The Emergence of a Baha'i Consciousness in World Literature

THE EMERGENCE OF A BAHA'I CONSCIOUSNESS IN WORLD LITERATURE: THE POETRY OF ROGER WHITE Dedicated to my wife Chris who has given peace to my heart and exercise for my mind and my son Daniel has has made me laugh, often until I ache. i April 1993, just before the end of the Holy Year commemorating the historic occasion of the centenary of the ascension of Baha'u'llah, Roger White passed away. By that historic juncture in the history of the Baha'i Faith, this emerging world religion was continuing its rise from an obscurity in which it had existed for nearly a century and a half. In addition, the literary work of several Baha'is during that century had signaled the emergence of a Baha'i consciousness in world literature. The poetry of Roger White was part of this emergence. His story and his poetry are briefly examined here. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Roger White for his reading of the initial draft of this book, his enthusiastic comments on its contents and his friendship; the National Literature Committee of the NSA of the Baha'is of Canada for their review of this work, their corrections to the manuscript, their suggested improvements and their granting approval for publication; my wife, Christine Price, for her continued interest in and support for my study of the poetry of Roger White and my writing of this book; my son, Daniel Price, for his always kind and reliable help in solving my computer problems; Bill Washington, a long time editor of the parliaments of the Northern Territory and Tasmania in Australia, for his useful editing of this manuscript and his words of praise at a critical stage in its development; Marlene Macke of 'execulink.com' in Canada, for her informative and encouraging emails; Will C. van den Hoonaard, a Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, for his reading of this book and his positive feedback at the 'draft three stage' of the book's evolution; Douglas Martin whom I have known longer than anyone here and who pointed my manuscript in some helpful directions; Anne Gordon Perry whose similar literary interest in Roger White has produced the first major study of White's letters; Anthony Lee of Kalimat Press and Wendy Momen of George Ronald Publisher for their continued interest in the book throughout the 1990s when it was still in its first draft and in early gestation; Jonah Winters of Winterswebworks.com for locating the book at the Baha'i Academics Resource Library site and helping me feel my manuscript was really a book; White Mountain Publishers, the Australian Baha'i Publishing Trust and the American Baha'i Publishing Trust for their interest in the manuscript during its third to fifth drafts. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE OF ESSAY PAGE NUMBER 1. Introduction: (i) The Emergence of 1 a Baha'i Consciousness in World Literature (ii) The Poem Not the Poet 14 (iii) Canada's Third Wave 35 2. Biographical Account: (i) The First Twenty-Five Years: 43 1929-1954 (ii) The Second Twenty-Five Years: 67 1954-1979 3. The Letters of Roger White 75 4. The Major Works of Roger White: (i) Another Song Another Season: 98 The Canadian Who Lives Here (ii) The Witness of Pebbles 126 (iii) One Bird One Cage One Flight 150 (iv) A Novella: A Sudden Music 184 and The Shell and the Pearl 'Martyrdom and Doing What is Under Your Nose' (v) A Poetry Reading: "Lipstick and Bruises" 194 (vi) The Language of There 197 White: Meant for Beginners (vii) Notes Postmarked: The Mountain of God 216 White Exits: Smiling and Heading for 'There' (viii) Occasions of Grace: An Introduction 234 5. Special Topics: (i) White's History 239 (ii) A Galaxy of Characters 272 (iii) White's Future 286 iv (i) THE EMERGENCE OF A BAHA'I CONSCIOUSNESS IN WORLD LITERATURE: THE POETRY OF ROGER WHITE Geoffrey Nash, in a review of Roger White's poetry in 1982, wrote that White heralded "the development of Baha'i consciousness in world literature." Literature, poetry and prose, letters and other genres, have been arriving on the world's literary stage from the pens of Baha'is for more than a century and a half. White certainly has been, in Nash's words, a herald. White's work emerged from obscurity at the same time as the Baha'i Faith was rising from an obscurity in which it had existed for nearly a century and a half. The Revolution in Iran in 1979 marked a significant point aloing the road of that emergence. It is more than coincidental that White's first major book of poetry Another Song Another Season was published that same year. There is now a burgeoning literature on the Baha'i Faith provided by individual Baha'is the world over in the two decades since Nash wrote what have become prophetic words. White has, indeed, become a herald. Though I'm sure he did not set out to become the brilliant initiator that he has been. There are others I could focus on to describe this 'development of a Baha'i consciousness in world literature': Robert Hayden, Bahiyyah Nakjavani, H.M. Balyuzi, M. Momen, Adib Taherzedeh, John and William Hatcher, among others, whose books, each in their own way, played their unique parts, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, in laying this foundation of consciousness. To pick one example: in April 1966 Robert Hayden was awarded "the Grand Prix" at the Third World Festival of Negro Arts for "the best" recent volume of Anglophone poetry. This was without 1 doubt a milestone in the emergence of a Baha'i consciousness in world literature. I could cite other events along the road of this emergence, but my purpose here is to focus on the poetry of Roger White. The focus is timely since he passed away ten years to the month that Juxta Publications in Hong Kong placed this e-book on their website. The efforts of poets and critics to come to terms with the legacy of a post-traditional poetry that had begun as early as the second decade of the twentieth century with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, especially its disturbing mixture of poetic innovation and reactionary politics, its vast international influence and intense Eurocentrism amounted to a kind of collective anxiety attack and this anxiety was reflected in post- war II poetry right up to the seventies. By the 1990s, by the time White died though, it had become clear that these sometimes embarrassing ancestors who appeared about the time 'Abdu'l-Baha went on His western tour, had laid the foundation for a post- traditional poetry. That new poetry had been growing by the time of White's first major publication in 1979 for at least six decades. Brian Conniff describes its last phase in the 1980s in the African American Review. This poetry, he writes, is "more explicitly heterogenous and more international, both in its sources and its influence, in such works as Adrienne Rich's Your Native Land, Your Life(1986), Seamus Heaney's Station Island (1983), and Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990)." Conniff continues: "Considered more broadly, a distinctly post-traditional stance has become increasingly apparent in the linguistic heterogeneity of contemporary Irish poets like Nualani Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian, in the communal heritage evident in the prison poetry and autobiographical writing of Jimmy Santiago Baca, 2 and in the remarkable emergence of contemporary poetry by American Indians. For these later poets, any approximation of a tradition - any communal or even personal heritage - is conceived pragmatically, as one instrument among many others with which they can engage a world that is at once overwhelmingly various and desperately in need."1 And I would add the poetry of Roger White here and his three books of poetry written from 1979 to 1984. Much of White's poetry has a very traditional style and tenor, although its content is for the international stage. White gives his readers what Arthur Koestler said was crucial for modern men and women: truths which were perennial without being archaic. He also gives his readers the global Baha'i community, its history and its teachings. His is both a very traditional and an international poetic mix. As a fellow poet I am only too conscious of the remarks of Charles Martindale in his introduction to the Roman poet Ovid that "artists, for all their intuitive insights, are often both idiosyncratic and egocentric when responding to the work of others."2 Martindale notes "the comparative poverty" of the critical tradition of Ovid." The afterlife of a great poet, the artistic responses of the generations that follow a writer, shows how even the finest writers can fail to be understood and appreciated. This first generation following the death of Roger White and the industry of critical reflection that it creates has yet to establish any pattern. I trust this book will initiate a pattern of enthusiastic appreciation. I think the period 1979 to 1984 was especially significant in bringing about a transformation in the literature available to Baha'is on their Faith. White published 1 Brian Conniff, "Answering 'The Waste Land": Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American 3 three books of poetry and a novella which I deal with in essays later in this book. Nakjavani published two books: Response and Four On An Island in a refreshing and highly stimulating idiom that was as much poetry as prose and, like White, left many readers puzzled.

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