have to sleep inside tiredness —
Like snow-filled white ocean of North Pole! –

This night – this day – O this light as bright as it may! —
These designs for a life – will forget all —
Under such a silent, fathomless sky! –

Had felt the fragrance of a body one day, —
By washing my body inside sea water —
Felt our heart so deep by falling in love! —
This vigor of life had seen one day awaken –
Light stoking the edge of darkness —
Have heard the passionate whispers of a night – always for a day! –

This visit! This conscious vigil that I see, I feel —
Yet will end one day —
Time only remains for us to ripe like a harvest in green soil —
Once so ripen, then the hands of death will be likeable –
Will hold us in his chest, one by one —
Like a sleeplorn —
Fugitive lovelorn —
Inside tender whispers! –

When that time will prosper to an end and he will come —
That savor will be … the most relishing.

Das was also known as a surrealist poet for his spontaneous, frenzied overflow of subconscious mind in poetry and especially in diction.

During his lifetime, Jibanananda remained solely a poet who occasionally wrote literary articles, mostly on request.

Only after his death were a huge number of novels and short stories discovered.

Thematically, Jibanananda’s storylines are largely autobiographical.

His own time constitutes the perspective.

While in poetry he subdued his own life, he allowed it to be brought into his fiction.

Structurally his fictional works are based more on dialogues than description by the author.

However, his prose shows a unique style of compound sentences, use of non-colloquial words and a typical pattern of punctuation.

His essays evidence a heavy prose style, which although complex, is capable of expressing complicated analytical statements.

As a result, his prose was very compact, containing profound messages in a relatively short space.

Jibanananda Das: The Poet Who Walked Into the Dark

You saw Bengal’s rivers as veins of time,
its fields as pages waiting for poetry.
You lived among shadows,
spoke in whispers that would one day echo.
Did you step willingly into the accident,
or did the world simply fail to catch you?
Had you stayed,
what other verses might have poured from your soul?
We, who remain, must write what you might have,
must give voice to the beauty you left unwritten.

Above: Flag of Bangladesh

17 February 1903

Teheran, Iran

“In life there are certain sores that, like a canker, gnaw at the soul in solitude and diminish it.“

The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat

Sadegh Hedayat (17 February 1903 – 9 April 1951) was an Iranian writer, poet and translator.

Best known for his novel The Blind Owl, he was one of the earliest Iranian writers to adopt literary modernism in their career.

Above: Sadegh Hedayet, The Blind Owl

Hedayat was born to a northern Iranian aristocratic family in Tehran.

Above: Teheran, Iran

His great-grandfather Reza-Qoli Khan Hedayat Tabarestani was a well-respected writer and worked in the government, as did other relatives.

Above: Iranian poet Reza Qoli Khan Hedayat (1800 – 1971)

Hedayat’s sister married Haj Ali Razmara who was an army general and among the Prime Ministers of Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

Above: Iranian Prime Minister Haj Ali Razmara (1901 – 1951)

Above: Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919 – 1980)

Another one of his sisters was the wife of Abdollah Hedayat who was also an army general.

Above: Iranian General Abdollah Hedayat (1899 – 1968)

Hedayat was educated at Collège Saint-Louis (French catholic school) and Dar ol-Fonoon (1914 – 1916).

In 1925, he was among a select few students who travelled to Europe to continue their studies.

Above: Dar ul-Funan (Polytechnic College), Teheran, Iran

There, he initially went on to study engineering in Belgium, which he abandoned after a year to study architecture in France.

Above: Flag of Belgium

There he gave up architecture in turn to pursue dentistry.

In this period he became acquainted with Thérèse, a Parisian with whom he had a love affair.

Above: Paris, France

In 1927 Hedayat attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Marne but was rescued by a fishing boat.

Above: Marne River, Dormans, France

Above: The Marne River, France

Hedayat was a vegetarian from his youth and authored the treatise The Benefits of Vegetarianism whilst in Berlin in 1927.

“Everyone who eats meat must kill the animal himself.

Because carnivorous animals do not take a assistant, or at least presence walk and spend an hour of their lives watching this beautiful meal and see how these delicious foods are prepared for them.

As long as we do not suffocate the natural emotions of our hearts by force, it is clear that there is a feeling of hatred in humans for killing and pain of other animals, and it is also clear that when all people are forced to kill the animals they eat with their own hands, most of them turn to vegetarianism.“

Sadegh Hedayat, The Benefits of Vegetarianism

Above: Berlin, Deutschland

After four years in France, he finally surrendered his scholarship and returned home in the summer of 1930 without receiving a degree.

Above: Flag of France

In Iran, he held various jobs for short periods.

Hedayat subsequently devoted his whole life to studying Western literature and to learning and investigating Iranian history and folklore.

Above: Flag of Iran

The works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, and Guy de Maupassant intrigued him the most.

Above: Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)

Above: American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)

Above: Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924)

Above: Russian writer Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904)

Above: French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850 – 1893)

During his short literary life span, Hedayat published a substantial number of short stories and novelettes, two historical dramas, a play, a travelogue, and a collection of satirical parodies and sketches.

His writings also include numerous literary criticisms, studies in Persian folklore, and many translations from Middle Persian and French.

Above: Middle Persian in Pahlavi and Manichaean scripts

He is credited with having brought the Persian language and literature into the mainstream of international contemporary writing.

Hedayat travelled and stayed in India from 1936 until late 1937 (the mansion he stayed in during his visit to Bombay was identified in 2014).

Hedayet spent time in Bombay learning the Pahlavi (Middle Persian) language from the Parsi Zoroastrian community of India.

He was taught by Bahramgore Tahmuras Anklesaria, a renowned scholar and philologist.

Above: Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India

Nadeem Akhtar’s Hedayat in India provides details of Hedayat’s sojourn in India.

In Bombay, Hedayat completed and published his most enduring work, The Blind Owl which he had started writing, in Paris, as early as 1930.

“I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light.

I must introduce myself to it.“

Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

The book was praised by Henry Miller, André Breton, and others, and Kamran Sharareh has called it “one of the most important literary works in the Persian language“.

Above: American writer Henry Miller (1891 – 1980)

Above: French writer André Breton (1896 – 1966)

The Blind Owl is Sadegh Hedayat’s magnum opus and a major literary work of 20th-century Iran.

Written in Persian, it is narrated by an unnamed pen case painter, who addresses his murderous confessions to a shadow on his wall that resembles an owl.

His confessions do not follow a linear progression of events and often repeat and layer themselves thematically, thus lending to the open-ended nature of interpretation of the story.

“In this base world, full of poverty and misery, for the first time I thought a ray of sunshine had shone on my life.

But alas, it was not a sunbeam, rather it was only a transient beam, a shooting star, which appeared to me in the likeness of a woman or an angel.”

Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl was written during the latter years of the rule of Reza Shah.

It is believed that much of the novel had already been completed by 1930 while Hedayat was still a student in Paris.

Hedayat was inspired by European literature and ideas, and challenged many traditional Iran conventions in the novel, a quality that has often marked him as the father of modernist Persian literature.

“I was growing inward incessantly.

Like an animal that hibernates during the wintertime, I could hear other peoples’ voices with my ears.

My own voice, however, I could hear only in my throat.

The loneliness and the solitude that lurked behind me were like a condensed, thick, eternal night, like one of those nights with a dense, persistent, sticky darkness which waits to pounce on unpopulated cities filled with lustful and vengeful dreams.”

Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

The novel tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, who, while in despair after losing a mysterious lover, addresses his morbid confessions to a shadow on his wall that looks like an owl.

He sees in his macabre, feverish nightmares that “the presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary“.

Death hangs over the narrator, who claims that:

“We are the offspring of death and death delivers us from the tantalizing, fraudulent attractions of life.

Throughout our lives, the finger of death points at us.”

The novel is in two parts.

The first is a surrealist, dreamlike narrative of the opium-addicted narrator, the woman he both loves and loathes, and a cackling, turban-wearing old man.

The second part retells that story in a more realistic tone, and includes details that appear to contradict the first part.

“What is love?

For the rabble love is a kind of variety, a transient vulgarity.

The rabble’s conception of love is best found in their obscene ditties, in prostitution and in the foul idioms they use when they are halfway sober, such as “shoving the donkey’s foreleg in mud” or “putting dust on the head”.

My love for her, however, was of a totally different kind.

I knew her from ancient times — strange slanted eyes, a narrow, half-open mouth, a subdued quiet voice.

She was the embodiment of all my distant, painful memories among which I sought what I was deprived of, what belonged to me but somehow I was denied.

Was I deprived forever?”

Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

“The Stray Dog” is a short story by Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat, first published in 1942 along with seven other short stories in the book of the same name.

Pat is a Scottish breed dog with two intelligent human eyes.

He misses his puppyhood, when he could drink his mother’s milk without any difficulties.

He used to play with his brother and with his master’s son.

One day, Pat’s master and two others got into an automobile, called Pat and put him beside them in the car.

A few hours later they arrived at Varamin Square and got out of the car.

His master and the other two were passing the alley when Pat picked up a scent.

This scent of a female canine brought him close to insanity.

Pat followed the scent.

When he came back he couldn’t find his master.

From that day on, Pat’s misfortunes began.

The inhabitants of that place differed from his master in feeling and behavior.

They beat Pat because of their religious believes and to please Allah.

Pat’s sufferings continued until a strange man came and gave him bread and yogurt.

When the man’s car moved, Pat started running after the car, despite the pain in his body.

The story ends when the barely alive dog lies on the side of the road, while three crows are waiting to eat his brown eyes.

Sadegh Hedayat wrote the book Pearl Cannon (Tup-e Morvari) in 1947, named after the cannon.

In the book, Hedayat criticizes the superstitions of his time and people’s beliefs about the cannon, considering Iran’s broader social and political context.

The Pearl Cannon is an old cannon in Tehran, Iran.

It was involved in several cultural practices of the people of Tehran in Qajar era (1789 – 1925).

It is now located north of the National Garden, in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building.

Above: The Pearl Cannon, Teheran, Iran

The cannon was first placed in Arg Square, before being transferred to a place known as the Officers’ Club.

The Officers’ Club was later used as an office for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The cannon remains there today.

The namesake of the cannon is unknown.

Some, however, have suggested that it is named after several pearl necklaces decorating its muzzle.

Above: The Pearl Cannon, Teheran, Iran

Many stories are told about the origins of the Pearl Cannon.

For instance, it is said that Shah Abbas took it from the Portuguese at Hormuz Island.

Above: İranian Shah Abbas İ (1571 – 1629)

Or that it was built on the orders of Karim Khan Zand in Shiraz.

Above: İranian ruler Karim Kan-e Zand (1705 – 1779)

Or that it was taken from India by Nader Shah Afshar in his Indian campaign.

Above: İranian Shah Nader Afshar (1688 – 1747)

On the cannon itself, it is written that it was made by an Isfahani molder named Esmaiil Rikhtegar during the year 1233 of the lunar Hijri calendar (1817-1818) on the orders of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar.

Above: İranian Shah Fath-Ali Qajar (1769 – 1834)

This cannon has been part of many superstitious practices by the people of Tehran.

It was once common for women to tie a knot to it, believing that this would grant a wish, generally for a spouse or fertility and on Qadr Nights or on Chaharshanbe Suri.

Above: Jamkaran Mosque, Qadr Night, 18 June 2017

Above: Fire Festival, Iran

The people of Tehran would give gifts and bribes to the guards of the cannon, so they could be left alone in their rituals.

Criminals that were pursued by policemen used to take refuge under the cannon’s shadow, and due to their beliefs, the policemen refused to arrest them, instead opting to wait until hunger drove them out from their position.

Above: The cannon at Tehran Officers’ Club

In 1951, overwhelmed by despair, Hedayat left Tehrān and travelled to Paris, where he rented an apartment.

A few days before his death, Hedayat tore up all of his unpublished work.

On 9 April 1951, he plugged all the doors and windows of his rented apartment with cotton, then turned on the gas valve, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Two days later, his body was found by police, with a note left behind for his friends and companions that read:

“I left and broke your heart.

That is all.” 

He is widely remembered as a major symbol of Iranian nationalism.

Above: Sadegh Hedayat in Paris – 9 April 1951

The English poet John Heath-Stubbs published an elegy, “A Cassida for Sadegh Hedayat“, in A Charm Against the Toothache in 1954.

Above: English poet John Heath – Stubbs (1918 – 2006)

In November 2006, replication of Hedayat’s work in uncensored form was banned in Iran, as part of a sweeping purge.

However, surveillance of bookstalls is limited and it is still possible to purchase the originals second-hand.

The official website is also still online.

Above: Sadegh Hedayat Tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France

In 1987, Raul Ruiz made the feature film La Chouette aveugle in France: a loose adaption of Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl.

Its formal innovations led critics and filmmakers to declare the film ‘French cinema’s most beautiful jewel of the past decade‘.

Hedayat’s last day and the night was adapted into the short film, The Sacred and the Absurd, directed by Ghasem Ebrahimian, which was featured in the Tribeca Film Festival in 2004.

Above: Scene from The Sacred and the Absurd

In 2005, Iranian film director Khosrow Sinai has made a docudrama about Hedayat entitled Goftogu ba saye (Talking with a shadow).

Above: Talking with a Shadow poster

Its main theme is the influence of Western movies such as Der Golem, Nosferatu and Dracula on Hedayat.

In 2009, Mohsen Shahrnazdar and Sam Kalantari made a documentary film about Sadegh Hedayat named From No. 37.

Sadegh Hedayet: The Night That Swallowed You

You carried the weight of a world
that would not listen.
The owls circled in your mind,
your words haunted like a dream too vivid to forget.
You chose silence in the end,
but your stories refused to vanish.
Had you waited, had you endured,
might the world have caught up with you?
We, who remain, must refuse silence,
must take up the pen,
must make sure the stories are never left untold.

Above: Sadegh Hedayat

I have examined the lives of four creative people all coincidentally born on the same day of the calendar year, all whose lives ended prematurely.

By this examination of their lives I believe we can examine our own.

The philosopher Socrates said:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.“

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher Socrates (470 – 399 BC)

We live busy lives at a frantic pace.

There doesn’t seem time just to “stand and stare“, as the poet W. H. Davies put it.

Above: Welsh writer William Henry Davies (1871 – 1940)

We spend so much time reacting to events that we leave ourselves little time to investigate the causes of all the small blazes in our lives.

Why do we do the things we do?

Why do we often feel hurt, neglected or sad?

How can we be better people?

How can we make sense of a world that contains 7 billion people?

What is the point of it all?

Above: The Earth seen from Apollo 17, 7 December 1972

I believe that the point of life is to decide who we are and then try to become that person.

I believe that we can do this if we try to express our own unique way of seeing the world.

We want to tell stories.

We want to tell our own stories.

We want to transform our own existence into words that will delight, entertain, amuse and educate others.

Our individual attempts to make sense of our lives contribute to the way humanity itself discovers its nature and purpose.

Everyone’s story has value.

I want to quote liberally from Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters:

“The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bonds of the possible by goıng beyond them.

If you don’t know it is impossible, it is easier to do.

And because no one has done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again.

Yet.“

I believe that the two greatest days of your life are the day that you were born and the day you understand why.

Above: American writer Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain)(1835 – 1910)

“If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.

And that is much harder than it sounds and, sometimes in the end, so much easier than you might imagine.

Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut.

And sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get. Imagine where you want to be.

Think of a mountain, a distant mountain, your goal.

As long as you keep walking towards the mountain you will be all right.

And when you truly are not sure what to do, stop and think about whether the walk is taking you towards or away from the mountain.

Learn to create by creating.

Do anything as long as it feels like an adventure and stop when it feels like work.

Life does not have to feel like work.“

“When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure.

You need to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive.

The problems of failure are problems of discouragement, of hopelessness, of hunger.

You want everything to happen and you want it now.

And things go wrong.

The problems of failure are hard.“

“If you are making mistakes, it means you are out there doing something.

And the mistakes in themselves can be useful.“

Above: Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989)

“Remember that whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, a designer, whatever you do, you have one thing that is unique:

You have the ability to make art.“

“Life is sometimes hard.

Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong.

And when things get tough, this is what you should do:

MAKE GOOD ART.

Make it on the good days too.“

“Make your art do the stuff that only YOU can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy.

And that is not a bad thing.

Most of us only find our own voices after we have sounded like a lot of other people.

But the one thing that you have that no one else has is YOU.

Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision.

So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only YOU can.“

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”

Tennessee Williams

Above: American playwright Tennessee Williams (1911 – 1983)

“Change doesn’t just happen.

It starts with the idea that something could be different, could be better.

It starts with a person who is brave enough to stand up and say:

STOP.

You only need one thing to start a campaign for change.

It isn’t cash, experience, a thick skin or the ability to use a computer.

It is passion.

Passion will give you the bravery to stand up and start speaking out.

Passion will keep you going.“

Lucy-Anne Holmes, How to Start a Revolution

If Bruno and Eberhardt, Das and Hedayet had stayed — if they had fought just a little longer — what might they have left us?

How might they have changed the world even more than they did?

And if we falter, if we surrender, what might we rob from the future?

The world is heavy, the impermanence of all things undeniable, but it is precisely because everything fades that we must create.

To write, to paint, to compose is to defy time itself.

Let sorrow be ink.

Let disillusionment be the brush.

Let the imperfection of the world be the reason we carve beauty into its bones.

We, who remain, must create.