The many odes to Dante

A reading of Dante’s cantos in session at the site of his grave in the city of Ravenna in Italy. Pic/Rosalyn D’Mello

As a feminist who is tired of the numerous ways the works of ‘great men' continue to be worshipped, I'm unlikely to be found reading any of their canonised masterpieces. Not because they aren't significant, but because I am interested in evolving a consciousness that sidesteps their over-glorified genius. There is such an enormous wealth of contemporary female and queer artists, writers, poets and thinkers whose works are utterly brilliant and exist quietly in relation to each other, without having to compete for sunlight. Yet, funnily enough, as a child, I was obsessed with Shakespeare. Growing up in a neighbourhood that wasn't predisposed towards literature or intellectual thought, I only knew of the Bard because my mother suggested I begin with him when I joined the school library at age 10 or 11.

So, when one day, Aunty Celia, the mother of one of our friends offered to take my sister and me to a book fair in south Bombay, our parents consented. I gravitated towards one tiny book of Shakespeare's love sonnets. Ours was not a family that had disposable income to buy books. My sister bought an Archies comic book and I bought this tiny collection of Shakespeare's love sonnets which included Renaissance paintings. That night onwards I began a ritual of reading at least one sonnet aloud before I slept. It was so silly and yet so cute. Reading it aloud felt like a way of accessing the words and their sounds, because I doubt I ‘got' their complexity. By uttering each line I felt closer to their essence. I memorised many of the sonnets. My siblings frequently teased me. Indeed, I must have seemed ridiculous.

The love for Shakespeare remained but had to share space with Rabindranath Tagore, whom I suddenly discovered at the school library. I eventually bought a pirated copy off a footpath near Flora Fountain. The omnibus encompassed his writings, speeches, poems and short stories. I spent a whole summer vacation poring through them. Tagore's critique and scepticism towards the logic of nation and his penchant for mysticism would ground a lot of my subsequent thoughts on both subjects, perhaps serving even as the basis for my later feminist inclinations.

By the time I finally had the opportunity to study English literature at St. Xavier's, I was already on my way towards being radicalised as a feminist. Instead of concentrating on the legendary works of Chaucer or Milton, our professors tended to follow an approach that nurtured in us a tendency towards criticality. I tripped on T S Eliot, Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla, but I also feasted on Kamala Das and Eunice Desouza, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Helen Cixous and Julia Kristeva. In the aura of their words, Chaucer or Milton seemed unabsorbing. When I had to choose between a post-graduate programme at either Delhi University or Jawaharlal Nehru University, I picked the latter because it offered much more agency rather than the former, which had a fixed programme that went back to Chaucer. At JNU, I was exposed to literature from so many different parts of the world.

I revisited many of these past brushes with literary marvels last week as I was reading up about what to do in the Italian city of Ravenna, which served as the capital of the West Roman empire during the fifth century, then as the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and again as the capital of the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna. Beyond these historically significant facts, Ravenna is where the Italian poet Dante died. Of course, as a literature student I was made aware of Dante's genius. Living in Italy, it is not possible to escape his monumentalisation. He is the ‘supreme' poet. He is the father of the Italian language. Statues of him are omnipresent. Maybe for these reasons, I could never ‘get into' his work. But since I love visiting the graves of literary figures, I had to see his. I learned about the convoluted history of his mortal remains. However, what took me by surprise was learning about a 2020 initiative by the city of Ravenna to host a daily reading of one of his cantos until perpetuity. If you visit Ravenna today or at any point in the foreseeable future, you will find someone reading at either 6pm or 7pm (the timings are different on weekdays and weekends and change in winter) a canto by him.

I was so sure we would find a stodgy Italian man reading but was pleasantly moved to find a person of Iranian descent reading in Farsi. The next day's reading was presumably by an Ethiopian woman. Instead of Italians, the crowd was mostly composed of people of colour from the Global South. As the Iranian person introduced the canto he would read, he spoke about home and exile. The crowd stood there, listening, feeling, vibing with each other. Dante, most certainly, must have turned in his grave.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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