Debleena
Imagery plays a central role in Debleena’s narrative, and many of these images are focused on the specific places of her past literacy experiences, from the Buddhist prayer flags in Bhutan, to the images in picture books and newspapers, to the variety of people she saw in the Calcutta streets, as mentioned above.[1] Central to this imagery is Debleena’s focus on the Calcutta book fair, a lively and diverse place that forms a central experience both for the city and for Debleena’s literacy narrative, a carnival atmosphere where people are “milling around a sea of stalls set up in the Maidan, an area the size of a football field, eating, talking, getting portraits done by students from the nearby Art College, trying to spend on the latest novels to display on nouveau riche shelves, all in the dust and the blaring music over 3 whole weeks.” These images become central to Debleena’s narrative, and we begin to grasp and to envision just how important these annual experiences were to her literate practices.
Debleena has a conscious understanding in this narrative of how her experiences growing up in Calcutta helped to define her literate life today, particularly the way in which she views language:
Perhaps because I never regarded language as possession or more than a reed, a flute, I didn’t ‘get’ the debates about translation and literacy when I got older. Wasn’t all language like paint, and weren’t you supposed to switch from water colors to pastels to oils to acrylics and so on as you learned more in art school? I still refuse to entirely join those debates. I know that you can say certain things in some languages and not in others. Perhaps that’s why people quarrel. Regardless, speech, sentence and song impel radiance from experience. I shall have to keep learning, chanting, this mystical thing, this song in blank verse—speech.