New book by Lata Mani & JS
A transoceanic exchange about life, death, trust and the Divine as it evolved via email, WhatsApp, SMS and audio messages. A story of friendship and courage - emotional, intellectual and spiritual.
Read the reviews, here.
Preface
Radiant Anguish is an accidental text. It collates my correspondence with my dear friend JS between September 2016 - when I learned that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer - and her death in March 2018. It traces a mostly transoceanic dialogue about life, illness, death, trust and the Divine, with some of it unfolding in person during my visits to Northern California. JS was embedded in a broader weave of conversation and care that involved many others. Our exchanges were only one strand in a complex discursive web.
I met JS in 1990 in the USA in the lead up to the First Gulf War. We were active in the nationwide mobilization against the impending war. We quickly gravitated towards each other. JS, my partner Ruth Frankenberg and I shared a deep bond despite the infrequency of our meetings. Over the years our paths diverged more than they converged. I suffered a head injury in 1993 and entered the parallel and socially invisible universe of the ill. JS went on to graduate school and grew to become a brilliant, significant scholar. When she and her husband KJmoved to Northern California so she could write her dissertation our paths briefly crossed again. We spent memorable evenings with each other. Over JS’ writing desk hung a huge color poster of Kali, the ink-black Hindu goddess of transformation. Looking back, one could read it as presaging something about the future.
A year later JS moved to the East Coast and Ruth and I relocated to India. We were in touch briefly after Ruth died in 2007 but our contact remained intermittent until September 2016 when I wrote to invite her to a screening of my film The Poetics of Fragility.It is here that the story told in these pages begins. Ruth hovered over our conversations throughout this post-diagnosis period - as energy and as memory - which is why she has been introduced here.
A terminal diagnosis reconfigures the pieces of one’s life. As one grapples with a new reality, customary predilections can gradually recede and previous dispositions soften. New questions assert themselves prompting new directions of inquiry, even a new modus vivendi. Since I had written extensively about the process of being remade by illness our conversations naturally tended in the direction of such exploration.
Radiant Anguishdiffers from other accounts of life-threatening illness in two ways. First, it is a set of epistolary exchanges dispersed across digital forms: email, SMS, WhatsApp and voice mail. Our exchanges range from the quotidian business of scheduling meetings, to sharing music and poetry and addressing JS’s concerns about the transition that we have come to call ‘death.’ This slim collection is as much about friendship as about illness; about living as much as it is about dying.
Second, and perhaps more unusually, Radiant Anguish includes teachings JS received from the Divine Mother.[1] Though addressed to her, the wisdom they contain have the potential to comfort others facing the end of life. The profound impact these teachings had on JS convinced me to accept the inner call to assemble this text. On our last day together, I surprised myself by asking JS if she would be open to our correspondence being made public if I was guided in that direction. Her response was unequivocally affirmative. Her husband has concurred with her decision and it is with his support that I publish this text.
JS’ unmistakable energy, courage, honesty and brilliance shine in these pages. Since some of what is recorded may strain credulity for some who knew her and/or distract from the import of her work we have chosen not to disclose her identity. Here then is our dialogue as it unfolded, lightly copyedited to ensure privacy and readability.
Lata Mani, July 2020
[1] The Divine Mother is the personification of the feminine sacred principle. Her many names include The Great Mother, Devi, Kali, Tara, La Madre, The Virgen of Guadalupe and Yemaya, the Mother of all Orishas in the Yoruba tradition.