Valson Thampu

I have wondered for long as to what is more spiritual: theology or literature? Theology makes the concrete abstract. Literature makes the abstract concrete. Literature, like spirituality, is incarnational. But Incarnation is a paradox. To be incarnated is to be stained. Sarah Joseph certainly thinks so. Hence the title of her new novel: Kara, or stain [Current Books (2023) Rs.875].
Everything significant involves, in the final analysis, a stain of some sort. No piece of canvas becomes the site of a work of genius without getting stained. Colours are stains, right? No adventure is possible without incurring the stain of trespassing into the forbidden and encountering the unknown. To be the Saviour, even the divine has to take on the stain of mortality. The Son of Man, though sinless, ‘becomes sin for us’. Every reformer incurs the risk of being stigmatized as a rebel. In the paradox of existence, poison must surface first in the manthan of life. God or man, he who dares to stir the depth must imbibe what emerges. That’s the meaning of the Cross. Nothing about life and living escapes its implacable logic.
Sarah Joseph has had a proven track-record of re-telling scriptural stories. Her Ramayana stories being a case in point. Even though the Bible has been the imaginative universe of her creativity, Kara is her first major work of biblical grandeur. It adumbrates the pattern common to all her works: namely, othappu, or offence, is basic to freedom, freshness, and vitality. Equally important is her realization, somewhat understated though, that there is a limit to romanticizing this offence. In this regard, she subscribes to the paradox that Jesus highlighted: it is necessary that the Son of man be betrayed, but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed.’ (St Matthew 26:24). Such things must come to be, but…. Sarah is instinct with this tragic ambiguity in the human condition.
Kara re-tells the story of Abraham and Lot (chapters 12-19 of Genesis). Abraham had to break out of his past in order to go to ‘the land he had never seen before’. He was urged to do so by a God his ancestors hadn’t known. The God of Abraham is a call to the future. And that future cannot be claimed without breaching the status quo. The biblical Abraham led a pastoral life. Lot, as Sarah portrays him, chooses the broader path to wealth via urban trade in a city stained with opium trade. She portrays such affluence as bristling with murderous intolerance and ethical depravity. Sarah’s Sodom is as much a symbol of affluence as it is of human degradation. Allergy to the alien -concretized in the Sodomites’ hostility to Lot’s guests- is basic to Sarah’s version of the Sodomite syndrome. Stagnating in self-preservation, not less than venturing into the unknown, stains existence; though not in identical ways. So, you’re damned if you do, and damned as well, if you don’t.
Lot’s wife -Sarah names her Edith- petrifies into a pillar of salt for ‘looking back’ towards the city of doom. This looking back is not, as the novelist chooses to re-imagine it, as negative or reprehensible as it is in the biblical account. Nonetheless, in her defiance of the given instruction, there’s an echo of the Edenic offence. She turns into a mute, statuary reminder of the ought-not-to-be. But, after all is done, and the battles are won and lost Lot, battered, bruised and atomized, bereft even of his daughters and the sons by them, the petrified Edith is all there is for him to return to. Nothing in the novel equals in pathos Lot’s reunion, so to speak, with her. Adumbrated in that pathos is the ambiguity that stains the warp and woof of the novel. To obey God, or not to obey? That’s the question. But it is a question the novel does not answer in a definitive fashion. Perhaps it has to be that way; for, after all, obedience to God is a dialogue with the future, as one-sided as Lot’s paradoxical one-directional dialogue with the Edith that had been.
Lot’s daughters incur the ultimate sexual stain in order to be bearers of life. They can do so only via the moral abomination of conceiving by their father. Later on in the story, they break the religious taboo as well. They choose to worship alien gods in the land of the giants in the interest of self-preservation. It is as if life can be preserved only by staining it!
A thematic highlight in this work is how the author problematizes God. God helps and hinders. Liberates and constrains. He calls Abraham to a unique destiny. But that scheme of things -within which Abraham, unlike Lot, is fully domesticated- also serves as a realm of confinement. It is only within the prescribed that ‘God as refuge’ remains non-problematic. What happens when individuals are impelled into the proscribed, the ambiguous realm of the forbidden and the un-manifest? Will God be refuge also to the wanderers, the Cains, on the face of the earth? In what ways? To what extent? Sarah implies in this novel a qualitative difference between the God of Abrahm and the God of Lot. That problem aggravates with Lot’s daughters.
As for Lot’s daughters, it becomes unviable to stay true and loyal to the mores of Abraham’s God. Unlike the heroic youths in the book of Daniel, they lack the faith-foundation to believe that they will be protected and preserved by Abraham’s God. So, they adopt the local gods. But these gods are, alas, anti-life. They demand the blood of children. It is, yet again, the same old paradox. They survive; but survive stained. Kara, or stain, looms in the thematic horizon of the novel as a marker of the poignant paradox of being human: the logic of the need to venture, as well as the offence inherent in such venturing.
In looking beyond this paradox, Kara’s Lot has recourse to a vision in the fag end of his life. It stretches across two millennia and echoes with the Beatitudes of the bruised. The matrix of life stretches, as per this vision, between the symbolic pillar of salt and the living waters: between the backward glance to the city of doom and the forward march to the City of God that is come and is still coming.