Preston Merchant

Manifestos and Dead Revolutionaries

My artist friend Sharlene Khan is part of the South African online magazine The Dead Revolutionaries Club.  The site recently published a collective effort on the idea of artistic and political manifestos.  Here's my contribution (though they wrongly list me as South African):

At the risk of spoiling the party, I will say that I am anti-manifesto. Manifestos are creeds, statements of belief, lists of political or artistic positions, loyalty tests, exclusionary devices, frontal challenges, stiflers of debate, rallying cries, ideological touchstones, political entrenchments, club memberships, weapons against dissent, willful provocations.

An artist's loyalty should be to his or her own integrity, to the intellectual and creative challenges, and to the work itself and not to a set of bullet points on a sheet of paper – which are political positions. Great art works against conventions, entrenched ideas, and grand pronouncements. It subverts expectations and creates new ones. It is the triumph of individual expression over groupthink.

You photograph (or paint, sculpt, write, carve) with all your ideology. It's there in what you create, unavoidable. It's unique. Embrace its fluid and ineluctable beauty in your work. That's your manifesto.

Children of Phoenix

This essay was published in a recent issue of Pravasi Bharatiya by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (under the title "Revisiting Satyagraha in Phoenix").  It's online in PDF form at that link, but I am posting here where it is easier to read.

No Indian cab driver will take me to Gandhi's house.  Parked in front of the Holiday Inn at Durban's South Beach, the cabbies protest about safety.  Someone asserts that since it has been raining, the main road will be washed out and we will get stuck at the bottom of the hill, unable to flee.  The word impossible comes out a few times, with the sense that going there would be a bad idea, something you just don't do, like wandering through New York's Central Park at night.  I walk back into the lobby, and a few minutes later a young driver, squat and tough looking with gel in his hair, comes in and agrees to take me.  But when we get to the car, an older man intervenes and packs me into the front seat of his rusty Toyota.  We head off — but not to the Phoenix settlement.

Merle, Darlene, and Merle's Niece Kezia in the Phoenix Township

Phoenix is the South African township, on the northern periphery of Durban, that began as an Indian settlement when Mohandas Gandhi, a young lawyer schooled in London, moved from Johannesburg in 1904 to focus his political activities on the plight of Indian laborers in the British colony.  He built a school and a printing press, published a newspaper called the Indian Opinion, and organized a community around his ascetic, non-violent principles.  The trust Gandhi established continued its mission even after he returned to India ten years later, and his style of political activism and passive resistance left its mark on the struggle against Apartheid.  In 1985, during a particularly violent period toward the end of that era, poor blacks from a neighboring settlement laid waste to Phoenix, evicting the Indians and occupying their homes.  An historic, prosperous township became a squatters' community, a slum.  Gandhi's printing press, house, and school were destroyed.

The ruins of a school built in memory of Gandhi's wife, Kasturba

Today Phoenix comprises a  collection of settlements, some Indian, some black.  Many areas are comparatively well off, with apartment blocks and lighted streets, schools and cricket grounds.  Others are shantytowns.  The area around Gandhi's site is a black shantytown.  This is where the Indian drivers refuse to go.

Think of the Children

Any big photo project about Indians around the world is going to feature a lot of children.  Here are some of my favorites:

Vaibhav on New Year's Eve. Singapore

Kamran with Jack Russell terriers India (airborne) and Hugo (grounded). Nairobi, Kenya

Ashley and her grandmother. Hague, Guyana

Durban beach, South Africa

Young sailor aboard a dhow. Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Indo-Caribbean Phagwah parade in Richmond Hill, New York (left) and boys in Dubai (right).

At a Hindu home for underprivileged boys. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Richard at a Guyanese jhandi ceremony. Richmond Hill, New York

Byron aboard his father's boat on Lake Washington. Seattle, Washington

Children of Phoenix

This essay was published in a recent issue of Pravasi Bharatiya by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (under the title "Revisiting Satyagraha in Phoenix").  It's online in PDF form at that link, but I am posting here where it is easier to read.

No Indian cab driver will take me to Gandhi's house.  Parked in front of the Holiday Inn at Durban's South Beach, the cabbies protest about safety.  Someone asserts that since it has been raining, the main road will be washed out and we will get stuck at the bottom of the hill, unable to flee.  The word impossible comes out a few times, with the sense that going there would be a bad idea, something you just don't do, like wandering through New York's Central Park at night.  I walk back into the lobby, and a few minutes later a young driver, squat and tough looking with gel in his hair, comes in and agrees to take me.  But when we get to the car, an older man intervenes and packs me into the front seat of his rusty Toyota.  We head off — but not to the Phoenix settlement.

Merle, Darlene, and Merle's Niece Kezia in the Phoenix Township

Phoenix is the South African township, on the northern periphery of Durban, that began as an Indian settlement when Mohandas Gandhi, a young lawyer schooled in London, moved from Johannesburg in 1904 to focus his political activities on the plight of Indian laborers in the British colony.  He built a school and a printing press, published a newspaper called the Indian Opinion, and organized a community around his ascetic, non-violent principles.  The trust Gandhi established continued its mission even after he returned to India ten years later, and his style of political activism and passive resistance left its mark on the struggle against Apartheid.  In 1985, during a particularly violent period toward the end of that era, poor blacks from a neighboring settlement laid waste to Phoenix, evicting the Indians and occupying their homes.  An historic, prosperous township became a squatters' community, a slum.  Gandhi's printing press, house, and school were destroyed.

The ruins of a school built in memory of Gandhi's wife, Kasturba

Today Phoenix comprises a  collection of settlements, some Indian, some black.  Many areas are comparatively well off, with apartment blocks and lighted streets, schools and cricket grounds.  Others are shantytowns.  The area around Gandhi's site is a black shantytown.  This is where the Indian drivers refuse to go.

Phoenix Township, Durban, South Africa

 

I visited South Africa in January of 2005 and spent some time in the Phoenix Township, near Durban, which is the suburb that grew around Gandhi's ashram when he was an activist-lawyer campaigning for Indian rights in colonial South Africa in the late 19th century.  The Phoenix area today sprawls among rolling hills and includes black and Indian communities.  This photo is from an Indian community, which I visited thanks to the artist Sharlene Khan and her family.

I am much more interested in people than landscapes, but these houses caught my attention for their pastel tones and the grey, ominous skies.  The grass in foreground reminded me of Andrew Wyeth's famous painting, "Christina's World."  I snapped two frames and did not remember the image until I got home and looked at the slides.