The old narrow wooden streets of claustrophobia
with market traders of differing size and health
are adjoined by newer streets of many young gazers
arrested in their stare, they fill the old greyish walls,
the walls whose faces receive the slanted backs of snake charmers of authentic calibre and
barterers a plenty.
The old streets like those of Middle-Age England,
her dusty grounds and shacked-up street sellers align the city
and lie opposite this Western modern face.
F
Fiercely Tender: The Simple Complex World of Michael Ondaatje’s Novels
Shortly afterwards in that novel we encounter a celebration of the body, grime and all, unimpeded by this abstraction called mind. While writing the body might seem not altogether unusual, my point is that you cannot simply assume its naturalness. Language, even fictional language, is so much of a mentally...
